Working from Home to Build Your Business? Useful Free Gifts

Working at home to build an online business is hard. We would like to make the process easier for our friends out there with this gift of free applications and really useful stuff.

Everyone likes free gifts (is there any other sort?). And we were determined to find as many useful gifts for our friends who run or would like to run small online businesses.   Well, it is that time of year after all.

We know (because we have been there) that if you are working from home to set up an online business, every penny is vital. If you can do something for nothing, it might just keep you going.

So we dug through our own archives, and did a trawl of the internet to come up with stuff we thought would be useful to you as you try to set up your business online. I think you will like what you find.

As you "tear off the wrapping" we are confident that you will find something you can use to improve your business.

So dig in. Help yourself, and download, copy, pass on or just plain hoard everything you find through the links on this page.

Just one warning. Free stuff hardly ever really is free is it? So just be aware that you need to check Ts & Cs in case you end up with too many ads on your site or other conditions you did not want. Otherwise, enjoy!

Oh, and Happy Holidays everyone.

7 Great Links to Fantastic Free Stuff

1. Small Business Ceo:   This brilliant site has put together a collection of FREE management and leadership software that includes calculators, forms, plans, letters, training, spreadsheets, marketing material… The list just goes on and on. Make this your first stop and have a great Business New Year.

2. Inc.: http://.inc.com/tools/ also offers a range of free tips, tools and software. Their offering is divided into various sections including "Doing Business Online, Marketing and Performance Management.

3. Entrepreneur:   Provides a set of 12 free tools for online businesses. These tools vary from a toolbar that evaluates websites, image reducing tools and free keyword selector tool, to HTML tutorials and browser compatibility service (a tool that will show you how your site looks to browsers).

4. New York Times guide to marketing your business with Facebook. http://tinyurl.com/ykpa6yl Any hints and tips on using social media to market is useful, so go ahead.

5. Bookfresh.com blog:  A blog about starting and running your own business with loads of hints and tips – go check it out!

6. Web CEO: –  this is a great piece of software that has helped me loads in deciding on keywords when setting up my sites. It has all the SEO tools you could wish for. You can use the free version for ever, its really helpful.
7. Freeware Home:  is an indexed collection of FREE programs commonly found on the Internet around the globe. Fill your systems guys! http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/clickthru.cgi?id=Hathor

For even more great information  about starting different types of online business come and see us on our website!

Is Starting Your Small Business Online The New Black?

Online Literacy - A 'Must Have' Skill for Starting Your Small Online Business

Everyone used to be educated in the 3Rs.  Reading, wRiting and 'Rithmetic once upon a time was enough to get you a job for life.

But there is no such thing as a job for life today.  So what can you do to prepare yourself for our dramatically changed conditions?

Today a 4th skill is required if you want to be sure of maintaining your financial independence.  Today's 'must have' skill is Online Literacy. 

Internet Business Set-Up - Progress is Haphazard

Internet Business Set up Can be Haphazard

Follow progress on my internet business which teaches others how to start their small business online.

For those of you who have not visited us before, I am putting together an online business.  The business will teach others to do th sane using ebooks, online courses, video, audio and offline seminars.  Our goals is to help get 1,000 small business up and running in the next five years.

Oh, and to:

• boost my potential pension using e commerce and
• describe my progress and help me get things in order in my own mind.

I was trying to find a word that would describe progress so far and I have to say that haphazard does not go far wrong.  It is not that I haven't been working hard - every hour of the day is spent either thinking about the business or doing something in relation to it.

It is just that there are so many things you have to do when you set up a new online business.  They all seem to need to be done at the same time, and as you do one thing, you are reminded that you should be doing something else.  Also, so much of what you do is related and you need to make the links as you go, or you are likely to forget them.

The good thing about that is much of what you do or write can be used more than once.  A web page can be re-written and circulated as an online or offline article, a blog can become part of your sales materials, a sales page can be updated to be a new web-page.

I though I would run through what I should have done by now, what I have done and work out what needs to be done this week

Know What Your Market Is

So far I have got a very clear idea of what market I want to be in.  This market is made up of people who want to learn to make money online.

Know What Your Niche Is

I also know exactly what my niche is and I have set up all my goals with this in mind.  My niche  is made up of  people who have possibly not thought of starting this kind of business before.

These people may not be natural e-ntrepreneurs perhaps, but they have been pushed into starting an online business by current financial circumstances.

Know What Your Business Model Is

There are as many ways of running a business online as there are offline.  In my free course course I will be describing four business  'models' (apologies for the jargon), and I will be combining three of them in my own new business.    The four models and I will be combining them in my own new business.

 The four models we describe are:

1. Affiliate Business
2. Drop Shipping
3. Start Your Online Business
4. Your Offline Business Online

Start Communicating

It can take a long time to get noticed on the web, so the sooner you start the better.  I have got my web-site up and running and written 12 pages of content.  However, it is best ot wait until you have 30 pages or more before submitting the site to the search engines, so there is a while to go yet.

It is also good to get as many incoming links as possible before submitting to the search engines for the first time.  To try and achieve this, one of the things I am doing is creating useful links from this blog to  various pages on my web site.

I Can See Clearly Now

OK, well that has clarified that what I need to do this week is frantically write pages for our website and compliment them with articles and blog entires that are linked to the website.

If anyone out there has got a good suggestion as to where else I should try and get links from, let me know - I will be very grateful.

Ideas for Businesses to Set Up in Successful Industries

Generate Ideas for Successful Online Businesses

Set up in industries guaranteed to be successful in the future.  That is one way of future-proofing your small online business.  But how can you do that?

I have mentioned before that passion is vital when you set out to make money online.  But passion must be tempered with judgement. In this case judgement means being really careful about choosing  what you sell and who you try to sell it to. You want to be in a market that is going to grow and succeed in the coming years so that you can grow and succeed with it.

Hot Industries for the Future

So what industries will be hot in the future? Below is a list of areas the talking heads online generally seem to agree will be successful for a long time to come.

• Health 
• Employment Services
• IT (including hardware, software, design, manufacture, repair, installation, outsourcing, games, etc
• Financial Advice
• Management, scientific and technical consulting services
• Child day care service
• Skilled technical services

How can you use this list to better position your online business? Well these are the industries, but ask yourself, who are the buyers? Who are the people out there doing the buying and what do they want?

Consider Baby Boomers

A garden snake digesting a hedgehog is a metaphor that has been used to describe baby boomers. The lump the hedghog made in the snake as it was gradually digested was compared to the lump the boomers created in the economy.  Boomers are the generation born between 1950 and 65.  Because the generation was very large, its progress has created a 'bump'   in national economies all the way through.  

It is not going to stop anytime soon. Baby boomers are expected to live longer on average than anyone before them. And as they enter into the winter phase of their lives, that should be very interesting to anyone involved in business marketing (and everyone running an on line business is involved in Business Marketing!)

Turn a Problem into an Opportunity

Boomers living longer means more of them will have more needs that you can provide the answers to.

• Health Services: Health care, flue jabs, nursing, cosmetic procedures (in the US boomers soaked up 8.9 million cosmetic surgery procedures from a total of 12.1 million), supply of drugs and aids, alternative therapies. Consider how you can offer specialist advice, sourcing, management etc of all these areas. 
• Employment Services: Employment agency for health workers in hospitals, cosmetic procedure clinics, primary health providers, and homes for the elderly. 
• Training Services: For all the people that go through that employment agency 
• IT: Provision of goods and services, advice, training, assistance etc relating to IT. 
• Financial Advice: These boomers have lived through great times, but they have also lived through some very hard times. Many of them do not have enough saved to see them through to the final years. These guys need very specialised advice, but will only take it from someone they really trust – and how many trustworthy financial adviser could you name today?
• Management, scientific and technical consulting services All the services being set up for boomers will need the services of consultants. – be the 'go to' guy in your niche and the work will come in.
• Child day care service: Many boomers are already providing this service for their grandkids. There must be an opportunity here for training them to set up a child-care business, in offering them help in caring for the kids, in offering a care-service for the days they can't manage it, in helping them deal with the massive difference in the way they brought their children up and the way they are expected to treat their grandchildren now.
• Skilled technical services: All of us need good skilled technical services from time to time, but for the elderly it is vital as they can so easily be targeted by criminals. Can you set up an agency, can you provide information; act as a whistle blowing page to warn others about heartless traders in their area.

 Compare Industry to Market and Find Your Niche

This is just a tiny number of suggestions about how you could apply one market (baby boomers) to the hot industries of the future. Try it with other generations (generation X for example) and see if you can find a connection to your passion and the beginnings of a niche you could make your own.

Get Step by Step Instructions to Find your Passion

Send for our free introductory course to Affiliate Marketing for step by step instuctions and if you want to explore more about niches and how to find yours, read this blog.

Online Businesses can be profitable - in the right niche

Find the Right Niche to Make Money Online

Anyone can make any amount of money they chose online, as long as they chose the right niche.

What is a Niche?

A niche is a tiny, usually specialised corner of a market.  For example, there is a market for Jewellery. Within that there are markets for precious jewellery and costume jewellery. There are markets for Celtic, Indian and Chinese jewellery to name a tiny few.

Let's go with Celtic jewellery. You could say the market was split into types of trinket (necklaces, bracelets etc). You could break the market up by what the jewellery was made of (gold, silver, semi-precious metals, plastic etc). You could break the market up by colour – blue, gold, red etc. There are as many ways to break markets up as there are features to the jewellery.

You might find that there are enough people interested in blue, plastic Celtic jewellery. If this just happens to be your passion, and there are not too many competitors – you have found the perfect niche, and have taken a great step along the path of making money online.

Find out what markets are considered to be hot then send for our step by step how to choose the perfect niche for you by sending for our free introductory course on Affiliate Marketing.


Why Should I Go for a Small Niche?

The great thing about the internet is that you can reach a huge market. The worst thing about the internet is the huge range of competitors you are exposed to.

Focusing on a small niche minimizes the competition (if you chose the niche well) and actually makes it easier to reach out to your potential customers.

How Does A Small Niche Make Reaching Customers Easier?

People searching on the web have a good idea what they want and they use words to find it. “Green cow” might be their Google entry; “vacation in Ethiopia” might echo round Yahoo’s database.

It is this use of words that will help us find the perfect niche.

Slicing up the pie

Take the examples above. You might have decided that you want to sell cows or vacations. But if you just head for those markets, you will find it is very crowded. (20,000,000 results for cows and 56,000000 for vacation on Google at the last search).

But if you used Google Adwords tools or Wordtracker, you would discover that people are quite specific in what they search for.

You might find for example, that there are 200 searches a day for ‘green cows’ and 500 for ‘vacation in Ethiopia’. Now we are beginning to slice that pie up into manageable slices. And now you are beginning to see the outlines of a niche, a place you can make ‘all your own’ with a very definite group of potential customers and little competiton.

Finding your niche, understanding the people in it and giving them exactly what they want is one of the key secrets to making a success of starting a small business online.

Step by Step by Step

Again, if you want step by step instruction as to how to find your niche send for our introductory course in Affiliate Marketing.

Outline Plan to Start a Small Business Online

Job Squaring Gets the Small Busines Online

In my first blog I talked about the huge number of tasks there are when you are starting a new online business. It is harder for the new E-ntrepreneur to keep up with her/himself than to marshal bees in a flower-field. It is therefore vital to be organised, systematic and methodical.
You can’t rely on multi-tasking even if you are a mother. As a person who has studied personal efficiency in detail, and taught it to hundreds of people, I know that using multi-tasking is unfortunately utterly ineffective.

Then I had a brilliant ‘a-ha’ moment. You can’t multi-task (there have been scientific studies by experts proving this), but you can job-square. That is, instead of trying to do multiple jobs at once, do one job but make it have multiple outcomes.

Get Your Home Business Online With Great Organisation

Get the Small Business Online with Job Squaring

Yahoo….It worked. In previous blogs I talked about the new E-ntrepreneur marshalling bees. ‘It is therefore’, I stated somewhat pompously, ‘vital, when managing a business start up, to be organised, systematic and methodical’.

My trouble is, like a lot of you, I’m not.  Organised, systematic and methodical I mean. Not by nature anyway. So I have to be careful to make a habit of the things I think are useful when it comes to the planning to set up my internet business. But seriously, I think I have come up with a useful tip in terms of job squaring.

Your Internet Business Can Only Succeed If Your Mind is Behind It

Your Online Business Needs Your Brain

 Setting up and running an internet business requires an E-ntrepreneur to do so many different things it is not funny.  In fact it can be terrifying.   It can't be done unless your mind is working for you and not against you.  And that means setting great goals and sticking to them!

Setting great goals is more complicated than just saying "I want to own an online business" or "I want to be a millionaire". Our subconscious brain needs things to be specific. Oh and it needs things to matter as well.

SMART Goals

Lets look at SMART goals briefly first. All goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound. Breaking this down a great goal would be "I want to earn $2,000,000 dollars by 12 Dec 2014 by running a successful business selling nappies online".

It is Specific in that it says exactly what will happen, it is Measurable – a certain amount of money by a certain date. It is Achievable, it is Relevant to me and it is Time bound. (12 December 2014)

WOULD YOU RATHER START YOUR OWN ONLINE BUSINESS OR RIP YOUR FINGERNAILS OFF?

STARTING YOUR OWN SMALL BUSINESS IS HARD

“Start online business; rip my own fingernails off”

Do you remember that great advert where a little girl is asked by her sister “which do you prefer? Chips or Daddy”. This as a plate of luscious French fries is placed in front of her by her mother. Staring dreamily at the plate she intones “Chips, Daddy... chips, Daddy” as she tries to make this impossible choice.

This advert was funny and touching because it seemed like such a silly choice. Clearly she was a small, hungry girl who felt that she had to make the choice based on her feelings at that moment in time rather than on the long-term factors.

But perhaps the advert held a hidden truth. Perhaps the advert illustrated a truth about us that makes us all uncomfortable. Perhaps the vast majority of us would prefer to do anything rather than start our own business.  (And by the way, I did mean your artificial nails.... natch!)

Can Pensions Be Replaced Through Making Money Online?

People Have Lost Their Pensions, Savings and the Value from their Property

The dream of retiring at 60 or 65 has disappeared along with the savings of many because of the financial carcrash they call the recession.  For these people, the vision of the 'golden years' has been wrenched out of foucus and replaced by the nightmare of permanent trolley clearing or shelf stacking.

A survey by the CBI revealed that between 25 and 35% of Directors think the number of people working past the retirment age will increase.  A further survey by CIBT revealed that 71%  of employees 55 or over believe they will have to work long past the retirement age.

This is depressing enough, but to make things worse, many employers are reluctant to keep people on after retirement age.   Older people have the highest salaries and wages, there is a perception that older people can't learn new approaches.  Finally, according to Charles Cotton, CIPD:

"An older workforce poses many challenges for employers in terms of motivation and inclusion."

As a result many face continuing to work into their 70s at jobs they may not have been willing to do before 60 or 65.

Can Making Money on the Internet Come to the Rescue?

In the UK, online sales have increased by nearly 350% between 2004 and 2008. But the number of businesses selling online is only about 17%.

Clearly this is a gap; an opportunity for people to start tiny enterprises selling popular goods and services on their own websites, blogs and from sites such as eBay.

Mining Your Blog

Starting a business online can be easier than starting one on the high street.  The affiliate business for example allows people to promote products other people produce. They do not have to manage stock, premises, staff, cash flow or any of the other nightmares besetting small entrepreneurs.

An affiliate signs up with a seller and gets a special link. The affiliate then promotes the relevant product or services online.

A visitor clicks onto the affiliate's site.  If the visitor likes the sound of the product, they will click the link and go to the seller's site. If they then buy the product, the affiliate is paid commission.  Simple.

Lifestyle of choice

Services as well as products sell well online and their providers are doing very well and often enjoying their new lifestyle.

"I have been working from home for a while as a science editor and writer" Carol Featherstone told Julian Warricker on the You and Yours Show. "I work for clients all over the world".

Not an easy option

I should emphasise that many people who have done it agree that working online is not an easy option.

"But it meant I could live where I wanted" said Featherstone who moved to South West France 10 years ago. "If you have to earn your living, being able to work with something that really interests you and in a place you love takes the sting out".

Learn to earn and earn while you learn

I would not try to say that everyone can earn a living doing this. There is a lot to learn, a lot to do. But I think anyone vaguely determined can create another income stream. I also think that anyone who is really determined can definately earn their living online.

It does not all have to be done in one go. If you are willing to give up some time you could join many people who are working a day job and building a business at night and weekend.

For those willing to have a go there are many ways to earn and many ways to learn the necessary skills.

Use your search engine and you will find plenty of free stuff to help you.  If you want to stay local, take a look at our website for information about affiliate businesses as well as a lot of other information about starting your own business, and if you like download the free 5 part course on starting an affiliate business.

Invisible online

One of the key advantages of working online is that no-one knows who you are. Grannies can set up sites selling leathers for bikers, call themselves Clyde – and no-one will know the difference.

Cash in the Attic look out, here comes cash in the computer.

Starting a New Online Business

If it is true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks I am in trouble.  Arthritic, smelly, fur falling out all over the place and four-legged I might not be, but transister radios were cool when I was a teenager.  Yup, I am that old - I can even vaguely remember the Beatles the first time round!

I am comfortable with the world wide web, I know how to use most of the programmes on my computer; I even know how to use all the apps on my mobile phone.  So I feel fairly comfortable with new technology.  But not with nechworking (a little word I came up with to describe the technology of online networking). 

Why am I bothering you might ask yourself.  I am bothering because I intend to plunge into the icy internet pool  and start a business online.