Work At Home Business Opportunities Weblog
Here are the hottest research topics in 2009 from the Kauffman Foundation. Perhaps they’re questions you had about entrepreneurship too?
In 2009, some of the most in-demand reports from the Kauffman Foundation were:
- Where Will the Jobs Come From? showed that newly created and young companies are the primary drivers of job creation in the United States.
- Timely Entrepreneurship Indicators unveiled the first indications of how the economic slump has impacted entrepreneurship in the United States and 11 other countries in 2008 and most of 2009.
- The Economic Future Just Happened found that more than half of the 2009 Fortune 500 companies were launched during a recession or bear market, along with nearly half of the 2008 Inc. list of America’s fastest-growing companies.
- The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom found that the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it.
- Right-Sizing the U.S. Venture Capital Industry suggests that the VC industry needs to shrink to be an economic force.
Read about the hottest research topics in 2009 from the Kauffman Foundation.
I just learned about an awesome opportunity to have your site featured on the website of a man who knows how to generate traffic!
Right now the prices are incredibly cheap. Here’s what Markus Allen is up to right now!
Do you have a website (or blog) about retailing that could use a quick burst of visitor traffic followed by an endless parade of targeted leads coming to you ever day?
If so, you might be interesting in nominating yourself to be my new Featured Site of the Day.
I created an audio about it here:
http://www.marketing-ideas.org/Site-Of-The-Day.php
Note: This is a tracking link, no commissions are paid on the posting fee!
If you’re trying to raise start up capital, you want to run a local recycling business, or you want to help fund a local charity, it’s possible to do just that when you sell cell phones for cash!
Whether you’re an individual, small business or charity, Gazelle (affiliate link) is a leading provider of cash not only for cell phones but dozens of electric gadgets such as: Cell Phones, Laptops, Digital Cameras, MP3 Players, Video Games, PDAs, Gaming Consoles, GPS Devices, Camcorders, LCD Monitors, Satellite Radios, Calculators, External Drives, Camera Lenses, Projectors, Streaming Media, Home Audio, and Blu-Ray Players.
It’s a good way to make money “by Friday” if you need to raise money without any investment on your part. Gazelle DOES work with recycling businesses who supply them with product.
The other day I told you about starting to build websites with Affiliate Genie.
I use and am an affiliate for Hostgator and this is an affiliate link for Hostgator. They are a state of the art company and as the industry moved to providing more value per dollar, they automatically upgraded my accounts to better service for my buck. So I am using Affliate Genie (affiliate) on this hosting service.
I used Filezilla (free) to ftp the software to my hosting account for the domain name I selected and it all worked like a charm.
I haven’t had as much time as I liked but I’ve already built 5 pages of content in addition to the home page here at CompareMobilePhonesASAP.com
It’s very easy to add both product review pages, information pages, etc. and each “content” page has the same “block” for your call to action and/or adsense, chitika, or other revenue source.
Affliate Genie is VERY easy to use. Unlike Wordpress which will get outdated after awhile and subject to hacking, I don’t think this will have all the same problems. After all – if you are going to hack websites, why learn to hack a limited number of sites when so many wordpress or other CMS built sites are available?
Affliate Genie is a software product I plan to continue using, but I’ll keep you up to speed on how this site is developing so you can get a fairly realistic idea of how a site comes together with the program.
In America, entrepreneurship is usually an individualistic event… “me against the world”. But in other places, people pull together to pull themselves out of grinding poverty. How? They form groups that borrow capital and hold one another accountable to repay the capital.
I was reminded of this fact from the Kiva email below. But I wonder – how do home business people in the United States ever work together to help pull themselves up? How could that happen?
Thomas Gold writes:
As a Kiva Fellow, I have spent the last three months working with Kiva’s Field Partner Esperanza International, visiting borrowers and writing updates about their businesses.
As you may know, all borrowers’ profiles are posted on Kiva’s website with the help of microfinance institutions (MFIs) such as
Esperanza. With several branch offices located in the rural areas of these two countries, Esperanza reaches entrepreneurs in the most remote and undeserved communities. This makes possible the connection between Kiva lenders and borrowers in some of the neediest areas of the Dominican Republic.
Most of the loans Esperanza International disburses are group loans, inspired by the Grameen method, which consists of making a loan to a group of people living in the same community, after providing them with a short training program that includes basic business advice and training about the Esperanza program. All the borrowers from the group are bound to pay together, and the repayment meetings that are led in the communities help strengthen the links between local entrepreneurs. It is not uncommon for neighbors to attend these meetings and decide to join the groups to start a new project, or strengthen an existing one through a loan.
Esperanza is a strong supporter of the idea of mutual support and local initiatives to lift whole communities out of poverty. For instance, the institution recently started to run literacy programs in many of the communities they work with. These programs are led by the most educated among its borrowers. Esperanza has also been supporting local projects, such as a school that was created by one of its long term borrowers, named Milàn.
I had the unique chance to meet Milan and visit her school. She was just back from a trip across the United States (her first time out of the Dominican Republic) to tell her story. Milàn took out a loan from Esperanza in 1998 that allowed her to increase the income from her clothing business. Like many Esperanza borrowers, she was selling clothes on the street. Milan felt that she wanted to do something for the children of her neighborhood who didn’t have the opportunity to go to school, so she started a little school inside her house, providing children with basic literacy lessons, and a meal at lunch. Milan continued her clothing business and from the income generated, she could expand her school, until she reached 100 students (divided in two classes of 50 students on morning and afternoon). As her project was taking shape, she received further financial support from Esperanza and
other non-profit organizations. The school I visited is a 2 story building, with eight classrooms, a library and computer room. Almost 500 students are attending the school, and follow an education program acknowledged by the Dominican ministry of Education, provided by 17 teachers (working part-time). Meanwhile, Milan has been able to complete her own education that she had left shortly before reaching high school. She is now about to get an advanced education degree that will certify her as a principal.
Recently, I was visiting a group of borrowers, who took their first loan funded by Kiva lenders. Maria, and one of the women of the group had a very similar story to Milan’s. Besides her clothing and home accessories business, she runs a local school, in her house, where she is the teacher of a class of 15 preschool children aged from 3 to 5. She is a well respected woman in her community. Her neighbors call her “la profesora” (the teacher). Although her activity as a teacher is not a source of income, it definitely is a great motivation for her to succeed in her business. Maria has recently added new products to her home accessories such as aromatic candles that she hopes will increase her sales during Christmas time.
Thanks to their commitment to reach the most isolated communities, and the indispensable financial support they receive from Kiva lenders, Esperanza may be fostering, through Maria, a new local project that will bring great benefits to the community.
Let’s wish Maria and all of Esperanza’s borrowers great success in their attempt to improve their life condition and access to education in the Dominican Republic. For this reason I entreat all of you who have lent to Esperanza International in the past to continue doing so, and continue to support this worthy project!
You can check similar lending opportunities here! Esperanza
Is it really possible to grow a significant business without any significant advertising using viral marketing and social networking?
Here’s the book that says “Yes”:
Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves
12 5-star customer reviews show it’s getting good reviews so far. (or else 12 friends weighed in!)
A friend suggested this book to me (via Twitter!) so perhaps there’s something to it. His point is that social networking tools allow you to spread your message like never before and, in theory, do business like never before. Think of those crazy games on Facebook. You never play them perhaps, but many do.
It makes you wonder what there is about your product, service, or non-profit that you can let people share and discuss through social networks that build your business or charity long term.
This Christmas there was an ebook called “One Tip” that raised money for charity. Will thousands of new future customers be on that marketer’s email list now? You bet. Did people promote the book out of good will instead of for affiliate commissions? At least one internet marketer I know did…
So perhaps this is part of what the book talks about.
How do you leverage this for a home business? How much viral marketing can you take before you have to leave the house and get into a warehouse?
Thought provoking indeed. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read the book. Before that, here’s what the publisher puts out about Viral Loop:
“Adam Penenberg’s lively book opens a window to all of our futures…”
–Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
“If you want to understand all things viral, this is the place to start. Penenberg’s reporting gives us a ringside seat for some of the biggest viral success stories in history, from Tupperware to Ning.”
–Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
“One of the most astounding things about the Web age is how the best advertising is often no advertising at all. Penenberg masterfully explains how this works with case studies of products that were designed to spread. Every product can use a dose of this technique; this is the book to get to learn how.”
–Chris Anderson, author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price
“In tight, engaging prose, Adam captures the essence of the ever-scaling power of the virus. It’s not just for geeks anymore.”
–Seth Godin, author of Tribes
“Penenberg discovers the perpetual motion machine for business and marketing… Buy this book. Catch a virus. Make a fortune.”
–Jeff Jarvis
“Penenberg has unlocked the secret to the most successful digital businesses. An indispensable read.”
–Robert Safian, Editor-in-Chief, Fast Company
“Instead of entrusting your business to a guru with an agenda and a ghostwriter, you should be turning to a pro journalist like Adam Penenberg, who understands the way media and money interact, has the critical faculty to engage with these phenomena in an unbiased fashion, and the technical facility to explain them to you in an entirely engaging, informative, and actionable way.”
–Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus and Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.
Here’s something you may not know about today’s Internet. Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a flourishing business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will flock to throw money at you.
Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Adam L. Penenberg calls a “viral loop”–to use it, you have to spread it. After all, what’s the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? The result: Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little.
In this game-changing must-read, Penenberg tells the fascinating story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses–some worth billions of dollars–that we have all grown to rely on. The trick is that they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them.
All kinds of businesses–from the smallest start-ups to nonprofit organizations to the biggest multinational corporations–can use the paradigm-busting power of viral loops to enable their business through technology. Viral Loop is a must-read for any entrepreneur or business interested in uncorking viral loops to benefit their bottom line.
If you want another look at the book, check out this review at Small Business Trends on Viral Loop
It was a crazy headline. Why? Because there’s no shipping fee on audio downloads over the internet!
Were they crazy to say such a thing? Or just crazy like a fox?
To lend credence to the possibility that these folks are crazy like a fox, consider this…
1. It’s Christmas time.
2. Online retailers are trying to get your business and boost their profits by what? Offering “Free Shipping”!
3. Some will just click a headline like that anyway because they’re conditioned to.
4. Others will go “What? Are they nuts” and click to see if they really are nuts!
5. But either way, they learn about a $5 discount (considered the equivalent of a “shipping fee”) on all orders.
You can see the promotion here: Free Shipping on All Downloads
You can already add Google’s Adsense to your blogger account, now you can add Amazon products as well.
If you’ve already got a well trafficked blog powered b y Blogger/Blogspot, this gives you a new way to monetize it with the vast Amazon product base and generate revenue. I’m sure there are many personal Amazon blogs that are talking quite a bit about products they love, so this is a good fit. It will create lots of pages that talk about products in the Amazon portfolio with reviews and information that never make it to the actual site allowing Amazon to take advantage of the social web (i.e. blogs) more to market their wares. I’m sure Google will get a nice slice too in addition to the benefit of enriching their own index of unique content.
Here’s the announcement:
Dear Associate,
Today we are excited to announce Amazon Associates for Blogger, a direct integration between Amazon Associates and Blogger. This new collaboration enables Bloggers to monetize their content by adding relevant Amazon products to their blog posts without interrupting the blog editing process. Amazon Associates for Blogger is available now available here on Associates Central. Amazon Associates who don’t have a Google Blogger account can set up a free Blogger account with their Associates ID and start earning right away.
The new tool allows Bloggers to add links and images to their blog posts in just 2 easy steps:
1.Bloggers highlight the relevant text and the Amazon Product Finder will search Amazon’s millions of products and recommend the ones that are most closely associated with the text
2.Bloggers can then insert a link or image to that product which includes their Associates ID, enabling them to earn up to 15% in referral fees from Amazon
Bloggers will also be able to show dynamic content in their blog sidebar using a new set of integrated Sidebar gadgets, such as gadgets for MP3 clips from the Amazon DRM-free music store, an Amazon Deals gadget, and an Amazon Search box.
Also as part of this new integration, Bloggers who don’t have a free Amazon Associates account can create one directly within Blogger so tell your friends that use Blogger how they can start earning with Amazon Associates today.
In the past, I’ve recommended the Content Management System called WordPress. I still love it, but I’m testing another CMS called Affliate Genie and I’ve linked to it with my affiliate link.
Affliate Genie is especially designed to help you create affiliate websites serving niche markets that help you earn commissions from affiliate programs, pay per click, etc.
Here’s a site I literally put together in the space of an hour and one half: CompareMobilePhonesASAP.com
I haven’t had time to add much content yet, but it has shown me that this is as easy – or easier – to use as Wordpress,
The drawback? There is not yet the user community developing free plugins and themes you can use for this product. Likely there WON’T be.
But because I’m extremely cheap, I would not have purchased this unless I was certain I’d make back the cost of Affliate Genie in short orders.
The best thing about this CMS is that you can install it on hundreds of websites … and even sell a site built with the CMS.
So check out Affliate Genie! I think you’ll love what it offers!
CNNMoney reports Google filed a lawsuit against Pacific WebWorks and other unnamed defendants for allegedly using the company’s name and colorful logo to promote fraudulent work-at-home money-making schemes.
Thousands of people have been tricked into sending payment information and being charged hidden fees by questionable operations,” Google said in a blog post.
The search engine giant sued Salt Lake City-based Pacific WebWorks, an application service provider and software development firm, in a court in Utah.
Pacific WebWorks did not respond to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Google provided other names users should be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.
Photo by Google.
From the Business Opportunities Blog
