So why does everyone want to work from home?? I’ll tell you why, because working 9 to 5 SUCKS!!

Hey don’t listen to me, here are the stats: According to The MicroEnterprise Journal “In the last 25 years, self-employment has grown by almost 300%, fueled by waning employee loyalty and growing worker dissatisfaction.” And the US Census Bureau reports that “90% percent of all U.S. businesses employ between ZERO and FOUR workers, making this the fastest growing segment of the business community.” See I told you!

Everywhere you look on the Internet we’re bombarded with sites peddling “work at home” opportunities. The stats prove it, we’re all looking to get out of the 9 to 5 rat race. The biggest problem is that MOST of the so called “work-at-home” related websites are so bogged down with clutter, fluff and double talk that you’d have to be a friggin robot to find and process the information you need in order to understand what the heck to do.

So where can an Idiot like me get the information I need contained in a simple, concise format that’s easy to understand and follow? Well nowhere really. That’s why I wrote this article and condensed the whole process down into 5 Summarized Steps, so that maybe other Idiot’s like me will have a fighting chance in hell to get out of the “Rat Race”.

Idiot Step 1:

SELECTING a business - simple enough right…wrong. Questions to ask yourself: What do I like to do? What will make money? What is available? Can I make Money?

These are tough questions. These days, most people are scouring ways to make money on the Internet. If considering a TV or Internet program, do as much independent research as possible on the program you’re interested in and find something that fits your personality so that you will excel no matter what.

Whatever you do use common sense and don’t allow desperation to influence your decisions.

Start-Up Nation - www.startupnation.com offers SOUND advice and has tons of RELIABLE resources for selecting a home business.

Idiot Step 2:

PLANNING your business. You will have to have some “form” of a business plan before you get started with a home business. Even if you are the only one that will ever read it, you should definitely put a plan together on paper.

An informal business plan should contain a start-up budget (money you need to get to the point of doing business) and an operating budget (money you need on a weekly basis just to keep doing business).

Be certain to include all overhead expenses and be sure to include a budget for advertising. Also you should note any significant milestones you hope to achieve and list your financial goals in a time-line fashion.

Idiot Step 3:

FUNDING your home business. Every business has start-up costs and your new home-based business will be no different. As the old saying goes “You need money to make money”. So where do you get the money you need to start?

The simplest way for home business owners to get the money they need is from the principal owner’s own pockets…that means YOU! Like myself, many work at home entrepreneurs simply use their own savings to fund their businesses, using money from personal resources such as…

Savings

Personal Investments

Credit Card Advance

Sale of Assets

Second Mortgage Loan

…are all ways to finance a small business start-up using your own funds.

The alternative to funding it yourself is to apply for a small business loan. The biggest issue there is that unless you have sufficient collateral, or any related experience in your field of business, you may not qualify for this type of loan.

The Small Business Administration - www.sba.gov has a TON of information and resources for start-up businesses. It contains valuable info on locating financing and it contains several links to other business resources, planning tools and calculators.

Idiot Step 4:

STARTING your home business. Once you’ve chosen your great new home business, and have got your starting cash in reserve, it’s time to get you up and running. But before you do, you will have to do some preliminary work just to get to the point where you can actually start operating.

Two-thirds of all small business are solo operations. Therefore, when you’re a “one-man band”, you must wear different hats and assume several roles as the “head” of various departments.

You’re the CEO, sales manager, director of marketing, director of finance, the shipping clerk, receptionist, the janitor…you get the drift Fonzi?

Because of your heavy load, you need quality office equipment, supplies, software and business services to keep you, I mean your “departments”, running smoothly and at peak efficiency.

Choose the right office equipment and machines that will keep you operating at peek efficiency.

Idiot Step 5:

MARKETING your home business. Now that you’ve got your business funded and operational you will need to implement a marketing and advertising campaign so that you can start attracting customers and finally start making some money.

This isn’t “Field of Dreams”. If you build it, that doesn’t mean they will come.

In order to draw customers to your business, you MUST do some form of repeated advertising, and you should definitely have a plan in place so that you can budget it into your overall Business Plan when you first start.

A good place to start is by reading Jay Conrad Levinson’s series of Guerilla Marketing books. This is standard reading for any small business entrepreneur. You can learn some very useful and basic techniques that will help you form a great and inexpensive plan.

Everything contained here was condensed to fit into a short article format. Obviously there’s a bit more to it. But if this Idiot’ can do it, so can you.

Just don’t be intimidated. Start off really, really small, maybe just part-time to start. Take one step at a time. But whatever you do, just get off your keister and get started!

“U can do it…just dive into it”

Duh Idiot’s Home Biz Start-Up Guide - http://www.starting-a-home-business.org

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It doesn’t matter what stage your website is at, you’ll probably come to a point where you hit the point that well known web personally Ken Evoy calls ‘The Hump’.

So what is The Hump?

It’s that time in your website’s life where you’ve built a good amount of content, you’ve gone out and found some people to link to you, you’ve put Google Adsense and some affiliate links on your site…and either you’ve reached a plateau in your site’s earnings or worst still, nothing’s happening…

When this happens, you’ve found ‘The Hump’

So how do you get over that hump?

Well, let’s look at three ways of taking action towards getting your business back on track and growing through this temporary setback.

Step 1 - Work out what you are doing that’s working and do more of that.

Have you created some great content that is attracting visitors from the search engines? If so, find another 20 easy-to-rank-well-for keywords and build more content for your site.

Remembering that the most important part of any business is your prospect and customer list, make sure that every page you build has a prominent place where people can subscribe to your list so you can start building a relationship with them.

This will make your content work overtime by turning many more of your visitors into customers over time because they will come to know and trust you.

Step 2 - Stop doing what isn’t working until you can work out why.

Are you paying for a Google Adwords campaign that isn’t producing a satisfactory ROI?

Are you writing and submitting articles that aren’t attracting visitors to your website?

Stop what you are doing if it’s not working, re-evaluate why you are doing it, and fix the problem.

I see many people running up big PPC bills on campaigns that have very little chance of producing a profit.

When I ask them why, they say that they have to compete in their market and everyone else is doing it…Duh!

If it’s not producing a profit, stop doing it and test something else.

Only by testing can you hope to find the right solution and get your business again heading in the right direction.

Step 3 - Find a mentor and follow the advice they give you

No truly successful person has ever made it far without a mentor to help, coach and guide him or her. It just doesn’t happen.

Everyone has mentors, even if we don’t notice what’s going on.

Our parents, friends and family are all ‘mentoring’ us every day and we learn from them without even knowing it.

When it comes to building your business, you need a mentor who has been where you are and has found a way over that ‘Hump’ that you are currently up against.

Finding a mentor will make all the difference and propel you forward towards your most important goals that much more quickly than if you try to work everything out on your own.

Your ‘Hump’ is not impossible to climb over. You just need some guidance to find your way around it…

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Finding Mad Cow in Oregon puts a new wrinkle in the high protein diet, doesn’t it? What’s a person to do that wants to eat more meat, not less?

Are you Eating Less Meat Due to Mad Cow Disease?

Not the people I’ve spoken with. Most are saying, “Yipee, beef’s on sale!” The food industry has done a great job of convincing us they are providing a safe food supply and we’ve been lulled into a false sense of security. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In July 1988, a ban was introduced in the UK which prohibited the use of the remains of sheep in cattle feed. BSE is thought to have spread to cattle from feed including meat and bone meal made from sheep suffering from a similar brain disease, called scrapie.

Ban Not Properly Enforced

Unfortunately the ban was not enforced properly for many years and remained a paper exercise (exactly as it has been in the US ever since).

Francis Anthony, a Herefordshire veterinary surgeon, and the British Veterinary Association’s spokesman on BSE said, “If the ban had been enforced properly from the start, I have no hesitation in saying categorically that we should be seeing only a few cases today. But that contaminated feed was being given to animals until at least 1995, and possibly a year later.”

The false sense of security for us in the US came from it being widely reported that the practice had been banned. They failed to make it clear that this was a “voluntary ban.” Even I falsly believed they had long ago ended this practice until the recent news reports that it is still being done. Despite there being a clear connection between feeding rendered animals to animals causing Mad Cow disease, the meat and dairy industry continues the practice to this day. Why? Corporate greed, plain and simple. It is a cheap source of “protein” and makes cows and other animals fatten faster. A fatter animals weighs more, and they are sold by weight.

I have no doubt that people in the US aren’t getting excited about the threat or beginning to avoid beef simply because no people have been reported with the disease. After all, this was a sick cow, not a human. Hence, people do not consider it a direct threat. Amazingly they don’t consider those with CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) a varient of Mad Cow as being related when clearly it is.

The Costs of Clean Meat Supply

The meat and dairy industry will now begin a campaign to make the higher cost of clean meat seem a ridiculous indulgence rather than a possibly life saving measure. It does cost more to have a clean food supply. I and my family are worth it, are you and yours?

For excellent reference materials read Fast Food Nationby Eric Schlosser, The Crazy Makers by Carol Simontacchi, and Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher who Won’t Eat Meat by Howard F. Lyman. Be informed then make the choice for you and your family.

Food politics aside, I’m interested in my and my families health and well being, and I’m not interested in supporting an industry that doesn’t care about the quality of their products or whether those products are potentially dangerous or even deadly.

What You Can Do to Avoid Dangerous Meat

• Buy all your meat from the local butcher. He gets the animals from local farmers, and can tell you which Farms, if you ask.


• Buy all your meat from local stores that certify it is grain fed. Visit sites such asEatWild.com


• Cut back on your consumption of all meat in general, substituting beans for instance for protein.


• Eat a “special occasion” steak at the best restaurants such as Ruth Chris’ Steak House. Now that’s a steak!

More Info on Mad Cow and it’s Variant CJD

MadCow.org: Everything you ever wanted to know about Mad Cow.

Human BSE Foundation: An organization for those with CJD (the human variant of Mad Cow)

Mad Cow Facts

You don’t have to be a fanatic, just be informed and then make the best choices you can for yourself and your family.

Kathryn Martyn,Master NLP Practitioner, EFT counselor, and author of Changing Beliefs, Your First Step to Permanent Weight Loss. Visit OneMoreBite-Weightloss.comto learnhow she lost 80 pounds over 20 years ago and kept it off, and how you can do the same.

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Every year, thousands of people around the world fall prey to a small but deadly evil. Cigarettes ensnare people with their strong flavor and stimulating effects, but few realize that these joys are short-lived. Cigarettes are made of tobacco, which contains nicotine. Nicotine is an organic compound, which tends to physically and mentally stimulate humans when taken in small dosages. However, an overdose of this substance may lead to several complications.

Nicotine addiction is hard to fight. Once a person is hooked onto cigarettes, he will find it hard to let go. We all know that the harmful effects of smoking are many. From simple respiratory disorders to more complex and lethal cases of heart diseases and cancer, quitting smoking is a life saving necessity.

Many people around the world try to quit this life-threatening addiction. Although it might seem difficult, the task is not impossible. How to quit smoking is a question that a smoker asks himself when he or she decides to take the path towards self-recovery. There are several steps one can take to get started. Fixing a date for quitting and listing out the reasons for the same is the starting point. A person should try and stick to the date without postponing it indefinitely. Quitting might seem hard at first and people tend to experience withdrawal symptoms. Hence, the process should be gradual. To help oneself, a person could try switching to a different brand, so the taste difference might act as a deterrent.

A person usually tends to smoke when he has nothing to do. Therefore, keeping busy constantly is a great solution to the problem. Apart from staying busy, one can also keep the mouth occupied with sugarless gum or candy so that the temptation to smoke does not arise.

The most important aid to quitting is getting the full support of one’s family and friends. A word of encouragement by a loved one can go a long way in helping a person overcome the addiction.

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