Small Business4u

According to Wikipedia, “An entrepreneur is a person who undertakes and operates a new enterprise or venture and assumes some accountability for the inherent risks. In the context of the creation of for-profit enterprises, entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder.”

Let’s see if we can break this definition down into bite sized chunks.

Entrepreneur as an Undertaker

This term indicates a certain amount of initiative that drives an individual to do something tangible with an idea they have conceived. This initiative is in context of a business startup.

Entrepreneur as an Operator

This term is indicative of an individual willing to get in the thick of things and develop the business from the standpoint of administrator and marketer. In effect, an entrepreneur must be willing to do everything needed to manage the business they are seeking to develop.

Entrepreneur and Accountability

An entrepreneur understands that the buck stops with them. They are willing to be responsible in the development and affairs of the business.

Entrepreneur as Risk Taker

There will always be the risk that a business startup will fail, but the risk an entrepreneur puts forth may also result in a profitable business. The entrepreneur understands the risks and determines to move forward in spite of those risks.

Entrepreneur as Founder

In the context of a successful business start up the entrepreneur is listed as the founder of the business. This individual did what it took to move their idea from the thought process to a reality. This is hard work and, if successful, their name will always be linked to the business. Some may consider this to be a portion of the legacy of the individual; certainly it can be a highpoint in a person’s work history.

There is an exhilaration that comes with entrepreneurialism. The road may be difficult and you may have to get creative in solving problems you’ve never encountered, but you are, in that moment, the quintessential entrepreneur. You have chosen to take the initiative to operate a business. You have determined to be accountable for all phases of your business startup and you recognize and accept the risks involved in business development.

Entrepreneurialism is not for the faint of heart, but for those who walk through the various steps listed above there is an incredible amount of satisfaction knowing that the work you have done will not only benefit yourself and your family, but the customers who will benefit from the product or service you provide.

So you want to make money working from home? Where on Earth do you begin? The opportunities are endless and you only have so many hours in the day. The great news is that the Internet has now brought genuine relief to many would be entrepreneurs. These days it is relatively simple to build your web-site and become an affiliate and sell other peoples products. There is not a business like it, for less than a hundred dollars you could start something that has the potential to literally make you a millionaire, if not overnight, then certainly within one year.

So why do over 94% of all Internet businesses fail? With over 8 billion pages now listed on Google that 94% could represent a pretty figure (you do the maths) so to come up with a couple of line answer why all those businesses failed would be pointless. But there is a basic law of economics that says there is no such thing as a free lunch. Sure, there are plenty of offers out there, promising untold riches by software programs that will build your virtual empire overnight. The bit they conveniently forget to tell you is that are recycling content and as a consequence their chance of stardom is very short lived. The last thing Google wants is to fill its databases with regenerated rubbish. In truth, they are now very active in closing (or at least de-listing) those sites that use this questionable software. That really highlights the problem, this is all so new, after all the Internet proper has only been truly available to the public for around 10 years. Where is the experience? In truth, it is like the wild west of old, but now the lawmen are riding into town. That is why if you are thinking about starting a home based net marketing business there are many pitfalls that you should consider. At times like these it is useful to fall back on old adages such as:

‘If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is’

One we have already used in this article:

‘There is no such thing as a free lunch’

and one that I have just made up:

‘Fireworks may climb and rocket into the sky very quickly, but when the fizz runs out, they come back to Earth even quicker’

My final piece of advice, whichever home based business you are considering, please do THOROUGH research prior to committing time and effort into any program. I lied, this is my last piece of advice:

‘If I have got 8 hours to chop down a tree, then I will spend 7 of those 8, sharpening my axe’

Books

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Marketing your business is essential to its success. You can have the greatest service or the best product, but if you don’t market it and let others know about it, then it’s doubtful that you’ll be very successful. When considering your marketing, you first want to take into account who your clients are, and what your clients might be looking to you to do. To do this, you need to do the following:

1.Know Your Client’s Business: The first step is to know your clients. Do some research so you can have a clear understanding of what your clients’ business is and what they do. What does this business hope to achieve? What are its needs and how can you meet those needs? What can you do that will allow that client to perform better in business? By knowing your client and finding answers to these questions, you can become an immediate asset to their firm.
2.Offering Clients a Convenience: One of the main conveniences you can offer is that of time. Clients realize that their time is valuable. Anything that will allow your potential clients more freedom with their time is an immediate plus. But you need to be able to show them this in your marketing. Take for example a virtual assisting business, when you market to potential clients letting them know that you will do their correspondence typing, answer their e-mail, handle all their publicity needs and even keep their office running while they travel, they realize they will have the time they need to do the work that often so desperately needs done. They will have the time to draft that pleading or finalize the proposal. For the realtor, when you do their marketing they can see how they would be allowed the freedom to be out there selling.
3.Solving clients’ problems: If you can find a way to solve a client’s problems, then you are able to make your business a valuable asset to them. For example, let’s say they are having problems with their website and getting visitors to it. You can send them a letter addressing specifically how you can bring more visitors and also mention what other advantages you can offer. You become a very valuable asset when you do this. They have a problem they need fixed. You have a solution you can solve that problem. They are eager to talk to you immediately to get their site up and running and not miss out on any more missed revenue from their site being down.
4.Providing Clients with Something Better Than What They Have: In your marketing efforts, make sure to mention anything that might be of interest to your clients to run their business better. For example, you might have Voxwire capabilities. This allows you to do web conferencing. You can offer your clients the convenience of having meetings, classes online, etc. Or perhaps you are an expert at Outlook and e-mail management. You can emphasize how much time you can save them daily when you handle this for them. Also, how much more they can connect to their clients when you organize their contacts with Outlook so they can keep in better touch with them.

These are essential key points to remember in marketing to obtain clients or even to keep those existing ones. Now, it’s also important once you get those clients to keep those clients. To do this, you just provide the best possible service always.

For additional marketing tips, you can look to our articles at http://www.virtualwordpublishing.com for articles on all topics of marketing, as well as other business needs.

So I’m in online business now.

A while ago, I was reading a comedy website, and spotted a little advertisement down in the corner telling me that I could buy t-shirts from the site if I wanted to. I really liked the site, so I was interested, and went to take a look.

Life was never quite the same again!

It turned out that this website owner was something of a shrewd businessperson, and had set up an online shop to sell t-shirts, mugs, hats and a whole bunch of other stuff bearing their website’s name and logo. I bought a t-shirt, and was pleased with the quality and so on, and it got me thinking.

At first, I assumed that this must be someone with either a lot of money to risk, or an awful lot of know-how and business contacts. I mailed the site owner to ask for some pointers, and discovered that it was possible for me to sell the same kind of things remarkably easily, and, more importantly, for little or no investment.

Having received more than my fair share of attempted scam emails in the past, I looked into this carefully, and was pleasantly surprised at what I found out.

Anyone can have an online shop selling t-shirts, hats, mugs, framed prints, posters, greetings cards…. The list goes on and it is extensive. Even more surprising was when I discovered that musicians and writers can also release professionally printed and bound CDs and books this way.

Still wary of the “too good to be true” element of this new knowledge, I started up a free shop with a site called Cafepress and set to work on the frighteningly simple process of setting up designs and products. A little improvised web marketing (heaven knows I’m no marketing expert) and a few emails later, and I received an email with this pleasing subject…

“You made a sale at Cafepress.com!”

Eagerly opening that mail, I discovered that someone I had never heard of, somewhere far away, liked one of my designs enough to spend their money on it. You can imagine how good that felt. Suddenly I was earning money as an online retailer!

Encouraged by this, I upgraded to a “premium shop”, which enabled me to add more products and designs, and take more control over how my shop looked and so on. Knowing what I know now, I wish I had done this in the first place, but it doesn’t hurt to test the water, so to speak.

Those “You made a sale!” emails continued to trickle in. Then the trickle became a stream, and I discovered that the small monthly payment for the premium shop was being taken care of by my own sales. The shop was effectively still free!

Further encouraged by this development, I set to work on more designs, and learned a little about making sure my shop appeared in the various search engines (tip: basically just make sure you have plenty of good text in there).

The stream of sales became a river.

I discovered that Cafepress.com has a forum, where “shopkeepers” discuss tactics and ideas, and soon I was really cooking with gas, with a great shop, great sales, and feeling pretty great myself. Sales continue to grow, and I’m about to find out what the Christmas sales boom is like as we approach the later part of the year. It’s a good time to get into it, actually, because with millions of people out there scouring the web for unique and original gifts to give to people, the chances of making a positive start for your shop are very good.

Well, that’s my story. There are people out there making a lot more than I am, and I guess that it’s a case of finding the right niche, the right designs, and getting your shop just right.

If you feel like giving it a go, Cafepress is at…

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/storeref.aspx?refby=tshirtypoo

and if you fancy having a look at my shop, it’s at http://www.cafepress.com/tshirtypoo

How many time shave you seen brand new in-demand DVDs for just $4.99, $6.83 or any other amount that is less than the cost of two medium pizzas? Probability is that never or close to not many times as an answer. If you are a DVD wholesale fan like I am- you definitely purchase DVDs every month or every other month just to secure yourself of a nice movie and even profits because of your online mini-mall businesses online.

When you visit auction sites like eBay you see numerous amount of power sellers selling DVDs at prices that are in your understanding outrageously low. Many of them are legit and many of those DVDs are just bootleg copies from international countries. It is a fact that you can become a power seller on eBay by just selling DVDs. It definitely is a fact that you need to trust a power seller himself to tell you the best wholesale list sources to get the greatest wholesale distributors for your own mini-mall on the Internet, or perhaps your new offline retail store. Even while you just want to save from purchasing DVDs for your own home, thousands of regular people like you and me are savings thousands of dollars by purchasing from direct distributors for DVDs in singles or in bulks. Today, you do not need to purchase by the truckload or pallets, you can purchase brand new sealed DVDs that are In-demand today for pennies on the dollar.

Just go to eBay anytime you want and check how many online power sellers are selling DVDs by either in singles or in bulk. It is not surprising to see hundreds of power sellers selling them when doing in-demand movie searches on the search box of eBay. You can become one of them if you own reliable, trustworthy and profitable wholesalers and distributors that do not do nothing else but give you the lowest possible prices on DVD purchases. As you know, in the DVD wholesale business you made the profit when you buy, not when you sell. Selling DVDs is the easiest part, getting the greatest distributors to show you the most profitable prices per each in-demand newly released movie, is the difficult part. Lucky fact is, with a secure and tested wholesale distributor list- you can become profitable and an eBay power seller overtime.

In order to become highly successful in the wholesale DVD business, you need three basic concepts completely understood. You need focus, a plan and complete trust. The first two are manageable immediately, however, the last one requires a lot of time and trust from outside sources from either online with the Internet or by reference from offline businesses. Greatest fact of all is that you can get a reliable and trustworthy wholesale list if you really want to right now. You need to trust people that have made thousands of dollars on the Internet by selling tangible items like I and many others have done in the past. You need to open up your trust and become business oriented for the best possible chance of succeeding with your new wholesale business or home entertaining needs. Whatever you decide to do with your wholesale plan, I wish you the best of success and the greatest profits for your new ventures.

Internal controls protect a company from fraud and also allow a company to be in compliance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or more often referred to as GAAP. 

What is internal control?

Overall, it a process implemented by a company’s Board of Directors and Management, designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding objectives in the following areas:

1.       Effectiveness and efficiency of operation in the business

2.       Reliability of Reporting

3.       Compliance with applicable rules, laws, and Regulations governed by GAAP, FASB, and GASP

Accounting systems provides businesses with a uniform way to use a company’s data and financial information to strategize in the areas listed above.

There are four key elements of implementing internal control:

1.       1.Environmental control

2.       2.Risk Assessment

3.       3. Control Procedures

4.       4.Monitoring  of all of the above – the overall system

The reason these issues are so important is that it ultimately protects the company from fraud and collusion.   In addition to criminal injuries, good internal control is necessary to inform the management of abuses or inconsistencies vis a vie over-production, poor production, or inadequate production by both personnel and equipment.  For example, manufacturing production controls must be stringently adhered to.  If a machine is off by 5% in making a product, the ramifications of this downturn could be a disaster.  Simiiarly with people.  People in an organization need to know what is expected of them up front.  This comes with good controls.  It then becomes easier to monitor their commitment, production and success at their job.  Numbers do not only belong in the front office.  For a business to run successfully, all employees need to know production numbers, reality of achieving those numbers and  can contribute mightily to enable production to increase based on their input.

In short, we could write pages about internal controls.  Suffice to say that this is just a snippet  of information  about running a business.  If you are a small business owner, an example of internal controls would be the issuance of a purchase order to your supplier, a receiving ticket created by you when product is received, and matched to an invoice when received.  Although internal controls can sound sophisticated and overly-complicated, the bottom line is that you must know your business, understand all facets of your business, and in general ALWAYS control the money.  Start with that and then we can go to using GAAP and FASB.  Good luck!

Let me first start out and say that I am an internet marketer. Fairly new. That seems to be the problem. I am also a business coach and a dyed-in-the-wool entrpreneur. I have built two relationships with some internet experts online. I have paid for their packages and even looked at who they recommended. But what is going on with the push, push, push!!! Being fairly well-educated, I know how to read. If I don’t buy something at the original price of $399. how can it be reduced to $49.? This is a con and I for one am getting a little tired of being pushed into buying more and more and more on this subject. Instead of talking to me as an intelligent person and selling as an intelligent person with a legitimate product, I am getting inundated with crap. How do I know it’s crap? I don’t know for sure, but the example above gives me a clue. If a product is legitimate, it should have a legitimate price, maybe a sale, but that’s it. Who are we kidding here. Just get enough suckers to click on a site and give them a crap ebook that doesn’t really show them anything because you have to be an expert anyway.

Luckily I think I have found some good resources, but it wasn’t easy. Yes I would like to make money on the internet. Yes as much as I can. But don’t throw stupid numbers at me that a new person could NEVER hope to achieve in the beginning. I know business and I am prepared to LEARN the internet business. I don’t expect miracles but I resent these get rich schemes that prey on anyone that expresses an interest in learning this industry. Vultures is too kind of a word. So for those of you who are interested in this business, let me give you some legitimate resources that offer a real product for a fair price. No I’m not an affiliate and get no money for this. I just want you to have good resources.

FYI

www.thirtydaychallenge.com

This course if free given by Ed Dale and Dan Ranies and is truly a gift. They are giving back to the internet community in an most honorable way.

WordPressDirect.com

Run by fair people for a very fair price. Great source for finding key words.

TrafficGeyser.com

Again, very fair price and tremendous information about using video and audio on your sites.

With these 3 sites, you can begin to understand what’s going on in the internet world and start your business with confidence. Also, when you start getting billions of offers for other products, be careful what you buy. You might not need it. Inform yourself first by reading blogs. Happy Holidays Lorna

Imagine this scenario: you are an entrepreneur that supplies materials for end manufacturers. You register a domain name and hire a web designer to make you a nice web site to sell your products. You even come up with some very detailed and well-written pages which your peers consider authoritative. Naturally you would include a “Contact Us” page where your potential customers can get in touch with you. So you tell your web designer to type in your email address, and for the purpose of our illustration let us say your email is “rawmaterialsuppliesunlimited@hotmail.com”. Your web site is up and running. Traffic to your web site is pretty good but you do not seem to be getting any inquiries. Your web designer shows you the web logs and the stats do not lie–the majority of your site visitors surf away the moment they open up the “Contact Us” page. What went wrong?

For businesses, an email address is not unlike a storefront. A neat storefront is more likely to attract customers to come inside. Same with an email address. An uncluttered email address, and professional looking one, is more likely to be received favorably by your prospects. Let us go back and examine the email address we used for our illustration. The first part of the address, which is the name, is twenty-eight letters long. The more the characters, the more confusing it is for a user and harder to remember plus also more likely to be misspelled.

The second part of the address is the domain name of the company hosting the email. There is nothing wrong with companies like Hotmail or any of the others that provide free email to the public. In fact they are wonderful for personal use, but certainly inappropriate for business use. The negative image of free email providers, and certainly no fault of theirs, is that they are the preferred facilities of spammers and scammers. If you take a close look at some of the junk email that you receive, the spammer almost always uses an address from a free email provider. You do not want your business to be associated with spammers and scammers.

If you have a business and registered a domain name for it, the short and neat “info@yourdomain.com” is the most appropriate email address to list on your web site. It comes across as professional because it gives your prospects the impression that there is at least someone who specifically handles inquiries. Now in case you are not the technical contact who registered your business’ domain, get a hold of the person who did and tell him to set up pertinent accounts for yourself and your staff. When your prospects communicate with you, seeing an officially registered domain name as your email address will surely give them the impression you are serious about your business.

If you have not registered a domain name yet but have access to email, at least use the email facilities of your internet provider. Of course you cannot use “info” anymore if you will be using their email facilities but choose a short and easy to remember name, one closely associated with your company name and preferably limited to between eight and twelve characters. By using your internet provider’s email facilities, the knowledgeable prospects will know that you are legitimate because no respectable internet provider is going to allow their domain to be used by spammers and scammers.

Your email address is a powerful tool. Why else would spammers and scammers harness its power in order to carry out their twisted intentions? In fact many of them have gotten away with so much just by using this little tool.

The right sounding and official looking email address will give your business not only an aura of professionalism, seriousness and prestige, but it can also be a badge of sorts. That it indicates your pride with your company, that you have worked hard for it and that your prospects can have full faith in you.

ASU is transforming the role of the university through entrepreneurship.

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