4 Tips for Running a Home-Based Business from a Rented Apartment

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Home-Based Business|4 Tips for Running a Home-Based Business from a Rented ApartmentYou hear of home-based businesses all the time and, of course, you usually don’t think of them being run from a rented apartment. If you are honest, you think of a home that has a spare room in which to set up shop and perhaps even a nice area where you can meet and greet customers or clients if the need should arise.

Actually, a huge number of home-based businesses are run from rented apartments, but there are a few challenges that are a bit different than what you’d experience when running a business from a home you own. If you are considering going into business for yourself from home in an apartment, here are some tips you might otherwise overlook.

1. Check Zoning Codes in Your Area

Zoning codes are of vital importance if you are going to operate a business. To do it right, you’ll want to register it as a business, but some areas of the country are zoned for residential only. You’ll want to check this out before you take another step.

2. Talk to Your Landlord

If you can’t see anything in your lease that would prohibit you from running a home-based business, then it’s probably safe to assume that it should not be a problem. This just may be the case but if you are going to be seeing a lot of foot traffic, so it’s a good idea to get the property manager’s approval before advertising you are “Open for Business.”

3. Licenses and Insurance

This is something else many apartment dwellers don’t think of when running a business from home. You will want to get the appropriate business licenses and occupational permits if required in your city/county. Also, you should get the best renters insurance coverage you can find. When seeking a renters insurance quote, ask about the various kinds of coverage. For example, you’ll probably need liability if anyone is going to come to your ‘place of business’ and you’ll want contents insurance because of theft and loss due to natural disasters or fire. Obviously the amount of coverage you purchase will have an impact on renters insurance cost, but by comparing renters insurance online you will be able to find the most inclusive policy for the lowest amount of money.

4. Keep Work and Play Separate

Finally, even though you might be limited on space, always keep work areas and living areas separate if at all possible. Some people move their television and games systems to their bedroom and use the front room as their office space – or vice versa. It really isn’t quite that important how you do it, as long as you set aside an area to work so that when you are working you are in the right frame of mind.

It really isn’t that much different than setting up a home-based business in a family home, but the major differences will be that you have a landlord involved when you are renting. If you get permission to work from your apartment, it can be a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

Essentials That Every Business Owner Should Have

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Business Essentials|Essentials That Every Business Owner Should HaveBecoming a business owner is something that some people stumble upon. On the other hand, some have always known they would own a business one day. Whatever the case, entrepreneurship comes with a significant amount of responsibility that many aren’t often prepared for. There is so much you have to learn to set you on the path to success, and also to ensure you’re protected along the way. While some are business matters, others are legal matters or related to managing people. Here are a few essentials that every business owner should have on that note.

Insurance

As you likely know, starting a business comes with several risks. Aside from failure, you’re dealing with people virtually and physically every day, so you need to be protected from any unfortunate events by having insurance. There are different types of insurance you should have as a business owner, so you’ll need to determine which are most needed. However, some are mandatory, such as employer insurance and commercial business insurance. Some optional ones worth looking into include general liability, product liability, and auto insurance.

A Good Lawyer

As an entrepreneur, you can’t predict if and when a lawsuit will come your way. For this reason, having access to an experienced and talented lawyer is essential. Getting into legal trouble of any kind can affect your personal life, finances, and your brand. When looking for a lawyer, make sure you do background checks and look for legitimate reviews. In case you need suggestions for a good lawyer, take a look at dcwattorneys.com as you’ll find information on practice areas such as criminal defense, mediation and much more,

Savings

As an entrepreneur, having money saved is crucial if you want to have a level of financial stability. You can’t always predict which direction sales will go in, so having a reserve helps. Every month, put a specified amount in your savings account so that you can pull from it on rainy days. As you won’t be getting pensions from your workplace if you’re a full-time business owner, you should also have a retirement plan in place.

A Simplified Employee Pension IRA is ideal if you’re a sole proprietor as it’s easy to manage and annual fees are relatively low. There is also the Individual 401(k) if you want to build your retirement account quickly and have large amounts to contribute.

An Accountant

Unless you happen to be a star accountant on your own, hiring one could be a good investment. The slightest financial mistakes could have a ripple effect on your finances and put you in a bad place. Your accountant can help keep your books in order as well as make sure you’re keeping expenses as low as possible. They should also help you stay up-to-date with your taxes so that you aren’t owing money. When you’re on the lookout for an accountant, make sure they have sufficient amounts of experience and make clear work arrangements to avoid misunderstandings later on.

How to Use Outsourcing to Boost Your Profits

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article | How to Use Outsourcing to Boost Your Profits | Entrepreneurship | OutsourcingOutsourcing is a word that’s used a lot in business articles and guides for business owners, but is it really worth considering if you only have a small business or are a sole trader? If you think of outsourcing as something that only medium to large companies need to do, you’re missing out on a powerful way to boost your profits, because the benefits of outsourcing have no relation to the size of your business.

Because of its association with more sizeable businesses, outsourcing tends to be viewed as a situation where a whole section of a large corporation or organization is subcontracted to another company. For example, a hospital that pays a specialist cleaning company to undertake all the housekeeping duties.

There could be fifty or a hundred employees taking care of the hospital with not one of them being employed directly; the hospital pays the cleaning company, and the cleaning company deals with staff management. The hospital director gets a clean hospital without having to worry about looking after staff, equipment, recruitment, rotas, and all the other responsibilities of doing the cleaning in-house.

The test of whether outsourcing can work for you is to examine the numbers, which will tell you if outsourcing is viable in your circumstance or not. You may be a small business with a handful of employees or someone who works alone out of their back bedroom, but the same financial calculations are as applicable to you as they are to the hospital director. The bottom line is, can you earn more in the time it takes you to perform a task than it would cost you to pay someone else to do it? That’s the essence of how outsourcing boosts your profits in a nutshell.

In practice, what it means is that if your profit is $35 per hour as a freelance researcher, and it costs $20 an hour to employ an assistant to do all your admin, every hour you spend doing admin is costing you $15. If you spent those hours doing more paid work, you could have all your admin done for you and still be making money. In some cases doing tasks yourself could well be costing even more if you don’t have the skills to complete the task effectively and efficiently.

For instance, if you do all your own SEO, that could be taking you five hours each week, so straight away you’ve got the difference between how much you’re losing by not earning, and the cost of outsourcing the task. However you’ve also got the loss you’re incurring by spending more time than an expert would, and not being as effective as an expert at optimizing your business presence. By outsourcing to a specialist like Orlando SEO, you can devote more time to earning, and have a better return on the investment than you’d get if you carried on trying to do your SEO yourself.

Have a look at what you’re doing that could be done by someone else, and see how much it would cost to outsource those tasks. Even if you just take on a remote assistant to do two hours a week, if you make $35 an hour and pay them $15 an hour, over a year you’ll boost your profits by over $2,000 a year!

The Ridiculously Simple Ways You Can Get People To Read More Of Your Content

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Content creation is an effective yet epic task. It takes up hours of your time and is a massive drain on your marketing resources. Because of this, you want to make sure that it’s useful. But how?

It turns out that creating compelling content that people actually want to read is more complicated than many company owners imagine. If you’re like most professionals, you’re focused on what you know – the nuts and bolts of your business. Your bread and butter, if you will. Content marketing is usually little more than an afterthought.

Get it wrong, and you can waste a tremendous amount of time and money. Get it right, and you can dominate.

The trick to successfully getting people to read more of your content is understanding how people consume material on the web. Most of the people on your site probably aren’t reading every single word that you type. Typically, they’re scanning pages, looking for information they need, and then moving on. Bearing this in mind, therefore, is essential when creating content. Your content needs to have pertinent details highlighted or under particular headings so that people can visually scan your document and pick out the information they need.

That’s just one example. There are many more. Take a look at these ridiculously simple ways to get people reading more of your content and get them closer to conversion.

Start By Using Bullet Points

Using bullet points is a compelling way of engaging your users while at the same time giving them a break from a block of text.

  • Bullet points look different from regular prose
  • Bullet points break up the text
  • Bullet points provide white space
  • Bullet points succinctly collect information
  • Bullet points help readers to memorize your content
  • Bullet points organize all of the most critical information in your post

Enrich Your Text

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Ridiculously Simple Ways You Can Get People To Read More Of Your Content | Content Creation | Entrepreneurship
Photo courtesy of Diggity Marketing

The art of lead magnet creation involves doing much more than writing, say, 1,500 words. It’s also about including a catchy title, moving images, calls-to-action, landing pages, branded document designs and much much more. Creating a visually compelling document is an ideal way to encourage people to investigate more of what you have to say. People want to read articles that tell them about the pictures they’re looking at, for example.

Place Helpful Links Whenever Possible

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Ridiculously Simple Ways You Can Get People To Read More Of Your Content | StrategyDriven | Content Creation | Entrepreneurship

If you’re writing a blog about a particular food ingredient, it helps to insert a couple of links to recipes that use it. Likewise, if you’re writing an article about personal finance, it might be helpful to give users a link to an investment calculator so they can see how much their portfolio will be worth in ten years.

Placing helpful links is helpful to users and helpful to you too. People will want to come back.

Double Check Your Formatting

Once you’ve written your article using the advice above, double check it to see whether the format actually communicates your core message. Put yourself in the shoes of your reader and ask whether they can glean the information they need.

Crumbling Under The Pressure: Is There Ever A Time To Devolve Your Business?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Crumbling Under The Pressure: Is There Ever A Time To Devolve Your Business? | Devolve BusinessIt’s not something we should take lightly. After all, starting our business and getting it going is one of the biggest challenges we can undergo in life. But when you feel you’re at a dead end, and that once great team you had his now in tatters, you may very well give proper consideration to packing up, and giving your business away. But when you are going through something as traumatizing as this, are there any telltale signs that you need to start devolving your company?

The Financial Component

In an obvious sense, if you are struggling to make any profits, you could think that it’s not worth it, but is it as cut and dry as this? If your business is making no profit, do you need to give up? The question is all about if you’ve put enough preventions in place to ensure that your business is doing everything in its power to remain financially afloat. And it’s not just about a dire cash flow situation, it’s about ensuring that you’ve actually been to every creditor, resource, and institution in your midst to see if there are any ways to get out of this issue. It may very well be about getting rid of a certain aspect of the business to ensure that it can stay afloat. Resources, such as Professional Transition, are able to help businesses provide a suitable transition process, which may be a better option than giving up completely. The financial component is such a wide-ranging one that if you are considering giving up because profit is a problem, then you’ve got to give consideration to the next point…

Is Your Heart In It?

Your business is your baby. Or, if it was at one point, but now you are at the end of your tether, is it about evaluating your own attitudes towards the business? Giving up on something shouldn’t be taken lightly. But the question is if you are able to maintain this enthusiasm and zeal for the company in the long run. Because it’s not just about our own responsibilities within the business, it’s about seeing if it’s having an adverse effect on our lives. Not in the basic sense of one too many late nights, but if you’ve bent over backwards, you receive knockback after knockback, and after overcoming all of these obstacles, you still don’t have any sort of results, financially, professionally, or personally. At this point, if you start to lose heart, and you realize that the business isn’t good for you anymore, it’s time to see if you can spend time without the business in your life. Delegating to someone will help at this juncture, because it’s essential that you have time away. Having time and space away from it will give you the chance to see if it helps you renew your enthusiasm for the business.

Of course, we can’t answer the question for you. But when the thought crosses your mind that you should pack it all in, and it is a dire situation, professionally and personally, it could very well be time to make some major changes.