Have you ever stared at your computer and thought of it as a machine that might write you a paycheck as a home based business? There are billions of websites and somebody is making money, why can’t it be you? If you have ever wanted to work from home, now is the time to take action.Being an online business is the great equalizer. No one knows if you have a 40 million square foot warehouse or if you have 3 boxes hidden under your bed. Starting a brick and mortar business is extremely complicated and highly risky. A virtual business that you work at home gives you flexibility to succeed without a huge risk. In a very short time you can be up and running and have income.So what are some of the things that you need to succeed when you work from home?1. Find something that you enjoy and something that you will have fun learning more about. You are going to more than a burning desire for money to build a home based business. If you share something with others that you have a burning desire for you increase your odds of success.2. Start with the basics. You will need to have a bank account. Check for any zoning laws about home based businesses in your area. To suddenly start being successful and having an inspector to show up and red tag your work from home business can be expensive.3. Add separation from your personal life and your business life. Sometimes working at home you try multitasking the separate aspects of your life and both suffer.4. Self discipline is critical. Remember this is still a job. You are now working for your home based business. Set the hours you will work and follow your plan to success. The biggest cause of failure of any type of business owner is failing to show up to work.5. Socialize and network. Home based businesses grow because people know you are doing it. Big box stores can spend millions of dollars advertising each week. Your million dollar ad budget is word of mouth to get started. Be prepared to face rejection, but remember that if you can have 10 quality conversations a day and gain one new customer a day you will soon have a work from home empire.6. Find a strong online marketing training company and learn how to expand your business from the experience of others. Just because you work at home does not mean that you have to work alone.A home based business gives you the opportunity to replace your job with a successful work from home career. By working at home you will leverage those things that you honestly love to do. Let me be the first to wish you not great luck but to wish you great experience. Experience is what you control luck is just going to happen.For more insights in how to succeed with a home based business check out our resource box below.
The Finer Points of Internet Auctions
WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?
Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.
The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.
The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.
The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.
HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!
The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.
There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.
Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.
HOW TO WIN!
Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.
The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.
The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.
The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.
HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!
Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.
Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.
Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.
CONCLUSION!
New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.
There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.
It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.
10 Useful Books for Small Business Owners
Reading good management books enables small business owners think and act wisely. It helps them improve their ability to carry out business in the right way, by successfully resolving issues that a business is likely to face.There are thousands of books available in the market. It can be very confusing for a small business owner on what to pick and read. We have listed 10 books that every small business owner should read to succeed in business.1. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey:This is a book useful to everyone in general and small business owners in particular. It explains seven habits that are essential to be able to influence others. The seven habits discussed in this book are ‘be proactive’, ‘begin with the end in mind’, ‘put first things first’, ‘think win-win’, ‘seek first to understand, then to be understood’, ‘synergize’ and ‘sharpen the saw’.These principles will help you in shaping and strengthening your personality to tackle the issues at stake. They would help you develop a positive and pragmatic attitude without making you go over board under a given situation.2. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath:Using case studies, the authors claim that for any business, certain ideas are universal. The ideas may look simple, but are critical to make your business survive in the face of distress to business.3. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie:No business can run without the cooperation of customers. To survive competition, you have to win people. For this, you should have the skills to influence people. These people can be your customers, clientele, vendors, retailers or creditors.You can nurture skills to influence them all by reading this book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Lucid, and self explanatory, the book expounds the points with empirical examples and sound practical common sense.4. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill:This book is an inspiration and is the result of more than two decades of research by the author Napoleon Hill. Hill gives thirteen principles, which can help you to reach your goal. This book is an excellent source of information for beginners.5. Getting Things Done by David Alien:This book helps you to improve the productivity of your business. It points to various hindrances and dangers to your business. Further, it enables you to delegate responsibilities efficiently.6. Good to Great by Jim Collins:Jim Collins and team have examined the proposition whether a good company can become great. Collins says that the transition is possible if certain conditions are fulfilled, for instance, by removing redundant labor and fostering an ideal corporate culture. He also says that the personnel at the top management should be honest.The book would help you to realize and discover new knowledge, techniques of managing people and business, dealing with different groups such as clientele, vendors and the like.7. The E-Myth Revisited by Micheal Gerber:This book explains reasons for failure of a business within a few years of inception. The author provides supportive examples with empirical data. He finds that most small businesses become defunct because of lack of certain attributes on part of the owners. He says the business owner needs to be a technician, a manager as well as an entrepreneur; only then the business will survive.8. The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau:Chris Guillebeau focuses on the affairs of a tiny enterprise with one, two persons in the operation. Beginners and those who are planning a new start-up should read this book.9. Rework by Jason Fried:This book contains common sense ideas. If applied practically, they help you build qualities that are indispensable for a business owner.10. Built to Sell by John Warrillow and Bo Burlingham:This book will help those who want to sell their business. Others will also, find it useful. The authors have explained in detail the points to observe initially, and how to get profits from the business, sustain growth momentum of the business and finally sell the business.As a small business owner, reading these books will benefit you largely. You will improve knowledge on how to do things in business, and thus will be able to do your business better.