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.

There is no dearth with what one can do in terms of home based businesses. The number of different ways to earn money from home has grown significantly, thanks to the technology that encompasses us as well as all the different ways in which we can use our skills. In fact, many people who go in for home based businesses are the kinds who have had previous experience at some other job and didn’t like it for some reason. Even if you are inexperienced, there are a number of things that you can do from home which can help you earn a living.Some of the different ideas for home based business today include photography, matchmaker, author / eBook writer, accountant, real estate manager, proofreader and so on. There is no particular limitation on what you can do in a home based business, as long as it is legal and earns you money! Many people continue to find newer ways to earn money, but these are often developed versions of already existing ideas. If you are truly interested in starting a home based business, it should encourage you to know that there is nothing that is holding you back from earning a living through this method.When you do stumble upon a new idea, don’t discard it immediately just because you are having a tough time implementing it. It is always an uphill climb initially and one shouldn’t give up their dreams because of this. Work hard at the beginning and then be rewarded wisely in the end through good profit margins.

Martin, our money man and main investing partner, emailed us last night and said simply “I’ve pretty much lost it all”. We’d been shopping for a commercial property to buy to diversify our investments. Martin was once again partner with us on the deal we found, assuming he was comfortable with the numbers.

At least he was planning to before the markets crashed and Martin lost his six figure down payment! Now, sitting on pennies (o.k., not quite, but definitely not enough to make a down payment on a million dollar industrial property), Martin is probably really wondering what so many other people do, “Is real estate a much better investment than stocks?”

My answer is always a resounding “It depends” or “Diversification is best”… but if you change the question and ask me where my money is invested, 90% of my money and my net worth resides in real estate (even excluding my current home).

And yes, I am young – I’m in my early thirties! I am also a millionaire and it’s all thanks to real estate. It’s not to say that stocks won’t make you rich, Warren Buffet is one extreme example of the wealth that can be created through stocks, but I like real estate because:

You Can Kick It! Real estate is tangible. You can drive by a property and tell your friends or family that it is your property. You can also check up on how it’s doing. That is not as easy if you just own shares in a company. There’s nothing to show your friends and family, and most company’s won’t let you sit in on their meetings to see how they are doing!
Leverage: If you have $16,000 to invest (which is what I started with 7 years ago), you can buy $16,000 worth of stocks and bonds. But, if you buy real estate, you can buy a property worth $160,000 (which is exactly what I did). While some stock investors are able to buy on margin (when you only put down a portion of what the stock is worth), this is a sophisticated and high risk move that only experienced stock investors typically make. If your stocks go up in value by 5%, you’ve made $800. But if your property goes up by 5% you’ve made $8,000! This is on the same $16,000 investment. This doesn’t even take into account the other ways you can make money from real estate….which leads me to my third reason I love real estate.
There are three ways to make money from real estate: Appreciation, which we discussed above, rental income, and other people’s money (your renters) paying the mortgage down. Even if your property is decreasing in value, you are still getting paid rent and that rent is paying down the mortgage, and the surplus after expenses are paid is hitting your pocket!
Control: As a shareholder of a company, you have no control over your investment. And, you never really know what’s happening behind closed doors. I don’t need to start naming the corporate disasters of the last decade like Nortel, Enron and WorldCom for you to really understand what I am saying! But with real estate you do have control! If electrical bills are too high you can change the light bulbs to more efficient ones, seal the windows, and take other measures to reduce the costs. If you are losing money, you will know it very quickly! And you will be able to take measures to improve this situation. With shares, what can you do if your shares in Nike drop 15%? You can sell more or you can buy more… that’s it.
Creative ways to make money. A simple stock investor has two ways to make money from stocks… appreciation in their value and dividends. I owned stock with dividends once. The $30 cheque once per year was incredibly rewarding. Because you have control over your property, and there are three different ways to make money from the property, there are plenty of creative techniques to try to make more money from your asset. Some people rent out the garage separate from the house. In the right location, you could sell advertising space or just get price reductions on work done in exchange for some advertising (ever asked a painter what kind of discount you can get on their work if you put up one of their signs on your lawn??), you can add vending machines or laundry facilities, you can change the density of the property (add more units… more units means more rent), or you can change the usage of the property to sell it to someone who can make better use of it (if you are in a commercial area, an office developer might want to pay big bucks for a properly zoned property to develop on). There are dozens of ways to turn a simple house into a money making machine with creativity. The same can’t be said for stocks.
Access to the Equity without selling the asset. In the example of the $16,000 I used to buy my first investment property, I was holding most of that money in mutual funds and GIC’s. When I cashed out, I had to pay tax on the gains! So, while I actually had just under $20,000, after the government took their share, I only had $16,000. With real estate, when you need a chunk of cash, you can refinance a property or take out a secured line of credit against the equity you’ve built up in the property. This means that you get to continue making money from the rental income on that property AND someone else continues to pay down you mortgage AND if property values are appreciating, you will continue to have an appreciating asset AND you get the money you need – without taxes to pay too!
And speaking of taxes… real estate has a lot of tax advantages. Taxes vary by province and state so I won’t get into all of the different advantages… but suffice to say that there are plenty of opportunities to write off expenses against your income, write off the interest on your mortgages, and reduce capital gains taxes.
With so many reasons to love real estate, I haven’t been able to go back to the markets. It’s not to say you should do that too! Real estate isn’t a very liquid investment, and once you own it you still have work to do (unlike stocks). It’s a personal choice, but I know Martin, our money man, is wishing he’d never put his money in the hands of his trusted stock broker. Even in our absolute worst real estate investment we broke even…and in less then 2 months he lost 40% of his money…and worse for him is he lost a significant portion of the down payment he was going to use to buy the commercial property. Maybe some of the stocks will come back, but he’s afraid that a lot of his money is lost forever.