A hot trend in the home based business world right now is the forming of strategic alliances. Strategic alliances between home based business owners are generally not between competing home based businesses, but between businesses that offer similar products and services. The strategic alliances can be either short term or long term, depending on the need and desire for it to continue. If your home based business could use a boost, and whose couldn’t, right, you might want to consider forming a strategic alliance–or two. The advantages are many, and some of them just might surprise you.For instance, forming a strategic alliance with a home based business that offers a similar but broader range of products and services than your own would allow you to offer your home based business customers more products and services. This way, you’d spend less time and money developing your own. Most home based business strategic alliances work out a commission plan that can make this extremely beneficial to both home based businesses involved.Another way a strategic alliance can benefit your home based business it that you instantly have a greater number of sales people selling your products and services. This means you have to hire fewer sales people for your own home based business. Hiring fewer employees saves you a great deal of money–and time.A home based business strategic alliance also allows you to compete at a higher level than you could by yourself. You can reach a larger target market through a home based business strategic alliance, while also increasing your existing customer base. This gives you the advantage of being able to compete with larger home based businesses and conventional companies without having to increase your overhead, since most strategic alliances work strictly on a commission basis.Your home based business will also benefit from a strategic alliance in offering you an increased number of knowledgeable, skilled people working on a project. You’ll gain experience and knowledge from being with other home based business employees that you can easily put to use for your own home based business. Also, not having to pay these employees saves you a great deal of money that you can put to use growing your home based business and expanding it much sooner than you would be able to otherwise.Also, your home based business advertising and marketing budget is increased substantially through a strategic alliance. That’s because you combine your marketing and advertising costs in a home based business strategic alliance. An added benefit to this is that you can reach twice, and sometimes more, the number of people on the same marketing and advertising budget. Since you are increasing a much larger target audience for your home based business products and services, you could hardly help but increase your sales as well.One of the most important advantages a strategic alliance can have for your home based business is that it will make it possible to expand your business a lot more quickly. And not just because of the increased customer base and sales force. The money you save, and make, can be used to grow your home based business into new markets. You may also want to develop some new products and services as well. This can only be good for the future of your home based business and for the business you’ve formed your strategic alliance with too.Improved customer service is another benefit of a home based business strategic alliance. You work hard to meet your home based business customers’ needs and to solve any problems that may come up. But when you’re on your own, this can be very hard to do quickly because you have so much to do. And customers don’t like to wait. The strategic alliance gives you access to a larger number of customer service people who already know your products and services and who can be of immediate help. And of course you know that customer service should always be the number one priority of a home based business owner–because happy customers are loyal customers!Charles Fuchshttp://www.charlesfuchs.comhttp://charlesfuchs.blogspot.comI grant permission to publish this article, electronically or in print, as long as the bylines are included, with a live link, and the article is not changed in any way.
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.
Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation
Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.
If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.
Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.
For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.
No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.
There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.