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Section 1: The pros and cons of running a business from home

Running a business from home has tremendous appeal, and there are many home based business ideas to choose, ranging from work at home jobs to home based internet business opportunities.

The purpose of this business entrepreneur beginner page is first to help you to consider the pros and cons of siting your business at home, and then to move on to review a range of best home business ideas and work at home jobs. If you want to get straight to that, then scroll down to the bottom of the page now.

Hopefully this will help you select the best home business for you, in case you don’t want to create a business from scratch in the traditional business entrepreneur fashion. So, without further ado, let’s get started...

Dividing home and work space

If you decide that you want run a business from home, then I’d recommend that you seriously think about setting aside a room, or at the very least, a designated area in your home to work in.

I’ve always found that, apart from everything else that I’ll move on to talk to you about next, this has clear psychological benefits for you. Let me talk about “me” for just a few moments, so that you can perhaps begin to see what I mean.

I’ve almost always run a business from home, since I first started out as an entrepreneur beginner, way back in 1981. I was a rock music teacher, and in the early days of my teaching career (that turned into a big award-winning franchise business with over 60 outlets), I was living in my mother’s house, and my clients were coming to visit me for lessons. Clearly a defined space was essential.

If you’re providing some sort of direct service to customers with your business from home, then you’ll need to consider many of the same things as I did back then, which I’ll talk about as we move through this page together. Actually, in my case it got even more complicated, because my equally entrepreneurial wife became a self-employed beauty therapist a little later on. By then, I’d actually taken a mortgage on the house, and mum had moved out (all amicably I might add - she was the best support I could have ever wished for in those essential early days).

Clearly, running a beauty therapy business from home in one spare bedroom, and a rock music teaching business from home in a second spare bedroom was not going to work long-term, and so I saved up and had a garage-sized brick building constructed in the back yard for my clients. It worked really well for a good few years.

However, back to the psychological, as opposed to practical, aspect of a defined space...

Defined work space for a good lifestyle balance

Whether or not you are going to be receiving clients in your business from home, it’s good for your own sanity, and that thing called work/life balance, to have a defined area within your home that you use for work. Why? Because, however much you love your entrepreneurial business from home, and everything that goes with it, there will be times when you want to “switch off” - times when you half-admire your friends with their jobs that take them off to work in the morning, and back home in the evenings.

Their home is just that - a home. And when they’re there, work becomes a distant detached thing. They can switch off and enjoy the benefits that their income and effort bring to them. Home is a cosy nest, away from the world. Your home, on the other hand, can become “work central.” 24/7... we never close! You get the picture.

The intrusive phone

I made that mistake. The phone would ring in the middle of a meal. I’d feel I HAD to answer after all, “it might be a customer”. I’d be constantly talking about my entrepreneurial business all over the house, all the time, and guess what, before I knew it, the fun started to drain out and I started to think of it as “work” in the traditional sense of the word - everything I’d been trying to avoid.

So, I changed things. I Built that separate haven in the garden, took work out of the house and sanity was restored. I was still working on a business from home, but now I could “close the door” and switch of mentally. Order was restored - just in time.

I appreciate that you may not be able to place buildings in your garden - you may not even have one (although if you like the idea, then click this link (LINK COMING SOON), where I introduce you to some cool portable office solutions), but you can - and should - be able to shut the door on your entrepreneurial business from home now and again.

If you’re using a defined space in your home, then that’s easy - just literally close the door. If you’re working at a desk under the stairs or on a kitchen table, close the laptop, pack all the papers away. Relax.

Relax and be still sometimes

Take time to be still, both physically and mentally. Stillness is where most creativity comes from. Remember, you’re not your entrepreneurial business, and your business is not you. There is life outside and all around it. Don’t let it engulf you and your home - because, trust me, it will try to do that.

My advice, at all times, is to remember that you started as an entrepreneur to give you MORE life, MORE time, MORE enjoyment - as well as more money. So close that door at regular intervals.

Here's a tip to help make that even easier... For many of us, music can be a blissful and relaxing antidote to a busy day, and I recommend that you consider bringing music into your working day. It's wonderful for putting you in the right calm frame of mind - but it has to be the right sort, and wading through thousands of artistes trying to find something relaxing, ambient or appropriate on itunes is just no fun. I use a specialist website for my relaxation music (which I often also play in the background while I'm working away). What I like best is that I can download the beautiful albums for immediate listening, and preview snippets before I buy. Click the link below and try an album or two to revitalize your working day - it really works...

If you want to take things further and into a scientific direction, then what I have for you below is the ultimate calm, peaceful and creativity-inducing products I've EVER come across. Nuphonics recordings combine beautiful ambient music with specially designed frequencies, tones and rhythms that alter brainwave patterns and improve physiological states for the listener. It's complex stuff - but it works for me!

The scientific and artistic elements within each Nuphonics composition are designed to lift, strengthen, and help us in both general and specific ways. They really do help create a positive environment of renewal, balance, and harmony - and seem to make working on a home business even more of a pleasure. The great thing, of course, is that working from home, you have no-one to stop you playing this music while you run your business.

Nuphonics compositions are designed to help us in at least two important ways:

1. By creating a direct, physical shift: Nuphonics compositions use vibration and sound wave patterns that help create a physical shift, or syncing up of the body with the music, that leads to an improved level of performance and functioning.

2. By creating a mental and emotional shift: Nuphonics compositions also stimulate mental imagery and emotional shifts that that help transition you into a desired state of functioning.

If you don't believe me, then click the link below and listen to some of the free audio snippets on the site. I recommend the "Renewal" and the "Tranquility" products. I think they're marvelous...

Contamination of places and spaces

My final point on the subject is quite a deep one, but I would like to share it with you, and I hope you’ll find it useful if you plan to run your business from home.

I firmly believe that a strong negative occurrence can contaminate a place and make it unpleasant. Here’s an example...

You sit in your beautiful, sunny conservatory. It’s a place you love. The sun is streaming in.The garden is beautiful.It’s a haven of peace and tranquility in your home.

You don’t do work there - ever. But then, for no apparent reason, one day, you break with tradition and open your laptop in there and check your emails. Mistake BIG, BIG mistake... amongst the usual stuff, you get an awful email that affects your business in a dreadful way.

Something awful’s happened... you’re going to lose a ton of money.. aggghhh!!! Your heart’s beating faster, you can feel a headache coming, there’s a funny taste in your mouth, you feel a bit sick. You start ranting to your partner about it...

The real world tranquility of your lovely conservatory seems to disappear in an instant.

The sun is no longer pleasant, it’s just damn hot.The garden is unimportant... and on and on it goes.

But what’s worse is that, when the crisis has passed - and in life, all things must pass away - and you return to that lovely conservatory again, perhaps on the next sunny day, it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

It’s got a sort of “aura” hanging in it. You can’t help remembering that email. It keeps popping into your mind. You’re associating the conservatory and the email together and what happened there.

The conservatory has become contaminated, and it will take a lot of new “nice” things to happen in the future before it returns to anything like the wonderful haven in your house that it once was.

A tall story? No. It has happened to me, with my business from home and, I’ll bet that, if you care to think about it, something similar will have happened to you too. So, protect your home from your business and have a defined space where you work on your entrepreneurial activities - don’t let them escape and wash over everything, drowning life.

I’m not suggesting that being an entrepreneur running a successful business from home will bring you loads of bad stuff, far from it - there will be a ton of stuff to celebrate too - just be careful.

Email and how to control it

Entrepreneurs are in danger of being attacked by a creeping disease... a compulsion - it’s called “mustcheckemail”. Have you heard of it? It’s running rampant all over the world of business from home and elsewhere. Have you gone down with it yet?

You know what I’m getting at. These days most people feel an overpowering need to check their emails ALL the time. The “ping” or “blip” that heralds a new email seems to have gained a mysterious power to stop you doing whatever else you are engaged in and rush headlong to the computer and check to see what it is.

My advice is simple - DON’T. Email will distract you from your plan for the day, from the positive entrepreneurial tasks you’ve set for yourself to take your business that little bit further forward, and working on a business from home, there’s often more than enough distractions already (mmm, that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the freezer...)

Instead, do this..

Turn off the auto-receive on your email, so that new mail only arrives when you click the “send and receive” button.

Check your email only once a day, at the start of your working time.

Deal with the incoming workload - then don’t check it again until the next morning.

Guess what? Nothing bad will have happened due to you not checking feverishly every five minutes (or less).

Yeah, you say, but people expect to hear back immediately... No they don’t! If you don’t do it, they won’t expect it. As long as you give them a realistic expectation, then all will normally be very well, so...

Have your email server system send a courtesy autoresponder email back to everyone who emails you. A bit like those “out of office” replies you get when someone’s away for a few days. It simply needs to professionally set their expectations of when they will get their reply from you. Perhaps something like this...

“Hi, Jane here. Thanks for emailing me. I check my email once a day (except for weekends) at 9am, and aim to get back you within 24 hours of downloading your message.”

And, as if by magic, you’ve got your days back.

You’ve regained your productivity.

You’re able to devote the time that you planned today to the tasks to take your entrepreneurial business forwards.

Trust me, this works. Like a dream. Why not give it a go?

The phone and how to use it effectively

Sticking with communication when you’re running your business from home, let’s turn our attention to the telephone.

I strongly recommend that you completely separate your private calls from your business entrepreneur ones. It’s so much more professional.

If at all possible, I would suggest that you have a second landline installed, with its own dedicated number, terminating right inside the room you’re planning to use to work in within your home or, to your work area. Then fit an answerphone with a professional-sounding and appropriate message.

Finally, consider a mobile phone as well, and arrange for your landline calls to be diverted to your mobile whenever you’re out and about. That way, you won’t miss a thing.

I tend to not recommend that entrepreneurs only have mobile phones, because some people that you deal with are less comfortable phoning a mobile number, as they recognize that it could cost them a lot more money to do so than by using a landline.

Having a landline BUT with the ability to transfer calls to your mobile, as described above is what I think is the best solution. This means that you only have to hand out one landline number on your business cards too, which makes it more straightforward for people to get hold of you.

Phones and other useful personal technology devices are something that I discuss on my personal technology page, which you can reach from this link (LINK COMING SOON).

PO Box privacy

Sometimes when you’re running your business from home, you’ll want to protect your privacy - it’s another technique for maintaining a successful work/life balance.

Giving out your home address on all your business cards, letterheads and so on often looks unprofessional and also lays you open to unexpected (and sometimes unwanted) visits from your business associates, who may have mistakenly thought you had an office, and that they could just pop in.

Of course, if you welcome customers to your business from home for a service (such as the music lessons or beauty therapy that I used as earlier examples), then this won’t apply. However, in most other circumstances, consider a PO box address.

A PO Box is an address provided by your local Post Office, and may end up looking something like this:

Jerry’s Franchise Inc.
PO Box 1345
New York
123456

Or similar. It looks clean and professional, and normally there are two options. The first, and cheapest, is for you to have the PO Box address, but have to go to the local post office and physically pick up your mail from a small box there (yes, it really is an actual box in most cases).

The slightly more expensive option that I recommend, is to have the Post Office forward all the mail, daily, in one go, to your home address.

In addition to the Post Office handling this service, there are a number of commercial providers coming into the marketplace. Some are situated in prestigious-sounding locations, and can give you a fancy-sounding PO box... maybe Sunset Boulevard or Beverly Hills (good if you’re an actor entrepreneur for example).

One such provider is called Mail Boxes Inc. You can get their website from my link right here (LINK COMING SOON).

Cheaper living expenses at home

For most entrepreneurs, making money is one of the most important criteria to focus on, but equally, there will many times - especially in your early days as an entrepreneur beginner running a business from home or elsewhere - you’ll need to spend money on stuff too.

Crucially, it’s vitally important that you obtain and save all the receipts for everything you buy, because at the end of the year, your accountant will be able to claim back what you’ve spent against the tax you have to pay, thus reducing your liability. Great!

I’m mentioning this here on my business from home page, because if you’re going to be running your entrepreneur business from home, then you’ll be able to also claim a percentage of your household bills as well.

The tax office thinking is that you are using a proportion of your house as an office, for a proportion of the time that you live in the house. Thus, you’ll be eligible to claim a part of your heating, electricity, gas, water and perhaps some of your contents insurance premiums as well. Great!

It all adds up. Your accountant will be able to give you specific figures, and work it all out for you. As a beginner entrepreneur, I suggest you take a look around locally and engage an accountant very soon for this sort of thing. They should be able to save you more in tax than their actual fee costs, and so, in effect, their services are free. The sooner this sort of thing is sorted, the sooner you can focus your main attention on growing your business from home.

Section 2: Home based business ideas

This next section focuses on providing you with information on a range of home based business ideas and work at home jobs.

I'll be adding more opportunities as time goes on, but ONLY really good ones that I have carefully researched and have verified that really work.

I want to start off with one wonderful opportunity that I have personally used, and which is an absolutely stunning way to make a living working from home with nothing more than a laptop and a passion for a hobby. I can completely vouch for this and tell you honestly that it really works. Intrigued? So was I when I first saw it a few years ago. It's called Site Build It, or SBI for short. It's a VERY CLEVER method of building a website that gradually turns into a solid and dependable online business for you. Let me try to explain...

The SBI home business opportunity that I personally use and recommend to you

SBI! makes online business success do-able. Anyone can succeed with an all-in-one process, tools, and guidance.

The process is simplified to such a degree that success (i.e., profits, not the mere presence of a Web site) is achievable even for a beginner. For an experienced person, achieving success is even smoother. SBI! really does change lives.

SBI! removes the technical barriers allowing you to keep your attention on building your business. Many functions are completely automated. You don't need to know anything upfront about building a Web site in order to succeed. The tedious, "under-the-hood" stuff is handled automatically so you can focus on other important business-building activities.

The Action Guide presents a step-by-step process, presented in both written and video formats. All you have to do is follow it. Really! The most successful SBI! owners say "all they did was follow the Guide." They don't get sidetracked, or have to guess at what to do next. SBI!'s guided approach helps you reach your goals.

Continuous mentoring via the Action Guide and online help is always available. Learn by reading (written guide) or watching (video guide)! You are carefully guided every step of the way, which make success that much more do-able. Advanced help is also available (when you are ready for it), all designed to save you time and keep you moving forward.

SBI! comes with unlimited Customer Support. SBI! owners often call it the best they've ever experienced. And the SBI! Forums complete the picture. They are the most friendly, help-and-be-helped set of e-business forums in the world.

Brainstorm It! is SBI!'s powerful keyword brainstorming and research tool. It helps you verify that your site concept has acceptable profit potential. SBIers are saved from making that common fatal error. With Brainstorm It!'s help, they know they are on track, right from the start. Brainstorm It! also helps you to find topics related to your niche that will pull in traffic and generate income.

Page creation is as simple as riding a bike with its training wheels still attached. No need to know HTML. The block-by-block builder trains you how to write a page that is both "Search Engine and human effective." It's simple, do-able and most importantly, effective site-building. The block-by-block builder is perfect for beginners, but even many "advanced" users should start with this tool. It's an excellent way to break bad habits!

When it's time to create your site's Look & Feel, SBI! provides fully customizable, easy-to-use templates. You can choose and create a professional-looking presentation, even if you have no design skills. And if you're a designer, you can create and upload your own. This page shows a range of styles.

SBI! includes domain name analysis, optimization, and registration. You will develop the best name for maximum profitability in your niche. (It's often different than what you had planned.)

Fast, reliable, state-of-the-Net Web site hosting is all included with SBI!. You don't have to worry about choosing the right "hosting" features (size, capacity, etc.). Web hosting is included, no nonsense, no hidden clauses.

To announce your site to Search Engines, you need to submit a specialized file called a "Sitemap XML" file. SBI! does it all automatically, a huge time saver, that enables you to quickly achieve wider distribution and attract more targeted free traffic.

Search Engine spider/listing/ranking reports let you see how your pages are being handled by the Search Engines. You can see what pages rank best and drive traffic. Each report's insights help you to determine how to increase traffic and monetization. Most pros don't have easy and reliable access to this type of information.

Traffic Stats and Click Analysis help you understand what your visitors like most. Understanding them helps you know what to write about, which in turn leads to more and more business.

List-building and e-mail marketing are included (usually these expensive features are bought separately). Sign up visitors to your e-zine subscription list and then mail an issue to them. This repeat exposure builds a stronger bond with your visitors and allows for direct promotions to them. Deeper PREselling = More Monetization.

Automatic site blogging turns your site into a blog easily. You'll enjoy all the benefits of a blog without needing extra skills or additional software. For those experienced with blogging, auto-pinging for your SBI! blog keeps your site on the Search Engines' radar. All of this helps attract more traffic.

SBI! has a no-risk, 30-day money back guarantee. It's a risk-free decision that you can make with confidence and peace of mind.

SiteSell.com was established by Dr. Ken Evoy in 1997. His series of books have helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Make Your Content PREsell! and Make Your Words Sell!, formerly books sold by SiteSell, are now free. They are literally the dynamic duo of "Web-writing."

Click on the link below and spend some time learning more. There are some videos that explain things much better than I can for you here. I'm absolutely serious, starting a business using SBI REALLY could change your life for the better, and that's exactly what entrepreneurbeginner.com is all about helping you to do after all - Trust me, take a look....

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