Finance and Business

Did you ever go to a movie or a play, expecting to see this great performance, only to walk out of the theater scratching your head and thoroughly disappointed? Well, a lot of home business owners get that same feeling after they begin to tackle their business and find that expectations and reality don’t always jive. In this article, I’m going to explain to you why that is and what you can do to fix the problem.

Okay, so why is it that so often when we start out in our home business journey that we end up being bitterly disappointed? The main reason is because we venture into our business without a plan. We have some pie in the sky vision of what we want to make but it’s not based in any kind of reality. Okay, I can hear you saying “But I don’t know how to make a business plan.” Well, while I can’t go through a complete business planning course in this article, I can give you some pointers.

Whatever it is you want to do, the first thing you need to do is see what kind of a demand for your product or service there is. How do you do this? It’s really quite simple. Head on over to Google’s keyword tool and look up some keywords related to your proposed business. Let’s say you want to sell pet supplies. You might look up keywords like, “pet supplies for sale”, “where can I buy pet supplies” and so on. Total up all the monthly search figures for each keyword.

Now, let’s say after doing your keyword research you discover that there are 100,000 monthly searches for all the related keywords to your business. Great! Let’s for argument sake say that you are going to get about 1% of that market. That means you’re going to get roughly 1,000 visitors to your site a month. Now, let’s say that your average conversion percentage is about 2%. That means you’re going to sell about 20 products a month. Now, let’s say that your average product sale is $20. That means you’re going to make about $400 a month from this business.

If you were planning to make $4,000 a month from this business, you are obviously going to be very disappointed, provided the above estimates are fairly accurate. So, in this case, you have one of three things you can do. You can revise your expectations, in order to avoid disappointment; you can decide to go into a new business entirely OR you can add another business to your model in order to make the $4,000 that you originally planned on making. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest complaints I hear from people who run a home business is that there is too much information out there and that they’re suffering from information overload. Well, they’ll get no argument from me on this one. There IS a lot of information out there and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. However, you don’t have to suffer from info overload. This article will help you get through it.

There are a number of steps you can take that will make the assimilation of information easier on the brain. Of course if these don’t work, there’s always aspirin. The first step is to take a look at your business and see what it is that you feel you need to learn. Maybe you want to build a web site but don’t know anything about HTML. Maybe you want to learn how to write a sales letter. Put all the things that you feel you need to learn on a list and number it from one to whatever.

After you’ve done that, take the item that you feel is the most important to learn and start working on it. Pretend that there isn’t anything else but that one thing to learn. As you are working on this one item, you want to further break IT down into sections because you don’t want to learn it all at once. Your brain can only contain so much at a time. So take a little piece each day and get as much as you can out of that ONE piece as possible. With web design, it may be something as simple as figuring out how to use your HTML editor.

When you have completely learned that first item, master it. Make sure that you can actually do what it is you set out to learn. Reading through a book means nothing if you can’t apply the principles in it. So, for example, if you’ve just learned PPC, set up a small PPC campaign and see if you can get it to be somewhat profitable. It doesn’t have to make you a fortune. Even if it makes you just a little money, that’s fine. At least you’ve gotten to see that the principles you’ve learned you’ve actually LEARNED and know how to apply. Book smarts mean nothing.

After you’ve convinced yourself that the item on your list has been sufficiently learned, cross it off and move on to the next item. Continue to do this until all the items on your list are crossed off. Now obviously, as time goes on, you will add new items to the list. That’s fine. Just continue to do what you’re doing. The key is, don’t move onto the NEXT item until you’ve finished the one before it.