With current global conditions providing an ever increasing unemployment rate and economic hardship, there are millions of people today attempting to find alternative and successful methods of earning a living. From this pool of people, there are countless numbers that are turning to home based business ventures in order to earn a profit and keep their lives moving. As such, one requires a sound understanding of starting a top home based business in order to remain a viable and profitable member of the work force.When making the decision to start a home based business, one should take stock of skills and knowledge already acquired and see if they are able to be put to use. The internet provides an incredible array of opportunities for countless skill sets. Selecting the best one while still performing the work that one actually wants to do remains a key element in this mix of decision making.In the internet world of today, one of the most lucrative and fastest growing methods of home based business is internet marketing. This requires very minimal previous experience and more companies today are looking for solid marketing skills by using the internet to help in keeping their businesses going. Launching an internet marketing company is one of the fastest methods of earning a great living.With any business starting or venture, one should develop and follow a sound business plan. With internet marketing, the sky is limit in regard to profit yet one must truly follow very basic business principles and plans in order to get and stay successful. Within this plan, there should be built in and reachable short and long term goals to ensure the business is staying on track.It is often considered wise to join an established and successful internet marketing firm prior to starting on individually. This provides an incredible amount of industry knowledge and practice which proves vital for the success of any entrepreneur. This also could lead to some very valuable business contacts in the future.The use of current professional consulting is also crucial at some point. At any given point of any business, there will be obstacles that must be dealt with in order to remain successful that require the help of a professional. One must know when to seek outside help.Finally, once all the above steps mentioned are complete, one must work toward a solid and sustainable reputation and credibility. Any top home based business relies on this for remaining in business. Retaining customers and gaining new ones are vital to any growth which is what credibility and reputation often provides.

The Internet has leveled the playing field for everyone who wishes to make money online, as there are a plethora of legitimate home based business ideas as well as an abundance of fly-by-night scams.So how do you distinguish between the legitimate home based business ideas and these scammers?Unfortunately, there are many self-styled “gurus” out there peddling products or turnkey systems that claim will make you into an overnight Internet sensation and have you earning tens of thousands of dollars every month with very little effort.You need to learn to steer clear of these and beware.If anyone is claiming that they hold the secrets to making quick and easy money, you need to avoid them like the plague.Any legitimate home based business opportunity will require hard work, effort, patience, discipline, and ambition. But of course the rewards, the fruits of your labor, have an unlimited potential, as compared to working at a regular job, where you can only make as much money as your employer has agreed to pay you.By definition, a “legitimate” home based business plan is one in which the business model is sound, realistic, achievable, unambiguous and practical. The results are commensurate to the amount of work that you put in. Furthermore, the opportunity must not overpromise and underdeliver. For example, if a product is being advertised as being able to earn you money on autopilot with very little up front time commitment and effort, then it is most probably a scam.If you have a doubt about whether a particular opportunity you are exploring is a legitimate home based business, then you just need to seek out and find whether there are other people following the same business model who have managed to be successful.Network marketing is a prominent example of a legitimate home based business that many people seem to have doubts about. This is because they require you to pay money to join their network and be able to start selling their products. Many network marketing companies rely on hype to convince people to join, only to have the prospective entrepreneur become disappointed, disillusioned, and to fail miserably.Does this mean that network marketing is not a legitimate home based business?No! It only means that those people who fail did not have realistic expectations about the amount of work required in order to achieve the desired financial rewards that they sought.So what is the moral of the story? Basically, before you venture out and start any business, you need to do a little bit of homework to verify that it is indeed a legitimate home based business. Secondly, you need to assess how much work is actually involved in order to achieve the financial results that you seek.Thirdly, you need to assess whether or not the financial investment in the business, if any, can realistically yield a profit, by studying its business plan.Some very good examples of legitimate home based business opportunities are the ones that require absolutely zero money to get started.  

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.