Could you use an extra stream of income? A home based business is a viable option but how do you know which one is right for you? A few areas to consider when trying to decide on the best home based business is your personality, time available and profit potential.-Personality: When considering the best home based business, your personality can steer you in a general direction. Many direct sales companies recommend having home parties or one-on-one meetings as their main focus for selling products. This requires contacting friends and family to host a party. If you have trouble talking to people face-to-face or in groups or don’t want to impose on those people closest to you, the home party industry may not be for you. However, it’s not to say you can not overcome your obstacles and have a successful career in the home party industry.On the other hand, a strong and outgoing personality easily fits the criteria for that industry but does not limit oneself to just the home party type of company. All personalities lend itself well to online businesses for two main reasons. First, no matter if you are shy and quiet or friendly and outgoing, many online companies have extensive training to guide you every step of the way taking fear out of starting a business. And second, if you fear talking to people about an opportunity, many companies are automated in which your only job would be driving people to your website. Some online companies even offer online assistants who will close sales and help lead you toward success.-Time: Another factor in choosing the best home based business is time. The home party industry typically promotes having parties during the day, evening or weekends. This could be difficult to schedule around your family’s needs. The online industry is more flexible. If you choose, you can work in the middle of the night and not disturb anyone. Can you imagine asking your home party host if you could start the party at 10pm after the children are in bed? The host would think you are crazy!-Profit Potential: If you are going to spend your time and energy building a business, choose the best home based business that fits your expectations for profit potential as well. Home Party businesses generally offer 30% to 50% in profits. The online industry is usually 50% but the sales are in larger quantities and in some cases provide residual income where you can continue to get paid an override on a sale you made in the past. Online businesses open a huge market far beyond the number of friends you have or the size of your family. All you need to do is learn how to capture online sales and plug into an organized system that guides you to the path of success while working from home.I would recommend exploring your options based on your personality, time available and profit potential when deciding which is the best home based business is for you. Whatever direction you choose to go, keep in mind that the most important ingredients to being a success are consistency and persistancy…take action every day!
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.
Finding The Right Home Based Business Is Critical To Your Success When Working From Your Home
Starting a home based business can be one of the fastest ways to get out of the rat race while simultaneously creating the opportunity of “firing your boss” but make no mistake, it’s not all glamour and glitz. The fact is, developing a profitable home based business requires hard work, determination and a strong desire to succeed.Finding the right work from home opportunity revolves around a combination of items, such as the initial start-up costs, the actual opportunity itself, the quality of the product or service that is being offered and your own personal tastes and interests. With all that said; one key component that can not be duplicated or replicated is the actual asset of any home based business and that is the “You Factor”.The “You Factor” is what I consider to be the most important asset for any successful home based business. It is the driving force behind becoming unsuccessful, slightly successful or highly successful.Let me give you an example, if you are a hands on type of person that enjoys doing mundane tasks that other people avoid doing such as lawn care/landscaping, window washing, car detailing or house cleaning then those types of home based business opportunities might be just the ticket you are looking for in order to break out of the rat race lifestyle.Sure, each of those jobs represent hard work and require an individual who enjoys those types of activities but the fact is there are many money making work from home opportunities that can be taken advantage of within those fields.Of course, if you’re anything like me and prefer the direct sales route as the basis for your home based business then opportunities such as selling baskets, rubber stamping products or wickless candle warmers are exceptional ways to start working out of the comfort of your own home.As a home based business owner who has participated in several money making work from home opportunities along with several other direct sales companies I have determined that the only way to truly succeed is by finding a company that allows you to take full advantage of your individual “You Factor”.Of course, it also helps tremendously if you join a company that offers products that are impressive looking, easy to use and extremely easy to market. Those factors combined with the very low initial start-up costs make it easy to see why so many people are starting their own home based business.Of course, this direct sales opportunity is no different from any other because you will still have to approach potential customers, develop a viable marketing strategy and grow your business by recruiting others to join your sales team.Additionally, you will still require the skills necessary to conduct your business in a professional manner allowing you to provide first rate service to your customers and leadership, guidance and mentorship to the downline members on your team.With the current world economy being what it is, starting a small home based business with a minimum start up cost could be just what you need to escape the rat race.