PLS
Showing posts with label Home Jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Home Jobs. Show all posts
Monday, 14 July 2014
Friday, 11 July 2014
Creating Free Websites To Make Money Online
Building a website can be a stressful thought for someone new to
trying to build a home based online business and it is enough to scare
most people away.
Creating free websites to make money online can
ease the stress and allow people to become comfortable with the content
creation side of a website without having to worry about the design and
creation of the site itself.
These days there are plenty of places
that offer totally free "plug and play" style sites where you can be
creative with where to place text, pictures and even video without
having to worry about any kind of coding.
Sites like HubPages,
Squidoo, Weebly and Blogger offer very easy to use templates that you
can learn to build sites and become more creative with design as you get
more comfortable.
These sites function very much like making a
WordPress blog and it helps people get their feet wet while being able
to integrate some nice affiliate programs like AdSense, Amazon and eBay
to monetize sites and begin making money online.
As with any type
of website, there are things people need to learn to integrate even on
free websites to have a chance of getting people to visit their free
site.
Most of the free website creation sites have built in social
media so you can share your newly created sites with friend on
Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even Pinterest.
When I first
started building websites online the free website offerings were nowhere
near where they are today and you pretty much had to know some kind of
HTML coding to have a chance of creating a decent looking website.
Tasks
like adding pictures was much more difficult than it is today and video
was something we had not even dreamed of integrating into a free
website.
Back then websites were pretty much a static page or pages with some pictures and a bunch of words.
Today,
even beginners can make totally interactive websites that look way
better than anything I was able to create 10 years ago and with much
less effort.
If you have played around with trying to make some
money online or create a home based online business, check out some of
these awesome ways of creating free websites to make money online.
If
nothing else it will allow you to get a feel for how website creation
works as well as test out ways to make money online and see what works
for you.
Wednesday, 9 July 2014
Monday, 7 July 2014
The Smart Technology For Running Your Business From Home
Photograph: Iain Masterton/Alamy
Making sure you have
the right technology can make running your business from home a lot
easier.
Working from home or running a business from home is a great
thing, and using your own equipment can be fun, as well as productive.
Many pieces of technology double up as both consumer and business
products – here are a handful that I have tried. The opinions expressed
here are my own. Feel free to add your own observations in the comments,
below.
Phones: The trend is for people to use their own phone in the office as well as at home. The obvious options are BlackBerry, Android phones, iPhones and Windows. The trick is to get the spec you want but look at the screen size: the Nokia Lumia range of Windows phones and the Motorola RAZRs have larger than average screens, although not as big as the Samsung S3 and S4. If you want to use an e-reading app or watch some TV on the phone, screen size is important.
Tablets:
The trend for Bring Your Own Device and home working has led a lot of
people to consider the tablet format. Relatively low-cost options from Apple and Google are available from £200-£260, but if you already have an Amazon Kindle Fire HD,
it's worth considering that this is also an almost fully specified
Android tablet. It's worth noting that it's designed to look like an
Amazon product, rather than a full-fledged tablet, but it should do most
things, as should the higher end of the Kobo e-reader market.
If you're not certain a tablet is enough, then do consider the Yoga from Lenovo.
Like the early attempts at tablets in the early 1990s, this is a laptop
that folds back on itself so you end up with something that feels like a
large tablet rather than a full-blown laptop. This, like the
multi-accessorised HP ElitePad,
runs Windows 8 and will handle music and film just as efficiently as
the more business-focused elements people need (the HP device has a
sleeve available which has various connectors, making it more versatile
than a standard tablet).
Sound is important where
phones and tablets (or indeed computers with Skype or other voice apps)
are concerned. A nice gadget for the more senior at heart is the sturdy
Native Union CURVE Bluetooth
handset. This looks like an old fashioned landline phone and will
connect wirelessly to your mobile and another device as long as it has
Bluetooth. To answer a call, you pick it up; to hang up you put it down
again. No doubt a younger generation will be asking why you'd bother,
but it's nicely designed, a decent weight so it doesn't feel flimsy and
it improved the sound quality on some test calls. At £99.99, it's a
non-trivial purchase but still a nice thing to have.
Speakerphones are very popular and there are a number of very good ones on the market. The Aves Aqua
will act as a speakerphone, but will also play your phone's music,
again through a Bluetooth connection and, once it's charged, it will
happily travel with you, even if it's only as far as the garden. Black,
white or pink, £60. The only drawback is the touch sensitivity; move it
to a more convenient position on the desk and you can find you've hung
up a call, or paused your music in the wrong place unintentionally.
Check also the recent offerings from Jabra, Plantronics and somewhat unexpectedly Brother
in this area. There are some very good, easy-to-use speakerphones which
are very portable and unobtrusive in a domestic environment. Creative Labs' SoundBlaster Axx range is more like a small piece of furniture, but also offers good music playback.
Headphones
are another area in which the business basics are easy to cater for,
but it's easy to upgrade to something with a little more oomph for
music. Plantronics' BlackWire 720
is a fully functioning wired pair of headphones with unified
communications capability and it also has good music playback plus
SmartSensor technology so you can answer a call simply by putting it on
or hang up by taking it off. Jabra has a nicely designed set called the Revo
which offers good sound quality. Better yet, it offers a wireless
version for £199 which takes a Bluetooth feed without the cable tangling
if you're wandering around.
Batteries: Of
course, one of the biggest drawbacks to today's dependency on
smartphones is the battery life. Take a phone out, use it to Bluetooth
your music through your car speakers while using a satnav app and you'll
know about it as the battery drains away in no time. Battery cases are a
good answer, with the long-established Mophie brand
offering new lightweight cases for models, including the iPhone 5,
which extend the life by several hours. Back home, if your family is a
multiple-gadget household (and many are), Griffin's PowerDock 5 looks a bit like a toast rack and will charge five iPads or phones at the same time, keeping them in the one place.
Finally,
if there's one frustration people feel with their tablets and phones
then it's getting an email and having to forward it to a laptop to print
it, unless you have one of the cloud-ready printers available. This is
where attaching the Lantronix xPrintServer Home Edition
helps. Plug it in and it downloads the information on your printer,
setting up a driver (the software that will make your particular printer
work) so printing from your iPad or iPhone becomes possible – for
family photos or business documents. It's tiny, the size of a phone and
costs £90.22 on Amazon. The best thing about this is the support: the
printer on which this was tested, a Kodak, wasn't supported, so the
company got hold of one and updated the firmware so it now works
perfectly. They assure us they do this for every customer if their
printer isn't one with which they have worked so far.
Friday, 4 July 2014
Tuesday, 1 July 2014
Find Money From Home Business Without Going Insane by Ilona Morrow
More and more people find financial independence through home businesses. Although this is true, many don't know where to begin. In the time that you are planning and discovering your goals, you should be learning anything and everything about the reality of running a home business. This article covers some of the fundamental home business strategies.
Start a home day care, start a landscaping company, offer to cook meals for people, or even clean homes. Do some brainstorming on paper to come up with ideas for helping out people in your community.
Have your home business taxes done by a professional tax preparer. You need to spend time with learning what you can about tax laws for small businesses.
While it's great to give your customers information about your home business, you should be careful not to overwhelm them. Make use of newsletters or email announcements to keep your customers informed of timely and useful business related information, discounts or limited-time offers. Make sure you don't overstep your limits when it comes to communication.
A banner page should be created for your site. That way, you can have a banner exchange program with partnered businesses. This will provide many backlinks, which will increase your Google page rank as well as providing the users of the sites your link.
You can participate in online home business owner forums. This will allow you to interact with others in the same position. Most people who work from home face the same difficulties and challenges and discussing them is beneficial to all parties.
Swap online ad placement with other home business entrepreneurs. Sharing advertising space can increase traffic to all of the participating sites and increase their search engine rankings. Advertise your business prominently and display links to your own and others' sites so that readers clearly understand where the links will take them.
Effective Internet marketing is crucial to the success of your home business. Write articles, blog, contribute to discussion forums, and send emails to make more people aware of your company. All these strategies will combine to lead to profitability.
Discover what others have to say about your website, as well as your product or service. Perhaps you can solicit opinions from third parties, search online resources or read specific feedback left by customers. Whether you are getting positive or negative feedback, either will help you on your way to a successful enterprise.
All businesses should have an emergency fund. If an unexpected expense arises, this fund could see you through, without interrupting the regular operations of your business. Never withdraw money from your emergency fund unless it is absolutely necessary, and if you do, replace what you took out as soon as you can.
Social media is a great tool for internet marketers to utilize, however, you should not get too involved in the socializing aspect of social media sites. You can waste so much time being distracted by social media sites. Save the Facebook socializing for after work hours.
When choosing merchandise for your business it is wise to select those that you use yourself. Figuring out what consumers need is the most important step in choosing a product to sell. If you have noticed a specific need for a certain product, you can be sure that others have experienced that need as well.
Now that you have a greater idea of what you need to do to create and manage a home business, you should start feeling like you can accomplish your home business goals. Remember that the information you learned is only going to work if you apply it. If you follow the tips in this article, then your home business should succeed.
Monday, 30 June 2014
Spotting Home-based Business Scams
Photograph by Jochen Tack
Many work-at-home scam sites are highly sophisticated.
The website selling home-based business opportunities looks like a professional news outlet, with a stock market ticker, video footage, and a list of reader comments—complete with typos. But it’s really baloney. That ticker? An animation. The news footage? An unrelated, pirated television clip. And the testimonials? Internet-fraud expert Christine Durst calls them “testiphony-als”—all posted under fake names within a few days’ time, by crooks aiming to snare prospective entrepreneurs.
As the recovery plods along, many people who have lost jobs or are looking to supplement downsized income are likely to come across such websites offering big money for little work and no particular expertise. No one knows exactly how many will be duped, but given the explosion of faux news sites during the past year, the returns must be good, says Durst, chief executive officer of Staffcentrix, a Woodstock, (Conn.)-based company that has been designing career training programs for government and nonprofit agencies since 2001. She estimates hundreds of such sites, many pirating content from each other, exist online at any one time.
“Scammers rely on spam, paid ads, and posts to forums to drive traffic to their sites in huge numbers and in a short period of time,” Durst says. “This is important to them since, once word gets out that they are a scam, they will have to shut the site down. Big, fast traffic ensures their success.” Many sites are highly sophisticated, using tracking software to detect where visitors are and then serving up “success stories” purporting to be from that visitor’s location. They can also track repeat visitors and see what sites they come from and where they go, the better to electronically sniff out sleuths like Durst.
Last week she found a work-at-home site and started researching it. “I left their site to visit sites that would lead a trained eye to believe someone was investigating them,” she recalls. When she went back to the original website about 10 minutes later, it was gone. “They are very quick to hide, like cockroaches in the light.” When Durst checked again a few days later, the site had reappeared. “I guess they thought they shook me off. People really have no idea how sophisticated these people have gotten,” she says.
Losses can range from a couple hundred dollars for work-at-home programs to $20,000 or more for people who get hooked on worthless business coaching or training materials that rely on pirated, decades-old books, including one Durst got that was originally written by P.T. Barnum. Bethany Mooradian, a Seattle blogger and author of I Got Scammed So You Don’t Have To!, says scammers frequently post ads on websites such as Monster (MWW) and Craigslist. “I find ads there claiming you can make money reading e-mails, sampling products, or completing surveys. You might be told to pay $20 a month to get on a list where you’ll get freelance work opportunities, but what you get is basic information you could easily find for free yourself,” she says.
With today’s technology and a few minutes of due diligence, no one should fall for such schemes. Many sites offer free research tools that can help check out companies, individuals, and websites, such as: Whois.com, Copyscape.com,TinEye.com, and Quantcast.com. To find out whether a company is legitimate, type its name plus the word “scam” or “sucks” into a search engine and look to see if it has been listed at consumer protection sites like Ripoff Report.
Sales pitches that emphasize emotion and flashy promises but skimp on details about the company or actual work should be red flags. So should any business that describes itself generically as a “system” or “program,” Durst says. “Most of these scams are a mile wide and an inch deep.” If you do fall for a fraud, don’t expect to recoup your loss, but do take the time to warn others away by reporting your experience to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, and your state attorney general. “You can get revenge by educating the marketplace and preventing these guys from getting other victims,” Durst says.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-19/spotting-home-based-business-scams
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-19/spotting-home-based-business-scams
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)