The number of home-based businesses being established these days is the answer to the fact that in the race to make profits, many companies often forget the most important factor in building a business or holding a market, and that is to keep their customers happy. When the bottom line is all about the numbers, and not the people, it will definitely be harder to keep a business afloat.Big Company Versus Your CompanyIt seems like a David and Goliath story, but many home-based businesses are capturing their own small niches and taking away the business from big corporations. The possible explanation is that smaller home-based businesses are more personal, and customers and clients like being valued for more than just the profit that a business will be making from them.Small in Size, Big in PotentialThe advantage that home-based businesses have over larger companies is that the decision-making process is faster and completely centralized. Also, most of the menial jobs that need to be done can either be automated or outsourced, and that means you will need minimum capitalization and operational expenses, as well as less worries about unproductive employees.Being able to cut down on these expenses means that you can sell your product or offer your services for a lower price but for the same quality, while at the same time make a good profit out of it. It’s an arrangement that will benefit both yourself and your client or customer.The Human TouchThis is perhaps the best advantage that home-based businesses have over big retail stores. People are now looking for the “mom and pop” ambiance from the retailers or service providers that they want to close a contract with. They can get the best of both worlds because, on the one hand, they get professional and quality products, and but they still get to build oftentimes friendly relationships, as well, on the other.Getting Your Foot in the DoorThis is perhaps the biggest hurdle in creating home-based businesses. There is no lack of clients or customers searching for products and services online. There will always be someone looking for something that you may be able to offer competitively IF they can find you.There are indeed tried and tested ways to get Internet visibility, but the real key to success is being able to put your money where your mouth is and deliver what you say you can when you say you can. You should also always remember that if you put value in your customers and value in yourself, you will become one of the new home-based businesses moguls that will change the way business is done and for the better.

Due to the economic recession, number of employment has been rising tremendously month to month, and many have yet to find a financial solution to pay their bills, mortgages and debts. Consequently, many have switched their focus on setting up an online home based business – which it requires extremely low overhead cost. You might have noticed that some people who left their day jobs ended up making thousands of dollars per month, and you’re inspired and perplex on how they could earn such huge amount of money within a few months time.You might be blaming yourself that you’re not smart enough.In fact, you don’t have to put the blame on yourself since most people have made tons of money by doing the right things at the right time. It might sound easy but it’s actually hard to do. Therefore, you have to ask yourself – what are those things that I need to do at this critical moment?Here are some effective methods that most successful people use and help them earn lucrative profits from their profitable online home based business:1. Finding which ‘system’ that fits you mostIn the internet business industry, there many business models that can be applied in your online home-based business. The most common ones are affiliate marketing and PPC publishing. In fact, both are interrelated between each other, but it is much easier to understand them by separating them into two distinctive models.Affiliate marketing involves promoting other people’s products on your website and you’ll earn commissions once your website visitors purchase the products. Normally, you can look for products to promote based on your niche via affiliate networks – i.e. Commission Junction (CJ), Click Bank (CB) and Shareasale.On the other hand, PPC publishing means that you can earn money from putting ads on your website. This is much suitable for content-rich websites – i.e. blogs, forums and internet community sites. You can only earn money when your website visitors click on your ads.2. Increase traffic to your website – the main survival of your websiteOnce you have chosen the right system for your online home based business, it’s important to promote your website so that it is accessible for all potential website visitors. Thus, you have to drive targeted traffic to your website – is via article marketing.Therefore, you need to learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and article writing which are actively used in boosting your website rankings in Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It involves keyword and niche research – to include specific keywords in your articles. Besides creating contents for websites, you need to create some articles and submit them to article directories.The most well-known article directory is EzineArticles.com – which has a large base of high-quality articles, and also an ideal way of driving targeted traffic to your website from the link that you embedded at the bottom of your published articles a.k.a. Author Resource Box. In short, here’s a simple equation of driving high-quality targeted traffic via article marketing:Good quality EzineArticles = Increase Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of the embedded links = More targeted traffic to your websiteWhen you have more visits to your website – it has the potential of increasing your product sales, or total number of clicks on your ads.3. Finding a “mentor”In most common perception, working on your own online home based business can be a “lonely” business. In fact, this perception is not entirely true as you can find reliable “mentors” on internet forum like Warriorforum.com. Be specific on your needs as well as be selective on certain forum threads. For instance, look for journal-like threads about one’s personal journey to achieve certain of their goals. Follow such threads and interact with the forum thread starters – by asking the right questions, when possible. Certainly, knowing what they are doing is not enough – what matters most is ACTION!4. Stay focus and always have a positive mindNormally, you won’t get immediate satisfying results when you’ve just started your online home based business. At the beginning, you have to be extremely productive at work – i.e. avoid spending too much time checking emails in the morning, as well as reading too much free report about making tons of money online and spending less time on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and etc. You have to get important things done as you have to handle most of the work on your own. You need to have a positive mind to make your online home based business into a brick-and-mortar business. Here’s a great book about increasing your productivity at work entitled “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.5. Leverage your home based businessWhen you’re starting to earn some earnings from your internet business – you can use some of your money to hire some experienced freelancers from job seeking forums. Outsourcing is not a good excuse to avoid doing your work – it is mainly for assigning time-consuming tasks to others so that you can focus on important stuff. If you’re in a tight budget, you can outsource your tasks to freelancers from other countries – i.e. South East Asia countries including Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, as long as they can communicate in English and perform your tasks based on your requirements.The bottom line is that you have to be persistence and believe in what you’re currently doing, and always have the willingness to learn from your mistakes. From that, you can definitely earn $10,000 per month easily!

On a traditional and maybe not so even playing field, small businesses are not capable of competing with larger, more established industrial players. They do not possess the resources to take the same kind of large-scale actions – bulk purchases, to give a simple example. This is why they are on the losing end of any competition that requires scaling, such as a price war.Amazon.com is a good example. Look at the way that they manage to undercut traditional bookstores. This is due to their ability to survive on thinner profit margins and optimise their activities, from their shipping processes to the ways that they hold stock at their warehouses, economy of scale as such.However, if we think back to the beginning, Amazon started small (more specifically, one-man-in-his-garage small), which is pretty small by anyone’s standards. How do such companies manage to grow, and how can the small businesses of today’s world hope to emulate their success? I’ve been thinking about this recently and I’ve come to some surprising conclusions.It is my assertion that being a small business enables the innovative approaches that create game-changing economic juggernauts. On the other hand, the realities of being an economic juggernaut make the same type of innovation much less likely.This is why small businesses are the true drivers of innovation. It’s impossible to compete in a traditional manner, so the only way to win is to change the game.Unlike small businesses, large companies favour orderly changes that are easily contained in an existing industrial or corporatized context. They like controlled processes, where their tight structures and access to resources put them at an advantage. Any hierarchical organisation has the same attitude.Even if there is a mass adoption of new modes of problem solving, this is usually followed by attempts at acquisition on the part of a larger organisation. Look at the history of any large technology company – after a certain point they stop developing new products and begin buying start-ups and once again fast tracking their path to new and more innovating technology, all to stay ahead of the pack.Even when a company is not the creator of a certain type of disruption, many arise to occupy the new ecosystem that it generates. There would be no search engine optimisation industry without search engines, after all. In the rise and fall of these niches, it is the least established organisations that benefit from them.Why Small Businesses Can Create DisruptionWe know why industrial disruptions benefit small businesses, but why are they the ones that are uniquely capable of creating them? There are several reasons for this.Disruptive innovation is a mass-level, non-institutional change. At its core, it threatens the status quo and is usually born out of small, non-hierarchical groupings. Structural change and disruption take place in large, traumatic upheavals, which uniquely benefit small, loosely-organised groups.In smaller organisations, where each person is more likely to wear multiple hats, specialisation is practically non-existent due to the need of being the jack of all trades. This leads to a greater flexibility and willingness to change fundamental approaches. A specialised method of solving problems is a recipe for orthodoxy and thinking that any deviation from the norm is impractical.For exactly the same reasons that larger organisations are better at solving problems at a large scale, they are worse at recognising necessary deviations from the norm. Compartmentalised, specialised processes stifle novelty and creativity, keeping them less nimble while being necessary for mass support and service.Furthermore, the ties between those who run small businesses are most often not economic, but predicated on other social ties. Small businesses, including start-ups, are often formed among friends and family, rather than among a group of specialists in a particular field. This allows them to harness the self-motivating forces of loyalty and genuine ownership of the product, giving them that extra drive to overcome any potential hurdles.There are large companies that have attempted to create these types of structures within a larger corporate environment, but their successes are the exception rather than the rule. They become unwieldy and difficult to control from the centre. Industrial hierarchy makes it possible to take less trained workers and get more uniform results from them. Anyone who’s ever had a fast food job can attest to this.Small businesses, when faced with an unusual problem (and when you’re developing the next big thing in your garage, there’s no such thing as a usual problem) tend to find unusual solutions to it. In larger organisations, each possible new solution has to be passed up the corporate ladder, being distorted and or diluted each time it’s passed up or down the chain. This delays and usually weakens any adoption of new ideas. Furthermore, the employees in large organisations often resist new methods of their own accord, preferring habitual but non-optimal solutions.Mass adoption of new methods of socialising, doing work, or making money are never the results of the types of calculation that are common in the boardroom. Because the motives are so inarticulate and arise spontaneously from wildly varying sectors of society, this process cannot be manipulated, predicted, or controlled with any degree of exactitude.These changes also lead to the emergence of changed landscapes where the services developed by the establishment may not be relevant. Take the example of the recording industry. The CD manufacturing, distribution, and promotion infrastructure were devalued when digital downloads disrupted the industry. Their reluctance to accept it is understandable.If you already have an established business model that brings in revenue, it is usually foolish to abandon it. Even expanding your core services takes a great deal of resources and vision, and the largest, most profitable companies have made themselves that way by introducing disruption within the circumstances where they do their business.This can be accomplished, but the fundamental tendencies of each type of organisation remains the same – small organisations tend to be more agile and to seek unorthodox, innovative answers, while larger ones tend toward standard solutions to standardised problems.So there you have my view on how small businesses continue to be the drivers of innovation. As every professional was once an amateur and every expert was once a beginner and every successful company was once a small start-up.