06.12.07
Posted in Work at Home Tips at 2:06 pm by hannah
Today’s potentially lucrative “work from home” suggestion… How about opening an eBay Shop. An ideal money making scheme for stay at home mums. Most mums have already got into the eBay fever as they are frantically selling baby clothes that have hardly been worn to trade up to the next size - so how about taking it a step further and opening a shop?
eBay has lots of good info about setting up a shop and prices start from £6/month. Of course you have to think about what you want to sell but there must be something that appeals. The trend for personalisation has certainly created a demand within eBay - personalised embroidered ballet bags and sports bags to personalised towels. Most things see to have a market!
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06.05.07
Posted in Work at Home Tips at 7:47 am by Andrew
- Understand that your business’ success depends solely on you and therefore develop a level of self discipline and motivation that enables you to remain completely focussed on the objectives of your business.
- Know what the objectives of your business are and stick to them. Don’t get distracted into other ideas or variations of your business until you are satisfied that the original core idea is developed and working. Many businesses that fail in the early days do so because they try to grow too quickly and expand into additional areas before their core product is fully developed and marketed.
- Ensure you have a clear division between your personal and business lives. This is especially important when families with children are involved so the time spent working and the time spent with the family are entirely separate. Also make sure that the area you use for your work is clearly defined and as separate as it can be from your living space
- Understand what your regulatory requirements are. There are a multitude of forms, requirements and deadlines that you have to meet with Companies House and the Inland Revenue which will impose fines if the deadlines are not met. It is therefore critical that you understand and can comply with these requirements.
- Make the best use of the Internet as your communication channel. Working from home does not always provide the easiest network to develop contacts and market your product which can all be done through good use of the internet.
- Organise your day. One of the keys to successfully working at home is the self discipline to focus on your objectives and if you’re not organised it is easy to become distracted and involved in something trivial that detracts from the main business in hand.
- Ensure your systems are backed up. Most businesses being run from home rely on small networks which are not backed up regularly and with so much else to do it’s easy to overlook the importance of this until it’s too late. Losing a database of clients can be critical for a small business so ensure you have the necessary equipment in place to back up regularly and adequately support your business.
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Posted in Work at Home Tips at 7:45 am by Andrew
Many people consider the idea of working from home to be the easy option where they can work to their own timetable and not be overseen by a boss. However working at home actually requires a whole new level of discipline. Once the novelty of not being supervised has worn off many people find it hard to adjust to the concept of being responsible for their own time and need to find ways of focussing and motivating themselves to do their work.
This is all the more important when that person is trying to start a business from home because of the additional level of risk and responsibility that inevitably goes with that.
So when looking to start a business that will involve working from home a person should consider whether they have the self-discipline and motivation to keep them focussed each day especially when times are hard as they inevitably will be on occasions.
The other main considerations to bear in mind when starting out a business working from home are that you won’t have the support structure in place that you would have when working for a business.
This means that you won’t have a Finance or an HR department to rely on so you’ll need to deal with all of these functions yourself.
In addition you have to consider all of the official requirements of running a business such as doing the accounts and sending them in to Companies House as well as dealing with all the forms and processes required by the Inland Revenue.
When your business grows you then have to deal with the problems and issues of taking on staff and/or stock. This will normally require you to take on additional premises and will probably see you move away from the home into a more traditional working environment.
So in summary when starting a business from home it is the self discipline that is probably the most important and often the hardest requirement that people need to meet as well as becoming every part of the business all rolled into one person.
More and more people are meeting this challenge every day as the concept of starting a business from home is on the increase and ever more people are prepared to become their own boss.
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06.01.07
Posted in Network Marketing (MLM) at 1:57 pm by hannah
Network Marketing (Often also called MLM - Multi Level Marketing) - is otherwise known as Direct Selling. It is NOT a Pyramid Scheme (Illegal in the UK).
They are basically schemes whereby you are sponsored to be a distributor, you got a markup on all items you sell and often commission for recruiting new distributors.
There are 3 very popular and successful schemes in the UK that can at the very least help you earn a bit of extra money.
These are:
Kleeneze:
http://www.kleeneze.co.uk/
Betterware:
http://www.betterware.co.uk/
Avon:
http://www.avon.com/
But there are also other schemes - Body Shop does one called “Body Shop At Home”. Usborned Books also does one “Usborne Books At Home” (http://www.ubah.com/).
A lot of these schemes are ideal for Stay At Home mums - trying to earn extra income and independance.
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Posted in Affiliate Marketing at 1:41 pm by hannah
A while ago we touched on “What is Affiliate marketing”. We talked about it from the point of view of a website trying to get traffic by recruiting affiliates. But of course the more important aspect if you’re trying to make money working from home - is of course - becoming an creating an affiliate website to drive traffic to the merchant site and create money for YOURSELF.
There are two ways you can do this. Ideally you’d have a strong interest and create a fabulous website, which is information rich and has strong traffic. You might then decide to show adverts on your website via a scheme like Google Adsense. Each time people click on your adverts, you get a little bit of money. There are of course other schemes you could try. Yahoo has Yahoo! Publishers network - though the last time I checked, this wasn’t available in the UK. You could display adverts for Amazon books - or you could do a search in Google to look for other viable affiliate schemes - last time I checked I found a company that sold packing boxes offering an affiliate sceme.
The more devious and potentially lucrative way of doing it, would be to research the profitable Adsense keywords. Remember that for keywords to be profitable - they might not necessarily be the highest Cost Per Click - they also have to have high traffic. For example I just read that:
The most expensive keyword:
Selling Structured Settlements at $64.81 per click.
The most profitable:
insurance - CPC $17.41 and over $868,645 spent per day.
So theoretically you’d be rolling it in if you create a successful site about insurance and then display ads.
The problem comes, of course, in creating the decent website. The web is saturated with appalling “scraper” sites that pull their content from other sites, and are created solely for the purpose of displaying adverts. If you’re seriously thinking about doing this as a source of revenue - then give the website some serious consideration and create something that fulfills a gap in the market and provides valuable, unique content.
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05.25.07
Posted in Work at Home Tips at 11:31 am by Andrew
An increasing number of people are starting to look for opportunities to work at home using the internet and there are a rising number of business opportunities being developed to meet this demand.
The internet business opportunity that allows someone to work at home means that people can generally manage their own timetable and can generate an income to support themselves and their families by running and managing their business from their computer at home.
There are several significant advantages to working at home, the most obvious being the lack of any commuting to and from an office. As a result of this the person working at home also tends to have a much greater ability to control their working hours and manage them to suit themselves as opposed to having to manage their lives around someone else’s preset timetable.
The costs involved in working at home are obviously reduced through not needing to provide and run a work space and in addition there are certain tax benefits that the user can benefit from by offsetting some of the cost of running their home against their tax liabilities.
This can therefore add to the profitability of working at home due to the reduced or negligible costs involved.
Most internet business opportunities will be directed at the user being able to manage the business on their own and therefore there won’t be the need to employ staff and manage all the inherent issues that go along with employing and managing staff.
This makes the whole working at home business opportunity more profitable due to the high margins that can be attained as a result of such low costs.
Most online business opportunities will only require the user to have a computer to access and manage the business. In addition the connection speed associated with broadband will normally be required to effectively run the online business and with broadband becoming increasingly available this opens up the opportunity of working at home to a growing number of people.
There are various types of opportunities to run an online business at home, a lot of which are associated in some way with websites and promoting goods and services to the internet community.
Internet gambling has seen an explosion in growth in recent years and with it there have been an increasing number of spreadbetting companies coming into the market to meet that growth. One of the advantages of this has been the ability to make use of these companies to trade foreign exchange and the growing number of companies has had the inevitable effect of increasing competition and therefore reducing the cost of trading.
As the use of the internet continues to increase exponentially it seems inevitable that more and more people will be looking for and making use of online business opportunities that enable them to take control of their lives and generate their income working at home.
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Posted in Work at Home Tips at 10:45 am by hannah
We’ve developed our own home based business search engines and selected the sites we want to search. Why not give it a try?
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Posted in Taxation & Legality at 10:23 am by hannah
Well actually there are 12 so far but Top 10 sounds better.
We’ve gathered together a selection of our most useful home business resources. These are a combination of working from home tools, forms and advice and contains links to government sites for taxes, self assesment, pensions, insurance, business advice and even tax calculators.
Business Advice
Business Link This site provides good practical advice for start-up businesses. It also indexes and searches the HM Revenue & Customs PDF forms such as core self-assessment tax return. http://www.businesslink.gov.uk
Taxes and self assessment
HM Revenue & Customs Self Assessment comprehensive information and assistance in all aspects of Self Assessment.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/sa/
DirectGov Self Assessment info. Lots of info about being a self assessment tax payer
http://www.direct.gov.uk/Taxing Forex
HM Revenue & Customs info about Taxing Forex. Taxation of foreign exchange (FOREX) gains and losses. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/cfmmanual/cfm9001.htm
Contractor advice
Prosperity4 - an umbrella company - sorts out your tax and deals with the taxman for you. http://www.prosperity4.com/
Info about IR35 - the tax rule that closes the loophole that was allowing many contractors and freelance professionals to avoid paying large amounts of tax and National Insurance Contributions http://www.prosperity4.com/information/ir35/index.aspx?code=IR35
Pensions
A Government website providing a guide to Pensions for the Self Employed http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/resourcecentre/pm/pm5.asp
Healthcare
Private Healthcare for the self employed from AXA PPP
http://www.axappphealthcare.co.uk
Insurance
Self employed insurance policy from Norwich Union. http://www.norwichunion.com/self-employed-insurance/index.htm
Self employment checklist
A Self Employment Checklist from the Citizens Advice Bureau
http://www.adviceguide.org.uk
Tax calculator
UK Salary Tax Calculator from I-resign.com
http://www.i-resign.com/uk/financialcentre/tax_calculator.asp
IR35 Tax Calculator and others such as PAYE/NI calculator.
http://www.ir35calc.co.uk/
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Posted in Affiliate Marketing at 10:09 am by hannah
Affiliate marketing is a scheme whereby one site (the merchant) shows and advert for another site (the advertiser). The merchant makes money for the referrals to the advertisers site. The affiliate scheme can be based on referrals or actual conversions.
A popular examples of affiliate schemes are Google’s Adsense. Amazon also have a scheme whereby if a surfer buys a book having seen it advertised on your site, you are paid a commission.
You can choose a program like “Affiliate Window” to manage your affiliate program - this will probably remove most of the stress but will cost you the most. They host the tracking software and store the data. They will provide you (the advertisor) and your merchants with login details so you can see who has given you referals and the merchants can see how much money they have made.
Alternatively you can buy tracking software to install on your own server. This is a cheap option but you’d be responsible for finding your own affiliates.
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05.23.07
Posted in Work at Home Tips at 11:10 am by hannah
Welcome to home based business blog from fxprofessional.net.
We’ve decided to move our “home based business” content to its own separate subdomain - so as not to dilute the message on FX Professional.
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