In today’s business world, much is changing.
Increasing concerns for the environment, financial crises, the disappearance of the ‘safe job’ and people looking to re-align their priorities towards home and family and away from the corporate world – all these things are helping to drive many towards thinking of the home-based business.
Certainly the technology exists to support it and is relatively cheap in the scale of things. So what’s needed to turn working from home in your own business from something of a pipedream into reality?
Some basic truths!
One of the most important starting-points is to grasp that technology only provides you with a framework within which you can conduct your business. The technology that allows you to work at home does not, in itself, provide you with your business!
You’ll need a good idea that’s been well thought-through, thoroughly planned and that is appropriately funded.
If you don’t get this, the danger is that you’ll spend the first days, weeks and months staring at the PC and surfing the Internet ‘hoping’ an idea will come out and hit you in the face. The chances are – it won’t!
There’s no sure-fire way to describe how to get ‘ideas’ for your home Internet business. It’s a question of inspiration and out-of-box thinking. There are though a few points possibly worth keeping in mind:
- Be wary of gurus that will offer to sell you their latest “how to get rich on the Internet” scheme. They typically claim to have become fantastically rich using it and now they’re just motivated by the altruistic desire to share their success with others – for a price of course!
- If you see examples of Internet businesses that are doing well, be a little careful about copying their idea – the chances are if it’s up-and-running successfully then you may already be too late.
Think About Your Proposition
Once you have your business idea, it’s worth spending a little time and perhaps money doing some further market research to check out the age and social spread of your target clients and products/services to ensure that the Internet is a viable mechanism for selling to them.
That may sound odd – surely everybody uses the net?
Well, not necessarily.
If your business proposition is aimed at say senior citizens, then even today this group may not be significant users of the Internet and may prefer to purchase through more conventional channels.
If your business involves selling products that are best demonstrated through the closer senses such as smell or touch (new perfumes or cosmetics, some forms of lingerie) or by definition need to be tried on (clothes, jewelry etc) then you may need to have other forms of marketing and sales channels to supplement your Internet operation.
Get The ‘Back Office’ Right
One of the commonest complaints from people that purchase goods or services over the Internet is that the original web site purchase was fine but that the after-sales service was a shambles.
If you’ve got your business running on the Internet then you have got to have in place a service culture that supports it – even if you are a one-person business operating from a spare bedroom at home. Taking days to mail something off to a client because you were busy with the kids, repairing the garden fence or simply forgot, just won’t work – unless you enjoy spending all your time dealing with customer complaints.
Equally, getting customer communications mixed-up, taking days to reply to phone call or email messages, sending out invoices containing errors and so on – all these are things that will kill your business dead and very fast.
Many of these things originate because of a fundamental problem about working from home – you are at home! Your spouse or partner, kids and neighbors, may all see you around and assume because you’re at home then you’re automatically available to them for any reason that pops into their head at a given instant.
Be ruthless! Keep your business and personal lives separate even though you’re at home. When you’re working – concentrate on your Internet business or it WILL fail.
On the market there are also a host of cheap and smart PC packages that provide ‘back-office’ support in areas such as order and stock management, diary and client records support, accounting, shipping and much more. That might be a smart investment of a few dollars.
Internet sites – Be Professional
Having a business on the Internet can lead some people to adopt a DIY approach.
Ok, in one sense that’s maybe laudable and even admirable but ‘having a go’ can result in a sub-professional result in a number of important areas.
- Your web site is your customer portal and main business engine. If it looks like it was something cobbled together by an elementary school class then you’re off to a bad start in terms of creating the right impression. Be realistic about your skills and be prepared to pay a professional for help if you’re less than confident in your own abilities.
- Make your web site and all communications ‘positive’. If it’s laden with doom, gloom and messages such as “only serious customers please” then you’ll be manifesting your own frustrations and potential customers will just get frightened off.
- Your web site won’t be of much use in generating business if it only shows up on page 976 of a Google search result. Learn about web search rankings and be prepared to pay someone to help you improve yours.
- Make it easy for customers to buy and pay in a single click or two. If it’s not – remember that they WILL be able to go elsewhere in a click or two!
- Don’t burden your web site with pages of terms, conditions and threats of retribution. A characteristic of Internet business is that you will get things such as timewasters and entirely unjustified returns with demands for reimbursement. Factor the costs into your plans a move on when it happens – demanding unconditional promises from your customers up-front won’t intimidate anyone other than those that are sincere anyway.
Have Fun!
If you’re as stressed and miserable in your new home-based Internet business as you were in your old job then something’s going badly wrong! Have a sit-back and examine what’s happening to see whether or not it can be fixed. If it can’t, well, maybe another radical change is necessary!
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