Work at Home Based Business

Don’t Fall for Get Rich Quick Schemes and Products

There’s a lot of so-called internet marketing guru’s out there coming up with new “get rich quick” products on a daily basis. They like to call them “blueprints” or “secrets revealed” or whatever else sounds cool, and tout them as the next best thing for making money online.

That sounds great at first, but the problem is that most of them are flat out lying to you and getting rich by tricking you into thinking you can do the same if you buy their product while they sit back and collect your money. It isn’t as easy as they make it out to be on their fancy sales pages. Think about it, if it was that easy everyone would do it and everyone would be rich. The simple truth is that you can make money online but it’s not easy and it won’t happen fast. And you definitely won’t get anywhere if you keep buying into all these new schemes that pop up all the time.

These money making schemes come in all shapes and sizes but they are all basically doing the same thing… Giving you false hope so you will buy their product. For example, there are programs that claim you can earn $10,000 in a week or some other insane amount. The problem is that in order to do that you need to have a lot of internet marketing experience, friends in high places, an already established online business, the right business plan, time, money, and who knows what else. The average person buying into these programs doesn’t have what it takes right away. It takes a lot time and effort to build up to a good online income, and even then $10,000 a week is rarely attained by anyone.

Building an online home business and making a living from home is a lot of work. Putting in several hours of productive work every day is necessary. But the pros do eventually outweigh the cons once you start getting a nice income coming in.

Anyway the point of this post is basically just to warn you to beware of make money schemes, especially the ones that cost a lot of money. If the information is really that great then why would someone let everyone else know about it by selling it for a relatively low amount when they could keep it to themselves and really become wealthy from it? If you think about it something just doesn’t add up.

When I started my online home based business I got sucked into several get rich quick schemes and ended up wasting thousands of dollars along with a lot of time I can never get back. This was all while I was in college so I didn’t have much money to be throwing around like that. It was hard to swallow at first but I learned my lesson, moved on, kept working hard, and eventually became a successful internet marketer.

There’s plenty of FREE information on blogs and forums that will teach you everything you need to know about making money online. No need to spend all your money on product after product because they will keep on coming and you will never get anywhere except deeper in debt.

3 Fundamental Ebook Writing Tips

When it comes to writing an ebook, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of tips, tricks, and advice that can be found online. It seems like everyone knows how to write the perfect ebook in record time, yet so many people are still struggling to get their first ebook actually written. One reason that so many people have problems completing there ebooks, is that they ignore the fundamentals. Here are three fundamental ebook writing tips everyone needs to know.

Don’t Get Fancy

Ebooks are simple tools, there is no reason to complicate them. Some people will spend hours trying to add nifty borders, images, and unique formats or colors (both background and text). None of these will add much if any value to your ebook. In fact, it can actually detract from your content. You should want your readers to focus on the content and avoid the bells and whistles if they do not add anything of value to your reader.

Along the same line of thinking, it is important to manage your whitespace. It can be difficult or even overwhelming for your readers to actually read your ebook if there is not enough whitespace. Whitespace makes people feel comfortable and makes your content easy to read, so take advantage of it.

Create a Simple Structure

While your ebook is meant to be read, some readers will simply scan it and only read a paragraph here and there. The best way to make sure that people scanning your ebook will read as much as possible, create an easy to follow structure that highlights important points. The easiest way to do this is with the use of headings AND subheadings. Headings will let people know what areas of the ebook might interest them, and subheadings will ensure that they will be able to find everything that might interest them with ease. By using this simple structure, people who would rather scan your ebook than read it, will still read a larger amount than they otherwise would have. Additionally, by using headings and subheadings, you will automatically create additional whitespace.

Profitable Practice

Some people are simply not natural writers. In fact, not many people are. Fortunately, there is way for you get practice writing ebooks and profit at the same time. If you have looked into outsourcing, then you may have noticed that getting an ebook written can become expensive. Additionally, it can be frustrating to practice and practice without getting any profitable results. One way to get the practice that you need, plus create profitable end-products is to hire a freelancer to write a set of articles, or to find a good source of PLR articles. These articles can then be used for article marketing, website content, blog content and the like. You can also use these articles as a framework for your ebook. Use them as a guide or even use them as part your ebook. By having professionally written articles as a guide, you can quickly practice writing ebooks, while still generating a profit.

These three fundamental ebook writing tips that everyone needs to know, will help you create ebooks that are easier to read, higher in quality, and even help you practice, while also making a profit.

Written by guest author David Hurley from Free Business Websites

3 Big Work From Home Scams

These days work from home scams are all to common and have become a very sad fact of life. A lot of people blame them on the internet but the truth is that many of these scams have been around since long before the internet was even thought of. They used to be run by mail, out of a post office box, by phone, with advertising in newspapers, magazines, bulletin boards, by leaflets through your door, or any other way the scam artists could think of.

These days the false advertisements often arrive in the form of email because it’s free and very easy to send out millions of emails without any work. There are no direct mailing costs or other costs or time involved. You can still find work at home scams in newspapers and all the other traditional places every day, but mainly they have moved onto the internet. Even so, the ads themselves are often the same old thing that they always have been.

Here are 3 of the biggest and most common work from home scams that have been around for a long time and are still going today…

1. The Stuffing Envelopes Scam

Filling and addressing envelopes for direct advertising was something that used to be outsourced to homeworkers decades ago, before the invention of word processing and mass mailing machines. These days it is virtually all done by mailing companies. They can print addresses to look like handwriting if that is what the advertiser wants, and they can do thousands of envelopes quickly and cheaply.

If you see an advertisement telling you to send money (usually around $5 to $10 or so) to find out how to make money at home by stuffing envelopes, it will probably be a scam. All you will receive is a letter telling you to put up ads similar to what you just responded to and have people send you money to find out how to work from home by stuffing envelopes, so that you can send them the same letter. That is if anybody even replies. Do NOT ever fall for one of these!

2. The Pyramid Scheme Scam

Pyramid schemes are based around the idea that you pay a sum of money, say $20, then recruit 10 people who pay you, so you make $180 profit. For example; you have probably seen a chain letter or email that tells you to send a certain amount to the person at the top of a list, then add your name to the bottom of the list and send the letter on to everybody that you know. That is a pyramid scheme that you should avoid. Pyramid schemes are illegal and can get you in a lot of trouble and some hefty fines. They are not worth it!

These are different from multi-level marketing (MLM) programs where you may again aim to recruit a certain number of customers but they are buying a product. Often they are confused with each other but they are not the same thing (usually). If people are buying a product or service that is worth the money, it’s generally OK. If they are just handing over money for nothing, it’s an illegal pyramid scam.

3. The Computer Software Scam

This is an updated version of the old work from home scams where you would be sold expensive equipment that would enable you to do some highly skilled job that you were told was in high demand. For example, when doctors began having to submit claims electronically in the USA a demand grew up for people to do that for them. They didn’t want to have to buy the special software themselves and then have their skilled nursing staff waste time entering data.

So companies that made this type of software began marketing it as something that you could do at home. A lot of people fell for it, bought the software and then found they had no clients. The doctors were all giving their business to large, reputable data entry companies. They didn’t want random home workers to have access to their patients’ confidential records. The aspiring home workers were out a lot of money and wasted time. Be suspicious if you see an ad that says something like, “Buy this and make $XXXX amount of money by using it” or whatever. Is there really a demand for the skills that you will have? If not, it could be a scam.

The above work from home scams and variations of them are very common so keep your eye out and don’t fall for any of them.

How to Become a Certified Life Coach

If you’re the type of person who knows how to listen and give credible advice, then becoming a certified life coach can be a great way to make easy money from home. The work is extremely interesting, particularly if you enjoy working for yourself from home but miss having daily contact with other successful people. A benefit of being a coach is that you are always pumping people up, elevating their expectations and helping them see what is right with their world. This type of enthusiasm is infectious, and everyone I know who has become a life coach reports that they are happier and more productive than ever before, on account of being so intensely focused on motivation and performance.

There are a few different accrediting bodies that offer life coaching certification, but the most widely recognized is the International Coaching Federation (ICF). The ICF does not, however, provide any kind of life coach training program. You will have to take an independent training program that prepares you for the ICF certification exam. Keep in mind, certification is not necessary in order to practice in the United States, since life coaching is not yet regulated by any state or federal licensing body. However, this may change, and even if it does not you will find that consumers and professionals alike have greater trust and respect in individuals who have gone through the certification process for this career path.

Many people begin by enrolling in a university psychology program, but this may be a mistake. Those programs tend not to be very relevant to the specific business goals of your coaching practice, although they can provide some good background information on human behavior and motivation. However, a more cost effective method will be to enroll in a specialized life coaching certification program.

Secondly, you’ll want to focus intensely on establishing your own support network. It would be much easier for you to pursue your career if you get full support from your family and loved ones, particularly if they are able to offer a financial buffer while you get your practice off the ground. More importantly, you need to make professional contacts who can provide you with some early professional experiences in providing life coaching services and send you referrals when their own practices are full. Training programs are probably the best place to make this kind of connection, as you can work hard to impress your instructors, who will tend to be practicing life coaches.

You will not be able to apply for ICF certification until you have completed your training program an logged 75 hours of practical experience. Fortunately, there are some techniques you can use to market your practice that will actually yield revenue in and of themselves. For a complete tutorial on completing your life coaching certification and launching a lucrative coaching practice out of your own home, visit the Becoming A Life Coach website.

Written by guest author and web business expert David Godot.

Introduction to Outsourcing for Your Online Home Business

Outsourcing can be a very important part of running an online home business. It allows you to scale your business efforts in a way that you normally can’t by yourself because you simply don’t have the time or skills to do everything on your own. Making money online takes a lot of work and having help can work wonders for your productivity.

Outsourcing some of your online home based business tasks is a great way to continue growth. The ability to outsource mundane tasks to employees you can pay a few dollars per hour is a great way to offload some of your work and increase your own personal productivity. However, low cost labor doesn’t always come cheap or easy. Depending on who you outsource to, there may be training that needs to be done, they may take a few months before they start paying for themselves, their fees might be hard to pay at first, etc…

You have a lot of options in terms of countries in the world in which you can hire outsourcers from as well as many websites and other places where you can find them for hire. You can stick with your home country where the cost per hour will most likely be higher if you live in the United States or another more developed country, but communication and productivity may also be higher, so you have to weigh cost versus those things. There are many countries, including India and the Philippines, which are much cheaper in price but communication and productivity may be decreased.

An example is an assistant I once hired from one of these countries had constant power outages so her work would be delayed several hours until the power came back on and she could start working again. This obviously hurt her lifestyle and productivity since much of her day was spent sitting around waiting to be able to get some work done.

There are many things to consider when hiring an assistant from a foreign country, but the biggest things are their pay rate, time zone, skills, and whether or not they can understand you and vice versa. Language can often be a very big barrier to outsourcing.

The pay rate is almost always negotiable, especially for countries in Asia and other parts of the world. Most of the world works like that, unlike the United States where there’s usually a set price for everything and you can take it or leave it. People are willing to work for less with a potential for bonuses every month if they perform well, for example. One of the best things to do is a trial run with the person by having them do a few tasks for you for one day and see how much they get done, how many problems they have, and how much they will cost you per day.

Time zone isn’t a major factor because you can communicate via email. However, it is nice to know exactly what time they will be online in your time zone. My assistant almost always starts at around 11:00pm my time, so I can assign her tasks before bed and know she has something to work on all day for me. Make sure you are familiar with the time zones so you know the best way and time to contact your home based business outsourcers.

Skill is debatable; some people will call themselves an expert when they are clearly not up to your standards. However, most tasks that people want completed for their online home business can easily be taught. Creating some screenshots or short training videos of what you want your employees to do will save you a ton of time and allow you to hire “unskilled” laborers for a much lower price and train them to do the business tasks for you.

Outsourcing is a changing and evolving area of internet marketing that is becoming more common all the time. Outsourcers are able to do more and more these days and the cost is getting lower and lower for people that are skilled at what they do. Learn to harness the skills of other people and use them to drive your home based business forward towards more productivity and profits.