Knowing When to Quit Working

Home business professionals have many reasons for choosing to work from home. These reasons generally include spending more time with our families, setting our own work hours, having more freedom to do the things we want to do,and controlling our own destinies. These are all good, valid reasons for choosing to work from home. Unfortunately, many home business professionals lose sight of the reasons they started working from home in the first place.

Anyone who operates a home business knows that we tend to work twice as many hours as those who work in traditional businesses. Many home business professionals become work-a-holics, spending twelve to twenty hours per day, seven days a week, working. It becomes a habit.

This habit can jeopardize your health and your family. It can take away your joy of living. One day, you will wake up and find that you have lost everything that you were working from home to have. There are ways to avoid developing this habit. If you already have this habit, there are ways to break it.

Start by setting regular "office" hours, and regular "work" days. Let your family know what these hours are.

When you make your work schedule, make sure that all of your tasks are scheduled during these hours - no exceptions and no excuses. If you are already a work-a-holic, this will be hard to adjust, but you can adjust if you work at it. If you are not yet a work-a-holic, determine work days and hours, make a schedule, and stick to it from the very beginning.

Schedule two days off each week. This is your weekend, and should coincide with your family's weekend. Not checking your email for two solid days will be tough, but you can do it. Turn the computer off, close the door to your office, and go "home" for the weekend.

Make plans with your family. Get out of the house. Take your spouse for a walk. Go on a picnic. Go see a movie. It doesn't matter what you do, as long as it isn't work, and it includes your family.

If there are no family events planned for your weekend, find a hobby. Make sure your hobby doesn't have anything to do with your work, and try to include your family. The point of working at home, was to have more time to spend with these important people.

During your work week, after quitting time, take some time for yourself to recharge your batteries. Try to avoid thinking
about work. Eat meals with your family, watch television with them, play a board game or cards. Whatever you do, make sure that your office door remains closed until it is time to work again.

It is a good idea to plan at least one week long vacation during the year. Your business will not fail if you take a week off.

It may fail if you constantly take a week off, however. The key is to know how much is too much, and how little is not enough.

It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you aren't working during your "off" time. Taking time off will refresh you. You will be rested and ready to go when it is time to work again. You will find that you enjoy life more. You will enjoy working from home more. Your health may improve if you get more exercise as well. Your family will certainly enjoy having your
time and attention.

Until next time, keep reaching for your fullest potential!

How to Effectively Manage Your Time With A Home Business

Are you spending too much time with your home business and not achieving the results you desire. Focusing too much of your time and efforts on your business and achieving poor results can have detrimental effects on your business, your personal relationships, physical and mental health, and overall happiness in life.

One simple way to reduce the amount of time you spend working on your business is to set clear specific goals and objectives, clear and specific plans and to organize your day so you can focus continually on the most valuable uses of your time.

The clearer you are about your goals and objectives the more focused and efficient you will be in achieving them. One trait that successful people have in common is they seem to get more done in the same amount of time as the people around them. They use the minutes and hours of each day differently. They are more focused and productive and they get more done.

Study the way you spend your time during a typical day.

1. What are the things that you need to do more of, sooner in order to improve the quality of your business results?

2. What are the decisions that you have made in the past that have created the problems you are currently dealing with today? Whatever they may be, immediately make new decisions that will take you in a new direction.

3. Gain control over the sequence of events in your life, business and future. What changes can you make immediately to improve the quality of your business and your life? When you have written them down decide to work on those changes today.

Understand the law of leverage:

There are certain things you can do that will enable you to accomplish much more than you would if you spent the same amount of time on other activities. Select one or two things you can do in your business that will make a extraordinary difference in your results.

Learn to employ other peoples knowledge and efforts. What could you offer to attract the support you need so your business can grow faster in less time with less effort?

Work harder on yourself than you work on your business The more you practice a skill, the less time it takes you to perform a task. Bunching similar tasks that require similar skills together will allow you to take less time to do each subsequent task. Align your attention to your goals and objectives and focus until you complete each task.

Many home business entrepreneurs launch highly successful businesses that earn healthy six figure incomes or greater. By following these easy steps, you can give your business a big boost, improve your relationships and quality of your life.

Until next time, keep reaching for your fullest potential!

19 Sure Fire Ways Affiliate Marketing Won't Earn You Money Online!

After all is said and done. It comes down to commitment and how bad you want to change. Here are a few ways that are sure to keep you from making your home business a success......Enjoy! but not too much you've got work to do to ensure your success!

1. By Not Offering Your Customers A Way To Earn Back Some Of What They Spent Purchasing Your Product, this is important in online marketing.

2. Another Mistake Online Marketers Make Is Not Researching Properly What Types Of Information People Are Looking For And Are Willing To Pay To Access Or Receive It.

3. By Falling For Every 'Get Rich Quick' Scheme There Is Off AND Online and Not Knowing How To Spot One So You DON'T Fall For Them.

4. By Mistakenly Believing You'll Make Mega Bucks by Selling Info Products at online Auction Web Sites.

5. By Not READING The Products You Are Purchasing To Educate Yourself.

6. By NOT Writing Your Own Information Products or Creating Your Own Unique Collections.

7. By Listening To 'Nay-Sayers' That Tell You Earning Money Online Is Impossible.

8. By NOT Listening To Those That Tell You It IS Possible To Earn Money Online From Those Who Have Already Done It And Continue To Do It!

9. By Not Learning About The ENTIRE Concept of Doing Business Online And Believing In All The 'Hype' Telling You Running Your Own Online Business Will Be Barely Working At All.

10. By Not Having Enough Courage To Ask Other Successful Marketers For Help When You Need It And Then COMPLETELY Ignoring Their Good Advice.

11. By Not Understanding That Making A Living Online Is EXACTLY Like Having A Regular 9 To 5 Offline Job, But You Will Often Spend 10 To 15 Hours A Day Working!

12. By Trying To Do Too Many Things At Once and Having Failure after Failure, Instead Of Picking ONE Thing, Doing It RIGHT And Having Success SLOWLY.

13. By Not Sticking To One Thing And Doing It Well, Making That The MAIN Focus Of What Sets YOU Apart From Every Other Marketer.

14. By Not Automating Most of Your Online Business Processes, And Then Wondering Why You're Too Busy to Begin Any New Projects.

15. By COMPLETELY ignoring you're Customers When They Contact You, Or Giving Them Absolutely No Way to Contact You When They Need To.

16. By Not Learning ANYTHING From The Mistakes You Have Already Made, And Then Making The Same Ones Over Again!

17. By Not Taking ANY ACTION To Reach You're Goals!

18. By Believing That Just By Taking A Pre-Designed, Pre-Packaged Information Product That You Can Just Slap It Up On The Internet, With Doing Nothing Further, And Watch The Money ROLL In To Your Merchant Account.

19. By Believing You Are Doomed To Fail Before You Even Begin Your Own Online Endeavor. In all seriousness, no one got anywhere by sitting back and letting everything just 'happen' around them. You must take chances. You must get yourself active in the online marketing community. You must learn, learn and learn and never stop! Only then can you become a true success.

Remember, having a home business does involve some work on some level. The trick is to stay focused and don't get distracted. Making money online can be hard if you don't stay focused.

Until next time, keep reaching for your fullest potential!

Affiliate Marketing

For those of your who make be considering affiliate marketing.
Here's an article written by a guy who's an expert an has been doing
it for a while, enjoy........



Why Internet Marketing needs a slap and why it's time to
change....

- by Andrew Fox

© Andrew Fox - All Rights reserved
Guru Slayer
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I can remember it all too clearly..

Back in 1999, when I began my
journey online there were only 5-10
'experts' in Internet Marketing.

It was a wonderful place to live
in, a safe environment where you
could work and breathe without
being poisoned with some hyped
up product.

Fast forward and the industry,
started to change. The 'sharks'
smelt blood and entered our
market place and started
destroying the industry..

What happened?

Simple really...

Greed. Products upon products
started to filter into the market
place like a tidal wave - relentless
and not caring about the damage
it left in it's wake...

People running up HUGE debts
on credit cards, in some cases
taking equity out of their homes
just to become another victim of
a vicious scam.

I monitored everything, my blood
boiling every second of the day
until it was too much.

That was when the 'Guru Slayer'
was born - a guide created for
an ordinary person to follow a
step by step plan online.

Not hype, not fluff or any BS. Short,
sharp, crisp and to the point.
No high price tag, no hard
selling...

I only hope it will help the market
place return to the state we
once had it in...

Warm Regards,

Andrew Fox

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Andrew Fox has been marketing online
since 1999. His latest product the
'Guru Slayer' fights back against a
polluted industry that has destroyed
the lives on many. Check out the Guru Slayer!

Until next time, keep reaching for your fullest potential!

7 Top Home Business Time Wasters

When starting a home business there are a lot of things that can distract you. But a lot of the distractions we cause ourselves simply by not being focused on the task at hand.



What I call "Time Wasters" is any action interfering with running your home based business.

What Are The 7 Most Common Time Wasters? Check Out The Following!

1. Email.
Email is without a doubt a very important factor in operating your online business. After you've mastered sending and receiving email, there's no limit to the people or organizations you can reach at the press of the send button.

There is a downside to the marvelous convenience of email. Think of all the time the average business person spends checking email accounts. You could easily waste half your work day on email.

2. Pop Ups.
Are you bombarded with pop ups at every turn on the Internet? Pop ups will slow down your surfing and it's down right frustrating trying to get rid of these annoying unwanted ads. As you know, Internet Explorer is not packaged with a good pop up blocker. So you will definitely need to download one if you plan to surf the Internet regularly.

To the rescue Google Toolbar!
The Google tool bar has a great and free anti pop up weapon.
Download the Google bar. http://www.google.com

3. Surfing.
How often do you plan to check a website resource, and click unrelated links?
Fight mindless surfing! Remember your goal. Ignore links that detract from your objective. If you are looking for information on the latest "Computer Virus Hoax" why are you visiting music sites or downloading screen savers?

4. Forgetting To Write Down Your Objectives. Open Notepad or write what you plan to do on a sticky note. And check off the goals as you accomplish them. This listing method works great if you overloaded with too many task.

5. Time Limits.
Learn to set a time limit! This will force you to focus on accomplishing your objective within the designated time frame. For example, limit yourself to 30 minutes checking email, or 1 hour researching a topic.

6. Telephone/Television Distractions.
Unplug your telephone. Turn off that television. The telephone is a big time waster. Ignore urges to check your voice mail or answering machine for messages every few minutes. Only return important calls. No more soaps! That's right! While
you are working tape your favorite programs. Watch them after business hours.

7. Family Distractions:
Make your home office "Off Limit" during work hours. Tell family members to handle any minor problems while you are at your computer. Close the door to your office. Place a sign on it "Do Not Disturb during Work Hours."

Until next time, keep reaching for your fullest potential!

7 Tips to Setup your Home Business Budget

Every Home Business entrepreneur in the world has a clear and well defined goal: to earn money with his/her Business.

Choose the periodicity of your budget. Usually you may choose weeks or months. This means you need to calculate every cost to a weekly or monthly basis. I.e. if you pay for your autoresponder 120$ a year, the monthly costs are 10$ and the weekly costs are equal 120$ divided by 52, getting 2, 31$ per month.

2) Make a complete list of all recurring costs you already know: i.e. Web hosting, Residual Income Fees, your autoresponder, lead subscriptions and so on. Make a complete list with all costs you already know. Consult your credit card statements and search your Paypal account for subscription payments. Transform the costs to the unity of time you have chosen in step 1 (i.e. monthly or weekly).

3) Now make a list of all one time payments you plan to have this year, and calculate the accruals for the periodicity you have chosen in Step 1. Example: you plan to buy Internet Marketing Literature for 300$ this year (this is your Budget).

You could calculate then a monthly costs of this literature as 25$ a month, or 5.79$ per week. If you have purchased equipment (i.e. Hardware), you need to distribute the costs amount the life of the product. I.e. one PC usually is used for three years. If you pay 1000$ as one time payment, you can distribute the costs over three years, giving 333.33$ per year or 27.7$ monthly, or 6.41 $ per week. This is call depreciation. If you now that after three years you may sell the PC for 200$, calculate the depreciation accordingly, starting now from 800$ (1000$-200$). As you see, Hardware is not as expensive as you would expect, from the financial point of view.

Add the costs obtained in step 3) to the list you have already prepared in step 2). Now you have the complete list of your estimated monthly or weekly costs.

4) Now we come to the most interesting section: your Earnings! Obviously you can be in plus, only if your earnings are higher as your costs. This sounds again trivial, but is not easy to achieve.

Most of the Internet Marketing Newbies would expect to be in plus after a very short period of time. This is unrealistic. As you have seen in the first steps of the calculation of your budget, you may consider Hardware, Literature, Marketing spending and other costs that in the first months do not have the corresponding earnings. Thus, it is absolutely normal that you may have a period where you are in minus for a while, till you reach your break-even point? (Earnings = costs).

But let's come back to the earnings. In Internet Marketing, your earnings are derived from sales. There are either direct sales or indirect sales from your down line, if you are driving an MLM like business.

Here you will see that the estimations of earnings is obviously much difficult then the estimation of your costs. Ideally, you may express your earnings as a percentage of your marketing spending. If your marketing effort is not able to produce sales, you may review it and look for other marketing strategies. You need to achieve that every penny invested in marketing lead to internet income. IF you have tracked properly your marketing campaigns, you may be in a good position to estimate your conversion rate (the percentage of your clicks that lead to sales) and thus, can express your earnings as a percentage of your marketing costs.

Example: you are running a Campaign with PPC Search Engines to promote your business. You pay 0.05$ per click and achieve 300 clicks a month. Your corresponding recurring costs of 15$ a month are already considered in your budget.

Your conversion rate may be 1%, so you expect three sales per month. If you get 8$ per sale, your monthly earnings are 24$ a month. This means your profitability is 25% (24$-15$) / 15$. For every advertising dollar you get 1.25$ sales.

The total profitability of your business will be lower, since you need to consider the total cost and not only the PPC marketing cost. The problem may consist that at the beginning you will not know the conversion rate of your campaign, so you will need to work with estimations. Once you have the real numbers, review your estimations based on that numbers. Your Budget will get more and more accurate, the more data you can provide.

5) Now you can build your Budget based on Costs and estimated earnings month by month. You may decide to reinvest part of your earnings and increase your marketing spending month by month.

It is time now to put all data into your Calculation Sheet. Start building columns, one column per period (week or month). Per each period, reserve two columns, one for your budget and one for your actual (your real numbers).

Divide your rows in earnings, and costs. Subdivide them in several rows for your earnings (in the case you are working with multiple programs, reserve one row per program) and one row per each cost element identified in the steps 1-2.

Reserve a Row for a sum of all your cost elements (per period) and a corresponding row for the sum of all your earnings (per period). At the end, add one Row with the difference of your earnings minus your costs.

Now you are in the position to see period by period, what is the ?net result? of your business. You will see immediately if you are earning or losing money.

As already mentioned, it is absolutely normal that in your first months (or years?) you will have more costs then earnings. This is the case for every business. However you should be now in the position to predict when your breakeven point will be reached (total earnings = total costs, per period). You may decide to invest more in marketing activities if they seem to be profitable, or save costs by reducing your recurring expenses.

6) Review your budget on a regular basis. The more data you have, the more accurate your budget will get. Calculate
period by period your conversion rate and monitor the results of your marketing activities. Put the results back to your budget and create new Budget versions for that purpose.

7) Now run your business! Your Budget is now a powerful instrument to give you a good financial basis if you are on track or not. Some people have the tendency to oversee spending and overestimate earnings. If you feed your budget with real data, it will give you an instant view of the results of your entrepreneurship! Most of the CEO´s of the world are doing exactly that. Of course financial aspects are important, but can not replace your Vision and Strategic thinking. But it can bring you back to the earth?, if your strategy and vision is too ambitious, but can not be financed.

Until next time, keep reaching for your fullest potential!