Work At Home Business Opportunities Weblog
The answer is “Yes” and “No”.
Outsource Management Group’s Medical Billing Blog accurately tells you all reasons why individuals seeking to do medical billing from home WON’T succeed.
I suspect it’s a bit biased though… local individuals are, after all, competition!
One medical billing and coding firm my wife worked for worked on the basis of being paid 10% of collections.
Since one busy medical practitioner can generate $50,000 in billings per month, you can see why it’s a potentially ideal business for a work at home “mompreneur”.
That $5,000 won’t all be profit by any means. But even 50% profit would be excellent for most folks seeking home employment.
Still, many buy the prepackaged software kits and the dream and never get their money back.
They just don’t have any contacts in the field, and don’t know how to get them.
But I’m aware of a local entrepreneur in my rural home town 90 miles from two mid sized cities with her own growing medical billing and coding company.
She “grew up” around medicine… her mom was a well known nurse in the local hospital.
She entered the field of medicine herself.
Her actual medical billing and coding business started in a garage about a year ago.
As her reputation grew and she went out to compete for big medical billing accounts, she’s developed several significant contracts and aims to employ 25 to 30 additional medical billing and coding clerks in the next year.
Good thing she didn’t listen to these naysayers!
I do agree however that 1) it’s best to be trained in the field as an employee and 2) the key to success as an individual is not knowledge and software per se, but the confidence and marketing savvy to get the contracts and them do the work.
Usually the ability to sell the service and perform the service do not lie with the same individual!
Hurricane Katrina ushers in a bonanza for this man. 
From RealEstateJournal.com
The phone rings and it’s a man representing the Veterans Administration inquiring about the empty Kmart in this boomtown community about 30 miles west of New Orleans. The caller’s got 200 workers who need office space.
Too late. That building, outfitted with 46 miles of telephone wire and bursting with desks, now houses 500 State Farm claims adjusters, with room for 400 more. It was leased for a year at $25,000 a month even before the power came back on. “Randy, yeah baby, the Kmart’s gone,” Mr. Roberts, clad in a T-shirt and tight shorts, yells into the phone. “I got an old Burger King building if you could use that.”
…for those businesses integral to the cleanup, such as power, insurance and engineering companies, towns closer to the devastation are the hottest properties around.
Luling, with a permanent population of about 6,000, is close to the ideal. It boasts one of the few working ATMs in the immediate area, has electricity, plenty of gasoline stations and a functioning Super Wal-Mart.
But what sets this small town entrepreneur apart was his unique combination of foresight (before the storm), ingenuity during the storm, and “get things done” service after the storm.
His office? Two cell phones he carries with him wherever he goes.
Read more
Shannon Belew started her first home business at age 7 selling home made napkin rings.
According to Mark Cosmetics, a subsidiary of Avon, that makes her the ideal candidate for them.
They market their products on MTV and the WB network and are recruiting sales reps as young as 16.
From the Huntsville Times…
Representatives must be at least 16, but they get 40 percent of all cosmetic sales, and a lesser percentage on non-cosmetic items. For those over 18 years old, there’s also potential college credit offered (with an online university) for completing the training course.
Read more…
For folks wanting to work at home, the lure of online marketing is almost irresistable.
It promises huge dividends for amazingly low monthly overhead.
But promises, they say, are made to be broken.
One tool of online marketers is “search engine optimization”.
Theories about just HOW to optimize a site abound.
Passing fads ascend to prominence only to be dashed by the latest search engine algorithm change as these websites found… From StartUpJournal.com
Last summer, Gary Pond realized he had a big problem: The Web site for his luggage business no longer showed up in the search results in Google or Yahoo.
He immediately contacted Traffic-Power.com, a company he had hired for $2,400 to do search engine optimization – tactics designed to make a Web site appear higher in Web-search results. But he said he was unable to reach anyone at the company. After further investigating, Mr. Pond discovered that Google and Yahoo had dropped his site, PorterCase.com, because Traffic Power had used methods the search engines deem improper. After weeks of correspondence, Google restored the site, but a search for “Porter Case” still fails to turn up the company’s Web site on Yahoo.
“I did not realize their methods were frowned upon,” said Mr. Pond.
Read more…
Fancy yourself a writer louging at the beach while plying your trade?
Do you have knowledge about a specific overseas tax haven?
How to get a second passport?
How to make money while living as an expatriate?
Insights into international real estate?
Or can “wow” them with an excellent travelogue?
You might be able to turn your knowledge into monthly ebook sales through EscapeArtist.com…
Our top author is grossing over $3,000 per month! ($3,046.95 for July 2004 – $21,128.85 between 14 February 2004, the date her ebook went online and today’s date 26 August 2004)
Admittedly she is a good writer, but she had never published a book before, she researched and wrote her book in four months. Four months may seem like a long time, but she now lives in Europe thanks to the income from the sale of her eBook.
There is no reason that any person of average intelligence cannot do the very same thing. It takes time to research and write a quality eBook, but it is a great way to make a living. One eBook author has three eBooks in our eBook store and he will probably continue to add more. He makes enough money from his ebooks to live like royality in Costa Rica. Shouldn’t you take a try at writing an eBook?
Many people get stopped when they realize that writing is work, and research is work. But consider the benefits once you learn your trade. I know one writer who actually writes in a hammock, using a laptop computer. He lives in a house on a bluff over the ocean, travels and researches various areas, makes a substantial income and his life is his own.
We want reports and photos on the following subjects:
Just like our magazine, we want reports on the subjects specific to our venue.
Relocating to a new nation
Opening a business in overseas
Ways to make money overseas
Unusual ways to make a living on the internet or by telecommuting
International Real Estate
Unusual lifestyles in unusual locations
Homesteading overseas
Overseas retirement
Offshore Investments
Tax Exile stories (anonymous bylines okay)
Living on an island or onboard a boat
Anything innovative or unique – living on a barge, working in Antarctica, working as a courier, etc.
Read More…
Motley Fool (UK) reminds home business owners, that their activities may be more valuable than they think.
While – like most small businesses – home businesses may be especially dependent on the owner for their continued viability, you may be able to get more than you’d think if your home business has expensive assets associated with running the business.
While ordinarily you’d derive the sales price of your business by multiplying the annual profits times 4 or 5…
If your business has expensive assets, then it may be better to value the business based on those instead. For instance, an apiarist may consider his prize bees and custom-made beehives to be worth considerably more than the profits made from selling honey to local shops. In this case, the income approach may not fully justify the value of the assets. Additionally, any contracts, albeit tacit, with local shops should be included as goodwill, which is another asset.
Read more here.
Just as the Internet was getting started, I used to publish a print publication reviewing Network Marketing opportunities.
From time to time, I’ll write about “Ethical MLM”.
The first rule for choosing an Ethical MLM product is the “Golden Rule”: “Do unto other as you would have them do unto you.”
In other words, before promoting an opportunity – even if it’s for the “latest, greatest, sure to make everyone rich next trillion dollar industry” opportunity… you must answer this question:
“Would I buy this product, use it every month, and then reorder at the end user’s price if I had NO financial interest in the company simply because it’s a good product at a good price?”
If you can’t confidently answer “Yes” that question, most likely you’re being carried away by the marketing hype.
Ever since William Nickerson wrote his classic “How I Made $1,000,000 in Real Estate”, folks wanting to work from home have been enamored with the “creative real estate” opportunities.
Nickerson bought undervalued properties, fixed them up, rented them for a profit and reinvested his profits.
That’s a far cry from what today’s “gurus” teach.
“Flipping properties” is one of the popular techniques today.
It’s easy to read a rah-rah real estate book and THINK you know what you’re doing.
The IRS says “Not So Fast”…
From RealEstateJournal.com…
The trouble, tax experts say, is that people don’t understand the rules. Many trust the advice of real-estate brokers, who often aren’t well versed in tax law. Some amateurs are buying and selling properties too quickly, running the risk that the Internal Revenue Service may deem the transactions a person’s trade or business, with gains taxed as ordinary income and subject to self-employment taxes.
Just how big can a “Home Business” get?
Carteret Mortgage is a nationwide provider or home mortgage loans, reverse mortgages, and other home related loans.
It was started at home and has stayed at home to this day while transacting millions of dollars of business.
In fact, virtually all of their loan officers are home based because the corporation aims to duplicate the home based model whenever they can.
Owner Erick Weinstein shares his philosophy of succeeding from home…why he started there and why he stays there. (Adobe Reader required).
Cutting Edge Media has been around the home business market for years.
As the technology for lead acquisition improves, the company lives up to their name and stays on the cutting edge.
Don’t worry, I’m not getting paid to say these things. They’re just true. Ever since I published my own network marketing journal they’ve been around.
While nobody would confuse the articles in their magazines with objective journalism (they’re paid placements), they do serve their intended purpose… generating the names of individuals interested in a home business program.
If you’re promoting such a program, you’ll be interested in knowing that Cutting Edge now offers leads from TV advertising.
TV generated ads are beyond the skills of most small marketers, especially network marketers.
So this may be of interest to you.
In my opinion they’re branching out to reach the folks who aren’t already on “business opportunity” mailing lists or purchasing magazines in the stores.
Experts in the mailing list industry tell me there are a limited number of new names to mail to monthly.
Using Internet, TV, and radio in addition to the traditional methods will hopefuly keep their organization growing.
They hope to provide higher impact leads for their customers.
