Rashmi's Home Business

Ten Tips To Turbo-Charge Your Income

Small Action Steps That Will Make A Difference To Any Home-Based Business
by Elizabeth H. Cottrell, IAHBE Editor

The New Year always brings optimism, good intentions, fresh starts, and a few new actions. Invariably, however, we get bogged down in the same old routines, excuses, patterns, and delusions. As I write this, it is early 2009 and I am 58 years old (for a few more months). I have been putting some professional priorities on the back burner for far too long and I am declaring to you right now that this is going to be my year to begin breaking free from old, worn-out ways. The checklist in this article, though written in the context of a new year’s resolutions, is timeless and can be used at any time of the year, any year of the century. The operative word in the subtitle is “action.” Until you put something into action, it won’t help you. The next operative word is “small.” None of these things, by themselves, is hard to do. So there’s no excuse!

1. Spend some time thinking. This exercise will help you focus your efforts and save you a tremendous amount of time down the road by enabling you to prioritize better and work smarter. It’s a step that we so often hate to take because we think we don’t have time. TAKE THE TIME for this step.

Carve out an hour or two, preferably a morning or an afternoon. Don’t answer calls; don’t check e-mails; go into a room by yourself with a legal pad and ask yourself the following questions and write down the answers:

• What am I really good at? What things do others comment on that I do well?
  
  
• Of all the things that I do in a week (month, year in my business), what things really give me satisfaction…make my heart sing?
  
  
• Of all the things that I do in my business, what things do I really dislike the most?
  
  
• Which clients or client jobs give me the most satisfaction? Which give me the most heartburn?
  
  
• Which products or services in my business offer the most return for my time invested?

Now, look at your answers and compare them to the ways you are spending your time. If you’re spending too much time on things that you’re not good at or things that you don’t like doing or things that don’t return much income, then it’s time to delegate or drop some things off of your “To Do” list.

2. “Systematize, Automate, and Delegate.” Andy Jenkins teaches this strategy for working smarter. He says to make a list of everything you do in your business day to day and then break it down into discrete tasks, as detailed as possible. This will take many pages (he says for him, it was 35 pages), but when you’re finished, you can look for patterns and find things to automate and other things to delegate. Read his excellent blog entry (see Sources below) for details on how to get your business running much more smoothly.

3. Increase your fees or prices by at least 10-15% right now. Home-based entrepreneurs are famous for under-pricing the market. They have a misguided sense that they have to charge less to compete with “the big guys.” Not so! Before you freak out completely from this advice to increase your fees, do the math. In order for you to LOSE money by raising your price 15%, you’d have to lose 33% of ALL of your sales for that particular service or product. You may lose a few clients, but research shows that most of your clients won’t even notice; in fact, you are much more likely to increase your income and gain other clients who will be attracted by the intangible fact that you value yourself enough to charge appropriately for your product or service.

4. Add value to your current products or services. This is the secret to offsetting any potentially negative aspects to raising your prices. The result will not only increase sales but will increase customer satisfaction in their perception of what they are buying. Read Jenkins and Lemberg’s “MBA in a Box” (see Sources below) to find out how to add so much value to your offering that a price increase will seem like a great deal to your customers. The gist of their advice is to remember that you’re not just selling a product or service. There’s a lot that goes along with that, and we—as sellers—need to remind our customers how much value there already is in such things as extra features, delivery, installation, your customer service, your reputation, your guarantee, convenience, terms, etc. Note that we’re not adding cost to the product or service, we’re just painting a more accurate picture to the customer of the true value of what they’re buying.

5. Revive an untapped source of clients by sending an e-mail, postcard, or letter to everyone with whom you have ever done business and bring them up to date with your current products and services, providing them with your current contact information, Website, and e-mail. Andy Jenkins says to make it sort of like a survey and to always include a special offer. If you have been diligent about keeping their e-mails, one e-mail from you alone may generate lots of sales. Don’t forget an important rule about sending group e-mails: put the e-mail addresses in the Bcc (Blind carbon copy) field instead of the To field or the Cc field so that their address will be invisible to all recipients.

6. Reward your existing clients and customers. Send them a coupon or a small gift, perhaps even just a personal note or letter expressing your appreciation for their business. The more personalized your gesture is, the better. Remind them that in these hard economic times, their business is so important and so valued by you. Stay in touch with them—through e-mail, newsletter or telephone. Let them know when you’ve got a new product or service. Even if they’re not in the market themselves, they can be turned into ambassadors to tell their friends and family.

7. Always be in networking mode. Have a stash of business cards with you at all times, and give them out generously, even when you hand them out in social settings more than business settings. That person who gets your card may eventually need whatever product or service you are selling…or know someone who does. Always ask if they have a business card too, and follow up with an e-mail or note saying how nice it was to meet them. If you find a way to help them or provide them with helpful information, so much the better.

Always use a signature at the end of your e-mails. It should include some informational or tantalizing text about your business. Just the other day, I got an e-mail from a business associate of my sister’s who does executive coaching. She had forwarded him an e-mail from me with a compliment about their company Website, and he happened to notice, in my signature, that I did resumés as part of my desktop publishing and writing business. He wrote me, and we are now in collaboration on ways that he can refer his clients to me if they need help with their resumé.

8. Schedule some learning time into every week. One of the hallmarks of successful entrepreneurs is their mastery of their field. Clients will pay more when they confidence in your expertise and ability and knowledge of your product or service. We’ve all been in stores where the salesperson was unfamiliar with their products and not very helpful. Contrast that with someone who knew not only the specifications of the product but was familiar with the potential uses, the situations a buyer might encounter, and prepared to answer almost any question or concern you might have. This not only increases the chances for a sale, but it vastly increases the chances for repeat sales. The sources of your learning will depend, of course, but look in industry journals, professional association Websites, and manufacturers’ product literature (if you sell products). Besides impressing others, this knowledge will build self-confidence in you.

9. Make friends with technology. This is related to both #2 (Automate) and #8 (Learn). Technology has revolutionized the ability of entrepreneurs to operate world-class businesses from a home-based office, especially in the areas of Internet and Communications. Don’t be afraid of it or get overwhelmed by it. Get help when you need it, and be willing to pay others to do things you don’t want to do yourself. Our own staff writer, Yank Elliott, has provided some terrific Tool Reviews of various software and other technologies that can make a big difference for home-based business owners. IAHBE members should definitely check the archives for these excellent sources of information. Keep an eye on the technology articles in BusinessWeek.com and Entrepreneur.com. Harnessing the power of technology can enable you to create a business presence that appears to have a much larger staff than otherwise. As with any tool, however, technology can be mis-used, so knowledge is power!

10. Make time for yourself. Why is it that we’ll keep appointments, promises, and commitments to other people faithfully, but we won’t do the same for promises we make ourselves…promises to take time off, to live a healthier lifestyle, to spend more time learning about our field or trade, to write that article or book, to learn that language, to visit that aging relative. Make just one more list—a “bucket list” if you will (those things you’d like to do before you “kick the bucket”). When possible, put a timeframe after the items on your list and refer back to it regularly. Put these things into your calendar (or steps to achieving them) the same way you would schedule any other important appointments.

I tend to “hit the floor running” in the morning, but I’ve changed my daily routine to allow at least an hour of quiet time—prayer, contemplation, reflection, and…yes…business thinking. On those days when I adhere to it (and I’m getting much better), I find that my productivity is much better and my sense of well-being soars. I spend more time on the right things, and the bottom line of my business reflects this directly.

You cannot wait until you have time to do these things. You have to MAKE time to do them. When you do, the most amazing thing happens: you’ll have more time to do the things you really want and need to do, and you’ll earn more money for the time you spend on your business.

SOURCES

AllBusiness.com. “Technology and Equipment for Home Based Businesses,” 2007

Dart, Laurie. “Ten Ways to Add Value to Your Services.” Jogena’s Article Directory.

Dean, Terry. “20 Ways to Add Value to Your Products and Services.” Internet Business Coaching by Terry Dean, 2007

Jenkins, Andy. “Make Your Business S.A.D.” StomperBlog.net, 2009

Jenkins, Andy and Paul Lemberg. “MBA in a Box,” 2008-2009. Disclaimer: this document is a sales piece for the authors’ FormulaFive program which they hope you’ll sign up for, but the document itself is free and jam-packed with valuable information.

Kooser, Amanda. “Setting Up Technology for your Home-Based Business.” Entrepreneur.com, 2005

Microsoft.com. “Microsoft Small Business Center.”

Rabay, Miguel. “Leveraging Technology to Grow Your Business.” StartUpNation.com

Rodriguez, George. “Strategies for Increasing the Income of Your Home Business.” PowerHomeBiz.com

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Directions to set up a Homebased Internet Business

 

This ezine (An ezine, also known as an email magazine, online publication or electronic newsletter is simply a newsletter available via email and/or online. There are hundreds of thousands of ezines on various subjects available on the Internet free of charge). You can subscribe to any ezine of your interest to access the information on a regular basis free of cost. This ezine attempts at providing necessary information to newbies on setting up their first Homebased Internet Business.

 

As the name implies “Homebased Internet Business” is a business carried out from the comfort of one’s home. The business is carried out with the whole world globally through the medium of Internet. You need a basic knowledge of Computer. No need to be a programmer or a software engineer to do internet business. Homebased Internet Business can easily be carried out by Homemakers. They can take care of their homes & children. It only needs 2-3 hours of work to perform your daily routine work like reading your emails, replying to queries of your customers, posting your business advertisements in classifieds, traffic exchanges, safelists, blogs etc. Not only housewives can do this job, but also many others like, retired people, unemployed, students etc. who can spare at least 2-3 hour per day.

 

In order to be successful Homebased Internet Business entrepreneur, you must have your product and a website. You can have your product later on, but a Website is a must for success in this business. Your website is just like your revolving shop. The whole world can see what is being sold by you. Till you don’t have your own product, you can sell other’s product on your website. You can also join Affiliate Programs to promote other’s Website, product & services for handsome monthly commissions. I too do not have a product of mine own. I have joined dozens of affiliate programs. My favorite Affiliate Program is SFI. The details are available at: 

 

You may choose a single product or service for your HIB (Homebased Internet Business) or multiple product & services. These may include Health Products, Beauty & Slimming Products, Medical Products, Ladies Hand Bangs, Toys & Games, Gadgets like Mobiles & Wireless Equipment, MP-3 records, e-books on various topics like “Pets & Animals”, Training of Dogs. In fact now-a-days, e-books are available on almost all the subjects.  Services may include booking of Hotels, Tours & Travels. Air, Railway & Bus Ticket booking etc, the list can go on and on.

 

As far as I am concerned, till 2000, I did not know a thing about Internet. It was only in the beginning of 2001 that I learned to operate a Personal Computer after purchasing it for Rupees 40,000/-, gradually, I developed a keen interest in the Internet. Today I run a successful Homebased Internet Business sitting in a cozy corner of my house at Visakhapatnam, AP, India. In addition to running a Website I have 8 Blogs and an equal number of Social Groups which I use for pursuing my business in addition to making friends online. More tips will follow next week including safety precautions while carrying out Internet Business like how to avoid spam etc.

 

You can visit my Website at http://www.rashmi.biz

 

Blogs are available at:

 

http://mlmattu.blogspot.com/  (Blog of My Biz Articles)

 

http://surfanytime.blogspot.com/   (Surfing the Web)

 

http://sfi-rashmi.blogspot.com/  (Strong Future International)

 

http://www.freewebs.com/mattu01 (My SFI BIZNIZ)

 

http://manohar-cashforall.blogspot.com/  (Cash For All)

 

http://manohar-mattu.blogspot.com/  (My Personal Blog)

 

http://multiincomestream.blogspot.com/  (Multi Income Streams)

 

http://blogs.adlandpro.com/blogs/manu55/default.aspx  (Manu’s Blog)

 

http://www.ning.com/home/apps/using

 

http://manussocialnetwork.ning.com/

 

http://sitewealthclub.ning.com/profile/ManoharMattu

 

http://strongfutureinternational.ning.com/

 

http://sta.rtup.biz/profile/ManoharMattu

 

http://www.intenet-business-resources.blogspot.com/

 

This ezine will be published every week. In order to subscribe to this ezine write a mail to Manohar Mattu on merimail@pochta.ru or directly go to my website http://www.rashmi.biz and register yourself for free to receive a copy of my weekly ezine.

 

To your online prosperity,

Manohar Mattu

+919177583445

 

PS: You can download my free e-book “Dotcomology – The science of making money online” at: http://www.PlugInProfitSite.com/main-24656

 

 

Write a Book in 14 Days

 

 

In Internet Business one should stay away from Spamming. It’s very urgent and important. Spamming can land a person into legal troubles & implications if the matter is reported. Therefore one should know what constitutes spamming and how to avoid it.

 

 

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, Online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, and file sharing network spam.

 

Spamming remains economically possible because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely condemmened, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

Persons who create electronic spam are called spammers.

E-mail spam

E-mail spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE) or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients.

Spam in e-mail started to become a problem when the Internet was opened up to the general public in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and today comprises some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by conservative estimate; some sources go as high as 95%.

Pressure to make e-mail spam illegal has been successful in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. Spammers take advantage of this fact, and frequently outsource parts of their operations to countries where spamming will not get them into legal trouble.

Increasingly, e-mail spam today is sent via "zombie networks", networks of virus- or worm-infected personal computers in homes and offices around the globe; many modern worms install a backdoor which allows the spammer access to the computer and use it for malicious purposes. This complicates attempts to control the spread of spam, as in many cases the spam doesn't even originate from the spammer. In November 2008 an ISP, McColo, which was providing service to botnet operators, was depeered and spam dropped 50%-75% Internet-wide. At the same time, it is becoming clear that malware authors, spammers, and phishers are learning from each other, and possibly forming various kinds of partnerships.

E-mail is an extremely cheap mass medium, and professional spammers have automated their processes to the extent that millions of messages can be sent daily with little or no labor costs. Thus, spamming can be very profitable even at what would otherwise be considered extremely low response rates. Researchers recently found one botnet was profitable with a conversion ratio of one in ten million spam emails.

An industry of e-mail address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling compiled databases. Some of these address harvesting approaches rely on users not reading the fine print of agreements, resulting in them agreeing to send messages indiscriminately to their contacts. This is a common approach in social networking spam such as that generated by the social networking site Quechup.

Mobile phone spam

Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. The term "SpaSMS" was coined at the adnews website Adland in 2000 to describe spam SMS.

Online game messaging spam

Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, chatrooms, or public discussion areas. What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but usually this term applies to all forms of message flooding, violating the terms of service contract for the website.

Spam targeting search engines (spamdexing)

Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to a practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization techniques" to unfairly increase their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing spamdexing tactics.

Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam

Blog spam, or "blam" for short, is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site. Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions.

Spam targeting video sharing sites

Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now being frequently targeted by spammers. The most common technique involves people (or spambots) posting links to sites, most likely pornographic or dealing with online dating, on the comments section of random videos or people's profiles.

Another frequently used technique is using bots to post messages on random users' profiles to a spam account's channel page, along with enticing text and images, usually of a suggestive nature. These pages may include their own or other users' videos, again often suggestive. The main purpose of these accounts is to draw people to their link in the home page section of their profile.

YouTube has blocked the posting of links but people can still manage to get their message across by replacing all instances of a period with the word "dot." For instance, typing out example dot com instead of example.com bypasses the filter set in place. In addition, YouTube has implemented a CAPTCHA system that makes rapid posting of repeated comments much more difficult than before, because of abuse in the past by mass-spammers who would flood people's profiles with thousands of repetitive comments.

Yet another kind is actual video spam, giving the uploaded movie a name and description with a popular figure or event which is likely to draw attention, or within the video has a certain image timed to come up as the video's thumbnail image to mislead the viewer. The actual content of the video ends up being totally unrelated, sometimes offensive, or just features on-screen text of a link to the site being promoted.

Others may upload videos presented in an infomercial-like format selling their product which feature actors and paid testimonials, though the promoted product or service is of dubious quality and would likely not pass the scrutiny of a standards and practices department at a television station or cable network.

Noncommercial spam

E-mail and other forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet spams were religious or political. Serdar Argic, for instance, spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of fraud, and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been kidnapped, held for ransom, and even murdered.

Geographical origins of spams

Experts from SophosLabs analysed spam messages which were caught by some companies' spam filters, these being a part of the Sophos global spam monitoring network. They found that during the third quarter of 2007 the USA was the leader in the number of spam messages around the world. According to Sophos experts 28.4% of global spam comes from the U.S. The second place in the list of spammer-countries is South Korea, bringing 5.2% of global spam.

The list of top 12 countries that spread spam around the globe is presented below:

1. USA: 28.4%;
2. South Korea: 5.2%;
3. China (including Hong Kong): 4.9%;
4. Russia: 4.4%;
5. Brazil: 3.7%;
6. France: 3.6%;
7. Germany: 3.4%;
8. Turkey: 3.%;
9. Poland: 2.7%;
10. Great Britain: 2.4%;
11. Romania: 2.3%;
12. Mexico: 1.9%;

• Other countries: 33.9%

 

Posted By Manohar Mattu

http://www.rashmi.biz

http://www.moreinfo247.com/9106094/EE