Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

Archive for May, 2009

If you were hit by this recession and lost your job, or fear losing it, what can you do to regain some control over your career and financial life?

The best answer is to start your own business(es) or build on a small one you already have. The next thing you need to think about is how to have multiple streams of income so if one goes away, you have other sources and the financial hit won’t be as bad. Ideally, no more than 10% of your necessary living expenses should come from a single source.

I assume that if you are reading the posts on this blog, you have some kind of home office. I’m pretty sure you didn’t set one up just to have a fancy place to write the checks and handle your personal business. Or maybe you did. No matter. It’s time to look forward and make that home office a profit center in your house.

Small businesses are the fastest growing segment of the commercial market. More jobs are created by the small business sector than in any other area, and more people now own and work for small businesses than for major corporations.

I have only one warning for you. You must work for yourself like the boss is watching you every second, because if you don’t do your work, it never gets done and the business never takes off. Owning your own business is work, but it can be work you love and a pleasure to get up to each day. You have to work much harder for yourself than you did for an employer. If it’s something you love, it doesn’t feel like hard work. And I personally love the commute…three steps from the kitchen and coffee pot to my desk! Goofing off or playing Solitaire at your computer instead of working takes away from your bottom line. If you want time off, take it, but don’t think you can act like an employee when you’re in charge.

Decide What You Want to Do

• If you want to find another job working for someone else, that is a very legitimate choice, but in the future you must be prepared to jump when the waters begin to stir instead of waiting for a wave to hit you. Find another job, but always be looking, and change jobs if there is something better on the horizon for you. The only loyalty you should have is to yourself, your family and your friends. No company will be loyal to you, and no one is ever irreplaceable or worse, the company may find they can eliminate your job altogether.

• Do you want your business to be online or offline?
• Are you or were you doing something that you can market and become a freelance consultant?
• What are you good at doing? Math? Writing? English? History? Singing? Reading construction plans? Leading others? Building furniture? Plumbing? Painting? Cutting grass? Cleaning and organizing? Websites? Design? Video games? Graphic arts?
• What do you love to do? Work with your hands? Work outside? Be the idea person? Be the implementation person? Volunteer and help others? Work with kids? Crafts? You get the idea.
• Do you know how to do something you could teach others to do?
• Is there something you have always wanted to try but didn’t have the time or energy when you were working full-time?
• Can you try it on a shoe-string budget?
• Could you start out part-time and grow it until it is earning enough to support you full-time?
• If you worked on it full-time, could you make it work to earn a great income and give yourself the freedom and control you always wanted while you were working for a boss?
• Do you need more education, a degree or a certificate so you can pursue a new career?
• Can you work at a flexible, part-time job to cover your financial responsibilities while you explore business opportunities? Pizza delivery, throwing boxes at UPS or FedEx, mentoring or tutoring etc.?

If you have no idea what you might like to do, see the resources at the bottom of this post for some books you can read to help you decide what you would be happier doing.

If You Already Have a Business

• Do you want to continue that business or do something else?
• Do you want to take your offline business and add an online component?
• Do you want to take your online business and add an offline component?
• Do you want to use the internet to add marketing resources to your offline, local business and your bottom line? There are several free things you could do right now to improve your existing business. See this resource at Affordable Local Business Internet Marketing.
• What would need to happen to make your hobby or part-time business a viable, full-time income?

It’s time to sit down with some blank paper and start doing some stream-of-consciousness writing and brainstorming. Draw pictures and diagrams if words aren’t your thing. Use butcher paper or shipping paper if you need large pieces to draw and write on. Use colored markers, pens, pencils and even paint to give your ideas the right emphasis. Let your ideas flow and don’t throw any out until you’ve done all the brainstorming you can and have found your niche.

This may take several efforts over several days. It takes each of us a different amount of time to get up and step all the way out of our boxes and open ourselves to the possibilities. If you’ve been working for someone else and were laid off, there is a good chance you were somewhat pigeon-holed and now you may feel unwanted. When we’ve been doing a job for a long time we tend to adopt a certain mindset, and we have to relearn how to think outside of that mindset again.

You may have several fits and starts, but don’t allow a project you try that doesn’t work define who you are. A project may fail because it’s not the right thing for you at the right time. Go back and start over until what you are doing feels right and works.

It took Thomas Edison thousands of tries to invent the incandescent light bulb. He looked at it by thinking and believing he discovered thousands of ways NOT to invent a light bulb. He looked at all his setbacks as lessons. We learn when we don’t succeed and we learn when we do. The important thing is to never give up.

Is having your own business worth it? Does it really pay off? Absolutely, as long as you are doing what you love, working like you want to and earning enough money to meet your needs and some of your wants. It’s even better if you can put some or all of your business on autopilot eventually. If you do something that you put a lot of work into up front that will continue to pay off for a long time, that’s even better. You may create an income source that will pay you like you’re still working while you’re retired. Or you could semi-retire early. You could even get rich if that’s your goal. Each of us defines “rich” in our own way, and not all definitions mean lots of money.

The only thing you can count on in this world is change. So why not embrace it and become your own knight in shining armor instead of continuing to be a pawn? Create your own business and your own world of work on your terms. What could be a better job than that?

If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life and you’ll get paid to have fun. – Wish I knew who said this…

Resources:

48 Days to the Work You Love

48 Days Workbook

No More Mondays

All by Dan Miller

Technorati Tags: be your own boss, home office, home office organization, home-based business, make home office profitable, self employed, small business

The Membership Site Mastermind [MSM] program is closed until at least fall 2009.

Why?

With a limited number of students in the program, Yaro Starak can spend more individual time supporting students and collecting case studies to add to a far less limited program in the future. Case studies are an extremely effective way to study and learn practical and immediately useful information from the mistakes and successes of other people’s membership sites.

Yaro doesn’t just tell you how to do something, he shows you how with real-world examples. He uses print, video and audio podcasts to teach his material so all learning styles are accommodated.

People have three learning styles: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. Auditory learning is learning by listening. People with this style do best with radio, audio podcasts and audio books, for example. Visual learning style is learning by watching someone else do something. People with this style learn best from video presentations or reading. Kinesthetic learners learn by doing something while being shown how to do it. People with this style learn best by watching and listening to a small amount of information and then doing it until they understand it, then they will watch and listen to a little more and do the next step.

While most of us use a combination of all three, we each favor one style over the other two. If we learn something in the style in which we are most comfortable, we learn it best and we retain it longer. Case studies on video allow all three styles to learn: listeners can listen to what is being said and can go back and repeat the audio, visual learners can watch the whole video before implementing, and kinesthetic learners can stop and start the video while they try each step in a process.

Keep a watch on this blog for the reopening of Membership Site Mastermind, and don’t forget, Blog Mastermind is open and available right now. Your membership site will be enhanced with a blog on the subject, so why not go ahead and start blogging and get several months of that while you wait for the Membership Site Mastermind program to reopen?

Start with the free Blog Profits Blueprint report. You can also download the free Membership Site Masterplan report if you haven’t read it yet.

There is plenty to do before MSM reopens. Read the free reports and learn to blog while the MSM program is closed so you’ll be ready to make the most of it when it reopens!

Sherri Joubert
Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind graduate

Technorati Tags: Blog Mastermind, Blog Profits Blueprint, home office organization, Membership Site Mastermind, Yaro Starak

Yaro Starak just opened his Membership Site
Mastermind training program and he’s taking
students for one week only.

You can join right now at this page (WARNING:
it’s a long page, so watch the video instead if
you don’t like long sales pages) –

Membership Site Mastermind

There’s been quite a build up to this opening.
Yaro’s report, the Masterplan, was hugely popular
and I got a lot of great feedback about it.

Then Yaro hit us with two amazing videos, one
explaining his powerful yet simple survey
technique that you can use to find out exactly
what your people will buy from you.

The second video showed how Yaro was able to
travel the world and make $211,969 while visiting
25 different countries in 8 months, and took you
behind the scenes of two case studies in
non-Internet marketing niches.

If the Masterplan and two videos are anything to
go by, then you can only imagine how incredible
his full, six-week training program is like.

You even get direct access to Yaro with live
coaching calls, so if you want to work with this
guru of Internet marketing and get personal
support, this is a brilliant opportunity.

Don’t wait, join today and start your journey
towards a $10,000 a month membership site –

Membership Site Mastermind

Good luck with your membership site and enjoy
Yaro’s program.

To your success,
Sherri

PS. If you’re not sure whether Membership Site
Mastermind is right for you, go read the details
on the order page. There’s a lot of information
about the program and a really powerful video you
can watch of Yaro presenting.

The video itself offers great content, so set
aside 30 minutes and go watch it now:

Membership Site Mastermind

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurs-Journey, Membership Site Mastermind, Yaro Starak

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted to this blog. The presidential election, the economy, the wars, education reform, health care, and the flu pandemic have been occupying my time.

After I was laid off in 2003 and couldn’t find a full-time job in my field, I started tutoring high school students in math and science, and I explored and started an online business. My income grows online each month and is a great supplement to my tutoring income.

With the economy in the toilet and job security the way we knew it a thing of the past, I wanted to share my list of free resources to help you explore starting various types of online businesses. An online business can be part-time in your spare time, it can supplement a job income, or become your primary income source.

Advantages of having your own online business:

• Very little money investment, you need a computer and internet access to start
• Lots of resources to help even the most online-challenged, most are free at the beginning. You don’t have to put out money until you decide you’re ready
• Takes as little or as much time as you want it to
• Can compliment a job or jobs
• Provides extra income
• Lots of areas to explore, from blogging to membership sites to niche markets
• The ability to diversify your income into several different streams so the loss of one stream or even two doesn’t take your entire income away. Rule of thumb: only 10% of your necessary income should come from any single source. The internet provides a huge array of programs to diversify your income streams widely
• You can make your own products (physical or informational) or you can earn your money selling other people’s products with affiliate programs, or both

Here is my list of good programs that offer lots of free information. There are paid versions as these programs advance, but you can start for free and start making your first $1, $10, even $100. You can use a combination of programs and earn with both affiliate sales commissions and revenue from the sale of your own products.

• The Thirty Day Challenge – 100% FREE and for absolute beginners of internet business. This is free, but I’ve learned more here than from some very expensive paid programs I’ve tried. This is high quality material.
• The Thirty Day Challenge Plus – a paid, but inexpensive, continuation of the Thirty Day Challenge. For a monthly fee, you continue your TDC education with lots more detail and material you are ready to implement after completing the Thirty Day Challenge.
• Blog Mastermind – a reasonably priced monthly paid program for those who want to become great bloggers and learn to make money from their blogs. Yaro Starak developed this program and you can check out the Blog Profits Blueprint report absolutely FREE before you decide to join a program like this. I completed this course and it has made me a much better writer and blogger.
• Membership Site Mastermind – a monthly paid program to learn how to set up a Membership site on any topic you can think of. Also by Yaro Starak, there are 3 FREE resources to explore this business before you join the paid program and spend any money: Membership Site Masterplan, Blue Sky video, and the info Slideshow video plus case studies.

I hope you will explore an online business as a part of your future income portfolio. No one can afford to rely on the income from a single job or career anymore. The job market is too insecure.

Here’s to your online business success and to finding a new job as well!

Sherri Joubert

Technorati Tags: free online business resources, job research, laid off, secondary income source, small business research, supplemental income, unemployed