Work At Home Business Opportunities Weblog
Google got in trouble for seeking to digitize books with legally enforceable copyrights.
Now Yahoo et al are planning to do the same with the classics.
Read through and I’ll pass an idea along that may allow you to profit while working from home…
From BizJournals.com
A group including Yahoo Inc., Adobe Systems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Labs said on Monday that they plan to digitize classic books and papers to make them available on the Web.
An effort by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) to digitize libraries of books has been controversial because it is doing so regardless of the copyright status of the works.
The new Open Content Alliance said it plans to respect the rights of copyright holders and it will be governed by its contributors.
Initial content will be provided by founding members including the University of California, the University of Toronto, the National Archives (UK), O’Reilly Media Inc., and the European Archive.
Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) will power the search engine on the group’s Web site and all its content will be made available through Yahoo Search. Once content is available through the OCA, any search engine will be able to index it. “
There are a variety of “Public Domain Profits” programs available. Adrian Ling is a reputable product provider and you may wish to consider his information on the topic of profiting from books now in the Public Domain.
No matter how you obtain your public domain document, there are several ways to profit…
1. Sell the entire work as an ebook from your website using a service like Clickbank or Payloadz.
2. Transform the content into html and monetize it with a pay per click program like Google’s Adsense (This may be a hard way to make money if your public domain book is on “buggy whips”… very low demand for that term!)
3. For smaller books, pamphlets etc, you may be able to give the ebook away free while integrating related affiliate links.
Note: Lance Mock’s program on making money giving away free ebooks is one program I intend to review in future posts here… if you want to make money with ebooks, even if you charge for your ebooks, you cannot find a better program to teach you how to explode your ebook profits!
Make $75 again and again and again? It sounds like a scam, but I know Skip Rosell’s reputation so I knew there must be something to it.
It’s really about making money with other people’s business cards.
He’s selling an information product but I think many enterprising people can still learn something from reading his information even if they don’t buy the product.
Note: I am not an affiliate of Skip’s. I’ve purchased his material though and feel he’s an ethical fellow.
Most days I make a sandwich or have a bowl of soup for lunch. I can eat the sandwich right at my desk while I go over the work for the afternoon.
Today, I wanted something different for lunch so I left my desk and went out for a Pizza I stopped in the local pizza shop and on the counter was a cool marketing idea. It reminded me of an article I read about months before. (For the life of me I can’t remember where or who wrote about this, because I would like to give them credit for this idea.) But, this is not a new idea but very few businesses use this profit making marketing idea.
Anyway, I went to pay for the pizza and I saw these business cards on the counter.
I thought they were for the pizza shop when I noticed the wording in smaller letters.
I took one and when I got back in the car I read it more carefully. It was actually for another business. But with a BIG twist. Now why would one business have business cards on their counter for another business. I can see if they were on a bulletin board but right at the check out counter?
This turned out to be a real neat marketing trick that you can use to make money. It does not cost you any money to start and no money to produce or run this program. You can do this program if you only have a few minutes a day to spare. And as I was to find out you can make $75.00 each and every time you do this.
This is a quick report because it does not take long to explain but it can make you some good money every day. You can start this business even if you only have five minutes a day. You can find that much time on your way home from work.
Yes you can run this business with five minutes in the evening setting it up and finish it on your way home from work the next day with a two-minute stop. You can set up and run a program like this while you have friends over for a weekend get together. Set it up while doing your shopping chores. Anytime at all is a good
time.
How do I know you can do this in the situations as described above? Because that is exactly what I did when I set up a number of these programs. And I made $75 bucks on each one.
Step One: Pick two businesses that will be in your travels. (I will show which ones.)
Step Two: Set up a business card (front and back) on your computer. (I will give you the template)
Step Three: Print out this business card on plain white paper.
Step four: Stop in the first business and tell the owner you would like to give him a gift for each of his customers (I will tell you exactly what to say)
Step Five: Stop in another business and tell the owner you can get him a ton of new customers if he will pay for the printing of the business cards. (Again, I will tell you exactly what to say)
Step Six: Stop at your local print shop and have the cards printed. (I will show you how to get them printed right away, even while you wait, if you like)
Step Seven: Continue on your errands and stop back and pick up the business cards.
Step Eight: Show business #2 the sample cards and collect your money.
Step Nine: Drop off cards at the first business.
Sound easy? That is because it is. I have put together a report outlining every step above and more.
Read more…
Catering to the growing work at home trend world wide, this UK architectural firm designs customized work at home environments for the work at home crowd…
The growing trend in working from home finds people working in very strange places. InsideOut Buildings, who design and build bespoke home offices were very surprised by their survey into whereabouts in the house people have their offices.
“When we started our business we assumed that most people who work from home were working on the dining room table,” explains marketing director, Lynn Fotheringham of InsideOut Buildings who design and build bespoke offices in clients’ gardens. So Lynn set out on a mission to see if she was right, and discovered home office locations that proved that fact is indeed stranger than fiction. “We talked to a number of the home-based professionals of Britain and found them running their businesses from the following high-powered locations.”
1. The bedroom. One IT solutions provider who works in bed and has mastered typing lying down.
2. The utility room. Complete with rumbling tumble drier and whooshing washing machine. One graphic designer got so fed up with this she moved into her loft, where she is now driven mad by the heat and the pigeons on the roof.
3. The Loft. See hot and bothered previously, and many others who are toiling and boiling in their loft conversions.
4. The Hall. A popular choice that sounds civilized until you consider the potter who set up a pottery in the space under the stairs.
5. The Kitchen. A bookkeeper from Bicester finds marmalade a problem in her office and more famously Lynn Franks who runs her PR business from her kitchen table.
6. The Drifter. A consultant from Manchester moves from room to room with her wireless laptop, trailing her fax machine behind her. She finds her husband’s martial arts practice distracting when she works in the sitting room.
7. The garage. Some people convert their garage, which detracts from the value of their house - ask any estate agent. On the other hand Dell, eBay, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft all started in the garage.
8. The clock tower. Very few people work in clock towers, but one property developer did until he was driven out by owls nesting in the clock mechanism.
9. The Summerhouse. One consultant has to bring his computer into the house every night to stop it filling up with condensation. He is too cold in the winter and can’t use his office in the summer because of the heat – but it looks nice!
Inside Out Buildings have an alternative, the purpose built office in the garden. A well-designed, stylish workspace in your garden gives you privacy and comfort and adds value to your house. You can invite clients home without them having to enter your house or you can retreat alone into a cozy, highly insulated building.
MSN is celebrated “National Work At Home Week” with some profiles in 2000.
Here’s one I found interesting.
A Portland, Ore., man describes how the MSN network of content and services enables him to work more productively from home and on the road.
A typical day at the office for Chris Hanschka might begin in his bedroom and end in his 1998 Jeep Wrangler.
As a mobile home broker for one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest commercial real-estate management companies, Hanschka, 26, does nearly all of his work either from home or on the road. He purchases repossessed homes within the company’s 90-plus mobile home parks, arranges for the properties to be refurbished, and then locates new buyers for them.
“Most of my day is spent talking on the phone or sending email or going out to see people, so I decided I could be just as effective working out of my house as I would be in a cubicle at the company headquarters,” says Hanschka, who started the job in August and spent the first two weeks driving to work before persuading his boss to let him stay home. “I’m actually more productive now, because I don’t have to drive half an hour to get to my office or spend an hour going out to lunch every day.”
National Work at Home Week, which lasts through October 8, pays tribute to a rapidly growing group of U.S. workers such as Hanschka, who no longer punch the clock at a traditional place of business. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 3.6 million workers were based at home in 1997, the last year for which figures are available, compared with 1.9 million in 1991. Another 21 million people performed at least some work for their primary job at home, and six out of every 10 at-home workers used a computer in their daily tasks.
The lifelines of Hanschka’s business are his personal computer, fax machine and Web-enabled cellular phone. He also relies on the MSN services from Microsoft to help him keep in touch with clients, colleagues and information throughout the day, regardless of whether he is sitting at his desk or driving along Interstate 5 to meet with a prospective home buyer 100 miles away. An MSN subscriber since 1996, Hanschka uses MSN to manage his email, track the performance of his stock portfolio, send instant messages to co-workers and generally streamline his active lifestyle.
“I work almost entirely outside of my office, so having access to all these services from MSN on my cell phone is a huge time savings for me,” Hanschka says. “I don’t have to wait at my desk for someone to call me or send me an important piece of mail, because MSN gives me multiple options for getting that information wherever and whenever I need it.”
Read more
When I read this Dilbert comic strip a few days ago, it sounded remarkably like many of the
“work at home” job postings I see in Monster, etc. that are really work at home business opportunities
where YOU have to pay.
It made me wonder… Is Dilbert doing MLM these days?
“The job doesn’t have a base salary…
“You’ll pay us $1,000 per month and work from home….
“If you make any money for us, we’ll give you 10%…
“You’re not allowed to have business cards, and you can’t use our name…”
Here’s the Dilbert cartoon strip from September 30th…
So what’s the difference between a “Stairstep Breakaway” and “Party Plan” compensation system?
Actually “Party Plans” are a type of “Stairstep Breakaway” compensation plan.
The “Stairstep Breakaway” compensation plans bascially allow a representative to start out making a retail profit.
As the reprseentatives sells increasingly higher volumes of products per month, the company rewards the representative with additional profits in the form of a rebate check.
Along the way, the representative who recruited the new distributor is paid (ostensibly to train and support the newbie) until the new rep is “on their own”… that’s when they’re earning enough through their own sales to “break away” from their recrutier and form part of their “downline” instead of their “personal group”.
This concept is true of party plans as well, but party plans can look deceptively stingy compared to some other “Stairstep Breakaways”.
While the “downline commissions” don’t look too bad in comparison with outher breakaways, the retail profits in a Party Plan can look very small.
In some modern Party Plan companies, retail profits remain flat at 25% no matter what one’s level of success otherwise, though royalties may be paid in addition to this amount. Still one plan I recently reviewed only paid a 2 - 9% royalty or rebate on personal group volume.
Some big breakaways pay much more.
Why the discrepancy?
1. Depending on the product line, there may be lower profit margins. Selling kitchen ware that has to compete favorably with other top of the line kitchen ware lowers the upper limit for pricing. Nutritional products may have much higher margins by comparison because of claims to being “proprietary”.
2. Party plans by definition retain revenue from the distributor in order to provide incentives to the party’s host/hostess. Since the host/hostess is making the invitations and doing lots of the “legwork”, party plan companies retain revenue to compensate these folks well and increase the likelihood that a visitor to the party will herself want to schedule one so she can get things for free as a “reward”.
3. Other incentives like free business supplies are often accounted for retaining revenue. If you join a party plan company, you make money by selling in homes, not - for instance - through internet marketing of your own website. That requires a steady supply of business supplies… catalogs, brochures, order forms, etc. You can either pay this out of pocket or the company can build in a reserve for average supply use per month for a successful representative.
So before you write off that “Party Plan” as “stingy”, ask your recruiter what the company is providing up front out of the seemingly “missing commissions”… you might be pleasantly suprised.
Carole Hubbard is a founding distributor of Southern Living At Home.
I visited with this home business pro at a district fair in the region where she had a display.
Though she’d never participated in any home business program before, she welcomed the offer to join Southern Living at Home because of the parent company’s sterling reputation and name recognition.
The publishing business of Southern Living “creates it’s own market” so to speak. Each season of the year and each new issue prompts inquiries about “those beautiful home decor” items and the firld force of Southern Living at Home is there to meet the demand.
She decided to join the business and tap into Southern Living’s success.
From StartUpJournal.com
There’s a growing market for slightly used books. I find these at my local library’s regular “book sales” for next to nothing.
Could this be a nice work at home niche for you?
The key, of course, is turning a one time sale into repeat customers through building your list of potential future buyers…
The Internet is creating a new and fast-growing category in the book-selling market — the barely-used book. An increasing number of consumers are snapping up used volumes online at invitingly cheap prices. These aren’t yellowing copies of out-of-print titles but often unblemished copies of newly published books — sometimes available just a few days after a book’s official publication date.
Read more…
Are you using forums to good advantage?
Not only are there some online forums that provide solid information, they can be an excellent
way to drive traffic to your web site.
I recently made a posting on just two forums about an unusual book I’d found:
Discovered! 505 Odd Enterprises
An inspirational collection of 713 unusual but practical ideas,
suggestions and plans for building a spare or full-time business.
Compiled from the actual experiences of many “little fellows.”
2nd Edition
by George W. Haylings
1947
Then I placed a link to my website that tells folks where they can download the book for free for themselves.
I received hundreds of visitors and a mention in another sites online newsletter that wanted to call people’s attention to my discovery.
I didn’t make megabucks, but I got some good pay per click revenue.
Marketing is about driving such traffic to your site on a regular basis because you’re posting new
“finds” all the time.
Using forums can create “instant traffic” while producing valuable third party links to boost your search engine rankings if you make relevant posts and don’t spam the forums.
Read more about marketing with online forums…
LocalTN.com is just another one of the bids to tap into the emerging local search marketplace. They’re using offline marketing via sweepstakes and other incentives (one a “lifetime hosting” offer for a sweepstakes winner) to build online traffic. From what I can tell it’s not a home based business, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reveal potential as one.
At present Yahoo, Google and MSN are hard at work attempting to become the next “Yellow Pages” as folks flee the time worn volume for the simplicity of a search engine even when it comes to finding the phone number for the pizza joint next door.
Work at home folks are gravitating to creating local information sites to capitalize on the trend.
Here’s one such site…
http://ottawa-information-guide.com
