How Do You Determine the Needs of Your Target Market?

When determining what business to start, the rule is to find out what the market needs and wants, and then address those needs in that kind of business. But how exactly do you find out what your target market wants?

Let’s use as an example one of the questions asked at Yahoo Answers — “What business [...]

End of the Year Checklist

It’s the end of the year again. After all the eating, shopping, and merrymaking of the holidays, take time to sit down and review your business. It is important to assess how your business did during the year.
Here are some checklists for your end of the year review:

Do your financials. If you are like some [...]

How Easy is it to Create a Successful Site?

A lot of people are lured on the prospects of making money on the Internet. They have heard or read about how others are making thousands per month, even more, just by having a website.

Until they actually start and find that it is not actually easy.
Success on the Web depends on a lot of factors:
- [...]

What Changes Are You Planning for Next Year?

It’s the end of the year again, and it’s time to take stock of how our business performed this year and to take stock of what we did (and did not do). Then of course comes the exciting part — making plans for next year.
The problem sometimes with being small or home based entrepreneur (moreso [...]

How to Hire an Accountant for Your Business

The tax folks at J.K. Lasser sent us a press release today that provides tips on what a small business needs to look for when hiring an accountant. It is not easy to find an accountant that you can trust, much less really look out for your interests.

According to J.K Lasser, the following are the [...]

Research on Strongest Online Marketing Tactic

MarketingSherpa has a new report entitled “Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008″ and one of the interesting data of the study is how the various online marketing strategies compare with regards to giving the best return on investment
According to the report, the strongest tactics and give the most ROI are:

House email marketing = 25% (strongest tactic) [...]

Increase Ad Revenues by Making Web Metrics Public

I stumbled across PowerHomeBiz.com’s profile in the new online measurement site Quantcast.com
According to Quantcast, our site “reaches approximately 70,581 U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a more affluent, younger, slightly female slanted audience.”
The demographic information certainly caught my attention. You have sites such as Alexa.com or Ranking.com that provides so-called traffic ranking based on [...]

Selling Online: Lessons from the Top Home Furnishing Stores

My all-time favorite home furnishing store, Bombay Company, discontinued its web operations after the company filed for bankruptcy in October. I guess my purchases cannot keep the company afloat ) Too bad, as I am a big fan of their cherry-colored furniture and stylish home decor items.

But there are still a wide variety of [...]

21 Common Mistakes of Home Business Startups

What’s the biggest mistake you did when you were just starting the business? The ideal situation, of course, is to go through the process of starting a business without a single misstep. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. We sometimes trip; or even stumble; or worse, fall flat on our faces.
Discounting complete ineptitude and bad luck, [...]