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5 Secrets to Starting a Successful Home Based Business

Welcome to your financial independence and freedom. I worked for many years as a slave to my job. I was one of almost 1,000 lawyers in an international law firm. The day I made the transition to have a home based business was a turning point in my life. Today, I exclusively work from home. I work a fraction of the time I used to work. I am much happier and much more financially free. I would like to share with you a few secrets to help you become successful in your home based business.

Many people who decide to start a home based business are still working full or part time for their other “job.” You can still succeed and ultimately transition to exclusively working just your home based business if done correctly. Others are ready to focus on their new home based business full time. Either way, there are some secrets to setting up your home based business so that it will be successful and financially rewarding from the get-go.

Secret #1: Organize Your Office

Organization and success are directly linked. Make sure to select a room in your home specifically designated to your home based business. Setting up a work zone will minimize distractions and establish a boundary for those who know you work from home and feel they can stop by or call you in the middle of the day for personal issues. I also recommend having a separate phone line designated to your business calls and one for your fax machine. It is not costly to set up an additional line or two and it is all deductible as a business expense. You should also start a filing system right away. Letting stacks of paper accumulate and postponing a good organizational filing system will hinder your success. If done correctly and from the very beginning, you can avoid needing to hire a file person or secretary until your businesses growth demands it and can afford it.

Secret #2: Get a Website or Internet Presence

Selecting a home based business that has an Internet focus or presence is important in today’s market place. Purchase a domain name and set up your website right away. Web and Internet based home based businesses are the new trend in business. In order to capitalize on this movement and on a very lucrative sector, it is a good idea to have a business or product that can be marketed with a website and on-line. This allows your client base or customers to learn about you and find you easily. It also expands your client base beyond your local market. Gone are the days of opening the Yellow Pages. Most everyone finds what they are looking for today by searching on the Internet. According to Forrester Research, ecommerce will be a $329 Billion industry by 2010. Seize on it with an on-line home based business!

Secret #3: Make a Schedule

The great thing about a home based business is that you do not have to work any set hours or days. However, you should make a schedule of both when you plan to work and what you plan to accomplish in that time frame. Task lists and to do lists are a signature of those with successful home based businesses. Having structure and a schedule helps you to be disciplined. It also teaches others to respect your work time. Creating a somewhat predictable work schedule will go a long way towards your success.

Secret #4: Have a Calendar, But Just One

One of the best things about working from home is the flexibility to break to attend your child’s school play or sports event or take the day off to golf. It is best to merge your personal and business calendar with a home based business so that you do not double book and to keep things simple. No need to check more than one calendar especially now that you don’t have a boss who you need to appear to be working for. Initially, I tried keeping one calendar for my legal events (court dates, depositions, etc.) and one for my personal life. It resulted in a few instances of double booking and the headache and waste of time involved in having to consult and fill in two calendars.

Secret #5: Get Help When You Need It

Part of the beauty of working from home is having the flexibility to work when you want. If you get into the habit of working all the time and assuming all the tasks on your own, you will have defeated that purpose. Thus, consider outsourcing much of your work, projects, and errands (bill paying, appointment making, etc). I learned this best from Timothy Ferriss in his book The Four Hour Work Week. Pick up a copy from a local book store or your library. I recommend the CD version so you can listen while you exercise or drive in the car. He is very funny and ever so practical. He will give you great tips on hiring good, inexpensive help in India and other over-seas places. Also, learn to say no. When your plate is full, you are not doing anyone any favors by accepting more work. This is true even if you are being asked to be the room mom, coach your son’s soccer team, chair a community event, or take on another project you can’t possibly take on. Know how much you can handle and learn to say no. If you can only fit ten tasks on your plate and you take on eleven, one will slip. Avoid that from the outset.

The Finer Points of Internet Auctions

WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?

Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.

The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.

The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.

The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.

HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!

The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.

There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.

Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.

HOW TO WIN!

Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.

The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.

The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.

The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.

HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!

Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.

Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.

Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.

CONCLUSION!

New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.

There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.

It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.

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Do Government Assistance Programs In Fact Assist Small Businesses?

Government budgets are relayed to various assistance programs whose purpose is to encourage economic activity in small businesses. It is often asked whether these programs do in fact fulfill their purpose or maybe these budgets are wasted?A groundbreaking research jointly conducted by Ben-Gurion University and the Ministry of Industry, Trade & Labor elucidates this issue. Researchers Dr. Rami Schayek and Prof. Dov Dvir have developed an innovative model which measures the effect of government assistance programs on small businesses, identifies the most important components incorporated in the assistance program and determines which managerial, operational and behavioral activities should be focused in order to improve on business performance. The research included one hundred and thirty five small businesses which participated in the Ministry of Industry, Trade & Labor’s Standard Coaching project. This project is one of several business coaching projects run by the ITL ministry and it is designed for small and medium businesses of five to one hundred employees. A business of five to ten employees is appointed up to one hundred coaching hours. A business of eleven to one hundred employees is appointed up to one hundred and fifty hours. The coaching project finances 75% of the cost of coaching. 25% are financed by the business.Results indicate that there is a return on the tax payer’s money!Findings indicate that government assistance program involvement positively affects small business performance. The basic research model, which examined only the direct effect the assistance program has on small business performance, shows that the greater the number of quantitative components (hours of consultation; proximity of consultation encounters; range of issues incorporated into the consultation), and the higher the standard of qualitative components (level of the consultant’s professional understanding of the respective subjects of consultation; level of organization and planning of the consultation process; level of trust, commitment and mutual understanding between consultant and small business owner), the higher will be the level of performance in the small business. When adding to the model an examination of indirect effects, assistance programs are shown to affect small business performance primarily through the consultant’s influence on the small business owner which is expressed in the latter’s motivation to take action, like as attention to the service provided after the sale, understanding the fluctuation in customer preferences and the small business’s operative environment, and the need to measure and analyze customer satisfaction and respond to the customer’s complaints regarding either the service or the product provided by the small business.The consultant also affects the business owner with respect to the latter’s ability to manipulate business opportunities through utilization of competitors’ weaknesses and an understanding of the ways in which the small business as a whole may benefit the customer. Consultation raises the small business owner’s level of awareness as to the need to innovate, take risks and increase the level of activity, both in implementing changes in the service or products he provides and as regards conduct in the face of competition. In fact, the consultation process motivates the small business owner to take actions which would raise the level of market orientation and entrepreneurship in the small business, and as a result initiate an increase in its level of performance.How is it possible to win an even greater return?The findings of Dr. Schayek’s doctorate thesis supervised by Prof. Dov Dvir, facilitate recommendation on a number of issues which could intensify the effect of public assistance programs on performance in small businesses. Thus it is important that the consultant emphasize before the client that submitting reliable and comprehensive information to the consultant, as well as willingness on the part of the business owner to implement changes in accordance with decisions reached as a result of cooperation with the consultant, is paramount for the success of the assistance process and the improvement on performance in the small business. Based on the research model, the client constitutes an integral part of the assistance program. The more involved and active he becomes in the process of coaching, the greater will be the assistance program’s positive effect on the small business’ performance.In addition, the research indicates that effort must be made on the part of the consultant in improving the client’s capacity of raising finance. The client’s capital raising capabilities which, according to the model constitute a parameter in the improvement of the level of performance, will improve if the client is given an explanation as to existing finance opportunities and is prepared as to the manner in which one should approach and present the small business’ requirements before possible financing sources (such as banks or credit companies).

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