Why Working From Home is a Good Idea Today?

There are thousands, if not millions of people, who dream of ending the daily commute to the office and yearn to be able to work from home. Of course, there are companies who allow their employees to telecommute, but the ideal that many aspire is to start their own home based business and are looking for business opportunities that enable them to make money online.

After all, when you’re ready to start a home business, you need to be sure that you’re choosing the best home business for you.What does it take to choose the best home business for your personality? How can you be sure that the home business ideas that you’ve had will prove to be profitable?

Part of my blueprint will included my marketing and advertising expenses, other financial and budgeting expenses per month, my growth objectives and potentials, and of course ladies and gentlemen how I will achieve this.

Although there are home businesses that have been launched with next to nothing, you’ll find that there are certain expenses that you will have to shell out money for. These include equipment, registrations, advertising, even construction.

How much are people willing to pay me for this product or service? Can I make a sufficient income from that? Is this a product that is requested Worldwide?

Purchase the essentials for your home business. Its impossible to do any job well without the proper tools.

As a registered member of the relevant link exchange site you can easily check from the websites control panel who your relevant partners are, their page rank and if they fall into the keyword phrases category you have selected.

I strongly believe you have to have a business plan. I have been taught by some excellent directors to make those plans and goals for two to five years down the road. I work from a 90 day blueprint at a time and reevaluate it every 90 days.

What you do need to do, however, is include any depreciation deduction you took in prior years as a taxable capital gain. You still benefit, because your capital gain rate is most likely lower than your ordinary income tax rate.

The most important ingredient to succeeding when you start a home business is you! Have you the self motivation you will need to be able to push yourself especially when opportunities have not worked out.

21 Entrepreneurship Websites Worth Checking Out

The number of websites dedicated to helping entrepreneurs is incredible: there are always new sites, to the point that it can be hard to keep track of them. However, I have a few favorites. There are some tools I absolutely rely on for everything from marketing to billing, some blogs I read constantly and a few resource sites that I consult for all sorts of small business issues.

If you are an entrepreneur of any kind, it doesn’t particularly matter where you are in the process. Whether you’re just starting out freelancing in your spare time or you have a thriving business and you’re looking to expand, there are always new resources that can help you along in the entrepreneurial process. These sites are a great starting point: they’re all good resources and you may not have explored all of them.

Blogs

1. Startup Nation: Startup Nation offers entrepreneurial advice from a whole slew of people who have been there and done that — and have the business to prove it. The site has advice on just about every aspect of creating and running a startup.
2. IttyBiz: This site is an especially valuable resource if you’re looking to start an online business, but it’s got tons of great information on marketing in general.
3. Lateral Action: For creative types, like graphic designers, writers and such, there are some special challenges that come with running your own business. Laterlal Action offers up advice specially targeted to those fields.
4. Freelance Switch: FreelanceSwitch has all things freelance — business advice, ideas for staying productive and far more. Even though the title says ‘freelance,’ there’s plenty of good information for anyone running their own business.
5. Escape from Cubicle Nation: Leaving a cubicle in favor of starting your own business isn’t easy, but this blog helps support such escapees.
6. Young Entrepreneur: Young Entrepreneur focuses on the challenges that younger entrepreneurs face when they start business. It’s also got some great profiles of young entrepreneurs.
7. Small Business Labs: It isn’t easy to predict the trends that will affect small business, but Small Business Labs goes the extra mile to help entrepreneurs figure out what’s coming next.

Web Applications

1. Basecamp: There’s a reason that Basecamp and 37signals other tools are so popular — they work better than a lot of the other options. Basecamp is the company’s project management tool. 37signals also offer Highrise (CRM) and a few other great tools.
2. Blinksale: There are quite a few online options for invoicing. Blinksale is one of the most recommended options, in part because it works well with other tools like PayPal and Basecamp.
3. Skype: Skype is a popular choice for making phone calls online, but it has a lot of bells and whistles (like video conferencing) that make it a far more useful tool for a small business than you might expect.
4. LinkedIn: LinkedIn has come in handy for me many times. It’s an easy way to find contacts for a wide variety of purposes, as well as get answers and advice on all sorts of business topics.
5. Zoho: For a full suite of business tools, including CRM, invoicing, project management and databases, check out Zoho. All of the tools have at least some level of free use, perfect for an entrepreneur bootstrapping a business.
6. RocketLawyer: If you aren’t sure where to start with the legalities of running your own business, RocketLawyer provides free forms as well as help with all sorts of legal documents.
7. Google Docs: At least when you’re starting out, Google can be the easiest way to share documents, manage your business’ calendar and far more. It may not be a long term solution, but it can help you get started without spending a ton of money.

Resource Sites

1. SBA: The U.S. Small Business Administration is a treasure trove of information for entrepreneurs. In general, the SBA’s focus is helping entrepreneurs create long-lived small businesses, but there are also some great resources for folks further along in the process. If you aren’t in the U.S., there’s still some valuable information on the site — and you may find a similar agency where you’re living.
2. SCORE: If you find yourself in need of mentoring from an entrepreneur who’s already been through it all, SCORE can help you find a mentor. The organization is an amazing source of free business advice.
3. Freelancers Union: The Freelancers Union offers a long list of resources for freelancers — and the Union’s definition includes a pretty wide variety of entrepreneurs as freelancers. Among the information you can find on this site is health insurance options that don’t require quite the expense of other non-employer options.
4. Entrepreneur: For a huge collection of information on starting and running your own business, start with Entrepreneur. The company behind the site also runs Women Entrepreneur — a good resource for women looking at entrepreneurship.
5. BusinessWeek Small Business: Business Week has been a solid source of business information for years. The magazine’s small business site is an equally solid resource.
6. About.com Entrepreneurs: About.com offers a regularly updated resource on entrepreneurship. It’s got links to all sorts of other resources, both on About.com and elsewhere on the internet.
7. Entrepreneurship.org: The Entrepreneurship.org site is run by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to provide global resources for entrepreneurs.

These sites are only a starting point, of course. They’re the resources I use myself — and I know there are thousands out there I haven’t seen yet. If you’ve got any resources that you’d like to recommend to entrepreneurs, I’d appreciate it if you would share your links in the comments.

Startups in a Downturn

It’s about the idea that great companies can be built during bad times–an idea I’ve been talking about a lot lately on my book tour. It seems to have struck a bit of a nerve. It was the most emailed story on the site and the third most read story. This historical oddity occurred to me during the research for my book when I realized that American Research and Development invested $70,000 in the 1957 recession in Digital Equipment Corp., which turned out to be its best investment ever.

Here’s the top of the story:
Startups in a Downturn
Entrepreneurs who helped build their startups into tech stalwarts—companies like Cisco, Oracle, and Google—share lessons on how to thrive during tough times

December 1987 was no time to be raising money for a startup. Computer engineer Len Bosack was trying to attract funding for a young enterprise called Cisco Systems (CSCO). But the stock market had just crashed and the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted 40% since October. Gun-shy venture capitalists either didn’t get the newfangled technology or deemed it too risky.

Making matters worse, Bosack was running low on the savings he had used to bootstrap the business, and competition was gaining steam. It wasn’t until this 75th meeting that he found a receptive audience. The willing financier was Donald Valentine of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. On Dec. 14, two months after Black Monday, Sequoia invested $2.5 million in Cisco. “Valentine’s reasoning was pretty simple,” recalls Bosack, now CEO of telecom gear-maker XKL. “It doesn’t matter what they are. They are selling stuff in a bad market. With a little bit of capital and more experienced help they should be able to do better.”

Better is just what Cisco did. By the time of its initial share sale three years later, in February 1990—during a recession—the maker of telecom networking equipment was worth $224 million. Within a decade, Cisco Systems had become one of the world’s most valuable companies.

GREATNESS CAN EMERGE FROM A SLUMP
Today, some of America’s sharpest financiers and entrepreneurs say Cisco’s story holds a profound lesson easily forgotten amid financial turmoil: Great companies can be built during tough times. “For us, Cisco is always the company we think of when we think about bad times,” says Michael Moritz, a general partner with Sequoia Capital who was a young associate when the firm made its investment.

Cisco is just one example. In the history of technology, many other great companies either were founded during downturns or forged business models during bad times. In 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, two engineers started Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in a garage in northern California. During the recession of 1957, Digital Equipment, the first computer company to challenge IBM (IBM), set up shop in a Civil War-era wool mill, sparking a high-tech boom in Massachusetts. “It makes sense to do research and development counter-cyclically,” says Tom Nicholas, associate professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Group of Harvard Business School. “Recessions can be really useful strategic opportunities.”