You’ve retired and you’re considering starting a home based business to solve your problem (not enough income to do what you want to do, or you’re bored spending your time watching Oprah and Dr. Phil).Your friends and family say that all the home based businesses you find on the Internet are SCAMS, and you’d be better off trying to live within your retirement income and spend your time watching Oprah and Dr. Phil.Well, some of them are scams, but most are legitimate opportunities.The problem is that even many of the legitimate opportunities raise unrealistic expectations by hype such as:* Start making a six figure Income Immediately.
* Unconditional $1,000 guaranteed weekly income.
* Earn $200K per year with no work.
* You can earn a six figure income with no selling.
* Get paid hundreds and even thousands a day without selling a single thing.
* Work 10 minutes a day at home. You will easily make $1,000.00 a day. No experience needed. No selling on your part. [This one is my favorite.]Then they tell you that you can do all this in your spare time.Home based businesses have a bad name because ads like these lie to you. Naive people believe them. When they end up losing money, they bad-mouth home based business.Do you wonder why they tell you not to quit your day job?Well, the reason is that it can take years before you start earning any significant money!The TRUTH is that a home based business is like any other business. You can make a lot of money in a home based business, but like any other business, it takes hard work, marketing skills, and an investment of time and money.There are a lot of legitimate business opportunities available. To find the one that best fits your needs, DO YOUR HOMEWORK!You can be successful in any home based business venture you choose if you are willing to learn how to market it, but there are great differences between the products they offer and their compensation plans. So before you sign up, you should find one that has a product that you will be comfortable promoting and one that has a compensation plan that meets your needs.The compensation plan is particularly important to you because as a retiree, you don’t want to wait five or ten years before you can make the big bucks.Another factor that is crucial for success is finding a sponsor who will help and support you while you are learning how to market your opportunity and your products.In later articles I will address how to successfully market your opportunity and your products, and what you should require of your sponsor before joining his opportunity.But don’t be taken in by the hype. If you’re not willing to work hard and learn successful marketing skills, you should NOT start a home based business.If I can be of help to you in sorting among all the conflicting claims, do not hesitate to email me.

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.

Would you rather make money by working the rest of your life or make money investing the dollars you have accumulated? As they say, you can either work for it, or you can make your money work for you. There is only one problem with the obvious answer here: most folks are somewhat clueless, and to make money without going to work you first need to learn to invest. Let’s get started.

In order to make money investing over the long term your goal should be to make your money grow at a rate that at least outpaces inflation and taxes. Otherwise, you’re not getting ahead; you’re treading water at best. You must first understand that growth is the objective, and then you need to learn to invest money so you can put it to work. There is no secret formula to make money investing, but there is a shortcut if you really want to learn to invest, especially if you sometimes feel clueless.

Here’s why people feel clueless: they don’t know what their choices are or what to look for when investing money. These are the basics, and until you understand them your odds are poor if you want to make money investing over the long term. Plus, you will likely never feel comfortable, especially if you’ve lost money in the past. It is very difficult to learn to invest piecemeal… picking up one nugget of information at a time. The pieces of the puzzle just won’t ever seem to fit together.

So, here we start at the beginning, the ground floor. This is your shortcut if you want to learn to invest money with a firm foundation so that the pieces of the puzzle start to fit together and make sense. There are only four basic choices that any of us have, and if you want to make money investing over the long term you should get a handle on all four of them. Here they are in order of least risk (with lower profit potential) to higher risk (with greater profit potential): cash & savings, bonds, stocks, and alternative investments. That’s it.

The first choice simply pays interest and features safety. Think of checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, T-bills and money market funds. The second choice offers higher interest income with moderate risk. Here we have Treasury bonds, municipal, corporate, investment grade, junk and a multitude of other bonds as well as bond funds. If you want to make money investing without too much risk you should include both of these safer choices in your portfolio.

Your third choice is stocks, your primary growth engine, and it obviously involves risk. You make money in stocks through price appreciation (rising stock prices) and from dividends. Here you find terms like blue-chips, high quality, low-priced, growth, growth and income, industrials, financial, high-tech and so on to describe them. You don’t really need to learn to invest in individual stocks; you can go with stock funds and let them do the stock picking for you. But if you are going to achieve growth, stocks can not be avoided.

The fourth category of choices is growth oriented and risk can be significant as well. Some professionals in the financial services business ignore it or consider these alternative investments unnecessary. The list is long, but think: real estate, natural resources, gold, silver, oil, and other commodities like aluminum and copper. I feel that if you ignore these choices, you’re missing out on the opportunity to make money investing when the likes of stocks and bonds are out of favor. The good news: you don’t need to learn to invest in real estate, gold, oil and so on. Mutual funds are available that do the heavy work for you in all of these areas.

Now you know your basic choices. The next step is to ask a few basic questions, and here are some questions you need to ask anytime you consider making a specific investment in any of the four basic areas. Ask about: liquidity, safety, income, growth potential, income taxes, and the costs involved. Ask yourself and then find the answers, or ask the person (like a financial planner) who is making a recommendation to you. Never ignore the costs involved. You are trying to make money investing. High costs only work against you.

You can’t learn to invest money by reading one article, but you can get pointed in the right direction. That’s what I have tried to do here by starting at the beginning. Once you have a handle on the basics, it’s a whole lot easier to learn the rest. Don’t give up, and stay focused on your objective: to make money investing so you don’t need to work for the rest of your life.