Monday, August 31, 2009

Great profit to selling hotdog

There are many reasons people search for work and in many cases they take whatever they can get and end up with low wages and a bad boss.

What if I were to tell you that there are some business opportunities out there for a very small start up fee and easy to learn tricks of the trade?

Well I'll tell you my absolute favourite career opportunity is selling hot dogs from a cart.

The reason I feel this way about it is, it is a very inexpensive business to start up and when you take a little bit of time to learn the ropes which is so easy to master you will have the time of your life and the money to.

There are some downfalls which I should mention such as bad weather,sometimes requiring a community kitchen which depends on your county regulations,and sometimes hiring the wrong people to help you out.

These problems are very minor when you get to know a few simple tricks that will easily get you past this road block.

Also you need to know the right products to buy and how to prepare them for the best taste that has customers coming back time after time.

By products such as potato chips,chocolate bars,soda pop,chili and if you like a homemade juice drink that out sells the soda pops are simple but necessary items that you have to know which ones to buy.

One lesson that is easy to understand but very necessary to the survival of this hot dog business is to not scrimp on any products and always buy top quality goods because your customers are your lively hood, and the best part of all you are the boss while making great profits.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Here is How to Create a Website For Your Small Business

Would you like a website for your small business, but you just have no idea how to go about creating one? Well, this article will share 2 different strategies that you can take to create a website for your small business.

1. Build one yourself. Yes, you can really create a website yourself - even if you do not have any technical experience. It just may take you a little bit longer to put together a website.

Websites like BlinkWeb and Weebly allow you to create simple websites fairly easily. You might also want to take a look at blogging platforms, such as Blogger and WordPress, to see if blogs fit your needs better.

One of the main benefits of creating your own website is that it will save you money (as opposed to spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for someone else to build you one). Another benefit is that you will start to become acclimated to website design.

2. Hire someone to create one for you. Obviously, this option will be a little more costly to you, but it very well may be worth it, especially if you are an extremely busy individual who does not have the time into learning how to build a website.

To hire someone to create a website for you, you can take a look at larger website design and development companies or you can outsource the work to a freelancer. You can find freelancers on websites, such as Elance, Guru, and Odesk. Prior to hiring a freelancer though, you should check his or her previous work.

Friday, August 28, 2009

5 profitable small business

Business ownership has been established as the only realistic route to financial independence available to most people. It is also a route fraught with many pitfalls. What, with the many stories we hear of businesses that turn against their owners, plunging them into pits of debt and even bankruptcy. Indeed, corroborated statistics show that out of every 100 business started, more than 90% of them fail within five years of their inception. And even for the businesses that do pick up, there is always the big question of profitability to look into. For the ultimate objective of starting any business is always to earn a profit, and a reasonable one at that, if one is to justify the hard work that is starting and running a business. Yet with the current hard economic times being faced globally, it has become hard to identify a business with a promise of reasonable profit that is also easy and within your reach to start. Thankfully, here are 5 businesses that are potentially highly profitable, and which are also easy to set-up and run.

Forex Trading

We are no longer living in the age where forex trading was the preserve of a certain elite class of people. With the advent of online forex trading programs, all you need is good Internet access, and the initial forex to start trading. This need not to be a big amount, for you can always start small and grow with time. And with the current upheavals in the financial markets (which translate into huge fluctuations in currencies) you stand to make a big killing. Moreover with aid of the modern forex trading software (which comes cheap or even free in some cases), you can arrange your forex trading in such a way that the program automatically sells the forex you are holding once it slides bellow a certain floor, thus eliminating the risk of your losing your capital.

Forex Trading Links

forextrading.com - Forextrading will help you set up and full understand trading.

Online Affiliate marketing

Total spending on online advertising runs into billions of dollars, and you can have your piece of this cake through online affiliate programs. These are programs in which you let sellers advertise their products on your websites for a commission. It is not as hard as it sounds. In fact, it could be one of the easiest profitable business ideas out there. All you need to set up an Affiliate marketing account and get a website have some basic know-how in sales and marketing. There are plenty of website creation aids available (some for free) on the web. Website hosting also costs a pittance, and in fact there are even some free web-hosting services you can give a try.

Affiliate Marketing Links

cj.com - Commission Junction is one of the largest Affiliate Marketing businesses around.

Custom Website Design

Sydney Website Design - Sab Solutions can set up a website for you from design to a complete package.

eBay Shop

eBay is essentially an online market where you can sell anything, from household goods to apparel, books and even patents. The key to making a good profit on eBay is by exploiting the economies of scale, that is, having many items on sale at the same time. All you need to set up an e-bay shop is a good internet connection and the initial stock to get you going. And the only overhead in this type of business will be your Internet costs only. You can have buyers pay for their own shipping, and in fact that is the standard practice on most eBay shops.

Set Up an eBay Store

eBay.com

Professional Consultancy

This is the greatest business idea for you if you have some marketable professional skill. This need not be anything fancy. You can set up a professional consultancy around your web design, book-keeping or any other skill you have. You may never know the potential value of the skill you are sitting on until you offer it for sale. In professional consultancy, you are mostly paid for what you know, rather than what you do, and the rates that professionals get paid for their advice can be simply astounding. Yet armed with a marketable skill, you don't need a lot of finance to set up a consultancy. In most cases, all you need to set up a professional consultancy is a basically equipped office and you are good to go. The key to succeeding in this type of business is simply keeping abreast of developments in your professional field so that you can offer your clients timely and valuable advice.

Retail

The current financial crisis is really hurting the big-time retailers and you can cut into their markets, potentially making princely profits. As a small time retailer, you have the advantage of lower overheads compared to the big retailers. Moreover, as a small-timer, you have the opportunity to offer your customers personal contact, an element of shopping that many shoppers are yearning for, and which the big retailers are finding themselves unable to offer faced as they are with forced staff-cuts. The key to success in retail will be to offer your customers a good variety to choose from, and great service. And while starting out in retail might be a bit costly, the concept of retail is easily and universally understandable and therefore easy to sell to financiers for start-up capital.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Increase profit strategy

As a small business owner, do you know how often your customers purchase from your business? Most small business owners do not pay much attention to how often their customers buy from them due to their limited resources and capability. Many just ignore the importance of knowing how often their customers walk into their store and buy something.

There is a very important issue that all business owners must know, if you cannot measure, you cannot manage. Many small business owners spend countless of their money to promote their businesses, products and or services, but they never create a systematic way of retaining their customers. Customers saw their advertisement or promotion brochure, buy the thing they wanted and leave without a trace.

As a small business owner, you need to know that your acquisition cost is the fixed whether you have one or one thousand new customers from your promotion campaign. However, the more they buy; the lower will be your average acquisition cost per customer. Better still, the more often they buy from you, the lesser will be your average marketing and promotion cost. Remember, every dollar you save will add an immediate dollar to your profit.

Open up your wallet; you will probably have a few membership rewards cards apart from your credit or bank cards. What do these cards serve? Some of them give you a fixed discount on your future purchase, some offer rewards points where you can redeem gifts, Some offer both but the all have one aim and one aim only, that is to remind you to keep buying from them instead of their competitor. People need reminder more than to inform. So as small business owner, what can you learn from this big corporation? You need to have a systematic way of reminding your customers to keep coming back to you than to your customers. Start by going through your customers' base and check how frequent your regular customers buy from you. And if you do not have a customers' data base, it is high time you must create one for your future expansion of your business.

Imagine, what would be your profit like when you can attract your customers who buy from you once a year to twice a year, you immediately double up your sales revenue from this group of customers. What if you can attract those who buy once a month from you to buy twice from you even with a incentive scheme such as a frequency discount, your business will still generate a steady flow of revenue with spend much on marketing promotion to attract new customers. Less cost means more profit, and more frequency means more income for your business, thus more profit.

Starting today, see how you can attract your existing customers to buy more frequently from you. Increase the frequency, increase your profit.

Did you find find the Ideas and Tips on these article useful? You can learn more of these small business profit strategy by clicking here Profit Strategy and Resources for Small Business Success.

Goal setting for business

Successful business people know how to set goals, make plans and execute those plans. Goals are drivers for success. Without goals it is uncertain how you are going to achieve success. There are many different terms used to express goals such as vision and mission often used in the corporate business world. They are all goals or desired future destinations. Ask yourself the question "Where do I want to be 5 years from now with my business?". This is a very simple question but it is not easy to answer it. Are you driven by profit only or there are other things you want to achieve along with your business?

Research on goal setting has shown that goal setting leads to improved business performance - it is the basis for success in business. Before starting your business you should take some time to think about what you are trying to achieve with your business. This is the first step you need to do before you develop your business plan. Business plans and strategy development are means for achieving business goals but they are not goals by themselves.

Once you start your business your employees expect you to set individuals goals for them and they need to understand the big picture of your business. Going to work without clear goals and expectations create frustration and does not motivate employees to do their best. Setting clear goals for your employees will improve their performances because they will know what is expected from them and they will know how to do their jobs.

Dreams, ideas and creativity are all parts of setting goals. All successful businesses have started with a good idea but before they jumped into business they crafted their ideas to stand the market and customer test and position their business successfully in the marketplace. Converting creative ideas into specific goals and objectives is very important process and it is the key for developing a successful business. Successful businesses have targets they try to achieve and convert their vision in measurable and specific goals.

Goals allow you to focus your time, resources and effort and they motivate you and make you work hard to achieve success. Effective goals are specific, measurable and action oriented. Once everyone agrees on the goals it is easy to manage your business and communicate with your employees. Goals help you to stay on track and always have the big picture in front of you. Goals are not set in vacuum. In order to be realistic (not only dreaming) you should develop a good understanding of the market you are going to do business in, understanding competitors' way of doing business and most important of all understanding your potential customers. Once you develop a good understanding of your business environment you should work on setting your business goals. During the process of setting your business goals you should take into consideration the SMART rule of goal setting.

Effective Goals are SMART:

Specific - Goals should be specific, clear and easy to understand.

Measurable - Goals should be quantified / expressed in numbers.

Attainable - Goals should be attainable.

Realistic - Goals should be realistic. People who are supposed to achieve the goals should be able and willing to do that.

Timely - Goals should be linked to a specific period of time. Deadlines are good drivers for success.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Start business with right way

Everyone just loves performance evaluations.

Employees tend to dread them because they’re often a useless exercise of “well, you’re doing ok, here’s your 2% raise, see you in 6 months or a year or whatever”.

Sometimes you’ll hear that you need to improve something, but more often than not you’ll hear nothing specific that you can really bear down on. Back to the treadmill you go, cubicle boy.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing and it’ll likely help – but it isn’t detailed, high-quality feedback that helps you improve your performance. Quotas aren’t feedback and neither is a serving of Zig, no matter how tasty a morsel of brain food it might be.

Self-employed folks like me get evaluations in a slightly different way: in the form of testimonials or by not having our calls returned, or by something somewhere in between. Not unlike an employee performance review – you almost always know why and to expect what you got.

Don’t be the majority

The majority of folks just don’t get a lot of guidance on what they need to do and specifically how to get there.

Some companies are better at this than others, but most just don’t seem to focus on it. Big mistake, because without specifics, you don’t know much.

You don’t know for sure who the best is, unless you consult your “Seat of the pants” meter – and we all know how accurate that is.

You might think you know because Joe talks about what he does more than Mary or Jerry, but it might turn out that Stefan (who you never see) is really the one putting out the programming that has the fewest bugs, the pottery that has lowest return rate, the timber framing that requires the least amount of shim, the websites that produce the best sales, the brochures that generate the most calls, or whatever.

All of these things are measurable.

If your business isn’t one of the ones I mentioned, there’s something that your employees do that can be measured – and thus, managed (yes, a Druckerism).

You already know what to measure. But you might not be doing it, and you likely aren’t doing it by employee, much less breaking it down by time of day, days since the last day off, days since first leaving for a sick day and so on.

Real world

Let’s make it a little bit harder by making the job a little bit harder to measure.

Imagine that you’re trying to do this measurement at an architecture firm. There’s a lot of highly-subjective work going on there. Seems like it would be hard to measure.

Who makes the best designs? And what does “best” really mean?

Sells the best? Uses the least amount of resources? Burns the least energy when compared to similarly purposed structures?

You have to decide what “best” is because until you do, best is a gut feel.

That’s a terrible way to assess performance, particularly of complex tasks like architecture, engineering and programming, but it isn’t any more attractive for less-complex roles.

Knowing your staff. REALLY knowing them

Without performance measurement of this nature, you might not have an idea who is more productive with high quality work when single family homes vs. commercial structures.

You might not know who does crappy work when they take 1 sick day and hits their normal quality level when they take 2 days. If they happen to perform critical path, possibly life-threatening work on that second day, wouldn’t you want to know?

The really cool thing is that it can completely alter your company’s future by vastly improving the one thing that lots of folks mess up, or at least, don’t do a very good job of.

Hiring.

Every manager has a bad hire story, maybe two.

Trouble is, that’s the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. Avoiding that hire or giving HR and management more tools to make a better hire are what you really need.

Measurement to the rescue.

Aych Arr

Using this same measurement data, your hiring can change – if you want it to.

For example, instead of hiring someone who knows how to competently design 437 different structures (in generic terms, a civil or mechanical engineer), you may just need to find the master of all composite wood beam designs because that’s the weak spot on your team.

You know this because… your measurement data says so.

Even if your composite wood beam expert just retired, you can still look at your measurement data to see which parts of their job should be given to existing staff and what specialties across the entire staff are your company’s weakness.

Either way, you hire for strength in the skills your data indicate – remember, the data illustrates what your existing staff do best.

IT managers and software execs: Imagine if your favorite programming environment could do this. What could you get from a tool that measured development at this level of granularity?

What if you knew who performs task A faster than everyone else, but stinks at performing task B, but you never really figure this out because each person does their own project from beginning to end.


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