treat home business like real business

Treating Your Home Business Like a Real Business is Vital

When you’re running a business out of your home, just the fact that you’re working every day in that environment almost gives you the feeling that it’s not a legitimate business. Naturally, you know that it is legitimate, but the casual surroundings and often smaller scale have a way of fooling you into thinking that you can treat it as a casual endeavor, which will have a negative effect if you continue to look at it that way. It’s easy to forget that everything is just the same as a standard business, except for the place out of which you are running it. You still need funding, market research, a website, employees in some cases, and every other element that you would need if you were running your business out of a regular office space. If you don’t treat it that way, you can retard your growth and impede the …

Phone Number Porting & Call Forwarding: What’s the Difference?

Do you find yourself in a position where your calls are coming in for the business, but they’re being sent to the wrong place? What do you do in that scenario? Well, the first problem might be that people are dialing the wrong number, but chances are, you’ve already got the phone number straightened out. When people are calling your main business line, but you want those calls to be sent to somewhere else, what you’ll do is to have those calls forwarded to another number, or another phone. That’s call forwarding. When you want your business phone number moved to somewhere else, entirely—that’s called porting. This is what we’re going to explain in this article. Once you understand what the words, “forwarding” and “porting” actually mean, it’s very simple, but understanding what each of these words mean is the key and is the first step. Hence, the reason for …

4 Online IT Training Resources for Yourself & Your Employees

If you deliberately clicked on the link for this post and are reading this now, and you’re a business owner, then you can go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. Showing interest in this particular subject means that you understand the value of information technology, not only for an IT professional by trade, but for yourself and everyone on your team. That’s why we’re providing the resources in this article because we want you to know exactly where you can go when you’re ready to take your IT game to the next level. This is absolutely an area that everyone, but especially business owners, needs to understand more fully. Why Do You Need IT Training? You may wonder why, when you have an IT professional on staff, you would need to train yourself in IT. There are actually a few reasons why you would want to do …

Ecommerce Can Infinitely Scale Home Business

How Ecommerce Can Infinitely Scale Your Home Business

Ecommerce is far from what it was 10 or 15 years ago. When online retailers, or “dot-coms”, as they were commonly referred to back then, first began to emerge as pioneering entrepreneurs who realized that selling goods and services over the Internet was a barely-tapped, extremely lucrative channel for doing business, it was pretty exclusive. This was a time when many consumers were still wary of submitting their credit card numbers online, but since there were still enough people who were fine with it, it opened up a whole new arena of commerce. It didn’t take long for other enterprising new businesses to jump on the bandwagon and start selling their products from a website. There were still relatively few businesses who were participating, though, and those who dared to try it only sold certain types of products. Not only that, but online marketing was in a nascent stage, as …

800 Number History

The History of 800 Numbers and Why We Want Them

Toll-free phone numbers have been around for quite a long time now, and their value to businesses remains even until today. There are a few benefits to having a toll-free number, most notably the fact that anyone can call it without assuming any charges, but it’s also a simple way to give your business a national presence. On top of that, it works great to turn it into a vanity number to make it easier for customers to remember and identify your business, especially when it has the original (800) area code. 800 numbers have come a long way to become what they are today. All the way from collect calling, to expensive, regional-based numbers offered during the time when AT&T still monopolized the telecom industry, to the affordable, nationwide toll-free service with which we are familiar today. In this article, we’ll explore that extensive history, its gradual development over …

How to Infuse Your Company with a Positive Attitude

  You might be thinking, “I don’t really care if everybody has a positive attitude. I just want them to get their work done.” As a business owner that needs to make sure your product gets made and sold consistently and efficiently, you’re probably not alone in having that sentiment, but that would be a pretty major oversight. The attitude and well-being of your employees is more important than you think because people who have a positive and proactive approach to their work actually get more done. They will also be willing to put in extra effort and get things done more efficiently. Positivity carries over into every aspect of the company, and it even creates a better atmosphere for your customers. There are a lot of ways you can inspire this positivity in your company. You can start with these few, very effective strategies.     Lead by Example …

Arcserve or Carbonite: Which Cloud Backup Service Stands Out?

Unless you have a highly-experienced, well-equipped, and resourceful IT genius on staff, you’re going to need some help to secure your data for the company and make sure that you’re protected in the unfortunate event that your systems are compromised. No matter how good your IT guy is, anyway, it’s still going to be necessary to have a backup service, so that you have the added layers of protection and the solutions they provide to be sure your systems get back up quickly if anything happens. Even for small events such as accidental deletions of data, you’ve got to have backup systems in place so that your business can continue to operate normally. This is exactly why these backup services exist, and they now have resources and technology to do an exceptional job of securing your data. We’re going to compare two leading providers of cloud backup services, Arcserve and …

Grow Home Business Partnering

Grow Your Home Business by Partnering with Others

Business owners tend to be the type of person who is independent and prides him or herself on being “self-made”, which is a good thing, but when you are that type of person, it’s important to remember that you can gain an advantage from partnering up with others, too. There are a variety of ways that you can connect with other people and organizations to help with growing your business. Whether you just need someone to join up with you in the business because they have something they can bring to the table, or you find another business with which you can work together for mutual gain, a partner can be a great ally. The following are a few ways that you can hook up with others to grow your business further than you may have thought you could. Classic Symbiotic Partnership This is the simplest form of partnership, and …

High-Quality Phone System

8 Ways to Tell If You Have a High-Quality Phone System

Every business needs some kind of phone system. Well, nearly every business needs it. There are some businesses today who actually manage customer support entirely through email and other messaging platforms, but even for those who have the ability to do that, it’s questionable whether it’s a good idea to completely eliminate phones. Back in the old days, there was only one type of phone system which consisted of landlines and nothing else, but then alternative types of systems were introduced, such as VoIP lines, virtual phone systems, and even personal cell phones. It can be pretty tough these days to choose one and to be sure that you’re getting everything you need to properly manage calls for your business. That’s why we’re providing some points here to give you a basic barometer that will tell you whether or not your phone system has exceptional quality and performance. If your …

SpyFu: The Greatest Competitor Research Tool Available Today

  You may not be the most skilled in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and that’s ok because many business owners are not. To become proficient at integrating SEO into your marketing strategy, it takes time to do your own research and learn how to make it work for you, as well as a teacher that can walk you through everything and show you what it all means. SpyFu actually does this for you, too, but their service does a lot more than that and can empower you with information about your competitors that will actually be of great use to you—not just a ton of meaningless data. There are quite a few services that you can find online which will provide you with tools to let you look at a lot of metrics for the SEO marketing campaigns of competitors and keyword research; however, none are as comprehensive as SpyFu, …