This website is not like all of the others. Since 2001, we've posted 15326 different business opportunities and ideas, so you're sure to find something here to inspire you!
Sher-Lee’s kids were intrigued by the idea of receiving mail but, unfortunately, they almost never received any. Inspired by their interest, Sherri-Lee formulated a business that would deliver postcards to those kids who loved to receive mail.
Barb Sharp had talked for so many years about wanting to open a home accessories store that it had become a joke in her family.
“We’d go into a store and I would say, ‘That place was nice, but I would do it like this,’ ” Sharp said. “My kids would finish the sentence, ‘Right, Mom, when you open your own store.’ ”
But Sharp was serious. And when a historic home became available on Williamston’s High Street, one block north of the downtown, the dream was suddenly so much more real.
“As soon as I saw the place, the vision was there,” she said. “I could see everything. Instantly, inside and out, in my mind it was already created.”
That connection between place and passion carries through in Sharp’s work.
The Silver Rabbit is part home accessories store and part interior design firm. A customer walks in to buy a unique item for his or her house, then hires Sharp to find the best place for it.
And if you’re hosting a party and are stressed out about decorating, Sharp’s your woman. She also provides home staging services.
The New York Daily News has an interesting article about a new breed of worker that has emerged from these tough economic conditions: the unintentional entrepreneur.
These are people who have lost their jobs and have been unable to find new employment, then decided to try their hand at consulting, freelancing or turning a hobby into an income stream.
Many have been helped by UnintentionalEntrepreneur.com, a new, free resource developed by Outright.com, the free bookkeeping site for the self-employed, and networksolutions.com, a provider of Web tools for small businesses.
Manhattan-based Yvonne Colebank – creator of weathergal.com – is such an entrepreneur.
She launched the site after leaving her job in the fashion industry, providing people with fun facts about storms, cold fronts and other weather patterns.
“Weathergal.com began unintentionally,” Colebank explained, “when I was caught in the Indian monsoon in Goa and had my handycam. I wanted to share this monsoon with the world but, more than just images, I wanted to share the exciting story of what a monsoon is, and how it affects everyone in this world!”
Often businesses join a group such as Twitter without really realizing the benefits that they have to offer small businesses. There are several uses to Twitter that greatly help out any small business company or even large businesses for that matter. Look below for some of the suggestions that CurrentMom.com had to offer on Twitter uses for small businesses.
Great for following all of your competitors. This comes in handy when you want to see how everyone else uses Twitter, creates promotions, tracking and more that way you can tweak your own program where it’s needed.
You can search for your customers and clients on Twitter or you can go directly to their site and see if they have a “follow me on Twitter” link that you can click on and automatically add them to your page.
If you are one of the thousands that follow all of the major news medias, you can forward the information you find in there to your Twitter account.
Josh Spiro at Inc. com asks an interesting question, is entrepreneurship in your genes?
If you made your first sale while still in diapers and your lemonade stand was a substantial contributor to the family income, you’ve likely been called a born entrepreneur.
But just how heritable is the ability to work hard, take risks, and seize opportunities?
According to research conducted at the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College in London, 37 percent to 48 percent of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic.
Researchers tested a number of indications of entrepreneurship including running or starting a business, the number of businesses a person had started, and the length of time they were self-employed, but for all of these factors there was the same strong genetic component.
It isn’t worth getting upset about. And perhaps if something comes at you repeatedly from numerous people their may be some truth to it and maybe you need to change as well. Welcome all commentary. Don’t let the negabots get you down and remember no matter what, you are you at the end of every day.
If you have a working website for your company, you no doubt have some sort of a comment or feedback page. In addition to this, you have most likely encountered a negative comment at least once. While it could have been something that was honestly wrong with your website, this could also be the result of a “negabot”…this is the type of person who will complain in the middle of summer because it’s only 75 degrees instead of 80 degrees.
So what do you do with these negabots? Well RiseToTheTop suggests using the killing them with kindness theory, and I would have to agree. I’ve used this one in all aspects of work and personal life and it’s always seemed to work. When you get your next negative comment posted, simply respond to them by letting them know that you appreciate their feedback very much and that comments are always welcome and taken into consideration.
Yes you have to bite your tongue to keep from saying what you really want to say but you will get a great result, either they will thank you for your acknowledgment to their comment or that will be the last of their negativity that you see.
Sitting in a duck blind gives hunters a lot of time to be inventive, especially if the birds are landing somewhere else writes The Omaha World Herald.
Camouflage-clad Mark Andersen was hunting ducks and Canada geese near Pierre, S.D. He was freezing. Shooting was slow. He stood to peer out of the blind.
“I looked over and saw a bunch of ducks pouring into a field and I said, ‘What’s going on over there?’’’ Andersen said. “Well, a farmer had spilled a big pile of corn, and the ducks were just pouring on top of it to feed.’’
Andersen was inspired. Ducks and geese eat corn. Why not lure birds with waterfowl and corn decoys? Not using artificial ears of corn, but something that resembles a small pile of spilled corn kernels.
After nearly three years of designing and testing, Andersen’s patented and trademarked invention is for sale in 13 stores in six states and online.
He calls it “Cornouflage.’’
Cornouflage is a circular piece of non-ultraviolet fabric (birds can see ultraviolet light) printed with a photograph of field corn. The diameter is about 25 inches, but it twists and folds into a circle less than half that size for stuffing into a day pack. A plastic-coated steel cable is sewn into the rim of the cloth to give it stability.
Setting Cornouflage over a few dirt clods or pieces of corn stubble elevates the center of the cloth, giving it the appearance of spilled grain.
Even if you’re a “lone wolf” type, the idea is to forge better business relationships and a network of colleagues and contacts who will stick with you. “And best of all they will voluntarily recommend your services to others,” says Kuzmeski. If you’re ready to ramp it up, here are some tactics that can start getting you immediate results:
Have some sort of priority plan in place. Not all business relationships happen naturally, most in fact have to be worked at and built over time. So make up a list of the ones that are the most important and vital for you to work your hardest on right now.
Always keep in continual contact with your connections. Do this by having a system where you follow up with them after meetings by a phone call, letter, email or even a post card. You can also keep in touch with them by sending out some sort of notice when there is new information regarding your business that you really want them to know about.
Make yourself as referable as you can. If you expect to get referrals from your clients that you have, you’ll need to be someone that they would want to refer to another client. Have some sort of survey that you can hand out to clients to fill out to keep you informed on how you are doing.
You should choose some niche products to promote – you need to find a business opportunity, a niche with some space for your small, but profitable home business. You don’t want and can’t compete with top Internet retailers. Product selection is not a simple task, probably the most important one that defines your dropship business success or failure.
There are certain websites and services that should help you to make an informed decision. The list is certainly not complete:
It is not an easy task to choose products properly even with the help of the above sites. You need to monitor some categories for weeks to decide on what goods to test.
Step 2: Choose the right suppliers
You can search for local wholesalers ready to dropship your orders, you can search online, you can subscribe to a list of verified dropshippers and wholesalers.
Your goal is to find a reliable merchant or a few to offer you competitive prices and to fulfill your orders for selected product niche.
Step 3: Test the market
So, by this time you feel you have found products you can profitably sell online and you have merchants. now it is time to push them to your potential customers.
eBay.com remains the most popular marketplace for this sort of product testing.
Step 4: Grow your drop-ship business
You make eBay sales and see them increasing. It is time to think of a business plan to grow your dropship business. Your next strategy step is to develop a simple e-commerce website (you can easily find affordable service providers at freelance boards similar to eLance.com and Guru.com).
Then you need to design a promotion campaign using SEO, PPC, e-mail marketing, social media channels and keeping control of your ROI.
This is a guest post by Alex Maas. You can discover a large dropship cases study selection at his website to get inspired and motivated.
When we attend meetings and seminars, many of us take along a notebook of some sort in order to jot down some notes to remember after the meeting or seminar. The problem with this is that many of us, when looking at our notes later on, can’t remember why we jotted most of them down or where that note was going in the lecture, the main point so to speak. So I have listed some ways to effectively take notes down that are sure to help you keep them together, so you can re-read them later with better understanding.
Always include some sort of topic title at the beginning of each new note. This will keep you from blurring them all together and getting them confused with something else.
Be selective on what you write down. Don’t write down everything word for word, select the key points to the meeting that you want to take away with you.
Keep it simple. While taking your notes don’t bother yourself at that time with proper spelling and grammar, this can always be fixed later on. As long as you know what your writing… that’s all that matters.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression: Once you find a Virtual Assistant that meets your requirement, be sure to take a look at their website. You want to make sure the site has a professional appearance and lists various ways that you can access them. Does their site leave you with the impression that they are experts within their niche? The appearance and copy on a Virtual Assistant’s website can indicate the quality of work you can expect to receive from your Virtual Assistant.
If you are considering hiring a virtual assistant and you have never used one before, there are some things you should know before jumping out there and hiring the first person who contacts you for the job. Working with a virtual assistant is much like having an office assistant but there are still some differences and things to think about.
You’ll want to make sure that they are a good fit, someone who “click’s” with you and your personality as they are going to be your right hand man on everything. Also, you are really going to want to ask for at least 3 references from them on past virtual assistant of even office assistant positions that they have worked. Most likely you will not be meeting face to face to have an interview, so checking on their references is very important.
Get to know the person before making your final decision. Find out why they are wanting to be a virtual assistant, find out what sort of hours they will be available from home to work for you, what sort of communication devices they have to work with such as email, fax, phone, cell phone and more. This will help you to determine if they can even handle the job.
In a world wrapped up in complex supply chains, small farmers are in a catch-22: sell to the supermarkets and get less cash for your carrots, or spend a lot more time and effort trying to sell directly to customers.
Consumers, meanwhile, are torn between loyalty to local businesses and the convenience of those established supply chains.
Trendspotter Springwise reports that a German farm, Peter-und-Paul-Hof, has found a solution in the form of… vending machines. The result of a collaboration between the farm and vending manufacturer Stuewer
, the specially designed machines currently sell fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese, potatoes and sausage in thirteen German towns and communities.
Initially, Peter-und-Paul-Hof were operating a service delivering milk to their customers. Finding this too time-consuming, they began encouraging customers to collect the milk from fridges on their farm, which proved successful and inspired them to use vending machines as a more versatile solution.
The machines can be placed outdoors 365 days a year as long as they’re under a roof (some have even been placed alongside hiking trails in Switzerland), effectively giving locals a 24-hour farmers’ market and farmers a lot more free time.
By cutting out the middleman, this system also offers potential savings over retail stores.
CitySquares Online Inc. saw sales start to decline dramatically in late 2008 as some of the local-search-engine provider’s customers could no longer afford its advertising services writes The Wall Street Journal.
So the small business turned to its board of six volunteer advisers—experts in areas such as sales, marketing, finance, entrepreneurship and venture capital—who suggested expanding the Web site beyond its northeast footprint.
CitySquares followed that advice and now has four national-advertising customers, up from zero a year ago.
Some small-business owners say their firms are surviving tough economic times thanks in part to advisory boards they regularly turn to for fresh perspectives and support. Yet a number of organizations that pair up small businesses with these volunteer-adviser groups say they haven’t seen more firms take advantage of their programs since the recession began.
Advisory boards can benefit small businesses in most industries after they’ve started operating, says Dennis Ceru, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College. But for those still in development, he recommends a single adviser or mentor instead.
Advisory boards differ from formal boards of directors because they only provide advice and entrepreneurs “don’t necessarily have to take it,” says Ceru. By contrast, boards of directors have a say in a firm’s leadership and more. “They can make decisions beyond the day-to-day operating structure of the company,” he says.
When building a new Web 2.0 site, especially a new social network, there’s always one hurdle that needs to be overcome – establishing a large enough userbase to make it both attractive to newcomers and worth using once you arrive.
ReadWriteWeb reports that a new site, Spiffbox, thinks they have figured out how to workaround this issue – they’re paying users to participate. Every action you take on the site including responding to emails, chats, friend invites and sharing photos, will earn you points which can then be redeemed for cold, hard cash.
Spiffbox is also different in the fact that it’s not entirely meant to be just for socializing – it wants to help you promote your career as well as ask for and receive advice from other users.
Of course what everyone wants to know is: how do you make money on Spiffbox? Basically, all that you need to do to start earning is participate.
To earn points, users should create a profile, communicate with other members, respond to messages, and optionally complete surveys or take merchant offers. With each action, more points are earned and when you reach a certain threshold (min. 2,000 points/$20), Spiffbox puts a check in the mail.
You may be surprised to learn that reaching that payout number is not as hard as it may sound. Accepting a chat invite earns you 28 points, accepting a friend request is 10 points, and so on.
After spending some time really engaging on the site, you could easily start earning cash.
Leslie Haywood’s rise from stay-at-home mom entrepreneur to reality TV business sensation started with simple dinner party glitch.
Her husband, Jason, unable to tell the difference, had served her spicy jerk chicken instead of a milder flavor at their West Ashley home one evening in 2006. Then he had mentioned that someone should come up with a way for him to tell the difference.
A frequent wine-charm user, 37-year-old Haywood dreamed up dime-sized stainless steel labels that, when placed on food before grilling, would indicate temperature or spice. She developed a business plan, found a factory in Taiwan to produce the charms for her $19.95 price point and, on national television last week, convinced a venture capitalist to buy into her concept.
“I think everyone’s still in shock,” she said by phone Monday as she pulled through the car loop to ferry one of her daughters from school to ballet. “It’s been a whirlwind of attention and support.”
Haywood speaks exuberantly about her company, even though she launched Grill Charms and then appeared on ABC’s “Shark Tank” while suffering from personal heartbreak.
Just two months after the dinner party, Haywood learned that she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. She remembers spending her recovery time carefully building strength walking on a gym treadmill and reading everything she could about launching a business.
Following two reconstructive surgeries and clean health report, she pitched herself to the CNBC cable show “The Big Idea” and watched Grill Charms take off. Then, while in Los Angeles to tape “Shark Tank” in July, her 62-year-old father had an aneurysm and died.
Haywood flew home but agreed to a second try at taping month later, resolved that she would not let the “sharks” in on her pain.
“I wanted to be able to stand on my own two feet,” she said. “It was very important to me that they didn’t feel sorry for me.”
While your favorite cooking show might be a great way to learn a new recipe or skill, nothing will ever beat having an actual chef in your kitchen to show it to you. However, most people don’t get that opportunity. Until now.
Using the tools that are readily available in nearly every kitchen, The Practical Chef, Craig Nassar, will come into your home and teach you how to use them all effectively. In many cases you don’t need a fancy gadget like the people on TV use, something similar is most likely hiding in a cupboard or drawer in your home. With over 20 years of experience behind him, it is likely that Craig will be able to help you in your cooking endeavors.
Tell us a little about The Practical Chef.
I’m a Culinary Institute of America Graduate and Certified Executive Chef with over 20 years of experience. I’ve been a Chef in New York City, Boston, Phoenix, and Austin Texas. I started in the industry when I was 14 years old working as a cleaning kid in butcher shops in my hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York. I then became an apprentice butcher and then moved on to working in restaurants. I’ve cooked for such celebrities as… Jackie O, Donald Trump, Margaret Thatcher, John Gotti, Muhammad Ali, Jamie Lee Curtis, Telly Savalis and Peter Falk.
The Practical Chef offers personal and private chef services, in-home cooking classes, cooking parties, catering and party platters.
Reader’s Digest has an interesting profile and interview with the guy who parlayed a childhood fascination with computers into one of the nation’s most-visited news websites, Kevin Rose.
Digg.com gets 35 million different visitors a month. One link from Digg’s home page can produce a tsunami of traffic that can turn a Web newcomer into a real player—or crash an ill-equipped smaller site.
And investors are banking on the idea’s value; just last September, Digg secured $28.7 million in new venture-capital funding.
Many believe Digg is worth much more: Last summer, Google was reportedly in talks to buy it for $200 million.
Rose came up with the idea for Digg in 2004 while hosting a cable news show about tech trends.
Social networking sites like Facebook had just taken off, drawing users who could post photos, links, and video and then talk about them.
Rose created a site that would take that approach to news. It debuted in November 2004. “It was an experiment,” he says. “I wanted to see what kind of news would surface and whether it would be of good quality.”
But when the number of people visiting Digg reached a few thousand a month—enough to garner ads—Rose quit his day job.
Q. Is starting an Internet business as easy as it seems?
A. Oh, absolutely. Back in 2000, just to get a site off the ground, you had to buy expensive servers. There weren’t as many freelance developers. Now you can get a rented server for $100 or less per month and hire a freelance coder for 10 to 12 bucks an hour and get off the ground for a few thousand dollars.
Q. What’s your advice for someone who wants to launch a site?
A. People spend too much time planning and trying to get everything perfect before they launch. You’re never going to know what users think until you get a site into their hands. Get something out there, find out what the community thinks, then refine and rerelease, refine and rerelease. You’re going to get a lot of things wrong, and that’s okay.
Q. What’s the best business advice you’ve ever gotten?
A. You don’t have to work for other people; you can do your own thing and it can work out. Also, do something you love.
When asked about their company’s policies for monitoring employees, more than one third of business owners say that they do not screen employee computer use in any way.
An Inc.com poll, which surveyed readers between September 22 through October 6 and received 305 respondents, found that 25 percent of companies blocked “unproductive” sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, while 19 percent monitored company email, but only when they suspected a problem; 16 percent tracked all employee computer usage.
In comparison, a 2007 survey by the American Management Association, which included businesses of all sizes, found that 66 percent of employers monitored Internet connections and 43 percent monitored email.
“I would tend to think if you have a company of 20 people or less, you already know what’s going on” with your employees, says Elizabeth Charnock, CEO of Cataphora, a Redwood City, California-based company that provides business software to collect data on employees.
Investing up front in your new employees will save a lot of time — and even customer service — from all parts of your company in the long run, and it’ll show in your sales numbers. Start today.
Training your employees sounds like it is a no brainer concept, something that everyone thinks is automatically done no matter what type of business. However, some companies do not invest the correct amount of training, if any at all, into certain employees such as salespeople. Rather, they feel it is a “comes naturally” type of job.
Take, for example, a person who is recently hired into a company as a salesperson, a few months into their job and they are caught trying to sell a product to the customer that does not exist. What do you think will happen if the customer actually bites and gets to the counter only to realize that product is not available to them? Most likely you’ve just lost a customer for life! Not good.
If employees are properly trained and continuously updated on a regular basis regarding techniques, new trends, new products being offered as well as products being discontinued and new buying behaviors that customers are showing, not only will this make their job easier but it will tremendously boost sales profits for you.
Trendspotter Springwise has a sweet article on urban beekeeping. Omlet’s Beehaus kit brings the practice back down to earth for individual consumers.
The Beehaus comes as a complete hive ready for colonization, with all the parts necessary including honey jars and a comprehensive beekeeping guide. Priced at GBP 465, the Beehaus is available in a choice of colours, and it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
An optional starter kit, meanwhile, includes the accessories a first-time beekeeper will need, such as a bee suit, veil, smoker and hive tools.
An average, colonized Beehaus will produce 50 jars of honey per year, UK-based Omlet says, with the potential for up to 100kg if things go well.
Will consumers tire of producing their own, hand-cultivated food? Survey says no, particularly during these rough economic times.
Success in a networking group comes when the rest of the group members trust you enough to open up their best referrals to you. Unless they’ve seen your work, you have to earn that trust by demonstrating your professionalism to them. Since founding BNI almost 25 years ago, I’ve seen how people truly succeeded in networks and I’ve seen how people totally waste their time in them.
Don’t waste your time and the time of your readers by posting all of your complaints about the other networkers. No one wants to hear about them.
Always follow up immediately on any referral that anyone gives you.
Don’t just concentrate on the followers and guests that you already have, invite more to your site every chance you get.
Never take a phone call while you are in a meeting, it’s rude, obnoxious and it bothers EVERYONE in that meeting.
When doing presentations don’t just wing it, make sure you are prepared and your presentation is the best it can be.
Branding. We’re done with that word. Instead, focus your efforts on expressing your identity fully and freely. Concentrate on transferring your passion to others. Make what you sell a natural extension of your personality. It won’t feel or look like branding, and as such, people will buy it. When was the last time you updated your brand identity?
Marketing is often seen as a stressful, out of control, chaotic sort of aspect to business. I believe this is due to most people not fully understanding the concept of marketing and where to locate great resources to help them. If you understand your marketing concept and have access to the right resources for help, marketing is really not that bad. Below are some of the most common mistakes made in marketing for you to avoid in the future.
Using adjectives on your website. Adjectives are pretty useless when you think about it, they are statements of what you “hope” to do, what you “hope” to accomplish. Rather, try providing testimonials proving that you have accomplished several things as well as helped several hundred people with their needs.
Putting all the spotlight on customers. Customers are good yes, but what you should be concentrating on is your FANS. These are the people that are die hard customers coming into your business all the time for years and years, the kind of people that spread the word about your company like wild fire!
When people think about children, they tend to think that their minds work in a way that is much simpler than that of adults. However, they are just miniature adults. Their minds work in much the same manner as that of a 30 or 40 year old.
Take, for example, when your child does something of great value or importance, you reward them accordingly by either giving them a larger allowance, a new toy, extra special attention that day and so on. Adults work the same way at work. When they do a great job, they expect to be rewarded accordingly for that job well done. If an employee or child does not get rewarded, the joy of doing a good job or doing the right thing quickly wears off, as Guy Kawasaki stated recently.
The same goes for when your child makes small mistakes or missteps. You step back, let them learn from the situation, and figure out the correct way to go in order to get the right result they are looking for. The same goes for your employees, they will fall from time to time as well as make a few minor mistakes here and there. Rather than get all excited and fretful, stand back and let them figure the situation out for themselves.
Inside Edition reports on 13-year-old Maddie Bradshaw who designs and sells thousands of Snap Caps — colorful bottle caps that can be worn as charms on necklaces, bracelets, and hairpins.
When victimized by workplace food thieves, some curse, others write threatening notes. Some might even contemplate surveillance cameras, if they’re hit often enough.
Being an inventor, Sherwood Forlee found another way to fight back when his sandwiches repeatedly went missing from the communal fridge at the SoHo ad agency where he worked reports The New York Post.
“It kept happening, and one day I’d had it,” says Forlee, 29, a designer and mechanical engineer who worked in the firm’s product design division.
He considered stealth laxatives and sandwiches spiked with cat food. But the light-bulb moment came when he was scanning the fridge in the apartment he shares with three roommates in Brooklyn, and came across an unidentified food item crawling with mold.
Next stop: the “anti-theft lunch bag,” a plastic baggie customized with green splotches that make a fresh sandwich look like a spore factory, deterring all but the most desperate snack stealer. When he put it to work in the office, the theft stopped immediately.
Charging $10 for a box of 25 bags, Forlee quickly sold out of his first run of 2,000 boxes. With a boost from Target, which briefly featured the product on its Web site, demand has held steady, and he’s currently on his fourth run.
Barb Sharp had talked for so many years about wanting to open a home accessories store that it had become a joke in her family.
