Before I got into the home-based business industry I weighed in heavily on the option of opening a franchise. I signed up for newsletters and got daily updates for franchise opportunities that were available. What I found was much like the home business industry, there are many, many opportunities to choose from. I knew it would be tough to decipher the good ones from the bad and spent a lot of time doing so. In the end, I came to the conclusion that none of them would be a good option for me and chose home business instead.Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking on franchises. There are plenty of success stories out there for that type of business, and for many it’s a great option. They just weren’t conducive to my goals and the lifestyle I wanted to live. I’m simply going to show the similarities and differences between home-based business and franchising to give a better understanding why home-based business can be a better option.The similarities between the two are abundant. They both offer an array of different opportunities to meet your budget guidelines. I’ve seen franchise options out there that require start up capital as low as $10,000. Some even offer in-house financing. With a home business you can start with an investment as low as $1000-$2000.They both offer a proven business model to help ensure your success. This includes things like training that are based off of what has worked, and hasn’t worked for others out there. With a franchise you can get in contact with other franchisees for advice on how to run your business more efficiently much like you can contact successful leaders in the home-based business industry.The biggest similarity of all is that they’re both going to require a lot of dedication and hard work. You can’t buy into a franchise and expected to make money the next day. The time and effort you put into it will ultimately dictate your success. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in this world and get rich quick just doesn’t exist. You have to be passionate about what you’re doing and do it every day to reach your goals. Both of these businesses have a failure rate that can be caused by a number of things. It could be because of a bad business model, or someone just didn’t work hard enough for it to be successful.Though some of the similarities we mentioned may sound great, it’s the differences that can make you second guess whether or not franchising is the path you want to take. With franchises you have a lot of overhead and operating costs. You’re going to have to pay rent for the space you lease, on top of additional things like electric, water, and sewer.In most cases you’re going to need to have employees and the payroll that goes along with them. You’ll have to go through the trouble of finding people you can trust. You want to make sure they aren’t people who will steal from you. If you don’t want to be there all the time you’re going need to hire a store manager on top of that.There’ll also be things like equipment or inventory that will be required to operate successfully. Not to mention the franchise and royalty fees that have to be paid in order for you to stay a franchise and use the franchise name. Normally this is a hefty flat fee and a percentage of sales. Add that to the money you spent to buy into the franchise and you can see how quickly your costs can rise. For a more popular franchise you’re going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and be required to have a set amount of cash and assets to even be considered.It could be years before you ever even turn a profit and you’re going to have to work 60 to 80 hours a week. Even when you do turn a profit it could be a very small margin. All of those long hours you put in could be for very little pay.With a home-based business you eliminate all those variables. You have a low start up cost and can work at a pace that best suits your current situation. Like me, most people got started while they still had jobs. There are no additional overhead costs other than what you already have at home and there’s no need to hire any employees. You won’t have to worry about traveling to a brick-and-mortar store every day or what you’ll do if you find the time to go on vacation. With a home-based business you can work wherever you have Internet access.You won’t have to pay any franchise fees and you can turn a profit much quicker. Your profits will be higher and you won’t have to work those 60 to 80 hours a week. The differences are tremendous and the risk is much, much lower.With that said, it’s important to do your research. As we’ve outlined here it’s easy to see why starting a home-based business can be a much better option. I’m not saying franchising is a bad thing. If you’re thinking about opening a store make sure you’re ready for the challenge that lies ahead. The same goes for home business to. Remember to weigh the pros and cons and get educated. Making an informed decision and working hard will add to your success.
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.
Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation
Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.
If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.
Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.
For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.
No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.
There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.