Starting a business anytime is challenging and fraught with missteps, however starting a home business gives you several advantages when you start your business out of your home. Evaluating home business ideas properly is still mandatory, utilizing a financial plan along with cash flow analysis to ensure success.

There are many ideas for beginning a home business from your home. Each one will have various advantages and disadvantages. This article focuses on the advantages of beginning your company out of your home vs. renting space in a business park. The main advantage and the one most obvious is that you do not need to pay rent for your office space when you use space in your home. For those people testing ideas or those who are not sure if they want to really invest a lot of time and money this is probably the best approach to use.

Rent for the office space is zero cost, utilities and communications costs can be shared with your normal household expenses and any direct expenses can be picked up by the company. If you require a separate telephone line, fax line, computers and high speed connections, these can all be charged directly to your start up business idea.

There are a number of other factors that should be considered when evaluating various businesses that you want to operate out of your home. Depending on what these ideas are, these items may apply to or not.

For example if you are planning to run a small manufacturing, woodworking or some other related type of business you will need to have the space to operate your business. For some home owners this can be a problem if space is limited. Internet related businesses require less space as a rule, however you will still need to have space for several computers, printers, scanners, etc., as well as a high speed connection with a local area network to connect your computers.

While this is not an exhaustive list of items to consider, readers will understand that each home business idea must be evaluated for ease of operation from your home. Some are better suited than others and you will have to consider the advantages and disadvantages carefully. In addition, all of these business propositions must be considered from the perspective of skill set match, expansion, market, cash flow, profitability and income earning potential. Failure to treat each idea this way can result in a great deal of lost time, money and stranded investment which you may not be able to recover.

While looking for free web hosting for your small business you need to keep the following things in mind.

Advertising: Just about all free web hosts will impose advertising on your site. The host does this to recover the costs of running the hardware and providing the bandwidth for your site.

Web Space: Most free small business web hosting has very limited space. You will be lucky if you find a free host that offers more than 20MB of disk space. This isn’t such a bad thing as most sites are under 5MB in size. A 5MB site can be up to 200 pages of html code but beware, if you site contains heavy graphics, music or video this limited free space will run out very quickly.

FTP: Some small business web hosts do not provide FTP access. FTP stands for File Transmission Protocol and allows you to transfer large files via a server. This isn’t a big deal if you don’t do a lot of file transfers but if you plan on sending and receiving lots of images or video files this is something you need to be aware of.

Stability and Reliability: This is an important factor to look at. Unless you don’t mind you site going down or off-line all the time you need to find out what the free small business web host provider “down time” is. If it is anything more than 99% I do not recommend using this provider.

Bandwidth: To have enough bandwidth to run a small business website you need about 1-3GB of monthly bandwidth. Anything less than 1GB and the most you will be running on it will be a personal webpage or one for the local church.

 

When you make the decision to earn income from the internet you will need to go through a set up process to be ready for business.

Following are the basic steps in setting up for home business success.

1. Attitude

The key to your business success is your attitude.

Treat your business like a business.

This is critical whether you are working part-time or full-time. One of my colleagues is a mother who works from home around her family. She has always put her family first whilst at the same time developing her business. She says, “I work part-time, but I have a full-time attitude.”

Put another way, “If you have a hobby attitude you will have a hobby income, if you have a business attitude you will have a business income.”

You can be successful working part-time and you can be successful working full-time but it is highly unlikely that you will be successful working in your “spare time”.

2. Working Environment

A space that you can call your own, free from distractions for your scheduled time.

A comfortable chair and organized desk.

Stationery supplies as required. For example: – pens – highlighters – stapler – hole punch – sticky tape – note book(s) – a simple filing system – ring binders – manilla folders

Consider the value of a broadband connection. Your time is valuable and a broadband connection can allow you to get more done in a given time frame.

3. Schedule

Develop a schedule that works for you, your family (or “significant others”) and your business. When you allot a block of time for work then use that time for work. Equally important is to schedule time for your other commitments – family time, self education ( reading, listening and viewing), “health time” (exercise, cooking and eating), and leisure time. During these other times don’t work. After all if one of the reasons to work from home is to spend more time with your family then you don’t want your working at home time to consume your family time.

You are working for yourself and your schedule (by your choice) is your “boss”. When you have people calling you or dropping around unexpectedly or maybe out-of-town visitors may want to catch up with you then you need to make a choice. Are you committed to your own business success? What will be your choice in these situations? Only you can decide what is important to you.

In a family environment you may need to negotiate with your partner and children to have your business time agreed upon, during which you will not be interrupted. Put this schedule prominently somewhere so all family members are aware of your work schedule.

4. Describe Your Business

Be able to describe your business concisely; a powerful one or two sentence description that someone can repeat in describing your business to others. A unique and memorable tag line can also be invaluable for promoting your business.

5. Know Your Product or Service

Once you have selected your product or service to sell, it may or may not be something that you use yourself but you need to know your product intimately. If you are selling ebooks then know the content and its value. If you are selling software then use it know it “inside out”. You will develop a reputation of providing quality information and because of your product knowledge you can become the preferred supplier.

It is not practical to use certain products (for example a woman may choose to sell man’s shoes or vice versa) in which case the seller won’t be a product user, however the seller can still know the benefits and features of the product intimately.

6. Administration

Use good record keeping practices.

This may involve a consultation with a tax advisor who can let you know about the optimal way to set up your financial records and what records need to be kept. Your advisor will also recommend record keeping systems and you can find out what software may simplify this aspect of your business. Additionally your obtain advice on the best arrangement for your bank accounts. You will most likely be advised to have a separate bank account.

You will also need to keep track of your various logins, usernames and passwords. A very handy little software tool for this is Treepad available as either the free Lite version (without password protection) or the commercial Plus or Biz versions. http://www.treepad.com

There are other useful tools for this also from a simple paper notebook to free and commercial password keepers. One popular solution is Roboform that will remember your login details and can automatically fill out your login and other registration forms. http://www.roboform.com

7. Computer Protection

Your computer is the lifeline to your business dealings and must be protected including the data that is stored.

You need a virus scanner, personal firewall, anti-spyware and anti-adware and preferably an email scanner with the ability to delete suspect of spam email from the server before it is downloaded to your computer.

Some suggestions are:

AVG Anti-Virus: http://www.grisoft.com

Spybot S&D: http://www.safer-networking.org

Microsoft Anti-Spyware:

www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

Adaware: http://www.lavasoft.com/

Mailwasher Email Scanner: http://www.mailwasher.net

8. A Domain Name

You will most likely need a domain name for your business and one cost effective registrar is GoDaddy, http://www.godaddy.com.

9. Payment Processing

You will need a way to process credit cards; that may be using services such as: – PayPal https://www.paypal.com – Storm Pay http://www.stormpay.com – 2 Checkout http://www.2checkout.com – Clickbank http://www.clickbank.com or others.

This is the most economical way to get started. Once your business picks up you may need to look into your own merchant account for credit card transactions.

Consideration may also be given to other forms of online currency such as eGold http://www.egold.com

10. Email accounts

Once you have your own domain you can use an associated email account. This can further assist in the promotion of your business and promotes a more professional business image.

As a final comment on continuing in your internet business, conduct your business ethically, provide extraordinary service and be proud to put your name to the products or services that you are selling and you will be on track to developing a sustainable long term internet business.