Locating Small Business FundingHow to locate Small Business Funding to start your Home-based business is a topic that peaks everyone’s interest, because we all need a little help to get started. Many times a home-based business is started through the use of multiple sources. If a loan is not right for you, there are other options available.Typically the average entrepreneur will use a variety of resources to start their home-based business. You might say they use a piecemeal approach or “Bootstrapping” consisting of the following sources:· Savings (probably the #1 resource)
· Credit cards
· Family
· FriendsLet’s talk about the top four:Savings: This should be your first option for your home-based business but many of us do not have savings to rely on or do we?What if you use your tax return or economic stimulus money to start your home based business? This may provide you with the initial capital than you could possibly add to it on a monthly basis to pay for some of your recurring expenses.Credit Cards: Most start up entrepreneurs use credit cards to start their home-based business. This can prove to be a valuable tool especially in the early stages of your home-based business. Warning! Use your credit wisely and with caution due to the high interests rates and remember sooner or later you are going to have to pay.Family and Friends: They may be your best source for borrowing money for your home-based business. Why? Because they know you, believe in you and trust you. If they were in a position to lend you money and will not then a bank probably wouldn’t want to take a chance on you either.Tip: To make your family feel more comfortable with lending you the money for you home-based business. Try using a service that manages the loan and documentation. This would make it a real loan for their added security and peace of mind. You may want to use this as a negotiation tool to help convince family and friends if they are hesitant to lend you the money to fund your home-based business.These are probably the most popular resources and the ones that are most familiar to you. However there are other sources available for your home-based business.Government Loan ProgramsPatriot Express: This new loan program is for Veterans, Disabled Veterans, National Guard and Reservists, current spouse and widowed spouses. These loans can be used for almost any business purpose (including start-up).Patriot Expressloans are available up to $500,000 and the SBA will guarantee from 75 to 85% depending on the size of the loan. Interest rates run 2.25% to 4.75% over prime.Micro-loan 7(m): The loan itself can be for as much as $35,000 but is not available in all states.Do you have an IRA?If so did you know you may be able to use it for your home-based business, to buy a franchise or for that real estate investment? People are doing just that every day, Why not you! There are a variety of creative financing sources available to the entrepreneur limited only by your imagination.To sum it up we all need a little help to get started in business. Be persistent and refuse to give up on your dreams. Your funding may come from many sources a little from savings, a little from credit cards, some from family and possibly some from a micro-loan. Money from many different sources may be just what you need to fulfill your dreams.
Money to Start a Home-Based Business
A Guide on Successful Product Creation and Internet Marketing
Product creation in Internet marketing is getting stiffer and stiffer nowadays owing to tough competition between Internet-based businesses. Putting up a new product requires plenty of brainpower and finances along with an ability to take risk. With that, even if you have the product well-set already, you have to position it strategically in the Internet landscape for others to notice. You should get the interest of Web users and turn them to actual customers. Aside from the usual physical products, many different products that thrive well on Internet marketing include E-books, membership sites, and video lectures.
The long and difficult process of product creation begins with ideas. They are easy to get – compared to the effort that comes with analyzing the market for that idea. Before the idea turns to a product, businesses often spend money, even amounting to millions of dollars, to ensure the success of the new product that emerges from an idea. Businesses undertake many types of market research and surveys before releasing their products to the public. Now, you may think that because your business is small, you can’t afford research or you don’t have to do research; you can and you should. The Internet allows you to disseminate materials needed for your market study to many people at once without your having to spend a cent.
It is a common maxim in business: Look at your destination first before mapping out your journey. So what are the goals you intend to accomplish with your product creation ventures? The everyday travails of your business may make you forget the end in sight. On the other hand, prepare to entertain new developments that come to your mind in your product creation. Your conception of a product may have started this way, but a few tweaks here and there along with some market research results and it ends up another way. Take it as the result of a creative process, not as a failure to reach your goal. After all, your product creation activities are intertwined with a long-term goal that you should strive to sustain at your utmost: profit generation. So if your less profitable initial idea evolves to a more profitable product, be thankful!
With your product made up already, start doing some aggressive Internet marketing. A product purchase typically comes after more than five times a customer is exposed to an informative call-to-buy message. Thus it is important to get the contact details, like the e-mail address, of potential customers who are on the brink of a sale. Use the results of your market research to determine the demographics to which you should concentrate your marketing efforts.
With consistent product creation, you can make an inventory of your products that you can market in due time. Just keep making products – the moment you succeed in making and marketing a product, customers are surely wanting more from you, so give it to them. Keep them on your side through constant product creation.
Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up
One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.
However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.
Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.
But why?
In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!
So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)
The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.
Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.
Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.
By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.
You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.