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AHBBO Home Based Business Information Return to AHBBO Archives
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_______________________________________________________________ A Home-Based Business Online _______________________________________________________________ Issue 149 : September 9, 2017 Sent to 13,307 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 - Flipping the Switch 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. This week's article is for those of you already running a business from home and finding that, far from bringing much-needed balance to your life, it's actually having the opposite effect. "Flipping the Switch ... How to Turn Off Your Business and Turn On Your Life" 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 - Video Duplication Service _______________________________________________________________ Audiotapes and videocassettes are as common as books right now, and there is an expanding need for reproduction services. Businesses are the most frequent users of these audiotape/ videotape duplication services. The business world is making heavy use of duplicates of tapes of conferences, business meetings, speeches, in-house seminars and workshops. You may also find yourself copying promotional tapes or sales videos. Beyond the business world there's an ever-expanding number of opportunities for tape duplication. Audiobook publishers use tape duplicating services. Musicians need promotional tapes of their work. Travel companies often want videos of the trips they offer. Parents want copies of their home movies to send to the grandparents. With more than seventy percent of the households in the United States having videocassette recorders, there is a large market for tapes of all kinds. In the videocassette world, the VHS format now dominates the market. The basic equipment to do the job costs less than two thousand dollars, and with some looking around you might find it as low as a thousand dollars for good used equipment. The quality of your transfers will be important. Duplicating audiotapes will yield one to three dollars apiece. Videotape copying services can be offered at five to ten dollars an hour. If you have several machines in operation, you can see that you can make hundreds of dollars an hour. Keep away from illegally duplicating any tapes, for example, copyrighted movies or audiotapes. Movie studios and other film producers keep a vigilant eye out for such piracy and they prosecute any counterfeiters they uncover. If you really enjoy this field, you may want to offer to do the original recordings, and then do the duplication, too. This will be more expensive and require more expertise so you may want to plan it for a future goal as your business grows. If you don't have all the equipment you need to handle some of the jobs you're being offered, you may make use of larger services to do the work and add a broker's fee to the cost. ----- This is just one of over 130 ideas from the new "Practical Home Business Ideas From AHBBO" e-book. Find out more at Unique Home Business Ideas . _______________________________________________________________ 3. Feature Article: Flipping the Switch ... How To Turn Off Your Business and Turn On Your Life _______________________________________________________________ © 2017 Elena Fawkner So, you work from home. Good for you! No boss looking over your shoulder, no wasting time commuting to and from the office, no-one setting your hours for you or telling you what to do. No one to care if you're wearing your rattiest clothes or don't take a shower before 10:00 am. And how about no life and no time for yourself while we're on the subject of what you don't have any more? Sound familiar? If so, read on. Escaping the regimented structure imposed upon you by the corporate world may have been one of the driving forces that prompted you to seek a way to work from home in the first place. One of the often-overlooked advantages of such a structure, though, is that it *is* a structure. It has limits, it places you at a certain place at a certain time, and it dictates what you will spend your time on. In other words, it establishes boundaries in your life. The boundary between work and home, work and play, on duty and off duty, company time and your time. You could leave work at the end of the day and your time was your own. Sure, you may have had other obligations but at least your work was confined within the boundaries of a workplace and a workday. Working from home, for all its advantages, can sometimes have the disadvantage of removing the boundaries between work and home, work and play, work time and your time. For some, the problem may manifest itself as a tendency to procrastinate when it comes to work activities or a lack of personal self-discipline may become unavoidably obvious. For such people, the formalized structure of a workplace separate from the home may suit them better than the independence and autonomy of a home business. This article, though, is concerned with those at the other end of the spectrum. Those who have absolutely no difficulty at all in motivating and disciplining themselves to work from home. So much so that their home business literally takes over their entire lives. In my time online, I've heard many people say that they sit at their computers for 18 hours a day working on their businesses. Oftentimes, they will still be working at 3:00 am and then go to bed for four hours or so before getting back in the saddle. They say this as if it is something to be proud of. I don't know about you, but working from home, when and if I am finally able to achieve it on a full-time basis, will be first and foremost a lifestyle choice. By that I mean I expect my decision to work from home will result in an enhancement of my lifestyle in that I won't have to commute the best part of an hour to get to and from work each day, if I want to start at 5:00 am and finish for the day at noon I can do that. If I want to work all weekend and take two days off during the week I can do that too. I can choose the projects I want to work on, I can retain the rewards of my own efforts and I am answerable to no-one but myself. Although I understand that I will work as hard or harder at home than I do at the office, I certainly have no intention of merely exchanging one form of prison for another. So, it perplexes me that some people seem to think it is a Good Thing to shackle themselves to a desk for 18 hours straight and break only to snatch a few hours sleep before starting all over again. But, if that's how they want to live their lives, that's entirely their business. But what of those who want more balance in their lives but find they simply can't 'flip the switch' on their home business so that home becomes a retreat again once the workday is over? If this is you, here are six suggestions to help you turn off your business and turn on your life. 1. Confine business activities to an exclusively "work" room If possible, confine your business activities to a certain area of the house, preferably a room that is exclusively used by you as your place of work. The advantage of a room as opposed to an unused corner of the living room is that when work is done for the day you can literally and symbolically shut the door on it. Out of sight, out of mind. If you don't cordon off your work area in this way, you will be reminded of work whenever you enter the living room. Even though you may not be physically engaged in work, you will still be mentally engaged and that's the same thing. 2. Separate communications systems Have separate communications systems for home and work. That is, you have one telephone for home and one for work. The same for fax machines, cell phones and email accounts. When you're working, you should have your home answering machine on. When you're home, you should have your work answering machine on. 3. Establish a routine and structure similar to the workplace As stated earlier, the structure and routine of an external workplace has the advantage of allowing you to leave work behind at the end of the day. By establishing a routine and structure similar to a place of work, you can still benefit from this advantage. Now obviously you don't have to be as regimented as you would be if you worked in a corporate office. You don't have to start at 9:00 am, work till noon, take a one hour lunch break and then work through until 5:00 pm. You can set whatever routine and structure you like. The important thing is to be disciplined in sticking to your routine, whatever you decide it is. If you prefer to work from 5:00 am through 10:00 am and then from 2:00 pm through 4:00 pm that's fine. This structure allows you to enjoy the hours from 10:00 am through 2:00 and after 4:00 pm as your own. There is room for flexibility here. Work however is most productive for you but stop once you get to the end of your allotted work time. If you haven't finished what you started, pick it up again in work time. Don't allow 'your' time to be encroached on by work. 4. Minimize distractions and interruptions By implementing suggestions 1., 2. and 3., you will also be establishing an environment where distractions and interruptions are minimized and discouraged. For example, if you have school-age children, by scheduling your work time to coincide with their school time, you will minimize the distractions and interruptions you will inevitably face if you try and work while they're at home. By having separate communications systems, you won't be interrupted with calls on your home phone while working (your answering machine should be getting these calls so you can return them on "your" time). By having an exclusively "work" area in your home, and making sure that other members of your household respect this space for what it is, you can help others remember that when you're in your room you're working and are not to be interrupted for things that can wait until you're "home" again. 5. Rituals Rituals can play a useful role in flipping the switch at the end of the workday. For example, you may already have a routine that sees you working until 6:00 pm, the time your partner returns home from work. Perhaps you share a glass of wine together at that time. Why not think of your shared glass of wine as an "end of workday" ritual. By making a habit of doing this, your mind will soon learn to associate that glass of wine with the end of the workday and flip the switch on work in automatic response. Another idea is to wear a certain item of clothing while working so that, when you take it off at the end of the work day, your mind makes the connection between its removal and the end of work time. A baseball cap, a particular pair of shoes, whatever it is doesn't matter. 6. Plan to take days off and vacations Finally, when establishing your routine and work schedule, don't forget to schedule days off and vacations. And make sure you take them. You may decide to take Saturdays and Sundays off, or your "weekends" might be Tuesdays and Wednesdays or Mondays and Fridays. Whatever works in best with your lifestyle, do it. The same goes for vacations. Don't underestimate the rejuvenating effect of taking a week off entirely. Not only is it good for your overall health and mental wellbeing, you will probably find that you are that much more productive when it comes to getting back to work for having taken a true time out. Hopefully you can see that working from home does not have to mean turning your home into a place of work. Working from home as a lifestyle choice should mean that the quality of your life is enhanced as a result of your decision, not diminished. By practicing these simple disciplines day-in and day-out you can be sure that even though you are taking care of business, you are also taking care of something even more important. Life. ------ 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 The following is an extract from Larry Wack's excellent weekly ezine, "Surveys and Trends". Follow the link at the end of the segment to subscribe for the full version. CLUTTERED ADVERTISING TRENDS & THE BACKLASH Burst Media Studies, the New York-based ad network said that a recent survey of 3,000 Web surfers found that generally, users accept advertising on the Internet. However, 63 percent said they wouldn't tolerate more than two ads per page. About 33 percent said they tolerated two ads per page, while another third said they could tolerate only a single ad. About 36 percent said they would immediately leave a site if they felt it was "cluttered" with advertising. Teens, especially, said they are more likely than other segments to abandon a site they perceive as cluttered. About 70 percent of respondents that said they remain on a site they feel is cluttered, said they pay less attention to the ads. The study also found that 58 percent of respondents said they had a less favorable opinion of an advertisers' product or service when it appeared in advertising on a Web page they perceived as cluttered. More than half of that group said they found the advertisers "much less favorable." The news contributes to the mounting research and anecdotal evidence suggesting that consumers might be reaching their fill of increasingly intrusive Web advertising. (source: markets advertising) WHO'S SPENDING THE MOST? The issue of ageism in ads has gained heightened attention following a survey released last month by the AARP, which shows that adults 45 and older are no more brand loyal than adults ages 18-34. Americans ages 55-64 spent 27.4 percent of the $4.16 trillion American households spend each year, the largest of any age category, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2017 survey of consumer spending. _______________________________________________________________ 5. Success Quote of the Week _______________________________________________________________ You only live once -- but if you work it right, once is enough. -- Joe E. Lewis _______________________________________________________________ 7. Subscription Management _______________________________________________________________ To SUBSCRIBE to this Newsletter:
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