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Week of Jan. 22, 2012—Home-Business News From The Field...
Don't Call Us--We'll Facebook You — INC: Email, text messaging, social media and phone are all competing for attention. So what's the best way to communicate directly with a partner, client or customer?...read more.
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THOUGHT OF THE
DAY
There's no feeling quite like the one you get when you get the truth: You're the captain of the ship called you. You're setting the course, the speed and you're out there on the bridge, steering.
-Carl Frederick
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| Featured e-Books |
| The 7 Secrets To Choosing The Best Home Business |
A Brief Guide To Starting A Home-Based Business |
 Learn the 7 secrets to choosing the best home business for you. Discover why 95% of home business owners fail and how to avoid costly mistakes and disappointment when starting a home business. Download now!
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 This ebook is a brief guide to help you overcome obstacles to starting a home business and place you on the road to becoming a success, in whatever they decide to do. Whether it be an online, or offline product, or service business the basics are still the same. |
| Download the PDF |
Download the PDF
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| Book Of The Month |
January Magazine |
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Fast Company |
 The old way of selling was to create safe, ordinary products and combine them with mass marketing. The new way is to create truly innovative products and build the marketing right in. But how does a brand make the transition from old to new?(FREE FOR IAHBE MEMBERS!)
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 Fast Company is written for the innovative pioneers who are transcending the boundaries of normal business conventions and shaping the business world. (AVAILABLE AS PART OF YOUR IAHBE MEMBERSHIP!)
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| Personal Growth & Success |
| Solutions for hard times... |
Opportunity In A Bad Economy
by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Writer
 Most people view a catastrophe as the worst thing that can happen—PERIOD! Their thinking immediately becomes negative, and, if the event is serious enough, this negativity feeds on itself until nothing good will come from anything an individual does....but successful people overcome all this bad thinking. To progress from negative to positive requires staying entirely away from people who are negative and trying to find something positive out of every situation. We are in a period of severe economic problems–a true catastrophe of unknown depth at this time. Successful people tend to find opportunity around every catastrophe...and that is what this article is about...
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 Tool Review |
| Getting on the bandwagon |
 Join.Me
Reviewed by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Writer
Most of us home-based entrepreneurs move around a lot during our work week. We also find subjects that need to be discussed with others, often at great distances. This has caused a lot of meeting programs and apps to become available; some carry a substantial price tag.
Accidentally, I discovered what appears to be a good one; several of my associates have been using this for some time and all I hear from them is good. It is popular on the Internet as evidenced by its Alexa rank of 3,515, and it is the subject of this review. What is it? The name is Join.Me... |
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| Book Review |
| Put your best face forward... |
 The Step-by-Step Guide to Facebook for Business, by Kathryn Rose
reviewed by Yank Elliott, IAHBE Writer
Facebook has so many followers from around the world that no entrepreneur wishing for his business to prosper can afford to ignore it. A Facebook business page is the very best way to market your business...on a limited marketing budget. This book discusses issues regarding what should be displayed on Facebook, and what should never be shown there. |
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| Getting Started Ideas |
| Cleaning up for profit... |
Spotlight On: Residential Cleaning Business
by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Writer
 In today's economic situation, many people are looking for alternative ways to make a living, even though some of them may seem beneath the efforts of college and higher education degree owners. If a job is honorable, however, and the pay is significant, why not do something out of the ordinary? Residential house cleaning is such a job, and it is the subject of this article...
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| Book: Business Reference |
Business Correspondence, Volume I: How To Write The Business Letter
 Knowing how to properly write a business letter is VITAL to the success of any business, online or in the brick-and-mortar world. In fact, well-constructed, properly formatted letters to vendors, legal entities, suppliers, customers, partners, and others you encounter in your business dealings can make the difference between a growing business and one that's failing.
This comprehensive, four-part, 24-chapter reference book covers everything you need to know about creating efficient business letters that will produce results.
This book contains the following chapters:
PART I—Preparing to Write the Letter
1: What You Can Do With a Postage Stamp
2: The Advantages of Doing Business by Letter
3: Gathering Material and Picking Out Talking Points
4: When You Sit Down to Write
PART II—How to Write the Letter
5: How to Begin a Business Letter
6: How to Present Your Proposition
7: How to Bring the Letter to a Close
PART III—Style--Making the Letter Readable
8: "Style" in Letter Writing--And How to Acquire It
9: Making the Letter Hang Together
10: How to Make Letters Original
11: Making the Form Letter Personal
PART IV—The Dress of a Business Letter
12: Making Letterheads and Envelopes Distinctive
13: The Typographical Make-up of Business Letters
14: Getting a Uniform Policy and Quality in Letters
15: Making Letters Uniform in Appearance
PART V—Writing the Sales Letter
16: How to Write the Letter That Will "Land" the Order
17: The Letter That Will Bring An Inquiry
18: How to Close Sales by Letter
19: What to Enclose With Sales Letters
20: Bringing in New Business by Post Card
21: Making it Easy for the Prospect to Answer
PART VI—The Appeal to Different Classes
22: How to Write Letters That Appeal to Women
23: How to Write Letters That Appeal to Men
24: How to Write Letters That Appeal to Farmers
DOWNLOAD THE BOOK (ZIP-184KB) |
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Software Of The Month |
| PC: |
MAC: |
SlimCleaner
Win XP/Vista/7
A variety of cloud-based system cleaning and optimizing tools in one free utility. It includes a file shredder, for instance, and it centralizes access to a variety of useful Windows tools.
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Growly Notes For Mac
Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6, 10.7
Capture everything you're interested in, all in one place. Organize research projects, trips, to-do lists, or journals. Scrapbook your images, web links, and video clips. Your imagination is the only limitation.
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| New Business Ideas |
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Success Through Altruism |
 Affiliate Programs As Fundraisers
by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Writer
Fundraising in the US is a $6 billion industry; it is needed by many groups and can be an excellent extra business, or even a main business, for many home-based entrepreneurs. Many fund raising ideas are inexpensive and require little work, while offering excellent monitary solutions for local institutions, including service clubs, churches, schools, and others. And that’s what this article is about... |
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| Expert E-Book |
You Are Your Choices: 50 Ways to Live the Good Life
 With her 25th book, lifestyle philosopher Alexandra Stoddard offers simple steps for taking charge of your life—your way. In brief essays filled with useful examples and optimism, she reveals 50 choices you can make to live joyfully in pursuit of what is true, good, and beautiful. Her essays help us trust ourselves ("Intuition is your guiding light"), stay steady in a storm ("Your choices count most in a crisis"), embrace the new ("Accept opportunity"), address unfinished business ("Have as few regrets as possible"), surround ourselves with delights ("Redefine what is beautiful"), and remember to have fun ("Cheap thrills are thrilling").
As a pioneering writer and lecturer on personal happiness for the past twenty years, Alexandra has inspired millions to break the "rules" and pursue fulfillment. Now, as scientists have begun to discover the benefits of living a happy life, Alexandra provides practical ways to live happily every day. She puts us in charge of our choices, reminding us that we always have a choice about what we think, feel, and do. When we are true to ourselves, we can fly above stress and conflict, contented and confident that we are the right path. Every choice you make is an opportunity to delight in life. You Are Your Choices offers insight and companionship each step of the way... |
Click HERE to download (12MB) |
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| Mini-Lessons For Your Business |
Tools For Online Success
 This is one online resource you don't want to miss!
Google and the Small Business Administration have partnered to educate local businesses about how to succeed online. Each video describes how you, as a small business owner, can successfully usesthe Internet to grow your business. It's important to be where your customers are...online!
Lessons are short, about three minutes each, but packed with lots of straightforward, helpful information. There are also tips accompanying each lesson, along with a link to a real small business utilizing the principles outlined in the lessons:
- Establish Your Online Presence
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Display Imagery on Your Website
- Engage Customers with a Website
- Interact with Your Community Using Free Marketing
- Promote Using Free Online Marketing
- Educate Your Customers Using Free Marketing
- Grow with Paid Online Advertising
- Measure Results with Web Analytics
- Google
& SBA
Access these tools HERE |
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| Business Trends |
| Back to your company's future |
 Rise Of The Barter Economy
by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Staff Writer
Everybody seems to want something for nothing. Barter is not quite the solution to that dilemma, but it often comes close. It is a way to turn excess capacity or inventory into goods and services either barter party may want. This article is about barter, as it was in the beginning, and as it is today... |
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| Business Tools |
| Put your best blog forward... |
Blog Review By Outsiders Is Good Practice
by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Writer
 This article originated because I realize that my blog gets very little traffic. I know that part of it is because I do not blog anywhere near as often as I ought to. But even if I had a new article twice every day, I’m afraid it would not pull as much traffic as I would like. Somewhere in my research I came across several Websites that deal with reviewing and critiquing blogs. The ideas expressed in these reviews will spark new thinking among all those who have blogs, and this article addresses some issues all of us bloggers encounter...
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Business Sales & Marketing Tips |
| Adapting your business... |
by Yank Elliott, MBA & IAHBE Staff Writer
 Social Media, which includes Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many other less known platforms, has become an important part of business marketing plans in the past few years. Recently there has been much written about how important it is to use Facebook to market your products and services. The same is true of Twitter. And until (and if) they fade away, which is unlikely because of the financial strength of their companies, home-based entrepreneurs should use them to the fullest extent they can.
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Princeton University Lecture: |
TED Talk |
| Health, Wealth, & Happiness Around The World |
Habits of Happiness |
 This informative video lecture (recorded during Princeton's Alumni Day, 02/26/11) features Angus Deaton—Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Economics. Professor Deaton discusses the concepts and realities of global happiness, wealth distribution, and health issues.
Length: 60 minutes
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 What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being, to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment.
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| Video From The Experts |
One-Stop Resource Center |
Design: How To Use Color |
Small Business Training Network |
 Color is a vital element to a successful Website design and can have a huge impact on customer sales and behavior—that's why companies spend millions designing product packaging, store themes, and more. Learn about the power of color in online marketing. This 10-minute video by Helen Bradley shows you how to use the color wheel to design the best color schemes for your small business' Web store for a truly professional look! |
 As an entrepreneur, you owe it to yourself to stop by, and become familiar with, this essential site. Explore a virtual campus housing a treasure trove of free training courses, video tutorials, workshops and knowledge about all aspects of financing, starting, maintaining, and growing a small- or home-business in today's market.
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| Expert Article |
Little Known "Boring" Websites That Make Incredible Money With AdSense
by Dimitri Davydov
 Introduced in 2003, AdSense was an outgrowth of Google's AdWords program, which put sponsored ads at the top of search results at Google's own site. Google created AdSense as a way to expand beyond search listings and onto hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs.
Google rivals Yahoo and MSN have similar programs, but they have found limited acceptance on the Web, where Google dominates both search, with more than 50% market share, and search advertising, with 90%.
Now everyone from big sites such as the New York Times and CNN.com to mom and pop operations such as Cooks Recipes and Natural Handyman have the familiar "Ads by Google" text-box somewhere on their site... |
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Monthly Content ZIP Download (21MB)
 Build
Your Online Business
with Pay-Per-Click 7Search.com!
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Show your pride as an IAHBE member while spreading the word about home-business success on shirts, hats, mugs, bags, and more! 
