Success is Not Just About Business
Succeed In The World But Don’t Throw Out The Baby
After many countless hours on the Internet, I realized there are literally tens of thousands of “how to” articles on business. It seems everything there ever was to be said about the subject, has surly been said. I honestly can’t say, even given my extensive experience, that I could contribute anything more. Quite frankly, I have seen so many articles on business I am becoming nauseous.
How to, how to, how to.
There are articles on how to get funding, how to plan, how to start and how to finish along with hundreds of other subjects. Starting a business is no picnic or walk in the park, it can suck everything good from your life and leave you an empty shell. Most articles focus on the person starting or running the business but isn’t there another side to the story?
No consolation for the spouse and children.
How about the spouse, and children? I never see anything mentioned about the people who are directly effected by someone going into business. They’re like background noise, it’s there but you don’t pay any attention to it.
It’s a stressful game.
Starting a business can produce stress which in turn causes anxiety in the people around the business person. It also causes a person to become focused on the business and ignore other personal duties. A person’s life can become so ingrained in the business that family and friends are set aside and eventually fall away. One day the business person wakes up to the fact that he/she is alone.
A consumer of your time
It’s true that starting or running a business takes a lot of time and personal sacrifice but no business is worth giving up family and friends. Everyone needs someone to converse with and business is not a good communicator. We are first social beings and second ambition seekers. One might say, you have to provide for the family and that is true, but to what expense? How much are you willing to give up for success? Your wife or husband your children your freedom and in the end your sanity?
What can money not buy?
Before you begin your quest for success remember this: no one cares if you succeed! It’s purely a personal challenge because your spouse and children will not appreciate your absence. No matter if you become the richest person in the world, in the end, you will hear, “you weren’t there when we needed you.” That’s right, money can’t buy happiness or health or a loving family.
What is success worth?
How do you become successful and still maintain a healthy family relationship? First adapt the mindset that the two are synonymous. Success encompasses the total person. It’s not just about business or relationships, it’s about being in tune with all the factors of life.
Sacrifice or embrace expanding yourself.
Everyone agrees you must sacrifice to be successful. You must “pay the price” and be willing to give up earthly pleasures for success. If so, how far do you need to go and how much do you have to give up? Age old questions no one seems to have a pat answer for. The problem with working for success is success becomes your master, mistress and confidant. Soon you don’t need anyone else, success has captivated your admiration and you have become its groupie. Sound ridiculous? How so, you must court success, tend to her needs, seek her approval and bow to her possibilities. Where then, is there room for anything or anyone else? Success is demanding and if not controlled will consume the hardest of men and women.
Master or friend?
Don’t let success become your master, rather become its cohort in mastery. Do not give up or ignore family and friends but include them in your quest.
Happy Trails.
About the author:
“Former Development coordinator for Imperial Research, author, Spiritual Adviser, Donald Yates is now retired but continues to expand through Self Discovery. Learn how you can also. Go to: http://www.clean4profit.com or http://www.clean4profit.com/homebiz.htm
Legitimate Work at Home Opportunities
There are plenty of work at home opportunities on the internet for you to choose from. The problem is knowing which work at home opportunities are legitimate, which ones are not so good, and which ones are outright scams. So how do you know? That is what I will answer in this post.
For starters, you can go to some of the top work at home websites out there and see what work at home opportunity they recommend. Be careful when doing this though because most of them are promoting these opportunities as affiliates so their opinions are typically very biased. However, if there’s an opportunity that most of these work at home websites all have in common there’s a strong chance it’s a good one. Or if the owner is promoting many opportunities you can ask which one they recommend the most.
You can also go to work at home forums and ask the members what they think about it. It’s best to ask in a few different forums and see what the overall consensus is among the members. If most of them have positive things to say about the opportunity you are asking about then it’s probably a legitimate work at home opportunity. If you are getting mostly negative reviews or if it’s neutral then move on to another opportunity. There are enough legitimate work at home opportunities out there so you don’t have to settle for anything less than a great one.
Another way to see what other people think about a work at home opportunity is to go to Google and do a search for the name of the opportunity plus review. Let’s say the program you are looking into is named “Successful Work at Home Future” as an example. So you would go to Google and search for “Successful Work at Home Future Review” or “Successful Work at Home Future” +Review. This will give you many reviews of what other people have said about the opportunity. Again be careful here because many of these reviews will be biased because the people doing them will be affiliates of the program.
One more great way to find legitimate work at home opportunities is to find a few very knowledgeable people who have been in the work at home industry for a long time and get to know them. After a while you will know if they are helpful and honest. If they are you can always ask their opinions on any work at home opportunity you find.
Those are four of the best ways to figure out if a work at home opportunity is legitimate or not. You have no excuse for getting scammed unless you don’t do your homework on any opportunity before getting involved with it!
What Are The Worst Home Business Ideas?
If you type into any search engine “home based business“, you will get a host of informative articles, press releases, blogs etc…The majority of which will be dealing with the best and most popular characteristics to look for in a home based business. This is a great place to start and will serve many people well. There is also more information of a different nature that can help people avoid some major problems. Let’s call this group “The Worst Home Based Business Ideas.”
It takes a lot of effort to make a home business a success. To assist you in making it a success, here is a list of ideas or things to be avoided when considering a home business.
1. For some people, this first point is not as important as it is to others. For me, it is a top concern. If a person is considering starting a business that is in an area or deals with a product that he/she does not enjoy or have any belief in, this is something to be avoided. If you are considering selling vitamins and personal care products and you truly believe all vitamins are the same and you are just trying to push the vitamins to make a buck, this will prove to be a huge waste of time, effort and money. Potential clients will almost always be able to pick up on the fact that you don’t really have a belief in the products and won’t put much value in your words.
2. Any home base business idea would be considered a bad idea if you do not have the funding required to adequately get it off the ground. If you instead consider risky and potentially disastrous personal financial moves such as taking out a second mortgage on your home, withdrawing from your retirement and/or college education savings and taking your credit card balances to their maximum, you are running the risk of causing a great deal of grief and the risk of a miserable outcome far outweighs the chance of success. For every rags to riches story that talks about the down and out mom of five who scraped together her last two nickels to get her now million dollar business off the ground, there are at least 100 such instances of moms who will have lost that last bit of money and the children’s college funds are far worse off than they should be.
3. If your current home business idea is the new “sure thing” and you have already inappropriately spent time and resources in less than successful attempts with other home businesses and your path is not clearly defined, almost any idea can be a bad one. This is not to say that all hope is lost. There are resources to help you find your way. There are plenty of tests on line to help a person find out what they truly enjoy, and may or may not be good at doing. The people closest to you can also be of great assistance. Friends and family know you the best and will be honest with you. They want you to succeed.
4. Even though this aspect is last on the list it could easily have been first as far as importance. The time you spend with those special people in your life and the time you spend being active in your community and spiritual activities is probably already dwindling with today’s hectic and fast paced lifestyle. Your daughter will have only one first recital. Your wife may only get that “big promotion” once in her life. These times are very precious and few and far between so any home business idea that will take you away from these times is a bad one and should be avoided at all costs. If you are looking to improve the quality of your life, keeping things properly prioritized is essential.
As you continue your search for a home based business, I hope some of the issues discussed here are useful in your decision process.
With all of the scams on the web these days, Joseph Munzer would like to invite you to investigate a legitimate home business and watch 10 free videos regarding The Wealth Funnel System.
Find the Number One Home Based Business
Finding the number one home based business isn’t easy. In fact, it’s different for everyone. Everyone has different goals, strengths, and timelines. Do you want a business you can use to generate additional income, or are you looking to replace your current job at some point? Do you mind putting the hours, or do you work too much already and are trying to spend more time with your family and friends? What type of exit strategy are you looking for? Do you want to sell your business in the future, or will you pass it on to your relatives when you decide to retire? Maybe you have bigger plans and want to you’re your company beyond the home based realm and take it public at some point.
All of these questions have an impact on how you find the number one home based business. What may be the perfect business for you may not work so well for someone else. You may be simply looking to supplement your income by a few hundred or a thousand dollars a month by working extra hours here and there. If that’s the case, you’ll have very different needs than someone who’s planning on having a full time business and income to replace their current employment.
There are many good candidates for a home based business. Your number 1 will be the one that fits your individual needs and strengths the best. Here are some great ones that have been well proven throughout the years, in no particular order.
1 - Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate marketing is a favorite of marketers everywhere. The affiliate marketer sells other company’s products and/or services and is paid a commission or finder’s fee for doing so. The advantages are that you have no inventory or customer support requirements. You’ll have nothing to store, no tech support or customer service phone calls to field, and no shipping to worry about. It’s perfect for the person who wants to operate out of their house and have very little overhead.
There are of course negatives to affiliate marketing. Depending upon what you’re selling, you may not make as much money sale as if you were selling your own products.(however, for some information products, the affiliate often makes more than the content owner) You also have no control over your right to sell the products when you’re operating as an affiliate.
Any individual affiliate, affiliate program, or product can be terminated at any time. This can be a real pain, not to mention expensive, if you devoted a large amount of resources to developing a website and marketing campaign around the product or program in question. It’s also frustrating to watch as a nice income stream evaporates, and you can do nothing to stop it, except another product, or program and hoe it performs as well as, or better than the old one.
Another disadvantage of an affiliate business, is that you can lose large sums of money through your advertising and marketing efforts if you’re not careful. It’s the same with many other businesses as well. There are many free or inexpensive ways to promote, but some marketers find that they achieve their best and quickest results using pay per click (PPC) advertising. The most widely known example of PPC is Google’s Adwords program.
2 - eBay or Other Online Auction Business - Here again is a way to generate fairly large amounts of money if you’re so inclined. eBay and other auction sites have large amounts of traffic that you leverage into a nice income and brand recognition. The upside is that there is practically unlimited income potential. The downside is that there are few barriers to entry. Anyone with a pulse can start a home based eBay business, and it costs little or nothing to do so.
While those attributes could be viewed as advantages, just know you have over 240 million potential competitors that are registered eBay users. Of those, 83 million are active users, so starting an eBay business gives you access to a huge potential market. Over 600 million items were sold on eBay in 2007. Some of that could have been your merchandise. In fact there were 532,000 eBay stores in 2007, and well over 120,000 people earn their full time income from the on-line auction pioneer, so you could be next.
Those are two of the most popular types and it could be argued that simply by virtue of their sheer numbers, eBay stores ranks as the number one home based business. However there are countless others, from consulting to landscaping firms that can be run out of one’s home. Actually firms such as consulting readily lend themselves to being run from home.
With the advent of the Internet and other modern communications systems, there is little reason to have a traditional office. In fact, keeping overhead low is one of the keys to success in your business, and a traditional office is one of the largest sources of overhead in many businesses. Eliminating the office adds directly to your bottom line, which is the point of having your business in the first place.
To find out more about home based business, which ones may be the best for you, secrets to success, how to get more traffic to your website, how to get financing, creating winning business plans, writing ad copy that really sells, making sure your website converts visitors to sales, and much more, you have to visit the Home Based Business Success Guide now.
Earn Money Working Online - Marketing with Podcasts
Originally derived from a combination of “broadcasting” and “iPod” podcasting, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, is “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.” The general accepted definition however, has expanded to include video as well as audio.
Marketers who want to earn money working online recognize the potential of having so many viewers and listeners consume their information in this intimate way.
But while marketing with podcasts seemed very cutting edge a few years ago, and don’t get me wrong it’s still a very innovative way to present yourself, so many people are taking up this marketing method which means that if you’re just getting started you will have your fair share of competition.
On a brighter note, many of those who use podcasts to earn money working online are not making full use of their potential. This means that if you take the advice given in this article you can reach your desired market better than those who have attempted before you.
I hate to sound cliché but the best way to get noticed is to get outside the box. The information you provide has to be original, unique, and relevant. Above all it has to be information. Many marketers can’t seem to take off their salesman coats and end up pitching to their customers every chance they get.
Consumers have the power, and if you plan to use your podcasts to hard sell you’ll be wasting your time. Podcasting is about sharing relevant, interesting information. Yes you can be funny, witty, edgy whatever just as long you don’t pitch.
This means planning your content carefully. In order to deliver the right sort of content in a highly received manner you need to have a good grasp on who your audience is. Different groups will take your content in differently. Market research is key to providing you with who your audience is, what they want to hear, and how they want to hear it.
A good way to find out this information is by viewing your competitors work. What do successful podcasts in your genre have in common? Once you have an understanding of what they are doing you can then begin to develop your unique selling point.
However, you’re podcasting to promote not just as a hobby, so you do have to plug in your website or service somewhere. The place to plug in website is at the beginning and end of your podcast. For example “This podcast was made possible by www.yourcompany.com” or “if you like this episode be sure to subscribe to this podcast at yourcompany.com” This allows you to mention your website without sounding like a sleazy salesman.
A number of podcasts online have good content but lack technical quality. The picture is blurry, or the sound is inadequate. This makes the viewing experience unpleasant and usually not worth the trouble. If you do not feel confidant that you can create a professional looking product, that will make your viewers stay, it may be best that you outsource the job to a professional. You can monitor feedback once your podcast is created.
As with any marketing strategy you need to test and monitor feedback. Monitoring lets you know how your message was received and what changes you need to make. A great deal of the time simply changing the title, or marketing with podcasts in a different category can increase subscribers. Monitoring feedback is the only way you’ll know what to do next time.
If you want to earn money working online you should consider marketing with podcasts. Be sure to provide quality, interesting information and monitor feedback.
About the author:
Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant and work at home business owner. For more information on earning money working online please visit his “Top Ranked” Earn Money Working Online Directory which gives you all the information you need to Work at Home in the 21st century.