The benefits of home based businesses are vast. According to Forbes work from home businesses are the fastest growing segment of start-up companies in the U.S. With the economy beginning to recover many people are opting to start their own business for the benefits it provides.In addition many people are willing to take a chance of making it on their own rather than getting back into the rat race and facing an employment sector where job security has become a myth.7 Benefits of Home Based BusinessCommute
Dress Code
Earning Potential
Flexible Hours
Less Risk
Overhead Cost
Tax AdvantagesCommute: Gone are the days of the pleasurable morning commute. The Millennial generation has sparked a change from the traditional 9 to 5 work week and looking for options such as, flex-time, 4-day work weeks, and telecommuting. Well, home business entrepreneurs are able to work from home while saving on the rising cost of gas.Dress Code: Most companies have dress codes that require workers to adhere to. Working from home allows a person to dress how they choose without losing productivity. Home business individuals can have teleconferences from home in their birthday suit or video conference meetings with a dress shirt on and pajama bottoms.Earning Potential: How many times have you felt you were passed up for a promotion or not given a raise because of a bad performance review? Working from home gives individuals the potential to proportionately make what they are worth. In other words the harder you work improves your chances of making more money. No need to ask for a raise or wait for the next promotion.Flexible Hours: If you are working in a normal business setting your hours of work would most likely be 9 to 5. In a work from home business your office hours are what you make them. Depending on your personality you can schedule your work to take place when you are most productive, whether that is in the morning, noon, or night. This is turn allows you to plan your work around your family duties (for work at home moms or dads) and gives you better control of a work-life balance.Less Risk: There is inherent risk with any business opportunity, but home based businesses offer less risk than the traditional brick-n-mortar business or buying a franchise. In addition, once your business is up and running your overhead cost are lower and the maintenance is easier.Overhead Cost: In comparison to a traditional business overhead cost can be one of the major expenses in a building. From paying rent, a lease or mortgage on a building to the utilities, these expenses can be a major drain on profits. In work from home businesses, overhead cost can be kept to a minimum and many of the expenses are tax deductible.Tax Advantages: This can be one of the greatest benefits of having a work from home business. Business lunches, business travel, a home office, and a portion of your home utilities are all examples of tax-deductions. Consult a tax professional when filing your tax returns, but many of the expenses related to your home based business are legitimate deductions that can lower your tax burden and in turn allow you to keep more of the money you make.Though this article covered the benefits of operating a home based business there are negatives as well, but getting into any business opportunity has positives and negatives, ultimately you have to do what is right for you. But beginning a home based business can be a chance for you to follow your passions and build an income producing vehicle that unleashes your creative abilities.Here’s to thinking like an entrepreneur and achieving your dreams.
7 Benefits of a Home Based Business
Information Product Creation: Never Compete on Price Because There Is Only One You
Information product creation requires extensive preparation, no matter which niche you work within and you want to make sure that your information product has a successful launch. That probably sounds scary and intimidating but here’s the thing: this is a one time effort and it will pay off in a foundation that is strong enough to get your ideal clients to invest in your high-end programs and services without the perils of a traditional funnel. This article will teach you a few of the things that you need to remember if you’d like to invest in yourself and start on the information product creation path using your unique talents and abilities. Remember that you never have to worry about anyone ripping off your ideas because if you understand how to properly position yourself around your story.
Understand Both Strengths and Weaknesses: It is good to have an impartial view of your own strengths and weaknesses when lay the foundation of selling yourself within the information product creation process. It helps you figure out where you are, what you lack and how to move forward so that you get as much growth as possible. It is more than important, it is urgent if you want to create fast success for yourself to have personal positive reinforcement and deep belief to provide yourself the support you need so that you can get over your own limitations to ensure that your information product is as valuable as it can be.
You also need to know exactly who your competition is so you can study them and use their methods to help you improve your own standings. Down recreate the wheel, but understand the wheel and position yourself going uphill from the competition. Check out which kinds of opportunities you’ve already got and try to figure out how best to use them while taking care to remember your strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way to figure out where you stand against your competition which helps you figure out how best to grow.
Launch on Time: No matter what, even if you haven’t officially announced your “launch date” you should launch the site when you’ve said you would. This will force you to stick to your goal and actually work on it. Thinking that “I’ll launch it when I think it’s ready to launch” will only hinder your efforts. You’ve got a responsibility that you need to live up to with your launch, and you can’t move back on that one. If you get close to your launch date and you are getting hung up on your self limiting beliefs in your information product creation, don’t worry this about getting it out there and not perfection. As long as it is usable you should launch it. Launching on time is the professional thing to do and it is more important than creating a “wow” effect in your site visitors. You can always update/upgrade your website when you have to, so there shouldn’t be any issue with that.
Analyze Your Own Concept: If you want to make your information product creation successful you need to understand how good your concept is: is it really going to work for your chosen audience or would something else be better? You already know about your competition; how does your concept measure up? If you haven’t come up with your own idea and are trying to work with someone else’s concept, do some more work on your own before your launch. People want original ideas because they’ve seen too many other me-too websites already.
Test Your Concept Before You Commit To The Information Product Creation Process: One of the biggest failures people have with information product creation is not testing an idea before putting a lot of effort into producing an information product. PPC to a small 5 page site with a landing page is a great way to test an offer before you even produce it. If people will sign up to get it, you can be sure that you can create an information product that will target eliminating the pain of your target market. The small amount of money will be invaluable in using crowd sourcing to direct the final outline of the information product creation process.
You’ll have lots of hurdles to clear after the launch of your information product and the only way to truly take care of them is to follow the advice in this article to work smarter. Plenty of people work hard, but it is the ones who work smarter who make real money online with the information product creation business model.
Blue Ocean Investment Strategies – 10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Utilize the Long Tail of Investing
Defined within the realm of the statistical Bell Curve, the long tail would reside in the skinny tail at the borders. The long tail, in regards to goods and services, refers to the evolution away from mainstream offerings towards more niche products and services. With the internet drastically reducing the costs of establishing distribution channels, the ability of entrepreneurs to focus more on the longtail sector to fit their customized needs is gaining increasing appeal.
However, almost no one speaks of the longtail of investing. To me, longtail investment strategies are the strategies that do not heavily rely on fundamental or technical analysis, but exploit other strongly predictive factors to produce not only superior returns to traditional investment strategies but also investment opportunities with far better risk-reward paradigms than those produced by traditional investment strategies. Here are 10 reasons why the longtail of investing is the only way to build wealth.
(1) You will never achieve the level of wealth you desire by handing your money over to a large investment firm. The vast majority of private investors hand their money to large institutions and allow them to invest their money for them. If this were truly the best way to achieve financial freedom, then almost every one you know would be ecstatic with their financial consultant. Think of how many people you know that absolutely rave about their financial consultant.
The fact that 90% of people you know do not rave about their financial consultant should tell you that niche investment strategies, or longtail investment strategies, are far superior. The ones that are happy with the large investment houses already were independently wealthy before they sought out their help. Think about how many people you know that have ever told you, “I wasn’t wealthy before, but thanks to my investment firm, I am wealthy beyond my dreams now.”
(2) Thanks to evolving information technology, there are many other means of making investment decisions than just utilizing fundamental and technical analysis. Though people have been really slow to grasp this, once they do, longtail investment strategies, like those invented by SmartKnowledgeU(TM), will boom. There is no doubt that the level of top-notch financial, political and corporate information available to the average investor has increased by leaps and bounds within the past decade.
There is a virtual treasure map that was created by the flattening of the world over the past decade to selecting stocks that are poised to explode. However, because the largest, most powerful investment institutions in the world have kept the masses of investors fixated on traditional investment techniques such as value and fundamental analysis, the longtail of investment strategies is currently much further behind in its developmental phases than it should be.
The best analogy I can use when explaining why people have ignored the long tail of investment strategies is to compare it to the incredibly slow adoption of Internet Protocol Version 6 (Ipv6) by the United States. When China started preparing its country for Ipv6 a decade ago, the benefits in increased security and its added value properties in e-commerce were evident even back then. However, people in the U.S. were comfortable with the lesser Ipv4 so did not take any action until the progress and superior internet and business capabilities of China, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong finally embarrassed the U.S. enough to move forward and catch up with Asia.
I see the same thing happening in the educational realm of investing. Everyone is comfortable with the traditional investment strategies that have been propagated for the last several decades so nobody sees a need to move forward even though much better strategies exist today. Just as with Ipv6, the world will eventually realize that the safest and best means of investing money reside in the longtail, and they will eventually adopt these strategies.
(3) With so much investor skepticism of corporate integrity sparked by past accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, General Motors and the like, and the current, ongoing backdating option scandals, investors will increasingly seek alternate means of making investment decisions other than crunching numbers that they feel are untrustworthy. Furthermore, technical analysis often yields false positives as well. A chart will show indexes that appear bullish having just broken through a ceiling of resistance only to have the index turn back downward for a prolonged period of time, or a chart will appear bearish having just broken through a floor of resistance only to turn around and begin another bullish ascent.
In fact, you have seen some of these turnaround trends with some of the technical posts that I’ve placed on my blog in previous months. In fact, that is why I always state that I never rely solely on technical indicators to make my decisions. I rely only on technical indicators to confirm or dispel what my long tail investment strategies tell me. Of the three types of analysis, fundamental, technical and long tail, long tail investment strategies yield by far the least amount of false negatives and false positives. That’s why I rely on them so heavily.
This sentiment will lead to an evolution of longtail investment strategies, and the discovery of more efficient and better predictive means of making investment decisions than even those that already exist. Even current longtail investment strategies, such as those utilized at SmartKnowledgeU(TM) are constantly evolving as access to reliable information increases every year. Making decisions as if you were a fly on the wall of boardrooms is no longer a fantasy. It is possible, thanks to the evolution of the information landscape.
(4) With the growth of blogs and pure information sites on the web, the stranglehold of global investment myths, including the Modern Portfolio Theory of diversification, will soon be exposed for what they are – cleverly disguised sales strategies posing as investment strategies. Once people realize this, longtail investment strategies will gain wider acceptance, much like acupuncture and herbal medicine eventually gained credibility as healing regimens in the schools of Western medicine.
(5) Wider acceptance of alternative, longtail investment strategies that far outperform those utilized by global investment firms will happen as word of successes via these strategies spread throughout the world via the internet. The internet distribution channel can and will be used to change the mindset of investors.
(6) The Do-It-Yourselfers are Growing – With the success of books such as Stephen Covey’s “The Eight Habit” that emphasize personal accountability to achieve excellence versus handing control over to someone else, cultural shifts will happen whereby people will seek to seize control over their own financial future versus just handing their money to a firm to manage. As this cultural shift happens, multitudes of people will realize that they are shorting their returns significantly every single year by handing their money to global investment houses.
(7) The flattening of the world and accessibility to previously inaccessible investment information will undoubtedly yield an increasing amount of investment strategies that reside in the longtail. People will realize the foolishness of believing in the one investment strategy thrust upon them by global investment houses for the past half of century as “the only viable and safe way to invest.” If the younger generation takes an interest in investing, adding their creativity to the investment arena will result in explosive growth in the longtail of investment strategies. However, since the odds of this occurrence are quite low, a more gradual shift towards niche investment strategies is much more likely.
(8) The explosion of social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, and so forth, will amplify the viral marketing of longtail investment concepts. Again, ignorance of longtail investment strategies causes fear and hesitancy to use them. Viral marketing of longtail investment concepts will increase millions of investors’ comfort level with these different and unique concepts.
(9) People are ultimately interested in returns, no matter how much global investment firms try to separate themselves from their competitors with smoke and mirror service claims. All the gratitude for luxury box suites at Los Angeles Lakers games, suites at the Four Seasons Hotel, conferences at world-class golf courses and resorts will quickly wither once people realize how much more money they are earning with longtail investment strategies.
(10) Again, because people will readily abandon all the perks they get as a preferred client at a large investment firm for far superior returns on their portfolios, longtail investing will eventually reach a critical mass. Eventually the longtail of investing will migrate towards the center and become the mainstream methods of investing, though this may take several decades to occur.
This article may be freely reprinted on another website as long as it is not modified, changed, or altered in any way and as long as the below author byline is included along with the active hyperlinks below:
JS Kim is the Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent investment research & consulting firm that uses proprietary strategies to create wealth during this ongoing financial & monetary crisis. JS Kim’s predictions over the past 3 years have been so startling accurate that the Financial Times, Reuters, and the International Business Times often reprint his articles.