Home-Based Business – Part Two in a Series – Choosing A Home-Based Business – What Are Your Options?

The concept of a Home Based Business has been around since the dawn of time and they are now more popular than ever before.

This is mainly because of:
1. people want more control over their income
2. the possibility of lower overheads/business costs
3. freedom of choice with regard to lifestyle.
There are many different types of Home Based Business and we will discuss a few of them here.

When you’re operating a Home Based Business you’re basically going to do one of two things: sell a product or sell a service (if you’re smart you will combine both into one business!)

Sell a Product
Product – your choices are to make/source your own or sell someone else’s product. This could be anything from food, clothing, flowers, gifts, games, toys, art, plants, or craft, to name just a few.

You could make your own products – many successful businesses started out as a simple cottage industry at home. Visit local markets, search online, read local newspapers and/or industry magazines for ideas.

Or you can source the products either locally or from overseas. Attend a trade show for your industry, read industry magazines. It is probably easier to become a distributor than to import a product yourself, but again it depends on your experience in the field.

Sell a Service
Service – use an existing skill you have, or learn something new. Think carefully if you enjoy this activity, is your skill level sufficient, can you expand your knowledge or skill level. Is there another skill you can add that will make you more valuable to your customers?

Service can include anything you can do for someone else and is only limited by your imagination. Some examples are, gardening, accounting, consulting in many different areas, business coach, personal training, house cleaning, computer technician, interior decorator, architect, pet minding/walking – the list is endless and don’t be put off by the fact that someone else may already be doing it – you could do it better or simply be better at finding customers or provide superior customer service. So, where could this all go wrong?

Now, the Hard Part
One of the biggest problems with starting your own product or service home based business from scratch is that you also need to be good at all the other aspects of the business – you are effectively a “one man band” (of course you can outsource – but this can be expensive for a fledgling business). The main thing you need to be able to do is MARKET your business – you could be the world’s best accountant but if no-one knows you exist it will do you no good at all! So marketing, sales, administration, bookkeeping are just some of the skills you will need.

So, consider this when looking at starting this type of business as you can have the perfect business up and running and find yourself with no customers. This is where many small businesses fail. Now, you may also be good at these tasks or have the money to outsource – just make sure you include it in your Business Plan and Budget.

So, What’s An Easier Option For A “One Man Band” Business?

There are many other business models that you can consider that will offer much more support to you.

Franchising – this is a good way to buy a ready made business that comes complete with instructions! You will usually have great support from the franchisor in regards to setup, advertising and management. The downside is that Franchises are usually VERY expensive to invest in – a McDonalds license for example will set you back over a million dollars! Yes, there are cheaper franchises around, but really anything less than $100,000 is probably not going to generate a huge income.

Direct Selling Organisations
Direct Selling is a method where products are sold outside of a traditional retail setting. The three main types of Direct Selling are Party Plan, Network Marketing and Door-to-Door Sales.

Most Direct Selling Organisations have one thing in common – they are Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) businesses. They will have different compensation and marketing plans, different reward structures and methods of operation, each will have one main focus, but they will all have common aspects of their business models.

DSO’s will all generally require you to “join” the company, some will have a minimum amount of product you need to purchase over a period of time, most will require you to recruit or sponsor people into your business, for some this will even be a minimum requirement, and for some there will be an ongoing membership fee.

They all differ in the way their compensation plan works and you need to study this carefully. There will be things such as, product commissions on products you sell and also sales from your team, bonuses for achieving certain sales or recruiting targets, incentives which may include national or international sales conferences (either paid or not). Beware of what you are paying for, firstly in joining fees, product purchases (initial and ongoing) and other equipment needed to run the business plus rewards for your team and/or customers that may come out of your pocket!

It can be very hard to make money in a traditional MLM company: many people drop out without having made any money or even having lost money (or end up with a whole lot of the company’s product)!

(You will find a more detailed breakdown of Direct Selling Organisations in the next section of this series.)

So, do your research, look closely at different types of business. Think about your skills and maybe more importantly, what you enjoy doing. Write a list of businesses that you think may interest you, then write a list of pro’s and con’s for each type and see what you come up with. You make just find the beginnings of your success right there on that page!

Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation

Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.

If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.

Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.

For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.

No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.

There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.

Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.