Being Your Own Boss Is Easier Than Ever

Taking Your Employment into Your Own Hands

In tough economic times, you may want to find ways to secure your employment and secure your paycheck. There are many ways to do this, and pretty much none of them involve working for someone else. In the 21st century, more and more people are beginning to learn that working for someone else is not the way to go. When you work for someone else, you are putting your life in their hands and as has been seen with corporations over and over, shareholders are more important than employees. Why show loyalty for a company that may fire you to save money? In addition, if you work very hard you might get promoted but the chances are you will not. The harder you work, the same you will get paid. Why should those above you benefit from the work you do?

This is why being an entrepreneur is such a great idea. When you are in charge of your own life and you are in charge of your own career, you get several benefits. First, as an entrepreneur, you can work in an industry that you love. If you like doing yard work, start a yard work company. If you love graphic design, then begin doing graphic design from home. All of this can easily be done through being the owner of your own business. The other big benefit of being your own boss is that when the company does well, you do well. If you work hard and make an extra $50,000 for the company, then that entire $50,000 goes to you. If you have employees, you can treat them the way you wanted to be treated when you were an employee. Being your own boss puts the power in your hands and it can be one of the most satisfying things in your life.

These days, being your own boss is easier than ever. In the past, when you owned a business in your area, your customer base was only the people who could get to your store. This would greatly limit the potential for your company. However, with the creation of the internet, your customer base goes from a few hundred to a few million thanks to the ability to make money online with an internet business. Whether it is selling services online, or just selling products, the sky is the limit when you are working for yourself from your home with a business that you have online.

Another great thing that the internet does for you is it allows is it provides you with the resources of individuals who have been their own boss for years. These resources can teach you how to be a boss and how to make your business successful. Websites like EntrepreneurJourney.com help you by giving you the ability to be successful with your online business. Whether you are delving into e-commerce by selling products online, marketing yourself through social media marketing, or just doing some freelance writing, being your own boss is something you will come to love, especially when you are making a good living at it.

First Published: Feb 28, 2010

How Successful Entrepreneurs Use The Law Of Attraction

Affirming the Law of Attraction – the Successful Entrepreneur

No one disputes that there is in nature a law of positive attraction, by which people hope to gain many things, including money, by doing things and saying things that they hope will invoke its power.

The reality is that the law of attraction will always work for you, bringing about the things that you desire, so that what you want will come to you. The only problem with it, and what you need to understand is that you don’t always know what it is that you really want, and what you say you want, and what you really want are often two completely different things.

The successful entrepreneur will attract success because that is what he wants, that is what he is aiming for, and regardless of failures along the way, he will still have his eye on the ball. Everything that he does, his whole attitude and approach will reflect that deep down desire to make whatever enterprise he chooses to engage with, work and become a success. That is not to say that there will not be mistakes and errors of judgment, but when these occur, lessons will be learnt, errors discarded, and new ways to make things work will be actively looked for and sought. Ideas will come as if by magic but really they are the product of a focused mind sifting and looking for potential.

This positive attitude will tend to attract the information and concepts which are most needed to put in place something which is highly desired, which could be to get a new business going, or to reduce current working hours without losing money or momentum.

This positive attitude, which seems to attract success can easily be compared to a less focused attitude, which might appear to put a lot of effort in, but still complains of lack of success. Two men have to be at a meeting – one gets there on time, although the car broke down. The other would have got there, but the car broke down. You will hear the little “but” creep in whenever what someone says was their main desire, in fact really wasn’t.

People might say they want to go out to work but they have to stay at home with the family. They might say that they want to work from home, but neighbours keep calling in for a coffee. When they complain that their business isn’t working, it is easy to see that what they really want to do is to be at home with the family having coffee.

The law of attraction is simply that you will make every effort to get what you want and attract what you really want to you – if you are focused and do what is necessary to get a money making venture to start, you will be successful if that is what you want – but if your dreams and hopes lie in other directions – you will attract a mixed outcome at best.

First Published: Feb 1, 2010 EntrepreneurJourney.com

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Entrepreneurs and Affiliate Marketing

A great many of us spend time looking for ways to make a little bit more money. Whether it is because our current job doesn’t pay us enough, or because business is our job, the ideal situation for us would be to find a way of making money without actually doing anything. This is impossible, of course. Isn’t it? Well, to some extent it is, but there are ways of setting things up so that you can make money for yourself without ever having to do a great deal. It does require a bit of work up front, and a little bit of knowledge too, however, so it is not the fabled “money for nothing” situation for which many of us would give our eye teeth. It is as close as most of us will get, though.

The practice of affiliate marketing is becoming more and more popular for Internet savvy entrepreneurs who know enough about the vagaries of business to be able to harness the power of the web and make hundreds, even thousands of pounds without needing to do a great deal. It is actually a fairly simple practice, although there is some amount of corkscrew logic involved in getting to the stage where it is up and running, and paying money to you on a regular basis. There is also some amount of caution required, as the Internet is as riddled as any other marketplace with fraudsters and tricksters. Once you are in, though, you may be surprised by how much money you can actually make.

The idea of affiliate marketing is that businesses gain promotion from an individual or another business placing an advertisement for a product or service on their website. The mere placement of an advertisement, however eye-catching, is no guarantee of a profitable affiliation. The website on which it is placed does much of the work for the affiliate. If we say, for example, that the company looking to advertise is one which sells a range of sunglasses, beach towels and other holiday paraphernalia, the person looking to act as an affiliate would be well-served by setting up a travel blog or website. Therefore, visitors to their website will come to read about traveling and holidays, spot the advertisement and potentially click through to buy a parasol (for example).

As long as the affiliate marketer is aware of the way to do things – and this is usually agreed at the point of making an affiliation – they can earn commission from each customer who buys from the merchant’s website after clicking on “their” ad. The success of an affiliate marketing campaign depends on the marketer pre-selling, however subtly, a product which is then advertised on their site. It can be summed up as telling someone that they need something, and telling them where they can get it, without ever making the link explicit. You leave them to make that link themselves.

First Published: June 8, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

Online Money Making Scams - Fact or Fiction

Beware Of Online Money Making Websites

Making one’s way in business is something that requires not only a lot of work on the part of an individual, but some amount of luck too. Starting out as an entrepreneur presents a series of challenges, and it is unsurprising that many businesses fail in their first year. Realistically, if a business is going to fail the that is as likely a time as any. Before you have really found your feet you may come up against some issues that, despite your best will, will prove insurmountable. And what really doesn’t help is the vast amount of supposed “help” that is out there for entrepreneurs, some of which is irrelevant to your own case, some of which is just plain lies.

Among the things that you need to look out for are websites that promise to make your business go through the roof in its first six months just by following some simple advice. While there are websites out there which will be of significant help to any potential entrepreneur, there are just as many – more, in fact – that will be as much use to you as a glass hammer. The latter can be recognized a lot more easily than the former. One thing to look out for is a site which is short on actual relevant detail. These sites are recognizable from the start. Most willhave bright, gaudy graphics, and grab your attention by highlighting seemingly random words and using highly informal language.

The individuals who has set up these website are doing their level best to get as many subscriptions as possible from interested or desperate customers by assaulting their senses and making broad hints while revealing nothing about themselves or their service. The sites have taken little time and cost only a small amount to set up, so from the moment they pick up even a small few subscribers they are already in credit – unlike their customers.

Sometimes you will be offered the chance to hear a talk from a “guru” who can give you the simple secret that guarantees business success. Being a successful entrepreneur is not about simple secrets, and business success is never guaranteed. Always look out for someone who goes out of their way to tell you what they think you want to hear. They may well even give you warnings like the ones in this post – but then they will ask you for money. You cannot buy business success from scratch, and anyone who promises that they can show you how to is simply selling a lie.

The information that will allow you to really build your business and make it profitable is a whole lot more mundane than some big flashy secret that needs to be advertised on a website that looks like it was designed by a room full of drunken chimps. It might even justifiably be called “boring”. The reason is that the people who are furnishing this information do not need to send up fireworks to distract from the holes in their logic – realizing as they do that there is a lot more long term future in giving people a formula that works.

First Published: May 26, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com

PayPal Is One Of The Most Powerful Forces In E-commerce

What Is PayPal?

The way the world is at present marks a quite significant change from how things were even ten years ago. Here is a little exercise to do with Internet surfing habits. When you got on the ‘net, chances are that you used Google to find pages – but did you use it as exclusively as you do now? When you were looking for fast, detailed information on any one of a range of subjects, if you were on the Internet ten years ago you certainly didn’t use Wikipedia. It wasn’t invented, even in its most basic form, until the turn of the century. And as for financial transactions, it’s almost certain that you were using credit card details, because PayPal was in its absolute infancy.

The list goes on. Only programmers of a certain level of ability were setting up websites of any real intricacy, and maintaining them. The word “blog” would have led someone to look at you with barely concealed fear for your mental health – although LiveJournal did exist and Blogger.com was on its way. The very concept of “blogging”, though, was a very niche market and idea up until the middle of this decade – but is now at the fingertips of thousands upon thousands of people. All of the above concepts, and others, have become common currency only in recent years but, now they are in vogue, they are immensely powerful and shape a lot of our working life and everyday lifestyle.

Business is never slow to react to a trend. In all honesty, if you want to see what will be on everyone’s minds, desks and t-shirts two years from now, it is well worth looking at what the business community are doing now. This requires some amount of judgement on your behalf as well, of course – not least because large sections of the business community are busily ramming documents into shredders, crying and booking flights to countries that have no extradition policy. But if the business world decides thatsomething will be big, it is worth getting on board, because the likelihood is that it will play a big part in all of our lives in time to come. Of the above Internet concepts, one of the most powerful is PayPal.

There are few of us who have not sat in front of a monitor preparing to send payment for a service or an item and thought “Do I really want to send my card details over the Internet?”. It’s safe, ninety-nine point nine (recurring) times out of a hundred, but there is always that little jag of doubt. But for the entrepreneur who wants to sell online, the joy of PayPal is that people have far fewer qualms about using it. It is tried and tested, efficient and speedy, and it is becoming accepted by more and more companies. As time goes on this is set to increase, and the people who use PayPal now will be in a stronger position than the late adopters, as they will know how to run an account efficiently.

First Published: May 11, 2009 EntrepreneurJourney.com