Perhaps you find yourself in this position or one similar: your bills are spiraling out of control; mortgage payment late with foreclosure looming. Car note is late. Insurance premium due. You find yourself playing catch up on your bills every month. Your financial woes are compounded by the fact that you cannot adequately provide for your children with some of the simple comforts of everyday life. This frustrates you. To make things worse, your relationship with your spouse is contemptuous at best. And finally, to add insult to injury, you’re working at a dead end job with no hope for advancement. The fact of the matter is that the number of days in the month outnumbers the number of dollars in your pocket book. You’ve got to do something quick. Erase the pain. Stop the bleeding. You think to yourself, “Boy, how can I get out of this mess?” You are not alone in this scenario. I’ve been there and so has many other people around the world. This is global.Starting a home based business can be the solution to your money problems. You’ve thought about it for some time and have come to the conclusion that you are going to give it a try. Will you make it is your biggest concern. Well, the truth of the matter is, with the right home based business, you can make it. However, this decision comes with some major concerns that must be addressed. The last thing you need right now is another problem. While the earning potential of a home based business is endless, you must be able to answer all of these questions:Where do I start? How do I find the right business? How much money do I want to make and how fast? Is there an initial investment? Are there marketing costs? Is there a one stop shop that can do all of the above?The solution, however, can be found in the answer to the last question – is there a one stop shop that can do it all? Well yes, there is. Here are three items to consider in your search for a home based business and that one stop shop that can do it all for you.Consideration # 1. Take a good look at yourself. What do you do really well? What are your special skills/strengths? Is there a business out there that caters to these strengths? The answers to these questions will help you find the home based business that best suits you. Keep in mind that in your present state of affairs, you’re looking for relief, not stress. You will want to partner with a team that caters to your strengths and are already achieving the kind of results you want.Consideration # 2. You will want to know how the team goes about getting customers for the product or service you’re selling. Does the team show you how to get customers or are you left on your own. Keep in mind that it does not matter how great the product or service is, you’ll make no money without customers.Consideration # 3. You will want to make sure that the company has earnings potential for long term residual income. While the recruiting of distributors is important, you’ll want to make sure that the company’s products or services generate new customers everyday over and over. You’ll want a product that can be sold online and offline. The product should speak for itself and be reflective of the highest quality.As you make your final decision on a home based business, set high expectations and demand that they are met.
Finding the Best Investment Opportunities Now
I once read that NOW is always the toughest time to find the best investment opportunities, and that sometimes it is anything but easy to make money investing. Now is 2015, and once again investment opportunities are out there if we can only find them. Where might we make money investing in 2015, 2016 and beyond?
People tend to throw the words “opportunity” and “opportunities” around a lot, especially when they are trying to sell you something (like swamp land or desert properties). For example, “the opportunity of a lifetime” or “one of the best investment opportunities I’ve ever seen”. We all learn sooner or later that real opportunities are the exception; and not the normal occurrence. Let us keep this in mind as we try to find ways to make money investing in 2015, 2016 and beyond.
If you have a brokerage account with a discount broker the world of investment opportunities is available to you at a cost of about $10 a trade. In one account you can make money investing by making a bet on stocks, bonds, interest rates, commodities; and in a wide array of markets, both domestic and abroad. Your broker’s website should offer lots of information to sift through, but it won’t tell you where the best investment opportunities will be in 2015, 2016 and beyond.
Here’s a good way to look at things: now is always a good time to look for the best investment opportunities, but it may not be an easy time to make money investing. For example, natural gas might look cheap, but it has been going down in price for several years. Interest rates are near all-time lows, but this has also been the case for years. On the other hand, stock market volatility has fallen as stock prices continued to rise. Stocks in general are now quite expensive, and super-low interest rates have made bonds expensive by historical standards.
No matter what happens in the markets in the next couple of years, many of the best investment opportunities are available to average investors in the form of ETFs (exchange traded funds) which trade as stocks. If you don’t have a brokerage account go to a financial website like Yahoo Finance and sift through the ETF performance section… looking for the best and worst performers for various time periods. You’ll be surprised by the wide array of opportunities available. Now, you must decide how you want to try to make money investing in them.
Let’s look at a couple of extreme examples you could find in early 2015. The best performer over the past 3 years (up 94%) was a Leveraged Equity fund that invests in healthcare stocks with 3x leverage. It was also up 20% in the last 3-month period. The worst performer was a 2x leveraged volatility fund, which was down 90% over the past 3 years and also down 15% over the last 3-month period. Other big losers included: gold stock funds and leveraged inverse equity (stock) funds. The real question is: do you jump on the big winners to make money investing? Or, will the big losers be the best investment opportunities for 2015, 2016 and beyond?
Here’s a real extreme example from early 2015. The best investment over the last 3-month period was a 3x LEVERAGED INVERSE CRUDE OIL ETF. It went up 285% (in 3 months). What’s that? INVERSE means that as the price of oil FALLS, the share price of this fund goes UP; and 3x LEVERAGED means it is designed to go up 3 times as much (on a percentage basis) as the drop in oil price. This was one of the very best investment opportunities in the months leading up to 2015, because oil prices then started to fall like a rock. But after a gain like that, it’s probably no longer the best investment if you want to make money in 2015 and beyond. This was yesterday’s opportunity.
On the other hand, there’s always the possibility that oil prices will rebound strongly in 2015, 2016, or later. If and when this happens, some of the best investment opportunities will likely be found in oil and other energy stocks (or ETFs) that fell in line with the previous drop in oil prices. Timing and anticipation are the keys to finding the best investment opportunities. You can make money investing by jumping on current winners, but the best investment opportunities are often found when a change in price trend begins.
Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up
One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.
However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.
Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.
But why?
In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!
So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)
The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.
Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.
Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.
By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.
You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.