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Need a Business Idea? Here are 55

Need a Business Idea? Here are 55
This article has been excerpted from 55 Surefire Home Based Businesses You Can Start for Under $5,000 by Entrepreneur Press & Cheryl Kimball (2009), available from Entrepreneur Press. Today, tens of thousands of people are considering starting a home based business, and for good reasons. On average, people can expect to have two and three careers during their work life. Those leaving one career often think about their second or third career move being to their own home. $1,500 or less to start up 1. Create a flier outlining your services. In many parts of the country, this business tends to be seasonal, but you can find ways around that. 3. Boats that are hauled out of the water for the winter or even just for mid-season repairs will need the hull cleaned. 4. Offer a soup-to-nuts business plan, including market research, the business plan narrative and the financial statements. Learning to be a chimney sweep may mean nothing more than apprenticing with someone already in the business.

5 Sources for Learning What It Takes to Become a Millionaire When it comes to learning the ropes of how to be a millionaire, nothing is as important as your education. Getting an education on becoming a millionaire may differ slightly from your traditional educational approach, but it is still all about the learning process. If you are interested in becoming a millionaire and earning substantial money that will cover you over the long-term, then here are a few education techniques to consider. 1. The Internet is a great educational resource for anyone seeking more information about earning money through their investments. Related: What It Takes to Go From Dead Broke to 6 Figures in 6 Months 2. Reading is the cheapest but most effective way to learn the valuable tools needed to trade smart and earn a great deal of money. 3. To learn how to be successful you need to know what other successful people are doing with their time. Related: The 5 Mistakes Standing Between You and Your First Million 4. 5.

7 Stupid Branding Mistakes Your Small Business is Making When you think about great branding, Coca Cola’s distinctive red and white lettering, Nike’s swoosh and Adidas’s three stripes likely come to mind. But as a small business, imagining the level of investment that’s gone into these iconic images can make the thought of undertaking your own branding initiative seem overwhelming. It’s actually easier to do than most imagine. Just make sure to avoid some common pitfalls and branding mistakes. 1. Defining your brand is also valuable from an SEO perspective. Related: 3 Ways to Get Graphics for Your Website 2. Logo (both an overarching logo and any logo lockups your company uses for individual product lines) Brand colors Taglines Fonts and typography The “voice” used in your branded materials Imagery Mascots and spokespeople Clearly, this list isn’t comprehensive. 3. Small businesses can learn a lesson from this beverage industry giant. Related: 4. So what’s the solution? 5. Can you do it? Related: Building Your Brand's Warmth and Competence 6. 7.

Steps to Starting a Small Business So you’re thinking about starting a business? Terrific. About 543,000 small businesses are started each month in the United States according to data from DocStoc. However, for those thinking about starting one, it’s often the mental hurdles that prevent you from forging ahead. Unanswered questions can get in the way of advancement. Starting a business is exciting, heady stuff, and it’s not for everyone. Why Start a Business? For some, entrepreneurship is inspired by the need for autonomy, like in Jayson DeMers' case. “I questioned everything and felt uncomfortable being bound by someone else's rules,” he says. After gathering freelance clients, DeMers was eventually able to quit his full-time job. For others, starting a business comes from solving a problem in their own lives, like it did with Sujan Patel, the vice president of marketing at When I Work, an employee software scheduling company. “That's when I knew I had something people really wanted,” he says. Are You Ready?

The 10 Fastest-Growing Industries for Small Business Past performance is no guarantee of future results, as the old business truism says. But you also may have heard that you can’t know where you’re going without knowing where you have been. To get a sense of which industries small businesses are growing in, the analysts at Raleigh, N.C.-headquartered private-company financial-information company Sageworks ran some numbers for Entrepreneur.com. Here’s a look at the industries where U.S. companies with $10 million or less in annual sales have shown the highest and lowest percentage change from Jan. 1 to Dec 31, 2012. As a benchmark, the average growth rate across all U.S. small businesses in the time period was 8 percent, says Libby Bierman, an analyst at Sageworks. Fastest-Growth Industries for U.S. Related: Hunting for Business Ideas? Slowest-Growth Industries for U.S. Related: Franchise Forecast Continues Strong for 2013 Not all of the businesses on the fastest-growing list are service based.

5 Hobbies That Can Make You Smarter (Infographic) Your teachers were right: Your brain is like a muscle. To make it smarter, all you need to do is lift intellectual weights -- and often. Studies show that regularly exercising our minds with challenging new stimuli -- not endless hours of Keeping Up With the Kardashians -- increases IQ. Sure, crossword puzzles and sudoku are brilliant ways to sharpen your intellect and expand your neuroplasticity, but they’re far from the only options here. Related: You Have the Power to Rewire Your Brain for More Joy Believe it or not, playing video games is another fun, engaging way to boost your brainpower. For more brain-feeding activities you can do to get smarter, feast your mind on the bright infographic below, care of ProEssayWriter.net. Click to Enlarge+ Related: This Is Your Brain on Not Enough Sleep (Infographic) Limited Time Offer Get a FREE Strategy Session Work Smarter, Not Harder!

Startup How-To Guides Quitting your job to launch your own business can be a hard pill for your company to swallow, particularly if your company is in the same industry. Here's some advice. Laying the Startup Groundwork Starting your own business is not just about having a dream. Planning for a Successful Start The old adage goes: failure to plan is a plan for failure. Raising Capital You've got the idea and you've got a plan. Establishing Your Image You may have a great idea, product or superior service, but have you thought about what image your startup will take on? Finding Customers Without customers, it doesn't matter how great your product is, how well you branded you are, or how well funded your start-up is. More Startup How-To Guides How to Start a Foundation BY Gwen Moran Establishing a nonprofit requires an ongoing commitment, not just an initial injection of funding. An Introduction to Business Plans Why is a business plan so vital to the health of your business?

5 Ways to Make Your Product Sell Itself We are creatures of habit. American families, on average, buy the same 150 products over and over again, which make up 85 percent of their household needs, according to research out of Harvard Business School. So how can you get people to take a chance on your new business and become loyal customers? The trick is helping customers overcome their initial hesitation and making your new item speak to customers in a relatable way. Here are five ways to help your product sell itself in a crowded marketplace: 1. Even cleaning products, the most mundane of all consumer necessities, can win using this theory. 2. 3. 4. 5. Local products or services benefit from actual social interaction: an informal gathering in a home where guests can "play" with the product or try the service, a farmer's or open-air market where consumers can touch and taste what you're selling and meet you. Join Entrepreneur in Long Beach, Calif. on 12/15–Increase Productivity and Business in 2016.

Choose Your Business Structure Sole proprietorship, corporation, LLC: Try them on for size to find out which legal structure will best suit your business. Of all the choices you make when starting a business, one of the most important is the type of legal structure you select for your company. Not only will this decision have an impact on how much you pay in taxes, it will affect the amount of paperwork your business is required to do, the personal liability you face and your ability to raise money. Mark Kalish is co-owner and vice president of EnviroTech Coating Systems Inc. in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a company that applies powdered paint through an electrostatic process to items ranging from motorcycles to musical instruments. Kalish has also been involved with a number of other start-up businesses, both as an owner and in various management positions. It's not a decision to be entered into lightly, either, or one that should be made without sound counsel from business experts.

Things to do after installing Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn  ·  How to Ubuntu After Installing Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, there are a wealth of things that need to be dealt with, including Hardware Drivers, DVD, Audio and Video Codecs, Archiving formats, generally useful stuff. These instructions presume you are proficient with PPAs, .Debs, and other terminal commands, Ubuntu Tweak, and require a full set of video, audio, and archive codecs, as well as Skype, Flash, and a truck-load of wallpapers. Warning Using the sudo command can result in severe system damage. Read all instructions and confirm you understand before executing any commands. Make sure you type commands correctly, or copy and paste the entire code. 2. Both GetDeb and PlayDeb are repositories, sources of updates for actual software you have or will have installed. While this may look like an awful lot of code for something that should be relatively simple, you should know that while GetDeb and PlayDeb are repositories, they're not launchpad hosted, and hence a little more difficult to add. 7. 8. 9.

Quality of Life Around the World: The Best and Worst Cities (Infographic) If you are going to get employees to pack up and move to locations around the globe with less desirable living conditions than we have here in the U.S., prepare to pay up. Determining exactly how much to pay can be confusing, primarily because of the wide range of factors to consider. That’s where quality of living ranking specialists come in. “Political instability, high crime levels, and elevated air pollution are a few factors that can be detrimental to the daily lives of expatriate employees and their families,” said Slagin Parakatil, senior researcher at mercer, in a written statement. Cities in Western Europe, including Vienna, Zurich and Munich, all rank high on the quality of living list, according to the infographic made by Column Five Media for Mercer. Related: Five to Follow for Doing Business in China For the ranking, Mercer uses New York City as a global benchmark. Click to Enlarge+ Catherine Clifford is a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com.

Is Your Business Plan Missing This Vital Ingredient? Image credit: Shutterstock As many as half of startups are no longer in business just four short years later, according to some statistics. Most businesses are owned by entrepreneurs who are driven, passionate and ambitious. So, how is it possible that so many fail? Having built several businesses over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the rampant failure of businesses comes down to the one tool that is supposed to help businesses thrive -- the business plan. So listen up, entrepreneurs, adding this to your business plan may mean the difference between success and failure. What you need in order to accomplish all of your goals in business is a network of people who can help you along the way. Related: How to Make Networking Suck Less Too many business owners believe that their entrepreneurial dreams are only possible with a fat checkbook and an MBA, but I’m here to tell you that the only ingredient you really need is your network of people. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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