My husband is a work from home dad and whenever I tell people that he gets to work from home the first response I get is how wonderful it must be. A lot of people I talk with would love to work from home and have a home based business. Some of their ideas of people who work from home include sleeping in until you are ready to get up, going to work in your pajamas, or not having to work for a boss that controls your every move. Some of these things are true for my husband’s work, but the reality of a work from home job and having a home based business sometimes out weighs the luxuries.There are definitely perks to a work from home job and running a home based business, but the challenges should be looked at and understood before taking the plunge.One of the most important qualities of a person who can work from home effectively is SELF-MOTIVATION. A person who can motivate themselves to work on something even if it is not the work that they want to do at the moment will have a huge advantage. Being able to go from one attention grabbing task to another is important. It is very difficult to stay focused when your attention is being pulled from what you need to do to want you or someone else wants you to do.Additionally, running a home based business also requires educating yourself continually on the business you are involved. Watching TV sometimes seems like an easier alternative than learning more about what you need to do for your work from home business. To help with this it is best to have a home based business you are interested in. In other words, don’t get involved with selling candles if you have no interest in them.Another important quality of a person who can work from home effectively is that they are WELL ORGANIZED AND TASK ORIENTED. Knowing what needs to be done and getting it done within a reasonable amount of time are very important for managing a home based business. There are a lot of activities vying for a person’s time (i.e., the laundry needs to be done, the bills need to be paid, the yard needs to be cleaned up, etc.) This is true even if you are working for someone else. However, when you are working for someone else you are a little more conscience of what needs to be done, because you don’t want to lose your job. When you work for yourself you need to establish priorities and keep yourself accountable to do them.Procrastination can be a huge enemy if you want to run a home based business, because there is not a given deadline for everything and if you continually put off the work that needs to be done until it must be done you won’t make a dime. Creating deadlines and having another person hold you accountable may be the extreme you need to go to keep yourself working.Another enemy of running your own business is having too much to do. A person who comes up with idea after idea for their home based business can quickly become overwhelmed by what they want to achieve. The best way to keep you moving in the right direction is to write down your ideas and prioritize them. When a new idea comes write it down to be reviewed later and work to finish the project you are currently on.Having a WORK-LIFE BALANCE is very challenging when running a home based business. When you work outside of the home you can escape from the workplace to the comfort of your home, but when you work from home it is a lot harder to find a place to escape to. Another challenge is knowing when to leave work, especially when you have children at home who want you to play with them or help them with their homework. Having a work-life balance can be difficult because of the amount of work that needs to be done. Even an established home based business person can find themselves inundated by their work. Knowing when to stop and take a brake is very important. One way to accomplish this is to give yourself business hours or create a schedule and stick to it or have one particular area to work in and another to live in.One of the biggest challenges when you work from home is the FINANCIAL OBLIGATION that comes with having your own business. It is difficult to not have a regular stream of income, because most people have bills and debts that need to be paid regularly. Some ways to help meet this challenge are to make more money than you can ever need (not the best reality scenario), reduce or eliminate the amount of debt you have and become very thrifty with your money, or keep a part-time regular stream of income to meet the regular bill need.Anyone who runs a home based business needs to become a good accountant. Not only do have to run a home based business but you have to have a part-time work from home job. Documenting your income and spending must become a habit. If you have a hard time keeping receipts pay for everything with a credit card and pay it off at the end of the month (make sure you have a designated business only card). The best way to document your spending is to use a program like Microsoft Money or Quicken.The last factor for financial obligations, when running a home based business, is taxes. When you work for someone else they have to pay part of your social security and medicare taxes, but when you work from home and for yourself you get to pay both parts. You also have to pay taxes to the federal government quarterly. Learning about taxes, tax write-offs and having an accountant can help you with this factor.By knowing the challenges of running a home based business you can determine if a work at home job is for you. If you do choose to work from home enjoy the perks when you can!
Information Product Creation: Never Compete on Price Because There Is Only One You
Information product creation requires extensive preparation, no matter which niche you work within and you want to make sure that your information product has a successful launch. That probably sounds scary and intimidating but here’s the thing: this is a one time effort and it will pay off in a foundation that is strong enough to get your ideal clients to invest in your high-end programs and services without the perils of a traditional funnel. This article will teach you a few of the things that you need to remember if you’d like to invest in yourself and start on the information product creation path using your unique talents and abilities. Remember that you never have to worry about anyone ripping off your ideas because if you understand how to properly position yourself around your story.
Understand Both Strengths and Weaknesses: It is good to have an impartial view of your own strengths and weaknesses when lay the foundation of selling yourself within the information product creation process. It helps you figure out where you are, what you lack and how to move forward so that you get as much growth as possible. It is more than important, it is urgent if you want to create fast success for yourself to have personal positive reinforcement and deep belief to provide yourself the support you need so that you can get over your own limitations to ensure that your information product is as valuable as it can be.
You also need to know exactly who your competition is so you can study them and use their methods to help you improve your own standings. Down recreate the wheel, but understand the wheel and position yourself going uphill from the competition. Check out which kinds of opportunities you’ve already got and try to figure out how best to use them while taking care to remember your strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way to figure out where you stand against your competition which helps you figure out how best to grow.
Launch on Time: No matter what, even if you haven’t officially announced your “launch date” you should launch the site when you’ve said you would. This will force you to stick to your goal and actually work on it. Thinking that “I’ll launch it when I think it’s ready to launch” will only hinder your efforts. You’ve got a responsibility that you need to live up to with your launch, and you can’t move back on that one. If you get close to your launch date and you are getting hung up on your self limiting beliefs in your information product creation, don’t worry this about getting it out there and not perfection. As long as it is usable you should launch it. Launching on time is the professional thing to do and it is more important than creating a “wow” effect in your site visitors. You can always update/upgrade your website when you have to, so there shouldn’t be any issue with that.
Analyze Your Own Concept: If you want to make your information product creation successful you need to understand how good your concept is: is it really going to work for your chosen audience or would something else be better? You already know about your competition; how does your concept measure up? If you haven’t come up with your own idea and are trying to work with someone else’s concept, do some more work on your own before your launch. People want original ideas because they’ve seen too many other me-too websites already.
Test Your Concept Before You Commit To The Information Product Creation Process: One of the biggest failures people have with information product creation is not testing an idea before putting a lot of effort into producing an information product. PPC to a small 5 page site with a landing page is a great way to test an offer before you even produce it. If people will sign up to get it, you can be sure that you can create an information product that will target eliminating the pain of your target market. The small amount of money will be invaluable in using crowd sourcing to direct the final outline of the information product creation process.
You’ll have lots of hurdles to clear after the launch of your information product and the only way to truly take care of them is to follow the advice in this article to work smarter. Plenty of people work hard, but it is the ones who work smarter who make real money online with the information product creation business model.
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.