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Securing Success For Your Home Business

Written by: Chris Simpson

Article Overview: Working from home is, for some people, the epitome of the American dream. You set your own hours, and you get to decide which twelve hours of the day are considered working. With the rise of the commercial internet, there have never been more opportunities to work from home and make your business thrive, particularly if you have a marketable skill that doesn't need a large advertising budget or office infrastructure.

Securing Success For Your Home Business

Working from home is, for some people, the epitome of the American dream. You set your own hours, and you get to decide which twelve hours of the day are considered working. With the rise of the commercial internet, there have never been more opportunities to work from home and make your business thrive, particularly if you have a marketable skill that doesn't need a large advertising budget or office infrastructure.

However, there are some things to learn before going into business for your-self from home. Learn from the mistakes of others, you don't have time to make them all yourself.

First and foremost - if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Your mother told you this one when you were ten, and it's still valid now. Working from home is, well, working. You may be working on things you enjoy doing (like writing, or painting). You may be working in a field where you have a set of clients from a former employer, but it is, still, work.

You need to have the discipline to get up and go to the computer (or go to your home office) every single day, rather than sleep in. You need to be circumspect about making dates with clients and keeping them, or you won't have clients…and you'll be handling a lot of the administrative stuff that nobody really likes to do, like cold calling for clients, running the accounts receivables, and handling your own marketing and advertising.

So, anyone offering you a work from home business opportunity that promises you a six-figure income in your bathrobe…proceed with caution. There are careers you can do from home that can generate that sort of income but it still takes a lot of work and determination to reach that level; bestselling novelists, day traders, and affiliate marketers are a few that come to mind. However, you still need a certain level of skill, knowledge, and talent to make any of those ventures a success.

Set goals. This is part and parcel of having the discipline to run your own business from home - you need to set a daily and weekly goal, and then review whether you've hit it. One of the most important business skills out there is taking metrics - assessing what you've done, what you can improve on, and looking for ways your business can grow.

And lastly, be realistic about how much you can get done during the day. One of the hazards of working from home is that without the structure of meetings and deadlines to show what's going on, its way too easy to over-commit yourself, to take on more work than you can handle, especially if the work you do tends to all come in at the same time from your clients.

Working from home is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who considers themselves a self-starter. But with enough determination, even the biggest procrastinator can make a home business very successful.

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Article Tags: accounts receivables, affiliate marketers, american dream, bathrobe, bestselling novelists, business from home, cold calling, commercial internet, day traders, epitome, home business opportunity, marketable skill, office infrastructure, own marketing, set goals, six figure income, skill knowledge, twelve hours, work from home business opportunity, working from home



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secure my connection - I agree with Link's second post. Security is a personal sticky issue and possibly not the first service you should introduce yourself at the door. I'd suggest also the Back to School "In-Home" Computer tuneup (it's such a pain to take your computer in for servicing) and promise that they would see a smoother and faster computer. You can hand them a 2 page report on the benefits of having a computer tuneup -> this is critical. After you are gone this is the only piece of information that they will have to begin trusting you and want to have you in their home. You can sneak at the bottom of the report the benefits of having a wireless connection and the importance of Securing it. finish off the report with two dotted rounded rectangle boxes beside each other. One has a free Computer tune up assessment and the other a free wireless network security test. If they take you up on either you can test for the other. You now have two sources of possible income.
Books for Women Entrepreneurs - There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here. It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new. In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment! 1. The Old Girl's Network 2. Mother's Work 3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women 4. Pitch Like A Girl 5. Workplace Warrior 6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer 7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery 8. She Wins, You Win 9. Napoleon On Project Management 10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do 11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years 12. The One Minute Millionaire 13. Talking From 9 to 5 14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions 15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success 16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded 17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful 18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End 19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide 20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen 21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business 22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker 23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business 24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises 25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy 26. The Promotable Woman 27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it 28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home 29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Re: How do you budget your life? - Here is my financial management categories for today: 15% Long Term Savings; 10% Home Expenses; 45% Business and Marketing charges; 10% Friends (Meeting); 20$ Scientific and Law Books. But this will change when it is August or September. Orxan
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: Books for the Entrepreneur - Here's one of my most recent books The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success By Brian Tracy


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