FiveUp.com.au

starting a real business from home on FiveUp

IF you are ready to be your own boss, are looking forward to a new kind of lifestyle and are considering starting up from a home office, then read on. The information in this chapter will help you get your home-based business up and running with minimum fuss. Due to changes in lifestyle and business practices, many people are opting to start home-based businesses. Technological advancement has improved communication and data/information storage and transfer which helps home businesses as much as, or possibly more so, than big businesses.

Before you start working from home, you need to make the correct business choice. Deciding on the type of business to start can be the biggest challenge for many, while for others there is really only one obvious choice. For those of you who aren't sure what the nature of your business should be it's really a case of narrowing down your options. The following section will help you choose a home business, determine if the business is suitable for you, and show you the right steps to getting started.

HOW TO CHOOSE A HOME BUSINESS/YOUR GIG

With so many options and choices to make, a good starting point is to consider a business doing what you love. What is your passion? If you are a designer - what area of design do you really love? If you are considering working with people - perhaps as a teacher or carer - do you prefer working with the elderly or with children? Success in any endeavour depends on the amount of effort that you put in. When you are passionate about a particular subject, you are naturally inclined to invest more time in it. When you are thinking of a small business idea, it makes sense to apply the following procedure to narrow the choices down to the one which fits your needs/interests best.

Consider the questions below. You may want to pencil some answers in the spaces provided. In each case I've started you off.

Categorise each of the items you've listed, measure them against each other, then narrow down to the most viable option/s.

You should also consider that one's passion alone does not necessarily translate into a good business opportunity, nor does it guarantee success. Many people who turn their hobbies into businesses fail because their markets are too limited, or because they are unable to find customers for their products or services. For you to be successful, there should be money to be made from your passion or hobby, and you should be in a position to market your products or services. In essence, determine whether there are good business opportunities for your passion, and identify how best to exploit those opportunities. It's logical that you should start with a 'known' rather than an 'unknown'.

Begin with an opportunity you already have. If someone you know is earning good money from the internet and that person is willing to teach you, then this could be a great opportunity for you to start a web-based business. You might venture into the online publishing business and start making money, like your friend, through various advertising and affiliate programmes.

Having someone guide you in the right direction by teaching you everything - from channelling traffic to your website to identifying the best money-making programmes for your website - is a great opportunity. Taking another example, you may have a lot of antique furnishings in your house, so you could start a business selling them on FiveUp.

If you have found what you think is the perfect business opportunity for you, then go for it. This may be an opportunity that is too good to pass up.

START A HOME BUSINESS WITH THE BEST POTENTIAL

Figure out if the business is profitable and if it is sustainable. It may be a business that you know little about, but if you think that the business has great potential - and the work involved in the business is work that you enjoy - you can certainly choose this path. It may be more challenging because you have to learn everything about the business from scratch, but it could be worthwhile. Some tips on educating yourself about an unknown business are to buy books on it, visit websites, or subscribe to trade magazines that may be available on the business or subject area.

BUILD ON WHAT YOU'VE CREATED

You could start a business by developing and marketing your own inventions. While you can opt to sell the rights to your product and wait for possible licensing royalties, you can also be more proactive and start working on the product yourself. It will be more difficult because it requires financing (the amount will depend on the type of product you've created), and entails marketing and financial savvy.

Firstly, it is essential to identify a need, and then capitalise on it. Identify if there is a large number of a potential customers. Then develop a product/service that could answer that need. With inventions, the marketability of the product/service is absolutely essential, especially if the product entails a high development cost. Someone must be willing to buy the product for an invention to succeed.

LEGALISE YOUR HOME BUSINESS

Of course you will need to comply with any legal responsibilities when you embark upon a new business. You need to decide upon the best structure (this was discussed in Chapter 1). Then you need to register your business name - remember, your business name must be registered if it is not your full legal name. Your business name informs the public that you will be doing business and will also help in marketing your business.

You need to research and confirm the rules of registering your home business within your state or territory. Details differ from location to location and may depend on the nature of your business. Some require that you publish a notice in the local newspaper while others do not.

You may need a licence to start your business. Licensing occurs at a state/country and/or local level. Contact your state or territory and local council offices to find out what licences you will need for your business.

Your accountant can advise on tax compliance issues and there is a lot of information on the ATO website, www.ato.gov.au. It will be your responsibility to file tax returns. Depending on your business structure and whether you are registered for GST, will determine whether you have to lodge a quarterly business activity statement (BAS) or just pay as you go (PAYG). More about this in Chapter 9. It is enough to emphasise here that it is your obligation when you start to work for yourself to comply with taxation legislation.

RECORD KEEPING ESSENTIALS

The following three points discuss the major reasons why complete and accurate financial record keeping is crucial to the success of your home business:

Good records provide the financial data to help you operate more efficiently, thus increasing the profitability of your business. Accurate and complete records enable you, or your accountant, to identify all your business assets, liabilities, income and expenses, which, when compared to appropriate industry averages, will help you pinpoint the strong and weak phases of your business operations.

Good records are essential for the preparation of current financial statements, such as the income statement (profit and loss) and cash flow projection. These statements, in turn, are critical for maintaining good relations with your bank. They will also present a complete picture of your total business operation.

Good records are also required for the preparation of complete and accurate tax documents. Poor record keeping often leads to the preparation of income tax returns that result in underpayment or overpayment of taxes. In addition, good records are essential in the event of a tax office audit.

LIFESTYLE CONSIDERATIONS

In theory, working from home (or from a coffee shop with a WiFi Connection and an iPad) is great.

There's no commute on busy roads or overcrowded trains and trams.

You can fall out of bed and start work in your pyjamas if you like. You are not paying rent for business premises and you're there for the kids when they come home from school or stay off school sick.

However, choosing to work from home doesn't suit everyone. The cross-over between work and home can be confusing. Your partner or family may expect you to do extra home chores, just because you don't physically leave the home when you are working. Friends may drop by and interrupt you. It may be difficult to keep motivated and easy to get distracted. It may be harder to switch off from work.

For some people working for yourself from a home office is often a good way to keep costs down when you are starting out, but you may soon find you are looking for business premises as soon as your revenue flow allows.

Below are some tips to make working from your home office more manageable:

Please, read these guidelines which may help to improve your job performance: Use unique, good resolution, appropriate, high quality, images. You may add few if you wish as long as images are related to the content of your jobs or gigs. Your Jobs or Gigs of visual nature (graphic design, art, photography, video etc.) should use actual images of work created by the seller. Add several images.

Add web links to YouTube and Flickr (if you have any).

Make sure that you complete the address field with a name of the suburb, the state and our country. Then check to confirm your location is showing on the map below. Click on the map to refresh and if it does not show your location correctly, go back and check the Address field. Start your job or gig's with a catchy title and describe them clearly.

Provide detailed Instructions To Buyer in the provided field when you create your jobs or gigs. If you require a Buyer to provide an attachment, please, tick the appropriate box. This will save the time you could waste going back and forth explaining and communicating your requirements with your buyers. Be realistic and set a realistic delivery date so that you can definitely meet.

We strongly advise you to specify 'Instructions To Buyer' in your jobs or gigs. Your buyers will see these instructions as soon as they order. When you use 'Instructions To Buyer' you help your jobs and gigs: When you use 'Instructions To Buyer', the order will not complete until the buyer provides your required information. Hence you will always get complete orders with full information and files you require so you can get started. When you use 'Instructions To Buyer', the time that the buyer takes to respond after they gathered this information will not be counted as part of the agreed delivery time. That order will only start counting from the time you receive the full desired buyer's info.

Here is an example of Instructions To Buyer:

Please send me:

Your photo, Minimum 300Kb size, JPEG format

Featured jobs, gigs and Gift Ideas posts are manually managed by our content admin.

As a Seller you may get featured draw our editors attention of our editors by using social media (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut, Vkontakte, etc.), send traffic from blogs and email links to your gig to your friends and family, thus increasing the amount of traffic coming into your jobs and gigs. The jobs and gigs that provide true user value, look attractive (images, description, user profile completeness etc.) and have earned many several reviews from buyers are likely to get featured.

If your feel that your jobs and gigs have good web traffic and you received positive reviews, send us a request for Featured consideration.

We may apply up to 10 days mandatory clearing period for seller revenues and additional verification for certain transactions. You can only withdraw funds after that time. This clearing period protects you and the buyers against fraud and unauthorized activities, chargebacks and PayPal disputes.

All jobs and gigs get posted to the 'Recent' category. Other categories are moderated. Those posts that are genuine, unique, valuable and are not considered duplicates, spam, jokes or pranks will be listed. We moderate the content every few hours. Your jobs and gigs will appear in all relevant key word and other search results, regardless whether they appear in the Categories. New posts are collected by our search engine regularly. FiveUp is moderated to keep this social network safe for everyone. If you made a mistake or feel your post deserves being placed in other categories instead of the actual category listed, please ask.

Presently we allow unlimited gigs per account.

Absolutely! Just click on the "Like" button located on each post. Those "Liked" will be added to your Jobs I Like page under your profile. At this point, you cannot "Like" sellers, but only specific gigs.

According to our Terms & Policies, when an order is cancelled, the funds are returned to your FiveUp account balance and you can use them for future purchases.

If decide that you don't want to use FiveUp anymore and have no use of your balance ever in the future, please contact us and we will refund your balance (according to our Terms & Policies).

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