Be Happy Working at Home

Learn how to create a business plan specially suited for your home business.

Whether your starting a home based business or already have a home business, a business plan is if not essential, at least very helpful. A proper home business plan will let you figure out your market, your niche, create realistic goals, and provide you with a clear idea of what you need to do.

However a home business plan is not a regular business plan that most people talk about. You aren’t likely looking for investors or bank loans, at most you’ll have one or two employees, likely family members, and you likely don’t need any truly major expensive item. So rather than filling out pages with info that is useless to you, I have trimmed it down into the parts that you actually need.

A home business plan focuses more on your potential customers, your marketing strategy, and your services. It’s informal, shorter, quicker, but just as essential.

Getting the Right Information

By subscribing to my website, below, you can get a free, abbreviated, copy of this ebook to read online or download. It has all the essential information you need to get started on the road to success.

Or you can purchase an expanded copy, with a template at the back, from Amazon Kindle. This provides more examples, more details and tips. You can order it here.

Both copies offer a special deal for readers, and if you want some help with your home business you need to check it out.

Starting Your Home Business: 2 Week Course

Alongside this great eb00k, I also have a new plan for people thinking about opening their home business.  An intensive 2 week program based around creating a business plan, creating a website, developing letters of introduction and marketing campaign, as well as fine tuning your plan.

This business coaching program involves 10 hours of phone calls, unlimited emails, and more. Be sure to check it out.

Alright you have some things at home you want to sell online, and than you’ll take the profit from that, go to a thrift store buy as much as you can and sell that online, rinse and repeat until you start making a decent profit as an online reseller.

Great, this has potential to make money and can even become an at home career if you’re good enough. Now the question is what is the best way to sell online? Today let’s look at selling on E-Bay.

Advantages of Selling on E-Bay

The biggest advantage is the sheer size of E-Bay.

When people think of bidding sites, E-Bay is always at the top of the list. So, you don’t have to do as much self marketing to find customers. You can’t ignore marketing completely, but you don’t have to first get a customer to visit your website, then check out your products, then decide if the price is right, then decide if you’re trustworthy, and finally buy it, they’re already there, and your rating will show if your trustworthy. All you have to do is make your presentation look good.

This advantage will let you focus more of your attention on copy writing, developing nice photo’s, customer service, and a bit of SEO. These may seem minor, but a good description and professional looking photo’s can mean the difference between making a profit and wasting your time.

The size of E-Bay also means you can sell virtually anything, so use that to your advantage.

Customer List

The other nice thing is creating a customer list. When you make a sale, you learn the customers name and email. Keep a list of all your customers, especially repeat customers, include what they have bought, if you later sell something related to it send an email letting them know you have something for sale they may be interested in.

For example, if someone bought a set of old china, and a month later you have some fancy wine glasses for sale, send an email letting them know.

This type of marketing works best if you have an actual E-Bay store and sell a particular niche, but even if you just have random auctions it can help bring in customers.

Little Initial Investment

When you want to start selling on E-Bay, you can sign up and start selling for free. You get to sell up to 50 items for free per month, before you start having to pay an insertion fee. You will have to pay a 10% final value fee if the item sells, but if it doesn’t sell, you’re in the clear. So until you get your feet under you, you can list and sell items at no cost to yourself.

Problems With E-Bay

The main cause for complaint against E-Bay are the fee’s.

Once you’ve used up your 50 monthly listings, you have to pay a fee for every item, whether it sells or not, depending on the item this is 10 to 30 cents. Add in the final value fee of 10% of the price, up to a max of $250, and several voluntary services that can improve your ability to sell an item, and you could risk losing money on low profit items.

Forced to Use Paypal

This is the second biggest problem with E-Bay and it actually relates to the fee’s. Due to the partnership of E-Bay and Paypal, to get your money from E-Bay you have to use Paypal, and there is a charge for transferring money over, and then shifting it to your bank account.

So, it’s best to only transfer your money in a lump sum to keep the fee’s as limited as possible, which can be annoying if you only do limited or low priced selling on E-Bay.

Detailed Sellers Rating

The better your DSR the better your ranking, the better your ranking the more sales you’ll make. This system is great for buyers, as they can see right away if the seller is trustworthy. However, if you get a bad review due to a lying customer, or because the mail lost your item, this review system can bite you in the butt hard. Fixing it can also cause you many headaches and frustration.

You have to be very customer oriented or risk getting hurt.

New Regulations

Fairly regularly, E-Bay will change their various rules and regulations. So what you used to do to attract customers will now get cost extra money, get you fined or shut down your account.

If you’re just starting, this isn’t a big problem, as you’ll have to learn the rules anyway. But once you’ve been doing it for a while you have to realize that missing one rules update could cost you. So you have to be very careful about keeping up to date on everything.

Good Potential to Just Break Even

If you want to be a professional seller, this is a serious concern. With the above mentioned fee’s, and necessity to spend a lot of time and effort on customer care (free shipping for best results, a detailed return policy, etc), you could find yourself making as little as 5% profit when selling your product if you’re lucky.

This is why you need to keep careful track of your sales. In the first month, see what sells best, what gives you the most profit, and what your customers are saying. Drop whatever is making too little, and tweak the rest to improve your profit margin. This requires a lot of time and effort, which has to be be done if you want to succeed. However once you have a system in place you can begin to relax a little.

Generally with most products I think E-Bay has great potential for online sellers to make money. But you can’t simply list an item and expect to make money. You have to go in with a plan, an understanding of the various fee’s and rules, and learn what the customers want and need.

Next week, Craigslist.

Filling out your tax forms isn’t fun for most people, when you work from home it makes the task even harder. What are you allowed to deduct, what will get you and audit, and what will earn you the biggest return?

If you aren’t an accountant figuring all of this out can be migraine inducing. So for all the home business owners here are five tips for filing your taxes.

1. Keep Your Business and Private Life Separate

   When you have a home office, it can sometimes be difficult deciding what is a business expense and what is a personal expense. You use the internet for your business, but you also use it for watching videos with your kids. Driving your car to drop off a finished product is a business expense, dropping by the store afterwards to do the shopping isn’t.

   When it comes time to file your taxes, you have to make sure you accurately mark down what is what. If you try to deduct 100% of your internet bill, you’re opening yourself up to an audit. But if you don’t mark off that gallon of gas you used to see a client, you are missing out on deductions.

   If your home business is big enough try to separate as much of it from your regular life, get a business phone, maybe a separate internet connection, credit cards and bank accounts only for your business, etc. This will help you keep everything nice and tidy.

2. Keep Financial Records

   If you cannot separate your finances, then for the love of god, keep your receipts, business meetings and expenses well marked and easy to follow. You should do the same even if they are separate.
   If you mark off a $100 business lunch as a deduction, the IRS will want to know if you are actually having a business lunch with a client who does a lot of business with you, or a friend that bought a single handmade $40 necklace. The first one will be passed, the second one not so much.
   Also with the car travel, you could deduct the cost of gas getting to your client, but on the way to the store and home you couldn’t. If you keep track of your mileage and gas purchases, you can show the IRS that you are following the rules and not trying to slip something past them.

3. Paying Family as Employees
   
   Does your family help you around the office? You should give them a reasonable salary.

   If your son fixes up your website for you, then pay him minimum wage. Your spouse sometimes acts as your receptionist, delivery service or assistant, find out what the going rate is and pay them a little bit less for their time. If you pay too much, then you’ll have to explain why, and it had better be good.
   Because they’re your employee’s you can receive tax deductions and insurance deductions as well. If they’re in a lower tax bracket, the deductions will increase.

4. Know What You Can Deduct and What You Can’t

   Gifts, office furniture, business expenses, employee’s and more can be deducted, but sometimes you can only deduct a certain amount, or only certain types. If you have an idea of how much you can deduct, it will help you make decisions on what to spend money on and what not to. It will also keep you from making costly mistakes that could lead to an audit.
   You don’t have to know everything, but get a decent understanding of what could affect your business.

5. Hire an Accountant or Not?

   If your home business is very small, or only part time, you can do most of this by yourself. You may miss some deductions, but if you’re careful you shouldn’t have any big mistakes.
   However if your home business is your career, is pulling in a lot of money, or has lots of expenses and possible deductions, spend the money on a professional. With a large enough business, the money you save through deductions and avoiding any problems with the IRS, will more than make up for the expense of getting professional help.

This is a fairly basic list of things for you to consider when filing your taxes. For more help, talk to an accountant and get first hand information that fits your situation.

Buy things at a garage sale for low prices, fix them up and sell online for a lot more.

Do you like shopping?

Are you a master at sniffing out good deals and know how to bargain?

Can you clean something up so it looks new, and do minor repairs?

If you answered yes to all of these, you may want to start selling online.

Working from home as an online seller may seem like a risky way to make money, but with numerous bidding sites available, the biggest being E-Bay and Amazon, online stores like Shopify, and free classified sites, such as Craigslist, it’s easy to buy low and sell high. With some investment, time and effort you can make some good pocket change, and even make a living online.

Where to Start Selling Online

The first thing you need to do is decide what online seller is best for you. Some people prefer selling on E-bay as it reaches a huge audience all over the world. Craigslist is preferred by some as there is no online fee, and you don’t have to worry about postage as your customers are local. Amazon is becoming popular, but it’s higher fee’s make it best for more expensive items. Shopify and similar companies that provide online stores are growing in popularity as you have the most control over your products and design.

Each of these selling options have pros and cons, which you need to consider (Next week I’ll go over each site individually), depending on what you want to sell, your needs and your budget any one of these could be good for you.

The second thing to consider is what do you want to sell. If you try to sell everything without knowing about the items, you’ll end up spending too much money and not selling it for enough.

When first starting out consider one or two areas you want to start in and as you get the hang of it expand into other areas. If you know a lot about computers, you may want to sell used laptops after you’ve fixed them up. For the fashion oriented, searching for great outfits at thrift shops and the sales rack can be the source of great finds, that many other people will ignore. For those who can do simple repairs, buying and selling old appliances, especially fridges, washers and dryers, can net some impressive profits.

For me personally, I wouldn’t know where to start in buying clothes, so it would be a waste of my time trying to do it. I can however fix appliances and bikes, so that would be a good place for me start.

Buying Low and Selling High

So you know what product you want to resell, and you know where you’re going to sell it, good. Now all you have to do is buy it.

Yard sales, estate sales, Craigslist and thrift shops are your friends, people want to sell ‘junk’ all the time, not realizing that with some research, cleaning and repair, they could be making a fair bit of money instead of a few dollars.

Look for items that are in decent to good condition, or are only suffering from surface damage. A bit of rust, scratches, a dent and stains are often easy to remove, and will double or triple the asking price.

If you’re buying clothes and small items such as toys, you can often tell how good it is simply by looking at it. With larger, more expensive and complex buys, be sure to ask questions. Never take the sellers word, always check everything, and if possible turn it on to see how it runs, you don’t want to buy a 300 dollar laptop only to discover it needs 200 dollars worth of repairs.

If you want to buy items on sale, at a store you should hold onto them for a little bit of time, sometimes even months. Seasonal items like winter coats can be bought at a 50% discount in early spring, when winter rolls around you can sell them at close to full price. You have to store them safely for a few months, but if you have the time it’s a good deal.

Another tactic to buy low, is to buy things out of the box, especially electronics. This will provide you a nice little discount, depending on your bargaining abilities and store policies, then you can turn around and resell it pocketing the difference.

How To Sell Online

The first thing you need to do is make sure the item looks its’ best. Take the time to do any minor repairs, clean it up and get some good photo’s. If there is anything you can’t fix, be sure to get a picture of that to.

Now you need to prepare the information. The most important rule:

DON’T LIE!!!!

If there is a bad scratch you can’t repair let the customer know, and put a small photo of the scratch so people know exactly what they’re buying. If you lie, many sites have a way to leave negative reviews, and even if they don’t, your customer will likely return the item, or simply walk away from the deal before giving you the money.

Emphasize that the item is brand new, or has been repaired, and provide as many good points as possible, with any problems listed at the end.

When it comes to pricing, do your research and see what comparable items are selling for, be sure to add in how much work you’ve put into it, a certain 5 year old bicycle regularly cost $85 dollars, but if you’ve repainted it, changed the tires and gave it a basic tune up, you should charge more for it.

Also, if you’re selling on Craigslist, people like to negotiate and to feel that they’ve won. So be sure to make your price a little high. If you think $25 is a fair price, charge $30, if they try to negotiate you now have $5 to play with. Don’t go below $25, you need to make money, but the customer will feel happy at getting a ‘discount’ and only paying $27.

So, these are the basic rules of buying things and selling them online. Decide how you want to sell things, what you want to sell, do your research, buy low and sell high, tell the truth, and give yourself some leeway.

Hello everyone, just a short message for today.

Tomorrow night I’ll be hosting the second episode of my new radio show for people who work from home, or want to start. Tomorrow’s episode will focus on working as a personal chef, an increasingly popular home service that has a lot of potential if you like cooking and don’t mind cleaning up afterwards.

Currently my plan is to have the radio show twice a week, on Wednesday and Saturday, at 10am Eastern time.

The Wednesday show will focus on a different work at home job or career, explaining what you need to do the job, how to do it, some advice on marketing it, and I will occasionally have guests who work in that field come on for an interview.

The Saturday show will feature various topics about working from home, ranging from networking, family, productivity, finding work, telecommuting and more. This Saturdays’ show is about Successfully Networking and Keeping Clients.

So, if you’re interested in working from home or are already doing it but want some useful tips, come join me every Wednesday and Saturday. And if you want to hear my first episode about Marketing in Your Community, just click the link.

Cheers
Dan

Finding a niche for your work at home business is important. As I explain in the video, having a niche lets you focus your marketing efforts more effectively, as you know who your customers are.
So, pick a niche, make sure it isn’t too narrow, start finding customers and start making money.

Cheers
Dan

Bartering isn’t a thing of the past. Many people and home businesses will trade goods and services even today.

Last year, while wearing my freelance writer hat, I got hired to do some editing work for an internet marketer. After doing the job, I was impressed enough to want to get some advice from her on expanding my business via marketing. However, I didn’t want to actually spend money on it (yes I’m a little cheap sometimes).

So, I made her a deal, I’d edit her website and news letters, while she helped me design a marketing plan. We’d each get something of value, without spending money on it. As a work from home business owner you occasionally may want or need to barter to get the help you need.

Why Barter Your Services

Sometimes you’ll need something, either for daily life or to help expand your home business, and the money won’t be there, or it will leave you strapped for cash. This is especially common when you’re just starting out.

Say your a website designer, and you need a suit tailored for a business meeting or a wedding, you don’t have the money, but you know the tailor has a business website that is in need of improvement. You offer to rework their website, and you either get the suit tailored for free or a for a large discount.

If you like going to a salon, you could create a professional brochure, ad campaign, etc, in exchange for haircuts. Offering quality home made jewellery for computer repair is another way to barter. Professional babysitting services for a good logo, writing services for your child’s music lessons, all of these types of bartering are completely legitimate, and if done properly, will help you get what you need, without spending money you may not have.

In each of these cases, you are not working for free, something I do not like doing, you’re simply using your skills to get something you need rather than spending cash. If you are trying to save money for things you HAVE to spend money on, such as your mortgage, food  car payments, etc, it’s better to spend your time rather than your money on the not so essential items.

How to Barter

Before you consider bartering, think about what your services are worth. A handmade quilt that you would normally charge a customer 3 or 4 hundred dollars for isn’t something you’d barter for a manicure or bit of copy writing.

If you’re undervaluing your work or putting an inflated price on the return service, you won’t be able to get a fair deal. The reverse is also a problem, if you’re demanding too much in return, you won’t be able to close the deal. So, go in with an idea of what you’re stuff is worth, and be ready to negotiate.

Also write up a contract, especially if you want to make it a long term deal. If it’s a short term deal, you don’t have to write a full contract, but have it put down in writing what each of you will do. That way if there are any problems or disputes you can look at the original agreement to see who’s right.

Finally, don’t make any agreement that lasts more than 6 months. If you get more customers, raise your prices, or simply stop needing the services, you will want a chance to drop the agreement without creating any hard feelings. If there is no clear end, or it lasts a very long time, backing out could look bad and become messy.

Finally, this is important. Bartering business services could be taxable depending on where you live, for Americans, here is a bit of information from the IRS.  If you’re not sure of the law in your area, or if something is worth mentioning, talk to an accountant or call the IRS with a question.

In my own bartering case, it didn’t work out. We both had different ideas of what was required and what our services were worth, so after a week, we mutually backed out of the agreement. So if any marketer out there wants to trade their services for coaching or writing help, send me a line.

If you’ve had experience with bartering your services, let us know how it worked out.

Cheers
Dan

My last post, “11 Good Websites for Virtual Assistant Jobs” I did not list a single bidding site. Many other people would have at least put Elance and oDesk in the list, as two of the biggest freelance bidding sites on the net, so why didn’t I?

Well the truth is, I don’t like them for a couple of reasons.

1. Finding Good Paying Jobs

   I have used oDesk and Elance in the past as well as a few other bidding sites for my freelance writing business, and frankly finding decent paying jobs for writers on those sites is difficult. I know the jobs are there, but finding them, writing a great proposal, and competing against the horde of cheaper writers is very difficult, especially if you’re just starting out.
   In my research for V.A. Job sites, many people complained of the same thing.
   To get the good jobs, you need to know exactly what you’re doing, and have a well thought out plan of action or you’re going to be working for a few dollars an hour.

2. Getting Stuck in a Rut 

   If you start off working for really low pay, it can be hard for some people later on to demand more money. I can understand taking a few low paying jobs initially, or when you’re desperate, I took a few writing jobs that paid about about ½ a cent a word when I first started writing.
   But with bidding sites, unless you have a great strategy, you will keep working at those 5 or 6 dollar an hour jobs.
   Even if you do have a good strategy, if you aren’t careful you can make a decent monthly income, but 99% of the time you can make more money talking directly to the customers.
   Here is one writer who stopped using Elance for this reason.

3. Intense Competition 

   I like competition, but I prefer to keep it reasonable, facing off against tens of thousands of people on bidding sites is not exactly reasonable in my opinion.
   When you’re on a bidding site, it’s easy to low ball your estimate thinking that you must be lower than most of the competition. This is the wrong idea, you need to make enough money to live comfortably on. Unfortunately, many people panic when they see the competition and don’t think strategically.

4. Lack of a Personal Touch 

   When I’m working I prefer to be personal with people, a friendly, well thought out letter of introduction, a phone call or better yet a video chat, and best of all a face to face meeting where I can really shine.
   Bidding sites remove all of this. You have to give a proposal with very little room for personality, and hope that it’s enough. For some people that’s good, but for me I can’t stand it.

5. Unclear Instructions 

   The biggest complaint I’ve seen for all bidding sites is that the job is unclear. This leads to bad proposals, low bidding, and frequent changes once you start the actual job.
   Quite a few of the jobs are posted by people who are not native English speakers, or simply don’t know how to write, which causes confusion and misunderstandings. What’s worse, is that when new employers place a bid, they often look at similar bids to see what they should write, they see the confusing, bare bones, job details and think they should do the same.
   When looking for freelance work, especially if you’re new, having clear instructions is essential for doing a good job.

So, that’s my opinion for bidding sites, if you are patient, study very hard, and go in with a strategy, you can make money. But if you just start bidding without a plan, and want to make money quickly, you’re going to get frustrated and make pennies.

In late April, I’ll let you know some of the strategies for successfully using bidding sites.

Cheers
Dan

If you have worked in the business world, have experience as a personal assistant, or you’ve done secretarial work or data entry, working as a virtual assistant in your part time or as a full time at home career, could be one of the easiest work from home jobs you can find.

With the ability to work as a freelance virtual assistant, or get hired on by a virtual assistant company, this job allows you quite a bit of freedom.

If you’re interested in this field, here are a list of websites and companies to find virtual assistant jobs.

Virtual Assistant Job Sites and Companies

Office Details
An agency for virtual assistants, no fee’s are required for registering. It encourages self-promotion, and allows you to set your own fees.

Virtual Office Temps
This site allows employers to post job offers for you to apply to. Registration is free, and once you have your profile set up you can apply for jobs. If your VA resume is slim they also allow you to take a series of tests to provide site certification, which is also completely free.

Todays Admin
Todays’ Admin is difficult to join, they require 2 years experience, as well as certain skills. If you have experience as a personal assistant or in business, this is a good company to apply to.

EAHelp
Another virtual assistant company that has fairly high standards. If you have secretarial or business experience you should try to apply.

Zirtual
This company has a non-disclosure clause in it’s contracts, so there is not a lot of first-hand information about, but there are virtually no complaints about it to be found. They also have a cap on what clients can expect within a certain amount of time, which should keep the virtual assistant from being overwhelmed.

Simply Hired Canada
Simply Hired USA
A job board for freelancers, the links go directly to the VA sections. No registration necessary and it collects job ads from all over Canada and the USA, very useful for freelancers.

Axion Data Entry Service
Axion deals entirely with data entry projects, great for VA’s with this type of experience. You will need to have a criminal background check before being gaining a contract.

Virtual Assistant Job Board
Another job board, but made specifically for virtual assistants.

Budding Up Job Board
A newer job board, so fewer listings, but worth checking out.

Accutran
This company is focused more on transcription, but also deals with other types of VA work.

24×7 Virtual Assistant
A company that provides a wide range of VA jobs in the USA, based around your experience and education.

You will notice that I haven’t linked to any bidding sites like Elance or Odesk. This is because I don’t like them, as I explain here.

When you work from home, you probably won’t have an employee, except possibly a virtual assistant, at first, but as you get more customers and money coming in the need for extra help could become very important. Rather than hiring someone to come to your home to help out, you may want to just hire a family member.

By hiring someone in your family, you can, hopefully, trust them more than a stranger, they can work your odd hours more easily, and you get to spend more time with them. So it should be a win win situation. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case.

Acting Unprofessionally

This is the biggest problem I’ve found and heard about when hiring a family member, they don’t treat it like a job.

One of my businesses is tutoring young Chinese students in English, and older students in IELTS. My wife acts as my marketer and negotiator for the young Chinese students as they and their parents don’t speak enough English to talk business with me. In IELTS, I do all my own work, as the students are planning on going overseas and speak more fluently.

Late last month to give myself time to enjoy some free time, I changed my main IELTS client schedule a bit, so that I would work Wednesday instead of Thursday night. The next week, my wife told me that I was teaching a group of 3 students on Wednesday night. The best part was she told me this half an hour before the students actually arrived.

I’d been teaching these students every Wednesday for about 6 months when they stopped coming in January, I had assumed they were finished the class, but it turned out they were merely taking a month and a half break during the Spring Festival. My wife had forgotten to inform me of this.

So I had to phone my IELTS client and tell them I couldn’t work Wednesday anymore. That was embarrassing.

If my wife had been a bit more professional, she would have told me before the last minute, and none of this would have happened.

So make sure if you hire someone in your family, they treat the job like a job. You don’t want them mixing things up, insulting clients, or forgetting to tell you important information.

Separating Family and Work

You are already trying to separate family time and work time by working from home, when you hire a family member, especially a spouse, you are suddenly making family and work even closer.

If you and your family member focus entirely on the business, your relationship will be ignored. While working with a cousin or sibling this may not be a large problem, between spouses this type of obsession can lead to one or both of you feeling trapped.

This can go the other way as well, if you only think of your family relationship, your home business will suffer.

I keep my wife out of the majority of my WaH business because of this reason, it’s simply easier for me to keep a nice work-life balance this way.

Before hiring a family member, have a long discussion about the expectations and responsibilities, working hours, and an agreement that if there is a problem it must be brought up. You should also be very careful about scheduling your family time, even more than usual,

Have an Exit Plan

Sometimes things don’t work out. You may find that your family member isn’t working as hard as you think he or she should be, that your relationship is suffering, or you just aren’t comfortable anymore and you want out.

Before you hire your family member, make sure they and you realize that if things don’t work, you both can call it quits with no hard feelings. There probably will be hard feelings anyways, but as long as it was discussed beforehand, it should keep it to a minimum, and not ruin any holiday get togethers’.

Just be sure when you let them go to be polite about it, and if they did a good job provide a nice reference for them.

Working with your family could be a good decision, especially with a work from home business, but like so many other things, if you enter it without planning or discussion, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Think about who you want to hire, what they can do for you, and how to keep your business and family separate.

Cheers
Dan