Business | Ideas, Strategy and Tips

Archive for July, 2009

The idea of starting a business is alluring to so many people.  There is the vision of wealth, providing opportunities and security.  Also there is pride and purpose- knowing what you’re doing is for you and your family.  And of course, one of the most appealing reasons is the freedom of being able to work from home and choose your own hours.  

These visions are wonderful and, in many cases, attainable.  In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, there are over 17.6 million businesses with one or more owners but no paid employees.      

So why are so many aspiring entrepreneurs left on the sidelines? 

It turns out, there are three reasons.  One, as you can imagine, is good old fashioned fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of failure.  Believe it or not, fear of success.  The second reason is a lack of knowledge.  “Where do I start?” “I don’t have enough resources.”  “I don’t know anything about marketing.” And the third reason, which I will be discussing in this article, is about the business idea, itself. 

Business Idea Paralysis

What is business idea paralysis?  Quite simply, it’s a condition that prevents people from starting a business because they get held back in the idea generation stage.  Basically, they are stuck in neutral.  Below are the two most common reasons why:

 The Pet Rock Syndrome

In 1975 a gentleman named Gary Dahl created a product called the pet rock.  Many of you have probably heard of it.  In case you haven’t, it was nothing more than a rock set in a box on some straw.  Within 6 months, Dahl had sold over 5 million of these pet rocks for $3.95 each.  It cost him less than 30 cents to produce the rock.  So, when you do some basic number crunching, he made over 15 million dollars in just 6 months – selling rocks.   

What does this have to do with anything?  Well, quite a bit actually.  Imagine how much your life would change if you could sell something as simple as a rock and become a multi-millionaire in just 6 months.  Pretty tantalizing isn’t it?  Unfortunately, it has tantalized people so much that they never end up starting a business.  They only end up chasing their own “pet rock” gimmicks that never catch on.

The reason is simple.  Some people just haven’t been blessed by the idea gods.  The gods have failed to spring upon them the multi-million dollar idea that they believe they need.    No matter how hard they try to come up with the next pet rock, they can’t.  If you don’t believe me, take a look at how many get-rich-quick schemes are being sold today.  If people can’t think of the next great idea, then they will buy the idea from someone else.  Well, guess what?  It doesn’t work.  Mr. Dahl was an aberration.  He hit the winning lottery ticket.  Chances are you won’t.

After you have wiped the pet rock syndrome from your head, beware of the next, equally as paralyzing syndrome that can keep you from getting to business with real, tangible ideas. 

Peace, Love and Happiness Syndrome

On the other end of the spectrum we have the peace, love and happiness camp.  This group is a little more realistic in their pursuit of a business idea.  Their problem, however, is that they love too many business ideas.  In fact, they love them so much that they can’t decide on the best one.  They become paralyzed by trying to figure out which idea is best, and ultimately, never try any of them.

These types of people, I have found, are extremely visionary.  They love to explore all of the different business angles and long term visions.  The problem is they don’t take action because their heads are filled with amazing ideas and forecasts for success.

If you fall into this camp, I have bit of advice.  Stop it!  You need to choose an idea and then let your mind run wild within the boundaries of that idea.

How Do You Find the Right Business Idea?

There are two schools of thought on how to come up with the right business idea.  I’ll discuss them below:

The Traditional Approach

The traditional theory for finding the right business idea states that you should find a need and fill it.  In other words, you need to pay attention to your surroundings and look to see where there might be an opportunity to offer a new product or service that people may need.  Once you do, that’s what you will build your business around. 

There is no question that this method of generating business ideas work.  It has led to many great inventions and innovations over the years.   It is for this reason that pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars.  They develop new drugs to satisfy a need, such as a heart condition.  You can also see the traditional approach at play with today’s green technologies.  New, “green” businesses are trying to fill the need for clean, renewable energy.

There is one problem with this method, however.  It can be quite expensive and time consuming.  First, you have to develop the product or service.  This includes spending a lot of time and money on market research and sampling.  Second, you have to spend a lot of money on marketing to not only introduce the product or service, but to also convince people that they really do need it. 

If you’re a typical entrepreneur with limited funds and expertise, this may not be the best method of generating business ideas. 

The Give Them What They Want Approach

There is a second school of thought about coming up with a business idea that in many ways is far less risky and is much less expensive.  This theory is based on the idea that you should come up with an idea that already exists.  Or, simply put, offer people a product or service that they are already buying. 

Wait a minute, you may say, but doesn’t that mean there is more competition?  Isn’t the market already saturated?   Um, I would reply, tell that to Netflix. 

In 1997 the originator of Netflix reportedly hit upon the idea for movie rental-by-mail when he was forced to pay $40 in fines after returning an overdue videotape of the film Apollo 13.  Renting movies was not a new business “need” that needed to be satisfied.  In fact, Blockbuster had been renting movies for over 10 years, and in 1998 had served nearly 60 million people who rented more than 970 million movies and video games.  Netflix took a proven market (movie rentals) and simply enhanced the service by offering movie rentals by mail, with no late fees.  The result:  today, Netflix has over 10 million monthly subscribers while generating  an annual revenue of over 1 billion dollars.  Blockbuster, on the other hand, is struggling to stay afloat. 

The point is that if you know what people are buying, a good business idea is nothing more than simply enhancing the product or service and/or marketing message.  It’s a lot less risky and more often than not, a lot less expensive. 

One of the biggest struggles I had in starting my business was actually coming up with the idea.  I wanted something that was scalable as well as needed in our society.  I combed through hundreds of ideas before settling on my current venture.  Through this discovery period, I uncovered what I believe are the five most important concepts in determining what makes the perfect business idea. 

So, what is a perfect idea?  Each individual entrepreneur has their concept of the perfect business.  While Google is a great business for the founders of that company – it may not be a great business for others that are non-tech savvy or who do not want to run such a large organization.  

Therefore, each perfect business is defined by the business owners.  Keeping this in mind, let’s start on my five concepts of finding the perfect business: 

Number One – Understanding your customer:  This might seem strange to start here as how do you know your customers before you have a business idea in place.  The answer is simple – your customers make the business, therefore without customers there is no business.  If you have a business idea don’t try to develop the idea around what YOU think potential customers will like or need, but find out what your customers actually desire.  Too often business owners get an idea in their head and jump right in with both feet.  However, they soon find out that their target market does not want what they are offering.  Spending both time and money on a project just to see it languish is not the perfect business idea. 

Moreover, let’s say you don’t already have an idea – getting out and understand consumers (those who will eventually become your customers) may lead you to the perfect idea.  Knowing what potential consumers need and building products to meets those needs will get customers beating a path to your door – that is a perfect business idea. 

Number Two – Passion:  Passion here does not mean being fanatical about your product or service.  But, it does mean having some interest in what you do. More times than not, you will be spending 15 to 18 hours a day working on your business in the beginning – usually for the first 12 to 18 months (more like 2 years in this economy).  You have to constantly be thinking about ways to improve and grow your business as well as be out talking about it to everyone, everywhere. If you end up starting a venture that you don’t have passion for, something that does not make you jump out of bed each morning, it will be very hard to put in the hours and energy to make it successful – thus not a perfect business idea. 

Number Three – Understand Your Competition:  Every business has competition – either direct or indirect.  Think about movie theaters.  They have direct competition from video rental stores or at home television.  They also have indirect competition from any other activity that consumers spend their disposable income on like bowling, paint ball, golf, etc.  Anything that people do in their spare time. 

Further, some competitors are ruthless.  Meaning that if you promote and offer a product that is similar to theirs but at a lower price, these competitors will just lower their price to match or beat you.  If they are already established businesses – they may be able to undercut your price enough to drive you out of business.  

If you don’t know your competition – what they are willing to do to keep you out of their market – you may be spending more of your time in a pricing war then growing your business – not the perfect business idea. 

Number Four – Cash Flow:  Lots of entrepreneurs enter the business world with great ideas but very poor understanding of the capital it will take to get their venture off the ground.  Most will prototype their product or service and understand what it takes to make the product or provide the service but they don’t understand the capital it takes to manage the rest of the organization – including marketing (very expensive but extremely necessary), employees (more than just salaries or wages), insurance or supplies and all the little miscellaneous expenses that add up very quickly like phone, internet, computer services, etc.  Knowing your total cash flow will help ensure that all of your costs (variable and fixed) can be covered by the business – the perfect business idea.  I have seen way too many businesses with great products fail because they could not cover simple expenses like rent or utilities. 

Number Five – You:  Know who you are.  Know your strengths and weaknesses.  Know that you are ready, willing and able to do what it takes to make your venture a success.  I have worked with many business owners in the past that think all they have to do is hang out their shingle and they have it made.  Thus, when it comes down to actually running the business day-to-day – they are unwilling to invest the time, energy or money necessary for success.  Thus, know how hard you are willing to work. 

Moreover, know your personal financial situation and what you need the business to generate to cover your lifestyle.  If you think your business will pay you a great salary from day one – it will not.  And, if you need it to, it is not the perfect business idea for you. Take away outside distractions like your personal financial situation – get those in order – thus, when your business concept does materialize – you will be able to solely focus on its conception and growth.  In the end providing you the financial security you are seeking – it will be the perfect business idea. 

Regardless of the level of your desire for your business – a lifestyle mom and pop operation or a multi-national conglomerate – if you develop a business idea with these five concepts in mind – your idea will be the perfect business idea for you.

Looking for the best home based business ideas ? Well hopefully we will help you out in this article. So where should you look to find the best home based business ideas? Well I would suggest you could start by looking in the mirror. In order to find a great home based business idea you have to take into consideration your strengths and weaknesses. Then you have to look at what available resources you have. Just because an idea worked for someone else does not mean it will also work for you as well. I will throw a couple of basic ideas your way and you can add to them as you like.

This idea pretty much anyone with an internet connection can do. I am sure everyone is familiar with yard sales, well you can have a garage sale on steroids. Instead of having a yard sale for your local area why not start listing your items on EBay. Now you maybe wondering what to do when you run out of items to sell. Simply start visiting thrift shops and other yard sales. Then you can purchase things there and list them on Ebay. Once you get into this cycle you will begin to have a knack for what sells on EBay and what doesn’t.

What interests you and what are you really knowledgeable in? Find out what it is. It could be something as simple as Christmas Recipes or which TV brand you find the best. Then just start typing and formatting your information. Once you have enough info, create an ebook. I know of a guy who wrote a book about donuts. The ebook sells for around 30 dollars and he is raking in the cash. It does not have to be a special topic and you do not have to be a top of the line author either. Just find a subject you like and you know a lot about.

These are the easiest home business ideas out there. Not only are they easy but they also bring in the quickest cashflow. So there you have it, a few of the best home based business ideas around.

Every time I have a business idea or come across a new opportunity I analyze it using these criteria:

Is it really any different from what is currently on the marketplace?

What wants and needs am I fulfilling?

Who will be buying my products or service offering?

How strong are my competitors?

Is the market for my idea growing or shrinking?

Do I have the time and energy to follow through?

Who is going to handle what?

How much initial capital is required?

How am I going to raise extra funding?

What is my maximum total loss including money, time and effort?

What is the potential for return on my investment?

How long is the time frame between initial investment, break even point and getting a return?

What is my exit strategy?

I believe that one should be very careful about how they invest their money. Very often I see people that invest a huge sum of money when the potential for return is low and the risks are high. In this scenario it is better to leave your money earning interest in the bank.

The ideal business idea or opportunity for me, offers a potential for high return, with low initial investment. It focuses on a fast growing marketplace and there is something unique about the proposition.

Alternatively another great form of investment is when the potential for return might not be high but the risks are low, little effort is required and the profits are almost guaranteed. I will only usually consider this type of investment if the payback is rapid and the amount of work required is low.

Let me give you an example based on personal experience on how not to do it. One of the first businesses I started was a packaging company. The market was served by established players and it was being eroded by cheaper imports. Britain’s manufacturing base (my customers) was declining as the UK was slowly turning into a service economy. Margins were tight and my customers were willing to change suppliers at the drop of the hat.

Although we did end being successful, the amount of effort and sheer stubbornness required was out of all proportion to the money making potential. This is a classic business idea that should be avoided at all costs! I vowed when I sold this business that next time I was going to get into a fast growing market place where exactly the opposite was true.

Your evaluation for investing in an opportunity might be different from mine, based on your propensity to risk. If you have a family to support than this reduces the amount of risk that you can take on. Your age, your sex and business background all greatly influence the types of opportunities that you can examine.

Before starting a new business, bear in mind that working as an employee has many advantages to being self employed. Your hours are fixed, the return of investment of time might be less but it is certainly guaranteed, at least for the short to medium term. Starting any new business especially for the first time is risky and demands extraordinary effort before any returns are forth coming.

How do you analyze any new business ideas or opportunities?

What is SEO?

SEO refers to the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural or organic search results. Whether your website gets very little or massive amount of traffic depends a great deal on how much effort you have put in to optimize your website for SEO. In this article, I will describe some SEO on-page optimization factors in which you can very quickly make on your site to improve your search engine ranking. This will give you a boost to your home business ideas you promote in your website and start to make money now.

Keywords Meta Tag

It would do you good if you keep your keywords and phrases not exceedingly long, perhaps not more than a dozen. A mistake some marketers make is putting popular keywords here but why would people want to do that. Would you put a popular keyword like diet if you are promoting home business ideas? The tip here is to use keywords that are actually found in your website content. In reality, a lot of search engines ignore keywords meta tag and some marketers remove this tag completely and focus just on the content page. But there is really no harm putting them, as there are many search engines which still index this tag. You also do not know when search engines change their strategies.

Write Unique Content

You’ve heard of the saying “Content is King”. If you consistently write good content and update it regularly, chances are, you will have more people visiting your site and looking at your interesting home business ideas. If you own a blog, always write not only unique content but update it regularly too. It is no different from the brick and mortar world. If you have a small store in which you do not have many things to sell, people are not going to patronize it, let alone buy from you. Just remember if you were the one looking at a website. If you’ve found one with good content, with keywords evenly spread out, a catchy title, you would probably be interested to read further. If you think about it, and apply this easy concept, making money now is really not quite as hard as you think.

Using Keywords In The Headline

Document title is what users see at the top of the browser. It is very important to put most of your main keywords in here. It would also help to remove any prepositions like “and” and substitute them with a “|” key. I would also go as far as to say, besides the content of the document such as your article, the title is the second most important factor which determines your SEO ranking.

Using Keyword Phrases

Don’t focus on single keyword but rather keyword phrases. There are five million pages on the web that contain the word “cat”, so a search for just that term produces meaningless results. If your page is actually about cat care, then that’s the keyword phrase you want to have on your home business ideas page. Similarly, make money and make money now produce very different results too.

Make Use of alt image tags

Include an image tag on every image or graphic and put your relevant keywords there. An example would be “weight loss picture graphic” or “safe weight loss image” using both words of graphic or image so that search engines do not view them as spam.

Add header tags (h1 and h2)

Add one header tag (h1) and place our most important keyword there. The header tag should be as far towards the top of your home business ideas homepage. When Google reads a webpage, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page. So, it’s best to place your (h1) header tag on the top left hand or top/middle portion of your page. You can think of an (h1) header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page. Similarly put your secondary keywords in h2 header.

Page Optimization Is A Skill

When a user enters terms into a search engine, the engine starts to scan the web looking for those words. If the engine finds the words on a page, it will count how many times the words appear and also determine whether the words appear in conjunction or on their own. If the words are grouped together, it’s more likely that the page is a good result. So, how can you associate your page with certain keywords? It’s simple really. Put them on your page. Put the keywords in the title element, the headings, the file name, and the text of the home business ideas homepage.

Keywords In Domain Name

A website with keywords in the domain name often ranked higher. So if you have not chosen your domain name, you have a great opportunity now to take advantage of this well known secret.

SEO is the process of optimizing a website as to obtain a high rank in search engine results pages. Search engine positioning and increased traffic essentially comes down to 3 basic elements. Keyword and keyword phrase selection, search engine friendly SEO, and good off-page SEO which includes your backlink management and strategy. Additionally, writing and posting articles, press releases and even videos can substantially help SEO placement and ultimately making money now for your home business ideas