How Home Business Can Take Advantage of a Pitney Bowes Postage MeterHome businesses are expanding throughout the world and with this evolution, a postage meter, such as those from Pitney Bowes (who produces 90% of the postage meters on the market) can add a dimension of professionalism. The Internet has given just about anyone who wants to, the opportunity to operate their own business from the comfort of their own home. Still, although these home-based businesses do not have the same overhead as traditional businesses, each one still needs to monitor its expenses and eliminate unnecessary ones when possible.Home businesses do not necessarily have to be web-based businesses. A hair stylist can run her operation out of her home as can a music instructor. When this happens, though, one factor is almost inevitably overlooked as a way to cut expenses and that has to do with postage. A postage meter offers many advantages to home business owners.When a home business owner needs to communicate with clients, sometimes this requires letters or invoices or any number of forms of paper transactions. Advertising that is mailed also requires stamps. This requires postage – and usually trips back and forth to the post office. Many home business owners claim they do not mind these trips, as it gets them out of the house. When one trip per week becomes two or three, then you are not only detracting from the time you have to promote your business, but you are also spending money on gas to get to the post office and back home.It is easy to overlook just how much a small business spends on postage. A Pitney Bowes postage meter, however, has the ability to track the number of letters and the amount of postage that was spent in a given period of time. When it comes time to track these expenses at the end of the month, there will be no more need for guesswork.A postage meter also eliminates the need to wonder how much postage to place on a given letter or package. A postage meter can weigh the parcel and determine, based on the destination zip code, how much postage is needed. Right down to the penny. How many times in the past have you thrown an extra stamp on a letter because you did not want it returned due to insufficient postage? When you run a business out of your home, the temptation to do this increases dramatically.Another advantage for home business owners that a postage meter offers is the look of professionalism. It is bound to have happened where you receive a letter from a business that was handwritten with a traditional stamp. The look and feel of the letter speaks of being unprofessional. By adding a metered stamp, your home business will look like any seriously professional business operating today. After all, image does mean a lot in the world of commerce.People want to feel that they are doing business with someone who is professional. A postage meter, such as those from Pitney Bowes, will not only save you money and time, it will also add that aura of professionalism people respond to in a positive way.
Information Product Creation: Never Compete on Price Because There Is Only One You
Information product creation requires extensive preparation, no matter which niche you work within and you want to make sure that your information product has a successful launch. That probably sounds scary and intimidating but here’s the thing: this is a one time effort and it will pay off in a foundation that is strong enough to get your ideal clients to invest in your high-end programs and services without the perils of a traditional funnel. This article will teach you a few of the things that you need to remember if you’d like to invest in yourself and start on the information product creation path using your unique talents and abilities. Remember that you never have to worry about anyone ripping off your ideas because if you understand how to properly position yourself around your story.
Understand Both Strengths and Weaknesses: It is good to have an impartial view of your own strengths and weaknesses when lay the foundation of selling yourself within the information product creation process. It helps you figure out where you are, what you lack and how to move forward so that you get as much growth as possible. It is more than important, it is urgent if you want to create fast success for yourself to have personal positive reinforcement and deep belief to provide yourself the support you need so that you can get over your own limitations to ensure that your information product is as valuable as it can be.
You also need to know exactly who your competition is so you can study them and use their methods to help you improve your own standings. Down recreate the wheel, but understand the wheel and position yourself going uphill from the competition. Check out which kinds of opportunities you’ve already got and try to figure out how best to use them while taking care to remember your strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way to figure out where you stand against your competition which helps you figure out how best to grow.
Launch on Time: No matter what, even if you haven’t officially announced your “launch date” you should launch the site when you’ve said you would. This will force you to stick to your goal and actually work on it. Thinking that “I’ll launch it when I think it’s ready to launch” will only hinder your efforts. You’ve got a responsibility that you need to live up to with your launch, and you can’t move back on that one. If you get close to your launch date and you are getting hung up on your self limiting beliefs in your information product creation, don’t worry this about getting it out there and not perfection. As long as it is usable you should launch it. Launching on time is the professional thing to do and it is more important than creating a “wow” effect in your site visitors. You can always update/upgrade your website when you have to, so there shouldn’t be any issue with that.
Analyze Your Own Concept: If you want to make your information product creation successful you need to understand how good your concept is: is it really going to work for your chosen audience or would something else be better? You already know about your competition; how does your concept measure up? If you haven’t come up with your own idea and are trying to work with someone else’s concept, do some more work on your own before your launch. People want original ideas because they’ve seen too many other me-too websites already.
Test Your Concept Before You Commit To The Information Product Creation Process: One of the biggest failures people have with information product creation is not testing an idea before putting a lot of effort into producing an information product. PPC to a small 5 page site with a landing page is a great way to test an offer before you even produce it. If people will sign up to get it, you can be sure that you can create an information product that will target eliminating the pain of your target market. The small amount of money will be invaluable in using crowd sourcing to direct the final outline of the information product creation process.
You’ll have lots of hurdles to clear after the launch of your information product and the only way to truly take care of them is to follow the advice in this article to work smarter. Plenty of people work hard, but it is the ones who work smarter who make real money online with the information product creation business model.
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.