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AHBBO Home Based Business Information Return to AHBBO Archives
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_______________________________________________________________ A Home-Based Business Online _______________________________________________________________ Issue 146 : August 19, 2013 Sent to 12,985 Opt-In Subscribers Editor: Elena Fawkner Publisher: AHBBO Publishing http://www.ahbbo.com Contact By Email _______________________________________________________________ START YOUR OWN FRANCHISE BUSINESS Ever think it's time for a change. Franchising offers the potential to start your own business with the benefit of an existing brand, business methods and continuing training and support. If you are interested in starting a business of your own, you can find detailed advice and hundreds of franchise opportunities. _______________________________________________________________ IN THIS ISSUE _______________________________________________________________ 1. Welcome and Update from Elena 2. Home Business Idea of the Week 3. Feature Article - The 9-to-5 Home Business Tug of War 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. As one who has recently rejoined the ranks of the full-time employed (after having worked part-time for 6 months), I thought it was time for an article for those of us struggling with full-time work schedules while trying to build a home business "on the side". "The 9-to-5 Home Business Tug Of War" is 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 - Pet Products _______________________________________________________________ What's one of the biggest industries in the United States today? Anything to do with pets. Step into any major pet supply store and you'll be dazzled by no end of inventions to make your life with pets easier and the life of your pet more fun. This ready-made market represents an online business opportunity for anyone with a creative streak and who loves animals. The possibilities are endless. Collars for dogs and cats with unique designs; name tags; handknitted doggie coats for those cold climates; ceramic water and food dishes with unique artwork; pet hampers for the pampered pooch at Christmas time; frisbees painted in your own unique design. You name it, it will sell! Your website is crucial. If you do this bit right, you can run this business right out of your home, mail order. So start out creating a few dazzling samples of your work, have them professionally photographed and display them at your site. Don't rush the website stage. This needs to be really professional and beautiful. It will be a reflection of the quality of the work you do on your pet products. If you don't make the right impression here, you won't make the sale. Plan on including ready-made products in your catalog but also offer custom work as well. You can charge much more for custom work and your profit margin on these items will be much higher. This is a business where word of mouth advertising will be very important. So create exceptional pieces and you'll find that the word will spread, and quickly. Get set up to accept credit cards at your site as soon as possible. You'll be able to find good reciprocal linking partners in this business too. Look for sites that are dedicated to pets such as pet care, what to look for in a pet, that sort of thing, and negotiate to swap links with the webmaster. ----- 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: The 9-to-5 Home Business Tug of War _______________________________________________________________ © 2013 Elena Fawkner Perhaps the scarcest commodity the new home-business owner just starting out has is time. This is particularly so if you are also working a traditional, full-time job and building up your business "on the side" in your spare time. So how do you go about burning the candle at both ends without burning yourself out in the process? First off, let's think about priorities. Working a full-time job while developing a business requires stamina and endurance if other areas of your life are not to be neglected. This means being fit and healthy. Make time to exercise at least three times a week. Four or five is better. I know how hard it can be to commit an hour to working out when you've got an endless (and I mean ENDLESS!) list of things you need to be doing NOW for your business. But make the time. It pays BIG dividends in terms of stamina and endurance. Second, eat right. Don't just grab a McBurger on the way home from work and scoff it down as you're driving. Take the time to cook a proper meal and relax for a half hour or an hour before getting down to business. This gives you a break and time to unwind from the pressures of the day, making you much more productive when you do get down to work. Eating proper meals will keep you in good health and, coupled with a regular exercise routine, will help keep your energy levels high. OK, so you're physically in shape and taking care of yourself. The next major thing to think about is time management. Every weekend, before the working week starts, prepare a business plan for the coming week. This is nothing more complicated that writing down the various business-related activities you must do over the course of the coming week and then scheduling them according to how much time you know you are going to have on a particular day. By planning out your time this way, you can schedule your business activities alongside your other activities. Take care of as many of them as you can through the course of the day. Whether you are able to do this depends on the nature of your 9 to 5 job but if you have even a little autonomy you should be able to squeeze out a little time here and there. Not huge chunks, just 10 minutes here and there. The nature of your job may mean you don't have the luxury of that sort of autonomy. If this is you, then there's nothing for it but to free up time before and after work. This may mean getting up an hour earlier every day, for example. Whatever your personal situation, by planning ahead you will at least have the peace of mind of knowing that time has been allocated to all important business-related tasks. By eliminating the "scatter gun" approach you will find that the limited time you do have will be much more productive. There are going to be some activities that you have to do day in, day out. Decide what time of the day is best for you to attend to these routine tasks. The more you can integrate business activities into your daily routine the more efficient will be your use of time. Let's take email, for example. Anyone running an online business has to deal with email on a daily basis. I use the time between when I get up in the morning and when I leave for the gym for this. It gives me time to wake up before I launch into my day and is a relatively undemanding task that does not require precision concentration. Make use of autoresponders for as much of your email processing as possible. This will further reduce the amount of time you have to spend on this aspect of your business. Other routine activities include things like site promotion and search engine position monitoring. Now there are a lot of great tools to help webmasters with this part of their business. For example, WebPosition Gold will automatically review your position in all the major search engines and report back to you with the results. It can also be programmed to auto-submit at appropriate intervals. Be sure to use quality automated tools wherever possible. They can save you literally hours of work every week and as we all know, time is money in this business. Keep a journal for a week. Record in it everything you do during the day from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to bed. What activities can you eliminate in favour of freeing up some time for your business? Maybe it means getting up an hour earlier. Maybe it's forgoing the sleep-in on the weekend. Maybe it means giving up those two hours of TV every night. You will find even 15-20 minutes blocks here and there can add up to a sizeable chunk of time over a week or a month. If you travel, keep a copy of your website on your laptop and work on it while you're in the air or waiting for a flight. Or answer your email ready to send it when you get plugged in again. As you can see, the trick is to practice the "nibble" technique. If you wait until you have a great chunk of time in one block, such as the weekend, you'll only waste all of those little bits of time you could have put to good use during the week and fritter away your "quality" time on routine tasks rather than business development. One final piece of advice. Take time every week to just relax and do something you want to do. Although the pressures of a new business are demanding, failing to take time out will only lead to burn out. ------ ** Reprinting of this article is welcome! ** This article may be freely reproduced provided that: (1) you include the following resource box; and (2) you only mail to a 100% opt-in list. Here's the resource box to use if reprinting this article: ------ Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ... practical business ideas, opportunities and solutions for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com _______________________________________________________________ 4. Surveys and Trends _______________________________________________________________ © 2013 Ryanna's Hope WHAT THE KIDS WANT! Apparently the breadwinners aren't the ones making the buying decisions for electronics in American households. Research from InsightExpress finds that students, including teens and young adults, have the real power when it comes to which consumer electronics are purchased when heading back to school. The survey, conducted online with 300 students in July 2013, revealed that while almost all (90 percent) of the students already own a computer, nearly 1 in 4 are looking for replacements. Furthermore, 35 percent of respondents would like to purchase cell phones; 18 percent prefer pagers; one-third are seeking digital cameras; and 30 percent desire MP3 players. More than ever before, the buying power for electronic devices belongs to students. THE CONTINUED RISE OF DIGITAL MetaFacts reports that 39.2 percent of households with PCs and kids owned a videogame system in 2013, down slightly from 2001's figure of 39.7 percent. MetaFacts principal analyst Dan Ness attributes the decline to the proliferation of home computers: Kids have discovered they can have fun on PCs, the Internet and handheld game systems, challenging the traditional videogame console. The presence of both kids and PCs in the household is related to the increased use of other technology products in the home sector. Digital cameras have increased in penetration of PC households with kids, rising to 31.3 percent from 22.5 percent last year. Additionally, cell phone use among households that have kids and PCs has also increased — 81.9 percent in 2013, compared to 73.3 percent in 2001. ONLINE LEARNING TRENDS More than 50 percent of U.S. high schools are currently offering online courses or exploring them for the future, according to a study by Interactive Educational Systems Design, Inc. (IESD). The study was sponsored by Apex Learning and Blackboard Inc. The researchers surveyed 447 high school principals and 345 school district administrators, and asked their districts' and schools' status, opinions and future plans for offering online courses. The survey revealed that more than 40 percent of all public high schools are already using online courses or planning to start using them during this school year. Another 17 percent are interested in offering online courses in the future. The study also revealed that 32 percent of public school districts will adopt and use an e-learning platform for the first time in 2013. THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION? More than eight out of ten teachers (84 percent) believe that computers and access to the Internet improve the quality of education, according to a survey by education technology nonprofit NetDay, and 75 percent of teachers said the Internet is an important tool for finding new resources to meet new standards. Two-thirds of teachers, however, agree the Internet is not well integrated into their classrooms and only 26 percent of them feel pressure to use it in learning activities. NetDay also found that nearly every teacher has access to the Internet at his or her school and 80 percent of classrooms have computers that are online. Seventy-seven percent of teachers agree that teachers without Internet access in the classroom are at a disadvantage. Teachers cite multiple uses for the Internet, but most primarily see its potential as a research tool, and say it has not changed the way they teach. Forty-eight percent of teachers say the Internet has become an important tool for teaching over the last two years, yet across every demographic group of teachers, half or more use the Internet at school for less than 30 minutes a day. GETTING INVOLVED WITH YOUR CHILDREN Parents are looking to the Internet as a tool to become more involved in their children's education, according to a study by Learning Pays.com and Yankelovich Partners. More than three-quarters (78 percent) of parents polled say that they would become more involved with their children's education if they had greater access to teachers, curriculum, and event schedules via the Internet as a tool to become more involved in their children's education, the study found. More than half (53 percent) of parents feel that their children would benefit from individualized attention, tailored to their unique learning styles and capabilities. The study also revealed that 48 percent of the parents of school- aged children wish they could play a more active role in class trips and other educational activities. Forty-seven percent would like to be more involved in their children's extra-curricular activities. More than two-fifths (44 percent) of parents would like to be more involved or aware of their child's homework and other assignments. More than one-third (34 percent) would like to be more involved in PTA meetings. Parents know that they need to be involved in their children's education and many are looking for Web-based tools to provide them with access to teachers, administrators, counselors, etc., to become involved in a more meaningful way. OFFER STUDY COURSES AT HOME! A survey of working adults conducted by Opinion Research Corp. revealed that 54 percent believe that college courses offered via the Internet are the future of higher education. The telephone survey was commissioned by Capella University, an online institution of higher learning and was conducted among 667 working adults in February of 2013. The study also found that while people see education as a top priority, busy schedules (42 percent) and family and travel commitments (10 percent) may keep people from continuing their education. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of respondents said they are interested in continuing their education, but 48 percent said that a busy schedule is the biggest barrier to hitting the books, one-third cited high costs as an impediment. Assuming the quality of education was the same, 32 percent of respondents said they would rather take courses through the Internet than go to a classroom. More than half (53 percent) of respondents said the biggest benefit of taking courses online was the ability to work from home, while 19 percent cited time saved from not having time to commute. _______________________________________________________________ 5. Success Quote of the Week _______________________________________________________________ There is only one road to true human greatness: through the school of hard knocks. -- Albert Einstein _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ 7. Subscription Management _______________________________________________________________ To SUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter:
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