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AHBBO Home Based Business Information Return to AHBBO Archives
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_______________________________________________________________ A Home-Based Business Online _______________________________________________________________ Issue 145 : August 12, 2017 Sent to 12,920 Opt-In Subscribers Editor: Elena Fawkner Publisher: AHBBO Publishing http://www.ahbbo.com Contact By Email _______________________________________________________________ IN THIS ISSUE _______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome and Update from Elena 2. Home Business Idea of the Week 3. Feature Article - Choosing the Right Home Business For You 4. Surveys and Trends 5. Success Quote of the Week 7. Subscription Management 9. Contact Information _______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome and Update from Elena _______________________________________________________________ Hello again and a warm welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined us since the last issue. Last week's solo mailing contained an error in the URL. To learn more about Selina Humnycki's home business opportunity, please visit http://www.selinah.123ts.com/. This week's article takes a look at how to choose the right home business for you. Not everyone wants to start a business on the Internet. "Choosing the Right Home Business For You" guides you through the process of taking what you're good at and what you enjoy and turning that into a profitable business. It's at segment 3. As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this week's issue. Remember, AHBBO is for YOU! If you have comments or suggestions for topics you would like to see addressed, or would just like to share your experiences with other subscribers, I want to hear from you. Please send comments, questions and stories to Contact By Email . _______________________________________________________________ 2. Home Business Idea of the Week - "How-To" Videos _______________________________________________________________ A Florida videographer produced a how-to wedding planner tape and sold over $250,000 worth of videos in just 12 months. Think about it: If you sell your video for $25, all you need to do is sell around 80 videos a week, or 325 videos a month to gross $100,000 a year. A typical "small" production can sell as much as 1,500 videos a month, or 18,000 units a year, at $25 each. It's the Topic If there is one single factor that makes or breaks a how-to video, it's the choice of topic. Another factor to consider is the length of the material. To remain interesting the average how-to video must be fast paced and relatively short, not exceeding 45 minutes. More successful videos are no more than 30 minutes long as this is a tolerable length by which a video can effectively cover a topic and remain interesting. The Shoot Who's going to do the shooting? If you decide to do it yourself, where will you get the camera? What format are you going to shoot it in? The average cost of renting a 3/4 inch U-Matic camera, with wireless microphones, and standard lighting equipment is around $495 a day. A camera person with an assistant will cost an extra $250. The Editing Once you've shot all the footage you need, you edit the work, assembling the footage in an orderly and coherent fashion that will effectively deliver the thought. Depending on how you shot your footage, editing can take 20 to 50 times the estimated finished length of your video. this means a 10 minute video may take 4 to 5 hours to edit, and so on. Studio time ranges from $40 to as much as $100 an hour, depending on the special effects you want to have available for your editing project. Packaging Full color printed sleeves start at around 40 cents a piece if you order 1,000 or more. You also need face labels on your tapes, as well as shrink wrapping for protection. ----- This is just one of over 130 ideas from the new "Practical Home Business Ideas From AHBBO" e-book. Find out more at Best Home Based Business Ideas . _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ 3. Feature Article: Choosing the Right Home Business For You _______________________________________________________________ © 2017 Elena Fawkner Pay any attention at all to your email inbox and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the only way to run a business from home is on the Internet. Sure, many people are running spectacularly successful Internet-based home businesses. Many, many more are doing so even more spectacularly unsuccessfully. But what if you're not interested in running an Internet business? What if you want to start and run a home business the old-fashioned way? Where do you start? Actually starting any home business is the easy part. The hard part's deciding what that business should be. So how do you even start the process of deciding on the right home business for you? The key is to be methodical, realistic, objective and patient. Step 1 : Personal Inventory The first place to start is to inventory your skills, experience, interests, and personality characteristics. These are what you have to work with - your raw ingredients, so to speak. Make a list of personal qualities and factors that you can throw into the mix. Include things like: => your personal background; => training and education; => work and volunteer experience; => special interests and hobbies; => leisure activities; => your personality and temperament. All of these qualities and factors make up what you know and what you're good at. Step 2 : Identify What You Like It's one thing to know a lot about something or be good at it. It's quite another to enjoy it enough to want to make it your life's work. So, remove from the list you created in Step 1 anything that you don't really, really like doing or which plain doesn't interest you. No matter how good you are at it. If you're lucky enough to like what you're good at, as a general rule, stick with what you know. Step 3 : Match Your Likes With Marketable Activities If Steps 1 and 2 still haven't suggested feasible home business ideas, review the following activities that have proven marketable for others and weigh them against your "likes" from Step 2: Crafts - pottery, ceramics, leadlighting Health and Fitness - aerobics instructor, network marketing for a health products company, home health care Household Services - cleaning, gardening, shopping Professional Services - attorney, architect, interior designer Personal Services - make-up artist, hairdresser Business Services - business plan writer, meeting planner Wholesale Sales - antique dealer, dropshipper Retail Sales - children's clothing, widgets Computers - web design, internet training. Step 4 : Make a List of Business Ideas That Fit With Your Likes From Step 2 By the time you're done, you'll have a hitlist of possible matches between your skills and interests on the one hand and home business ideas utilizing those skills and interests on the other. Step 5 : Research Armed with your list from Step 4, identify those ideas that you think have marketable potential and then research whether that belief is accurate. In order to have marketable potential, the idea must satisfy the following criteria: => It must satisfy or create a need in the market. The golden rule for any business is to either find or create a need and then fill it. => It must have longevity. If your idea is trendy or faddish, it doesn't have longevity. Go for substance over form in all things. => It must be unique. This doesn't mean you have to invent something completely new but it does mean that there has to be some *aspect* of your product or service that sets it apart from the competition. This is easy if you go for the niche, rather than mass, market. Don't try to be all things to all people. You'll only end up being too little to too many. => It must not be an oversaturated market. The more competition you have, the harder it will be to make your mark. It's unrealistic to expect no competition, of course. In fact, too little competition is a warning sign either that your business idea has no market or that the market is controlled by a few big players. What you want is healthy competition where it's possible to differentiate yourself from competing businesses. This all gets back to uniqueness. If you can't compete on uniqueness, you must compete on price (or convenience). If you're forced to compete on price alone, that just drives down your profit margin. Not smart business. => You must be able to price competitively yet profitably. The price you set for your product or service must allow you to compete effectively with other businesses in your market, it must be acceptable to consumers and it must return you a fair profit. If any one of these three is off, move on. => Your business must fit with your lifestyle. If you're a parent of young children and you primarily want to start a business from home so you can stay home with them, a real estate brokerage business that requires you to be out and about meeting with prospective clients is obviously not going to work. You'll instead need to choose a business that can be conducted entirely (or near enough entirely) from within the four walls of your home office. Similarly, if your business idea would involve having clients come to your home, you're not going to want an unruly 3 year old underfoot as you're trying to conduct business. => Your financial resources must be sufficient to launch and carry the business until it becomes profitable. No business is profitable from day one, of course. But some are quicker to break even than others. If your business requires a considerable initial capital outlay to start - computer, printer and software for a web design business, for example - it will take you longer to break even than if the only prerequisite was the knowledge inside your own head, such as working from home as an attorney. If your financial situation is such that you can't afford to quit your day job until your business is paying its way, this, too, will mean it will take longer to break even than if you're able to devote every waking hour to your business. Just do what you have to do. That's all any of us can do. Step 6 : Business Plan Once you've gone through the above process and identified what appears to be the right business for you, the final "gut check" is to write a business plan for your business, much as you would for a presentation to a bank for financing. Include sections for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and set goals for what your business needs to achieve for you, by when, and how you are going to get there. There are plenty of good resources online about how to prepare a thorough business plan. A great place to start is at About.com (http://www.about.com). Just type "business plans" into the search box. Although it may seem like a waste of time and effort to complete a business plan if you don't intend to seek outside financing, taking the time and exercising the discipline needed to really focus your mind on the important issues facing your business, you will be forced to take a long hard look at your idea through very objective and realistic eyes. If your idea passes the business plan test, then you can be reasonably confident that this is the right business for you. If you come away from this exercise feeling hesitant, uncertain and unsure, either do more research (if the reason for your hesitancy and uncertainty is lack of information) or discard the idea (if it's because you don't think your idea is going to fly). If this happens, just keep repeating Steps 5 and 6 until you end up with an idea and a business plan that you're confident is going to work! Although it's frustrating to wait once you've made up your mind to start a business from home, this really is one situation where the tortoise wins the race. By taking a methodical, systematic and disciplined approach to identifying the right home business for you, you give your business the best possible chance for long-term survival, hopefully avoiding some very expensive mistakes along the way. ------ include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to a ------ practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com _______________________________________________________________ 4. Surveys and Trends _______________________________________________________________ © 2017 Ryanna's Hope THIS WEEK! SPAM, EMAIL MARKETING AND 9/11! Editor's note: Months back Ryanna's published an article in "Opportunity World" indicating that "misleading subject lines" were going to kill your business efforts. As you can see from below, now the FTC is in the act with obvious complaints from consumers. Revaluate your email campaign ... it just may be turning customers away from you! SPAM AND EMAIL MARKETING ...THE FTC The agency is looking into cracking down on enforcement on three new groups: senders of e-mail with a misleading subject line, distributors of mail that lacks a valid unsubscribe option, and sellers of "millions" of e-mail addresses on CD. A formal announcement on FTC action on the matter is expected within coming months. By doing so, the federal agency will be broadening the scope of its efforts beyond targeting pushers of fraudulent offers -- an area in which it's had a considerable amount of success, recently bringing successful, multi-million dollar claims against a host of e-mail marketers. One effort is expected to build on a recent survey by the FTC designed to study the pervasiveness of invalid opt-out procedures -- that is, e-mail that falsely promises to unsubscribe consumers, who show their intentions by clicking on an embedded hyperlink or replying with "remove" in the subject line. Last year, the FTC and several local law enforcement agencies attempted to document their success in unsubscribing from about 200 different unsolicited commercial e-mailings. Not surprisingly, the majority of the unsubscribe requests had been directed to a dead address, or otherwise went ignored. EMAIL MARKETING AND BACKLASH A new survey lends further credence to the belief that e-mail marketing efforts are being blunted by record levels of spam and inbox oversaturation, according to research from Executive Summary Consulting, Inc. and Quris. Based on a survey of more than 1,200 e-mail users, the study found that spam makes up the largest share of most users' mailboxes. For those who use e-mail primarily at home, unwanted e-mail marketing messages comprise about 37 percent of users' mailboxes -- more than personal correspondence (26 percent) or permission-based mailings (24 percent). AND HOW MANY TIMES ARE YOU SOLICITING CUSTOMERS? Saturation, too, plays a major role in turning consumers off e- mail as a communication channel. Seventy percent of respondents said they felt they received more e-mail this year than last, with 74 percent of that figure saying that increases in spam volume are a major factor. Additionally, two-thirds of the respondents said they feel they get "too much" e-mail. About 51 percent of those say they are likely to "occasionally" respond to marketing mailings, or 7 percent less than the sample total. As a result, consumers who feel inundated by e-mail are less likely to respond to messages - - even if they've opted-in. ADVERTISING AND SEPT. 11TH... Fifty-one percent of U.S. consumers believe marketers should go dark Sept. 11, according to an exclusive Advertising Age survey. The survey, conducted by WPP Group's Lightspeed Research, found that only 34% of consumers believe it is acceptable to run any advertising on the one-year anniversary of the terror attacks; 15% had no opinion. Sixty-two percent of the 307 respondents to the online survey said their opinion of a company would not change if it advertised Sept. 11. But among those who said their opinions would change, the overwhelming majority said they would view the company negatively. Underscoring the complexity of Americans' feelings about the day, however, survey respondents said they are more likely to support TV advertising on programs that commemorate Sept. 11, with 50% saying it was an appropriate advertising venue, and 44% calling it inappropriate. (Six percent had no opinion.) Advertisers, wary of consumer backlash, are approaching the day with trepidation, while media sellers anticipate a major slowdown. _______________________________________________________________ 5. Success Quote of the Week _______________________________________________________________ Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. -- Anne Lamott _______________________________________________________________ 7. Subscription Management _______________________________________________________________ To SUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter:
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