If you’ve ever wanted to become your own boss, manage your own business and control your own brand, then it might be more accessible than you might think, thanks to the power of technology and the internet. In fact, all you really need to get started is a computer.
A computer is your gateway to the internet
If you think about it, we can do almost everything over the internet these days. We can purchase everything from furniture to groceries, we get entertainment from it, we can learn on the internet and we can even work over the internet. In fact, much of this can even be done from a smartphone which probably explains the surge of smartphone users over the past few years.
As the gateway to the internet, your computer can serve as your hub. It’s where you can carry out business, talk to investors, engage with clients and consumers and ultimately run your business.
What do you need to become an at-home entrepreneur?
Aside from a computer, you do need to make your home a suitable workplace. This typically involves making a private area where you can focus on work, removing distractions and learning to set a schedule that you can follow. While working from home does mean you can work whenever you want to, having a schedule is never a bad idea.
You should also think about the services you need. For instance, cloud solutions can help you perform everything from accounting to collaborating with clients, and you can learn more information by simply searching up the many different cloud services available. You’ll also want to set up your very own brand identity by using social media. Growing your brand over social media is arguably one of the best ways to ensure that your solo-entrepreneur venture has a great chance of reaching a wide audience.
Picking up your very first idea
There are actually a countless number of ideas for online-only businesses. As long as you’re skilled in something, you can apply those skills to almost anything on the internet and use it to make money. Are you great at music? Then you can teach how to play instruments, teach how to compose songs, play music and get followers, start your own record label or even become an online music critic or reviewer. From just one skill, you can turn it into hundreds of different business ideas.
Online business ideas can be found all over the place but it’s important to try and pick something that is relevant to your interests or skills. As long as it’s something that can be done over the internet, you’ll have all the power you need to become an entrepreneur over the internet and offer services, products or even engaging content viewers. How you monetize this is completely up to you, and there are dozens of options to pick from.
As long as you’re honest about your products and services and work on building an audience through social media, all you really need is a computer to start your entrepreneurial venture.
Running a business from your home is something that more and more professionals are choosing to do. Remote working is easy now and it can be done. However, that’s not to say it doesn’t bring its own challenges and problems because it certainly can. Here are some ways to mitigate those issues and ensure your home is better suited to being a base for your business.
Ensure the Privacy of Your Home Office
First of all, you need to think about the privacy that you have in your home. Running a business is a big challenge and you don’t want to be surrounded by regular home-life stuff. Instead, you need to feel like you’re really going to work; that’s why it’s so important to have a separate and private space from which you can work during your scheduled working hours each day.
Upgrade Your Equipment
Upgrading your equipment also makes sense because you’ll want to make sure that you have everything that your business rivals have access to. You might not have a big office, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the most important and relevant hardware and software at your disposal as you complete your work. It’s pretty important to have that stuff when you’re trying to run a business.
There’s a range of virtual services out there that anyone can make use of. If you’re trying to make your business seem more professional while also taking some of the work of your shoulders, using these virtual services is one way to make that happen. They can make your life easier and ensure your business provides the right impressions. It’s something that some home businesses can struggle with, so why not make the most of these resources?
Consider Big Changes
In some cases, you might want to make big changes in your home. For example, you could use Mark Saunders homes in order to have yourself a new home built. If you want to move anyway, building a home will allow you to incorporate your business into the home, ensuring that’s definitely enough dedicated space in it. Or you could look at building extensions so there’s more room for your business in the home.
Invest in Communications
Communication is an important thing for most businesses. You need to be able to communicate effectively with the outside world. The first thing in this department that you need to think about is your internet. Paying for fast and reliable broadband is absolutely essential because you don’t want your business to be held back by something like this. You can save by using a VoIP phone in your home office as well.
These things will all help you to work better from your home and run your business better from there. It’s important to work on your home office and things like that because when you have a better base for your business, it’ll help you to succeed more over the course of the years to come.
You have always dreamed of being a writer, of sharing a story with the world. You have a brilliant story taking shape in your mind and now seems to be the right time to start getting it out and onto paper. With so so many people self publishing their first books, now is an excellent time to take the plunge and start writing. Assuming that you have grasped the fundamentals of writing your first book, then your next stage will be to focus in on your characters. Which is where we come in, as here are our 3 steps to character development, so sharpen that pencil and get scribbling down your ideas.
Your characters needs to be living and breathing to you. If they aren’t alive to you, how do you expect them to come off the page for your readers? Consider them from every possible angle and imagine what they would do in a variety of situations. This need not be situations that they find themselves in in your tale, you simply need to understand how they would react at any given time. How would they feel, what would they say, what body language would they be displaying? In order to ensure that every character in your book is three dimensional, you need to go through this process with all of them.
Do your research
They say that you should write what you know, don’t they? However, even if you do base your novel on real life events or experiences, the chances are that you are still going to need to carry out some research. Your characters need to be completely believable, so for every job that they have and for every situation that they find themselves in, you need to understand it and be able to convey that to your reader. Only then will they be able to empathise and believe in your story.
Would your character get into trouble with the law and need the help of a bail bondsman? Would your character be aspiring to be a zookeeper and be undergoing their training? Would your character work at the Empire State Building? The sky’s the limit, you know this, but whichever way you decide to go with your characters, you need to ensure that you have properly researched and looked into the reality of each of these experiences before writing them.
Make them relatable
If you want people to keep on reading, you have to take the above two steps and then ensure that your character is relatable. You can make them likeable, flawed, heroic, strongly opinionated, adventurous, it is all entirely up to you, but the reader needs to relate to them on some level. No-one wants to read a book where they couldn’t care less about any of the characters and their fates. Readers need to be invested in your storyline, so make them relatable, bring them to life and inject a healthy dose of reality through your research.
When the time comes and your book is published, do be sure to come back and tell us all about it!
Life is an unpredictable thing. Sometimes, everything seems to be going our way, and it’s hard to imagine a situation that could throw us off our stride, or interfere with our goals, dreams, and aspirations.
Then, like lightning out of a clear blue sky, we end up becoming the victims of an accident, and find ourselves having to collect an accident report, and radically reassess and reformulate the way in which we are living our lives.
Accidents have the power to knock even the most resilient of us off track for a while, and, in particularly bad cases, can absolutely demolish our sense of well-being, and our ability to conceptualise a bright and meaningful future.
It’s in cases like these – where things seem absolutely dire – that it’s more important than ever to do whatever we can to rally our resources, and to begin to bounce back.
Here are a few things you can do that might help you to bounce back from an accident.
Give yourself “permission” to refocus and adjust, but don’t give yourself permission to give up
Accidents of various sorts can massively impact our ability to continue working in the way we had been previously, and this, then, can move our goals and ambitions from the realm of the possible to the realm of the apparently impossible.
It’s natural, following an accident, to be deeply disheartened and to want to give up. But if you do give up, you set a precedent, and begin a negative spiral that it may be impossible to recover from.
Following your accident, give yourself the “permission” to refocus and adjust. Restructure your goals and routines to be more practical in light of your changed circumstances. But absolutely do not give yourself permission to give up.
Maintaining a sense of hope, and a set of valued goals, can be absolutely fundamental for your well-being on numerous levels.
2. Narrow your time-horizon a little bit, and get “systems-focused”
One consequence of having an accident, is that it means you are thrown into a state of chaos, at least for a certain period of time. In such a state as this, it can be very difficult – if not impossible – to make hard and fast plans over the medium to long term.
But just because the future has become a bit more uncertain, doesn’t mean you can afford to become completely unstructured and unfocused in your life.
Instead of putting life “on hold,” narrow your time-horizon a little bit, and get “systems-focused.” In other words, come up with daily routines that seem productive and uplifting to you, and take pride in acting those out regularly, and in a structured way.
3. Work to reintroduce order to your life where you can
As already stated; being the victim of an accident means that your life is overtaken by chaos, at least to some degree, and for a certain period of time.
Ultimately, though, no one can live in chaos indefinitely – and feeling as though you’re caught in a chronically chaotic state will inevitably lead to heightened stress and anxiety.
One of the best things you can do in order to bounce back from your accident, is to begin reintroducing order to your life wherever you can, as soon as possible. This might mean going to bed by certain time each night, it might even just mean reintroducing a particular morning routine.
In either case, it’s a step in the right direction, and the way to begin to regain control over your situation.
When running a new business it can be easy to forget about the importance of your and your employee’s mental health. But the way that thinks, feel and behave can have a dramatic impact on office morale, productivity and the day-to-day running of your workplace. Helping yourself and your employees achieve optimum mental health could be one of the most important factors when it comes to the health and success of your entire business.
The Real Cost Of Mental Health
In a world where more and more of our workforce are being treated for or currently suffering from a mental illness, it is important that it is something that you will more than likely have to address within your workplace at some time or another. An issue like mental illness and substance abuse issues can cause you money in the long run so it is important that you tackle them head on and in an open and honest manner. After all, issues such as increased absence, lack of engagement and health-related issues that arise from issues such as anxiety and depression can affect your bottom line. Helping you and your team stay mentally healthy and strong is a great way to have a flourishing and productive business. Here we’ve outlined a few tips to ensure that you have a strong and fit workplace.
Encourage A Healthy Work/Life Balance
Encouraging staff to come in early and leave late is not the key to a successful company. Reports have shown that employees feel that they are under increasing pressure to work longer and longer hours, in fear of being seen as lazy or unmotivated. However, it is shown that in companies such as this, staff are usually burnt out, stressed out and demotivated. Which has a negative impact on overall productivity and morale? Let your employees follow from your example, like Cynthia Telles and take regular holidays, arrange staff days out and have a wide range of hobbies outside of work. Get to know your employees and encourage them to take on holidays or to go and see that musician they like or even start painting again. It’ll help you build a genuine rapport with your staff as well as opening up important channels of communication. Don’t expect your employees to be available late into the evening or during weekends. Unless there is an emergency there is nothing that cannot wait until Monday. Encouraging your employees to ‘work to live’ instead of ‘living to work’ will create an environment full of happy, healthy and productive staff.
Keep An Open Discussion Regarding Mental Health
Open up the channels of communications within your business by ensuring that you bring up any issues related to stress, anxiety and other mental health concerns. By talking about it you ensure that your team knows that everyone is affected by mental health issues at some time or another or has dealt with it with their family and friends. Let your team leaders know of signs and symptoms they can look for regarding psychological problems or distress and educate them on how to deal with it tactfully, appropriately and with care. An understanding conversation could be the difference between making a colleague feel alone or willing to seek help.
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