Home-Based Business Start-Up: 7 Tips For Lowering Your Fear Factor

By Bruce Scher
Posted Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Stop thinking about your start-up fears, and focus on something more exciting like; free business opportunities, and free advertising. It’ll greatly increase your confidence in being the boss.

All of us who tell the truth will admit to having fears. Many people live their entire lives with one fear or other, but Anne Block, discovered how to side step her fear factor into a home business reality.

Anne always dreamed of owning a home-based travel business, but the fear of losing her savings kept her dream parked in neutral. Anne says, “finally a business associate told me how I could start it with no money, and to start looking forward not backward.” Well she started it in 1995, and her business is growing strong to this day.

7 Tips For Lowering Your Fear Factor

Having a Great Idea

By concentrating on why you want to start your own home business, and visiting like-minded websites, reading newsletters or trade publications to gather more knowledge about the subject, will raise your confidence and simultaneously lower your fear level. Repeat after me, more confidence,
less fear.

If you don’t have a great idea, visit the site below for a free copy of “100 Hot Home Business Opportunities,” a survey of home business owners selecting the best business opportunities to start-up in 2003.
(http://www.homebusinessfree.com/home-business.htm)

Be Your Own Boss

Numerous surveys have confirmed this is the number 1 reason why business owners decided to go out on their own. As you research competitors on search engines, and read their ezines, you will find your interest rising, and your belief in yourself increasing, to the point of you saying one day, I can really do this. Your level of fear will definitely lower when I show you 5 ways to advertise – free. And read my previous article, ”12 Free Tools For Starting A Home Business With No Money, request a copy, mailto: bruce@ownsmallbusiness.com Paul Purdue, who founded iFulfill five years ago, with $100 leverages the Web's free benefits, and said “I use the top 10 search engines, to avoid the need for spending any money.” Presently, Paul ships about 800 packages per day, and hopes to reach 1,000 daily by midsummer and 5,000 by the end of next year.

With no money needed to start-up, what are you waiting for? Here are the 5 ways to get free advertising with specific links to follow:

1)search engines
2)articles
3)links
4)banners
5)press releases

Search engines are the most important element to bringing not only huge amounts of traffic to your website, and with no money expended. You can submit your website for free placement on the following search engines and directories:

(http://www.google.com) (http://www.lycos.com) (http://www.altavista.com) (http://www.alltheweb.com) (http://www.about.com) (http://www.dmoz.org) (http://www.goguides.com) (http://www.allbusiness.com)

The Freedom to be Creative

Many people in today’s workforce do not feel challenged or excited. The idea of working on your own interests, passions or hobbies, is very appealing. By focusing on what type of business you will start, and how you will start it, should help to lower your fear factor by one level. The 3 levels are: high, moderate and low. Lowering your fear factor just one level, to moderate or low, you should seriously consider starting your home business. Everyone has fears, but at this lower level should give you the confidence to pursue your dream.

The second most productive type of free advertising is writing articles. It’s an excellent way not only to get your website known, but to build up a sense of authority and trust in consumer’s minds. A great place to start is: (http://www.goarticles.com)

Make More Money

Money is certainly a big motivating factor, and it may even be number 1 in your books. A lot of business owners start their businesses for different reasons in the beginning, and learn to cherish the other reasons later on.

Having links on your website is very important to offer your visitors alternative places to go, giving your site an authority feel to it, by offering choices to your customers. Also, it’s your trading post with other website owners, as you both reciprocate the giving of links as a traffic builder.

Lastly, many sites such as Google give much importance to the number and quality of links in determining your ranking. The following site offers a free report containing step-by-step instructions as well as extensive links to articles and resources. (http://www.linkingmatters.com)

Convenience

Everyone has different motivational triggers, and for you the idea, of starting work at noon and quitting at 4pm might be the biggest draw. Or perhaps, you prefer to work only 3-4 days a week. and spend more time with the family. By seeing how life can be different and of better quality, might be your answer to that drop in fear, and rush in confidence.
Continuing with free ways to advertise, so money will be not be a hindrance to starting your own business, banners are another excellent way to get your message across to new potential customers. The banner site helps you to easily design your own banner with prepared templates, so you just add your own text, and does all the administrative work at no cost to you. Visit the largest banner exchange at: (http://bcentral.com/products/bn/default.asp)

Job Loss/Job Insecurity

As many as 2 ½ million Americans have lost their jobs since our economy started to weaken in 2000. And although this fear was not even thought of before 2000, I think it’s right up there now in the top reasons for giving up on the corporate world in favor of a home-based business.

Remember, some of the best companies are founded during weak economic times, that's when people with a good idea begin, because they know business goes in cycles, and good times are just around the corner. And by polishing your business in the weak times, you’ll be ready to profit in the stronger economy.
Because of the uncertain economy possibly effecting their job security, Rayand Cydi White were interested in self-preservation of their financial future, and started a very succesful real estate service company. “We couldn’t afford to be without income if something terrible happened, and started our business part-time to financially protect ourselves.”

By starting part-time with 1-2 hours a week, working on your idea, if the unfortunate should happen, you’ll have a back-up at least as a fall-back option to keep you afloat. The last method of free advertising is the press release, and quite possible the most effective way of reaching a mass audience at no cost. Just recently we have seen the phenomenon of a new product called the Segway, the human transporter of the future, as it was billed, receive a massive amount of free publicity, even getting corporate orders from the U.S. Postal Service and Amazon.com
For free press release distribution, visit: (http://www.prweb.com)

Getting Started

Now take your business idea on a search. Enter the keywords of your business into Google, and visit the top 30 websites. Look over the websites making notes which designs you like, good content, great products or services to sell, and sign up for all the newsletters they offer.

This is valuable intelligence you are gathering, and after you assimilate this information you will be ready to open the doors to your own home business.

About the Author
Bruce Scher is a home business advisor, and author of a new eBook, "Full-Time Money Part-Time Hours"
"An excellent ebook" _Les Brown, Nationally Known Author (http://www.ownsmallbusiness.com) mailto:bruce@ownsmallbusiness.com