Why Starting An Internet Home Based Business Make Sense

one of the reasons that people start an internet business when they have a full time job is because they believe that it is ultimately advantageous for them to do so. The question really then becomes one as to whether or not these people are correct in their assertions. Well, there are certainly some advantages to starting an internet businesses compared to having a full time job in the office. So let's take a look at a few of the big ones and see if they apply to you.

First and foremost, there is the comfort aspect of an internet business. The comfort aspect comes from you being able to work from your own home, in your own chair, frequently in your pyjamas should you so choose to do so. This means that you don't have to go anywhere and can do everything and earn money from the comfort of your own home. By having an internet business, you can sleep late at night and wake up even later in the afternoon if you choose to. It is definitely something to consider and something that a lot of people have been successful with. There are many people that claim that their internet business success has come from being motivated by that comfort factor.

Secondly, there is a convenience factor to go along with that comfort factor when you have an internet business. In addition to being in your own house, you actually don't have to leave it that often to get materials or other things. All of the components of your internet business are virtual and therefore controlled directly from your computer. Whereas customer service representatives or anyone else along those lines need to frequently leave their computers in order to do things for their customers, you as an internet businessman will probably not be hampered by that same need. Another key benefit of an internet business is not having to commute daily to your office. Your actual commute time is walking from your bedroom to you office in your home. Just imaging the amount of time and money you'll safe by not being stuck in a traffic jam. Convenience is a big reason why some people are able to succeed in an internet business.

In addition to those two advantages in starting an internet business, another one to consider would be the cost. When you are starting up a business for a specific type of venture offline, there are going to be massive start-up costs associated with it that will warrant you taking out a loan and ultimately taking a big financial risk. However, if you run an internet business, you can start up your operation for free. If you want to be professional about your internet business, you can even do that without spending more than $100 or so in start-up costs. It is a very cost-effective way to do business and one that has helped a number of people that didn't have the stomach for offline business ventures.

These are the three biggest advantages inherent to starting an internet business. When it comes right down to it, all three of them can make a profound difference in a person's life and therefore for that reason deserve to be given consideration. There are downsides to an internet business as well and these downsides need to be carefully considered before you decide to embark on an online venture instead of an offline one.

Starting Your Own Medical Transcription Business

Introduction

According to the predictions of the United States Department of Labor, the MT industry will expand at a greater than average rate through the year 2012. The health care industry will need 158,000 more professionals in this field to keep up with baby boomers that are becoming senior citizens and will require more medical care. In this profession, there is great demand for qualified personnel, and much job security for those who meet the need and produce quality work.
Medical transcription is one of the few legitimate work at home jobs a person can train for. This article will focus on how to start your own Medical Transcription business.

Education

To work professionally in this field, you first must get quality education. The best education for medical transcription is to enroll with a well-known on-line MT school. Many community colleges offer MT training, but since community colleges must meet the needs of the community they do not gear their training toward work at home MTs and they frequently throw in courses like filing, office procedures, etc. This takes away from the time you need to practice transcribing. Additionally, the best dictation tapes for training are the SUM CDs, and the community colleges cannot afford for every student to have a full set of these CDs, so students seldom get a chance in just one semester to transcribe all of the necessary reports that will assist one in becoming a qualified MT.

Getting Started

One you are adequately trained as an MT, you will probably wish to work for a national MT service where your work will pass through an MT editor for a few months. This will give you time to gain confidence, and will assist in ironing out any deficits that you may have in your skill set.

After you are thoroughly trained and confident in your skills, you are probably going to want to cut out the middle man (the national service), and contract with local physicians yourself. There is much money to be paid in launching out in this direction.

You will first need to make sure that you have a good home office set up including a good computer system, quality printer, fax machine, and adequate office space.

You will also need to decide how much you will charge for your services and what services you will offer. Are you willing to find addresses for letters? Are you willing to print the reports? Are you willing to mail letters? It is important not to undercharge for your services as this drives rates down in your area. The idea for a successful business is to charge competitively but to offer a few additional services.

Start up Expenses

Start up expenses vary greatly depending upon how many clients you want initially and if you intend to work from a home office or rent office space. You must figure the expense for an initial mass mailing, advertising expenses, initial office set up, and how you will pay for the dictation equipment, and or digital services. Most small MT businesses could get off the ground with just a few thousand dollars.

Finding the Clients

At this point, you are ready to find some clients. The first step is to take a survey of the physicians in your area. You want to ask the office manager the following questions to determine the need in your specific area:

- Do they have on-site transcription?
- How much experience do they require?
- What type of dictation equipment do they use- tapes or digital?

Then you will want to create an excellent flyer outlining your services, and to do a mass mailing to physicians in your area. Make sure you keep a list of the physicians that you will be mailing to, and then follow up with a telephone call to the office manager.

A list of selling points for going with a service rather than having someone in-house do the transcription is as follows:

- Save office space.
- Save money on benefits packages.
- Have vacation coverage.
- Turn around time is faster because the focus is just on MT and not other office tasks.

Once you get the appointment with the office manager or the physician, you need to sell them on the idea of using you as opposed to handwriting their records, or having someone in-house do the work. The benefits of transcription over handwriting are as follows:

- HIPAA compliance.
- Less mistakes. Explain that if the doctor is brought into court and asked to read what they have written but they cannot decipher their own handwriting, it could pose a legal situation. Additionally, if referring doctors cannot read the faxed record, and mistakes are made, it could pose legal issues.

Also, you should emphasize why the physician should choose you to do his transcription. Some selling points include the following:

- Quality transcription
- Confidentiality of information
- Excellent turn around times (TAT)
- You use state of the art equipment
- You are willing to do STAT reports whenever necessary

Being Organized

Once you have established a few clients and are happily working at home for yourself making good money, you will realize that you need to keep track of income and expenses for tax purposes. There are several ways to do this. One is to rely on an accounting software program like Quick books. You can also hire an accountant who will have you drop off your receipts and bank statements monthly. You can also keep records yourself but this should be done in an organized way. It is suggested that you take a general bookkeeping or accounting course to make sure that you are doing this correctly.

Also, it is never a bad idea to consult briefly with an attorney when doing a new business start up to make sure that you are complying with all local, state, and federal laws. Some people like to set up their business as a corporation, S-Corp, or sole proprietorship; others will do a limited liability corporation. Details about the different ways to set up your business is beyond the scope of this article, but it is suggested that you do research on each way that you can set up your business as each has both its benefits and drawbacks.

Conclusion

It is important to know when you need help. If you wish to grow your business and you continue to solicit for new clients, then you will need to hire people to help you do the work. Most small MT services will hire independent contractors to do this. You will need to do some research on how to keep track of the income you pay each contractor as you will need to prepare 1099 tax statements at the end of each year for each contractor. Additionally, doing some reading on employment law would be a good idea. Many new service owners get into trouble by treating their independent contractor’s like employees. There are specific laws governing the differences between independent contractors and employees.

Along with hiring some help, you will want to protect your business secrets by having each independent contractor sign a confidentiality agreement and possibly a non-compete agreement. It would be wise to have an attorney draw up these two documents for you to make sure they will stand up in a court of law should it be necessary. A non-compete agreement protects the business owner from things like an independent contractor soliciting your clients for a lesser amount. A confidentiality agreement prevents an independent contractor from discussing your trade secrets with others.

All in all starting your own MT service is a lucrative proposition and the outlook through the year 2012 is quite promising. The starts up costs are reasonable and you have the opportunity to grow the business as slowly or as quickly as you desire.

eBay made easy: ready to start an eBay business? These 5 simple steps will get you on your way

Ten years after being formed in 1995, eBay has become the world's leading online marketplace for all sorts of goods. At any given time, 29 million items are available worldwide on eBay, with more than 3.5 million new items added every day and $1,000 worth of merchandise sold every second. The online auction site has 135 million registered users in 32 international markets, and more than 430,000 people in the United States alone make a full- or part-time living on eBay.

f you think eBay is just about bobblehead dolls and Pez dispensers, think again. While $2.2 billion worth of goods in collectibles were sold on eBay in 2004, antiques and collectibles ranked only No. 6 among eBay's sales categories. The five highest were: automobiles and auto supplies ($11.1 billion); consumer electronics ($3-5 billion); computers ($3.0 billion); clothes and accessories ($2.9 billion); and books, movies and music ($2.4 billion).

Real people are making big bucks on eBay--and thousands have even reached PowerSeller status by maintaining at least $1,000 per month in sales for three consecutive months. Case in point: Angle Cash, 37, a stay-at-home mom who started selling on eBay nearly six years ago because it was "something I could do and watch the kids at the same time." Today, her Kennesaw, Georgia, company, Cashco1000 Inc. (www. cashco1000.com), sells thousands of home-decoration and other items each month on eBay and expects to break $500,000 in sales on eBay this year.

Even owners of existing businesses have found success on eBay by using it as an adjunct to their brick-and-mortar operations. Dan Morphy, 33, runs the Adamstown Antique Gallery (www. aagal.com), a 10,000-square-foot antiques mall in Denver, Pennsylvania. After a few successful eBay auctions, he started offering the antiques vendors who rent space in his gallery the opportunity to sell five items a month on eBay, at no charge other than out-of-pocket expenses. Within two years, Morphy not only had a full gallery of dealers, but was also listing 700 pieces a month and had exceeded $2.5 million in eBay sales.

If you dream of building your own eBay business, it's easier than you think. We've distilled what you need to know into five basic steps.

Step 1: Register Your Business

Getting set up as an eBay seller is a simple process that takes just a few minutes. You'll be required to provide your name, address, e-mail and phone number, as well as a credit card number and your checking account information. This information is used to confirm your identity--which protects the integrity of eBay's operation--and to collect auction fees.

Since every eBay business is a retail business, you should also register your business with federal, state and local tax authorities and consider forming a corporation or an LLC to protect you against legal liability. (For more legal issues you should know about before you start, go to www. entrepreneur.com/ebay/legaltips.)

Most eBay sellers are also encouraged to open an account with PayPal, an online payment service owned by eBay that enables buyers to pay you by credit card or by debiting their checking accounts, without you having to obtain merchant card accounts.

Step 2: Find Stuff to Sell

This can be the biggest challenge in setting up an eBay business. Keep these points in mind:

* PICK THE RIGHT PRODUCT. Select something you'll enjoy selling and that stands a good chance of making a profit. Avoid merchandise you know absolutely nothing about, that's difficult to describe in a short paragraph, that won't photograph well or that's tricky to ship without damage.

* CONSIDER COST AND SALE PRICE. "Buyers and sellers on eBay set the price--you don't," says Melissa Sands, 35, who started selling on eBay in 1999 to help her husband, a comic-book dealer, get rid of excess inventory. Today, Sands runs Sands-o-Time (www. sands-o-time.com), an eBay store selling pottery, porcelain, glass, silver, costume jewelry and more with sales averaging $8,000 to $12,000 per month. Before you buy anything, find out what other similar items have sold for on eBay and ask yourself if there's a good chance you will make money.

* SELL RELATED MERCHANDISE. "If you make it easy for people to buy something, they will want to buy more from you--and you have to have related merchandise in stock," advises Cash. "So, for example, if you're selling collectibles, you should also carry the display racks, books and other accessories those particular collectors will want to have."

* MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH STORAGE SPACE FOR YOUR MERCHANDISE. Don't start ordering pallets of large items if your basement or garage is small, or if your front door isn't big enough to squeeze the crates through.

* LEARN HOW TO PACK AND SHIP GOODS. Calculating shipping costs properly is also important. To help you with this, eBay, FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service all offer shipping calculators on their websites. Buyers really hate it if they think you're gouging them on the shipping and handling fees.

Do Us a Flavor - Ben & Jerry's Issues a Call for Euphoric New Flavors

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. -- (Grassroots Newswire) - Are you an ice cream aficionado? Do you fancy yourself a flavor innovator? Then Ben & Jerry's wants you to do them a "flavor!" Ben & Jerry's announces the "Do Us a Flavor Contest" - an opportunity to become an honorary Ben & Jerry's Flavor Guru and create an original, mouth-watering ice cream flavor.

"We hear suggestions from our customers all the time about different flavors we should be offering, now everyone has an opportunity to make some history at Ben & Jerry's," said Sean Greenwood, PR Poobah for Ben & Jerry's.

Ben & Jerry's Flavor Gurus are a bunch of cool guys with even cooler jobs. They boldly go where no ice cream makers have gone before. From Cointreau(R) to Sambuca, sweet potatoes to sugar plums, no ingredient goes unconsidered for the next lip-smacking, completely unexpected Ben & Jerry's flavor. They mix, blend, chop, whip, puree and swirl until they come up with an unrivaled pint of pure ice cream indulgence.

"We create and taste ice cream flavors all day long, so we thought it would be nice to take a break and let someone else do our jobs for a while," said Arnold Carbone, Conductor of Bizarre & D and Chief Flavor Guru at Ben & Jerry's. "We're looking for people to let loose and get funky in creating the next chunky ice cream. We can't wait to taste the results."

Ready to create the next Chunky Monkey(R), Chubby Hubby(R) or Phish Food(R)? All it takes is some inspiration, imagination and maybe a little discombobulation. Just visit www.benjerry.com to get cooking. First, pick an ice cream base like brownie batter, white chocolate or sweet cream, or something we've never thought of! Then go wild, adding in lots of chunks and swirls. And don't forget to give your concoction a catchy name. You can even submit a photo of your creation or one of yourself with your flavor masterpiece.

If you need a little help getting started, try the online Flavor Generator to get your creative juices flowing. Flavor entries will be judged on creativity (40 percent), flavor profile (40 percent) and relevance to Ben & Jerry's brand (20 percent).

Five finalists will be invited--four from across the United States and one from Canada--to a Flavor Finals Event to be held at Ben & Jerry's in Vermont. The showdown will be judged by Ben & Jerry's Flavor Gurus as well as a panel of guest judges. The grand prize winner will win an ice cream party for friends and family featuring their winning flavor, plus some of their fabulous flavor to take home. But everyone who enters is a winner! All contest entrants will receive Ben & Jerry's scoop shop coupons so they can enjoy a tempting treat while they wait to hear if they're a flavor finalist.

Contest timing:

March 8 - July 31, 2006 - Submit contest entries

September 8, 2006 - Announce Five flavor finalists

October 2006 - Flavor Finals Event at Ben & Jerry's; winning flavor creator announced

November 2006 - Ice cream party for winning flavor creator

In addition to all of Ben & Jerry's euphoric flavors, there have been a few famous flops along the way. Here are a few flavors whose fates were debatable from the get-go. Or in other words... don't go there!

Sugar Plum - Plum Ice Cream with a Caramel Swirl

Peanuts! Popcorn! - Caramel Ice Cream with White Fudge Covered Caramel Popcorn, Toffee-Coated Peanuts & a Caramel Swirl

Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich - Peanut Butter Ice Cream with Peanut Butter Bits & a Strawberry Jelly Swirl

Chips and Dip- sour cream onion ice cream with potato chips - one bite was all it took to kill it.

Licorice - a good way to lose your fillings

Lemon Peppermint Carob Chip -We can't remember the recipe ....but the name pretty much says it all.

Pepperoni Pizza with Anchovy Swirl - need we say more?

All "Do Us a Flavor Contest" submissions will become the property of Ben & Jerry's. For complete official rules and how to enter, visit www.benjerry.com.

About Ben & Jerry's

Ben & Jerry's produces a wide variety of super-premium ice cream, sorbets and ice cream novelties, using dairy products from a Vermont dairy cooperative and high-quality ingredients. The company is committed to using milk and cream from cows that have not been treated with the synthetic hormone rBGH, and states its position on rBGH on its labels. Ben and Jerry's products are distributed nationwide and in selected foreign countries in supermarkets, grocery stores, convenience stores, franchise Ben & Jerry's Scoop Shops, restaurants and other venues.

Ben & Jerry's, a wholly-owned autonomous subsidiary of Unilever, operates its business on a three-part mission statement emphasizing product quality, economic reward and a commitment to the community. Ben & Jerry's contributes a minimum of $1.1 million annually through corporate philanthropy that is primarily employee led. Contributions made via the Ben & Jerry's Foundation in 2001 totaled over $1.4 million. Additionally, the company makes significant product donations to community groups and nonprofits both in Vermont and across the nation. The purpose of Ben & Jerry's philanthropy is to support the founding values of the company: economic and social justice, environmental restoration and peace through understanding, and to support our Vermont communities. For the full scoop on all Ben & Jerry's fabulous flavors, visit www.benjerry.com.

Research and Markets : Tesco Plc - SWOT Framework Analysis

SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective.

The aim of any SWOT analysis is to identify the key internal and external factors that are important to achieving the objective. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:

Internal factors - The strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization.

External factors - The opportunities and threats presented by the external environment.

The internal factors may be viewed as strengths or weaknesses depending upon their impact on the organizations objectives. What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses for another objective. The factors may include all of the 4Ps; as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on. The external factors may include macroeconomic matters, technological change, legislation, and socio-cultural changes, as well as changes in the marketplace or competitive position. The results are often presented in the form of a matrix.

SWOT analysis is just one method of categorization and has its own weaknesses. For example, it may tend to persuade companies to compile lists rather than think about what is really important in achieving objectives. It also presents the resulting lists uncritically and without clear prioritization so that, for example, weak opportunities may appear to balance strong threats.

Content Outline:

A. Executive Summary

B. A Brief Profile of the Company

C. SWOT Framework Analysis

C.1 Strengths to Build Upon

C.2 Weaknesses to Overcome

C.3 Opportunities to Exploit

C.4 Threats to Overcome

D. Glossary of Terms

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c67242