Work At Home Business Opportunities Weblog

I was just scanning my traffic stats for the blog and there was a pretty significant drop over the Mother’s Day weekend.

I was so busy getting something for my mom, I forgot to blog about it.

But if I had, would it have helped?

Did your website have a dip in traffic on Mother’s Day?

I have blog posts scheduled through the Memorial Day holiday… we’ll see if that helps.

• Bigzeal on How To Screw Up An Interview - Margie Zable Fisher
• Steve on Beware Blog Bog - Marcia Yudkin
• African Boy on Does Firefox Crash On Your VISTA Platform?
• bigzeal on Beware Blog Bog - Marcia Yudkin
• » Mailbox: Questions About Home Medical Transcription - Medical Transcription News and Articles on Mailbox: Questions About Home Medical Transcription
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• Rachel Coffen on VIPDesk.com Seeks 500 Home Based Workers
• Srilakshmi on Lawyers Turning To Virtual Assistants/Paralegals
• Dana Keith on Working At Home Takes Balance
• Dana Keith on Work At Home Moms Considered Dangerous "Brain Drain"

Many people interested in working at home have been forced to by globalization’s push to “downsize” American companies through “outsourcing”. It’s affected factory workers and white collar workers.

Globalization, though, knows no loyalties. So when Chinese workers get “uppity”, they are downsized and outsourced and the companies move on to the next low wage economy. You can read this in Der Spiegel’s:Globalization’s Victors Hunt for the Next Low-Wage Country

 For a long time, it seemed as if China, with its 1.3 billion people, offered the world an inexhaustible reservoir of low-wage workers. It was the basis of the recipe for success that reformer Deng Xiaoping prescribed for the country 30 years ago. Foreign companies would outsource the production of simple products to China. And the communists would provide them with the workers they needed.

German investors, once lured to the Far East by low costs, have recently begun to realize that the financial advantages of outsourcing production to China have all but vanished. “Turning a profit is becoming increasingly rare,” reports consultant Wilfried Krokowski, who specializes in helping German companies enter the Chinese market.

Image courtesy Der Spiegel

Bankers in suits are too polite to come break your kneecaps when you get behind on your mortgage payments. So when there’s a mortgage crisis, they outsource the task to those who are more willing.

Actually this type of investing could help both the bank and the homeowner but this “investor” has certainly painted himself as a jerk in this Bloomberg article:

“You buy the mortgage for pennies on the dollar, carry the big stick, tell the homeowner how it’s going to be, then double your money very easily,” Gutierrez said.

The idea is simple… you buy a defaulted mortgage for pennies on the dollar from the bank.

You go to the homeowner and renegotiate a repayment plan.

The ethical question is just how hard are you going to negotiate. You have to make money because unless you’re sitting on wads of cash, you either borrowed the money you used to buy the mortgage or you have investors to keep happy.

But this could help some folks who are in foreclosure and still make the investor a great amount of money.

It seems though that the fellow they interviewed is just into flipping the homes. Here’s an illustration from the article:

The homeowner was $365,000 under water after buying the house with no money down in June 2005, according to a spreadsheet listing about 30 loans for sale by a national mortgage servicer that Gutierrez referred to in his truck. If Gutierrez bought the note for 20 cents on the dollar, or $73,000, he could probably get the owner to leave by giving her $5,000 for moving expenses, then sell the home for about $150,000, well below even the neighborhood’s declining market value, he said. That would leave him a profit of about $70,000.

`Buy Cheap, Sell Fast’

“I like the fast nickel,” he said. “You buy them cheap, you sell them fast and you get paid.”

Gary North’s newsletter today talked about all the $10,000 homes in Atlanta and the bankers who keep now vacant homes “on the books” at huge prices nobody is willing to pay rather than auction them off at what the market will bear, i.e. MUCH LESS. It’s a problem for the tax assessor too. North notes that one property is “on the books at $101,700. It is being offered for sale at $5,900.”

Here’s another juicy quote from North.

One agent explained the problem.  The tax authorities have these properties on their books at high prices.  The
prospective buyers do not want to buy these properties when they know they will be hit by high taxes.  He said that he had a buyer for a $95,000 duplex.  The buyer backed out when he discovered that the property was on the tax roles at $300,000.

This mortgage mess offers ripe investment opportunities. But for people in these areas where things like this are going on who managed to pay their mortgage, the “cost” will be felt in gutted equity as deflation lowers the value of all the “comparable” homes in the area AND then being asked to pay even more by desperate tax collectors.

From Dane’s Blog

I guess like most parts of the country, all our motels here seem to be run by Patels. What struck me as odd the other day was that one of the recently renovated motels in town had a unique message on it’s bill board. Instead of touting the motel’s “Free High Speed” or “Free Continental Breakfast” or “Newly Remodeled Rooms” the sign said “We Buy Gold”. That afternoon on Mother’s Day, an ad on TNT was for some “We buy your gold” service. There’s cash for gold. Is there cash for you in it?

ABC News:

Oil tops a record $120 a barrel? Bad news. Gold reaches a stunning $1,000 an ounce? Potentially very good news indeed.

Especially to Paige Rhodes, 40, of Alexandria, who has heaps of unwanted gold baubles cluttering up her jewelry boxes. Rather than wait for bold gold to come back in fashion — a return to the ’80s, anyone? — women are scrapping their unwanted gewgaws for cash or checks at wine-and-cheese “gold parties.”

Think Tupperware parties, but instead of buying plastic, guests bring gold (coins, watches, necklaces, teeth) to be assayed (tested) for carat content and weighed. Depending on the ounce-cost of gold that day, guests can walk away with hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

The party host pays them with cash or a check, then ships the gold to a refinery, where it is melted down and recycled. The refinery then pays the host — at a price higher than paid out to guests, the host hopes.

“Everybody wins,” says January Thomas, 29, of Royal Oak, Mich., who started MyGoldParty.com this year shortly after she married into a jewelry-dealing family and found out what she could get for her unwanted gold.

If you’ve ever been through Detroit or Cleveland, you’ve seen some of the most devastated urban decay in the United States. The parts that don’t look like war zones aren’t exactly prosperous. Big union towns once, they’re seeing hard times. Been there? You’ve seen some of the worst of urban America. But where some see manure to lament, others see fertilizer to sell. If you’re aiming to “buy low”… you may have found your cities for avoiding real estate bubble bloat and buying at rock bottom.

Ephren Taylor is an inner city kid turned community mobilizer turned investor. Here’s his contrarian take on these two cities:

Over a year ago I was getting ridiculed for saying Detroit, MI and Cleveland, OH were the next great real estate markets. Everyone looked at me like I was absolutely crazy, and especially since I was basing some of my City Capital turnaround on two depressed markets. I even debated on Fox News live with Neil Cavuto of why these markets were ones to watch.

Funny how things come to pass! Last month Money magazine came out with a list of the top 10 markets to invest in now, and what two markets were on that list? Cleveland and Detroit!

As an investor you have to be able to spot trends when others can’t see them, as well avoid at all costs the “Herd Mentality” of doing what everyone else is doing. There is a reason most of the wealth is controlled by a few entities, obviously cause they don’t do what everyone else does. So why do we as investors do what everyone else does, despite racking up loss after loss. With many of the people I have asked the question to many give reasons with no logic whatsoever.

I believe real estate is an investment and should be treated as such! Find the opportunities where everyone else isn’t looking, or scared to look then capitalize on it. Right now in Detroit we have a waiting list for our units, as well in Cleveland. These two markets you will see presenting opportunity after opportunity. Now am I advocating blind investment by rushing in? Of course not, however there is money in pain! When people are feeling pain money is being made. When housing collaspes look at the worst markets for the easiest profits, and best buying opportunities. It’s a formula that has worked for years, and we see it being played out day after day.

Be sure to check out his blog: Get PAID @ Any Age!

From Dane’s Blog

The Wall Street Journal:

Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience.

But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings.

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.

A team of five at-home moms hopped on a one-month project at Lending Tree to rewrite 600 job descriptions after several acquisitions and integrate them into its organization chart. “I was very impressed with the caliber of women” delivered by MomCorps, an Atlanta staffing firm, says Kathy Fritzsche, vice president, rewards, for the online lending exchange.

Ivanna Garibaldi Campbell, Charlotte, N.C., a former Bank of America senior manager who led the Lending Tree team, headed project meetings with her baby in tow. Once she became a stay-at-home mom, she says, it was “tough to go from 500 mph to stepping back. … I found myself a little stir-crazy.”

Skilled workers taking temp projects isn’t new, of course. What’s different about these teams is that they’re available on short notice because the women are usually at home; they tend to work cheap because their main motive is to keep their skills fresh; and they’re often extraordinarily well-qualified, having left the work force voluntarily when their careers were on the ascent.

Photo by MSDesigns.

I was looking for a database program I thought might be good to use.

I ran across this article on a “Year without Windows” (from Linux of course!)

All of our other business functions are covered with Linux. On the desktop, we use Moneydance for accounting. We use Microsoft Word under the CodeWeavers CrossOver Office, and OpenOffice.org for spreadsheets and presentations. We use the GIMP for graphics and Quanta and Bluefish for editing Web pages. We prepare our payroll with PayCycle. On the server side we keep media lists on MySQL using the phpMyAdmin front end. We wish we had an Access-like front end to MySQL so we could quickly write more complex apps. Finally, we use our own Jaya123 Web service to run order entry, reporting, and invoicing.

However, there was no acceptable way to do taxes on Linux. The software we tried did not run well under CrossOver Office, Wine, or Win2Lin.

This year we did our personal taxes online using TaxAct. For our corporate 1120 forms we used the IRS fill-in forms with the new Adobe Reader 7.0 for Linux. This was not as optimal as using tax software, but small corporate taxes are easy, and preparing them via fill-in forms was not difficult. Maybe next year there will be an online service for small business 1120 forms that works with Firefox under Linux; today most require Internet Explorer.

One great wish is for an Access-like front end to MySQL where we could put up quick-and-dirty data entry forms and create reports. Linux really needs a good (and inexpensive) report generator (like the proprietary Crystal Reports). Rekall, knoda, and others are works in progress and don’t come close to the robustness of Access. We can do a lot with phpMyAdmin, but it’s not the same. We miss being able to program a GUI application in a few hours using a really good IDE.

Our business is not that different from most others. We have products (books), services (consulting), and employees. If we can go Windowless, others can as well.

I guess being from New England where there are Cranberry Bogs, Marcia has a thing or two to say about another variety of “bog”… the “Blog Bog”.

I understand her point. For most of us, blogs are “stream of consciousness journaling”… Twitter on steroids before there was Twitter.

With Blogger you can put “blocks” of links on the sidebar to summarize your key points and product offerings. You can adapt Word Press too using widgets or summarize what you’re about through the navigation bar. Or you can set up a static landing page to organize your offerings.

As Marcia suggests, unless we use these options, people can come to your blog and leave wondering “what the heck was this about?”

(And if you are just putting fluff and filler in your blog because you - rightly - are sick of “giving away” the proprietary information that people should be paying to learn, you might follow Marcia Yudkin’s lead and contain a “meat and potatoes, no-holds-barred blog inside your membership program!)

From Marcia Yudkin’s “The Marketing Minute”

The blog format, with its conversational tone and informal jottings, works well for attracting links from other bloggers and boosting search engine results. But in other respects it’s feeble and ineffectual.

The other day, someone requested I add his blog to my list of recommended resources, which hundreds of visitors to my site consult each week. “There is little decent, up-to-date how-to information on my topic,” he said.

I had a terrible time wading through his casual, day-by-day entries for either a summary or a starting point on his subject.

Much the same challenge reared its head when I considered a blog recommended by another consultant for inclusion in the bibliography of a book I’m revising.

Again, I couldn’t find my bearings and didn’t see self-contained, reader-friendly chunks of information comparable to articles, nor any truly helpful navigation.

“Nearly all the best stuff on the web now is in blogs,” replied the guy who contacted me.

Yes, that would be the Sheep Theory of effectiveness: If everyone does something, you should too. Not necessarily!

Margie Zable Fisher offers good tips on how to do an interview the right way. It strikes me though that these qualities are essential for any interaction with your customers. The interview is just a customer communication by proxy.
How to Screw Up an Interview

Recently one of my clients had an opportunity to be interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. I “prepped” him for the interview, and I thought he would be a terrific source for the article. The reporter working on the story was eager to interview him as well.

Unfortunately, the interview didn’t go well, and it’s unlikely that my client will be included in the story. And though I’m not happy that things turned out this way, I thought I could use the experience as an educational opportunity for my newsletter readers.

Here are three ways to screw up an interview (and assure that you will not be included in a piece):

1. Focus on “What’s in it for me?” This is typical of many small business owners. They’ll say, “I only want a story if it focuses on me and my company and why my company is great,” or, “I don’t want to have me or other businesses I work with spend too much time on this if I don’t know what the end result will be and what the story will say.” Now, that’s exactly the wrong approach to take with a media person. The goal of the reporter is to write a great story. It is not to make sure you get terrific publicity coverage. In other words, if you’re looking to “sell” your story to the media, you need to focus on the needs of the media person who is interviewing you. And those needs can vary, and may require additional time and information, with no guarantee of any specific result.

2. Question how well the reporter has prepared for the interview. As I’ve said, it is the job of reporters to put out a story their readers/viewers/listeners will enjoy. Sometimes reporters do a lot of research prior to interviewing sources, and sometimes they don’t. Maybe they had information and misplaced it, or maybe they were busy with another story and forgot about it. Whatever the situation, be prepared to give the information from scratch. Remember, the media has the power to include you in a story (or not), so you need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to assist and educate the reporter – even if it means giving basic information that was available in “pitches” or at your Web site.

3. Act arrogant. Sure, you probably do know more than the media person, since you are most likely an expert in your area. But a reporter doesn’t need that “rubbed” in his or her face. Share your knowledge — don’t flaunt it.

Remember – if you get that golden opportunity to be interviewed by the media, make sure you provide the information they need without reservation. Be courteous, humble and forthcoming. That way, you’re sure to make a good impression, which can lead not only to a great story but to other media opportunities in the future.

Margie Zable Fisher is an expert in public relations for Small Business. You can visit her website here…

Here’s a question I got at my Home Medical Transcription Lens at Squidoo

hi! i found an online course, Its free, it’s called _________________. i was wondering if you have hear of it, i just stated today with the cours. I’m really interrested in becoming a MT. I use to be a pharmacy tech but since i want to work from home and becoming a MT fells perfect. I have a 2 year old son and I love taking care of him so his the reason why i what to work from home . Also i got alot of info. by reading your page…Thank you

I answered briefly on that page, but here’s a longer answer:

I truly believe that any “free” medical transcription course is just a come on to get you locked into another course.  If you want personal help from real medical transcriptionists and want to learn the business, then you’re going to pay real money.

But I believe it’s worth it if you really want to work at home.  We GLADLY paid several thousand for the course and hundreds more for books and equipment and these have paid off well.

Home Medical Transcription isn’t a get rich quick scheme… it’s a home based occupation that calls for training to get a job and make money. I doubt any free course is going to take you very far!