Do you have what it takes to get through the recession? Here are the traits that get home based business owners through the hard times.

Regardless of your definition of success, there are, oddly enough, a great number of common characteristics that are shared by successfulbusinesspeople. You can place a check beside each characteristic that you feel that you possess. This way, you can see how you stack up. Even if you don’t have all of these characteristics, don’t fret. Most can be learned with practice and by developing a winning attitude, especially if you set goals and apply yourself, through strategic planning, to reach those goals in incremental and measurable stages.

The Home Business Musts
Like any activity you pursue, there are certain musts that are required to be successful in a chosen activity. To legally operate a vehicle on public roadways, one must have a driver’s license; to excel in sports, one must train and practice; to retire comfortably, one must become an informed investor and actively invest for retirement. If your goal is success in business, then the formula is no different. There are certain musts that have to be fully developed, implemented and managed for your business to succeed. There are many business musts, but this article contains I believe to be some of the more important musts that are required to start, operate and grow a profitable home business.

1. Do what you enjoy.
What you get out of your business in the form of personal satisfaction, financial gain, stability and enjoyment will be the sum of what you put into your business. So if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, in all likelihood it’s safe to assume that will be reflected in the success of your business–or subsequent lack of success. In fact, if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, chances are you won’t succeed.

From a marketing standpoint, it’s a great time to own or start a business. The social web makes it more cost-effective than ever to get the word out about your products and services, no matter what industry you’re in. Most social media accounts are free to set up, and many targeted online ad platforms are inexpensive. The most it will cost you to get your marketing campaign rolling, at least in the beginning, is time.

In fact, the toughest challenge facing small business marketers these days is not cost, but finding a strategy to get your message heard over the din of a noisy Internet. For advice on this, we checked in with a few experienced social media marketers. Here’s what they had to offer.

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So, what are your big Internet marketing plans for the New Year? Will you be investing more in social media? Will you start blogging? Will you take a more proactive stance with self-promotion? Whatever your online marketing plans, the end goal is likely to attract more people to your website in the hopes that the influx of new eyes will translate into new customers, new leads and new opportunities for your business. However, you won’t be able to do any of that if your Web site is turning people off, instead of turning them on.

Below are some very common reasons SMB Web sites fail to attract customers and how to avoid falling prey to them.

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So, you are marketing to Gen Y. You know, the text-messaging, multi-tasking, advertising-wary, trendsetting, sarcastic, blog-reading, information-addicted, social media-savvy, tech-embracing, fast-moving, highly ambitious, quick-talking, well-educated,                                                                                     iPod, iWhatever-listening crowd.

Yes, I’m talking those insolent little brats who are entitled to everything (And yes, I’m a Gen Yer, so stop laughing.)

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We are currently living through a ridiculously interesting period in small business and entrepreneurship:  The rise of entrepreneurial niche celebrity.

If the word “celebrity” makes you cringe or cry, let me clarify a bit. This isn’t about pouring champagne up in the club, bling bling, red carpets, PR people speaking for you and being a jackass. It also isn’t about being a household name in every household in the world with                                                                                         paparazzi chasing you around town. Instead, entrepreneurial celebrity is all about being viewed as an approachable, trusted resource to a specific niche of people or around a topic of interest. The go-to person and company. A leader.

A better term is a trusted resource.

A trusted resource brings a specific subset of people together and leads them. A trusted resource also:

• Educates, entertains and inspires.
• Makes a lot of money because people know, like and trust him or her.
• Is often a person as opposed to a faceless company.
• Is accessible and transparent on social media sites, via e-mail, etc.
• Is not all-knowing and stuffy, but instead friendly and helpful.

Contrast that with the “old school” concept of the expert or “celebrity” which was focused on a public persona deemed interesting to mainstream media, based on the illusion of perfection, and heavily hidden behind gatekeepers (agents, publicists, etc.). These people were unattainable (good luck getting an e-mail back) and often took the “I’m better than you!” stance.

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Do you use Google Gmail and are you looking for an easy way to keep on top of your business contacts? Consider Rapportive.

Most CRM platforms demand that you be in their dashboard or application to see details about a customer.  That means one more app to keep open on your desktop.  Rapportive aims to do away with that, at least for Gmail users, by providing you with social data in the right-hand column of your                                                                        inbox.

You can see profile information, or links to contact information, immediately. You can see the contact’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Tungle and Flickr profiles and a bunch of others. You can see status updates, too. Rapportive does all this by recognizing the e-mail address of the person who sent you a message. If someone sends you a message from a different e-mail than they normally use in their social networks, their information won’t appear.  It has to be the same e-mail that contact uses in his or her social sphere.

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Judging by their behavior, most people have an obsession with wealth. Politicians promise to create it, most popular magazines are filled with gossip about those who have it, and the average person spends much of their adult life trying to obtain it. We are creatures obsessed with money, partly for what it can buy, but also as a thing of value in itself.

But most people misunderstand money. They don’t really know how to obtain it, or how to hold onto it once they have it.

If you’re interested in getting rich, I’m going to give you the simplest formula for doing so. In fact, if you follow it you’re virtually guaranteed to build enough wealth to get you into the top 5% of society. As the shampoo advertisement says: “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen”.

The hardest way to get rich
Before I go into my formula, let me tell you about hard ways to get rich.

One of the hardest is to be born into it. Of course, if you happen to enter this world as a Hilton, a Gates or a Windsor, then life is sweet. But since 99.9999% of the population aren’t that lucky, I’m assuming you didn’t win that particular lottery.

And speaking of lotteries, gambling is another very difficult way to get rich. Sure, some people buy a lottery ticket and win big, but most don’t. You can gamble your entire life and you’ll most likely end up broke rather than wealthy.

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A lot of people are poor thinkers, which will limit them when it comes to bringing money into their lives. By a ‘poor thinker’ I mean someone who thinks they are relatively poor and will never be anything more. Most people won’t even realise it.

Ask yourself, right now, how much you think you are worth in terms of your employment. I can almost guarantee you the figure you came to was based on your current salary. Now add a ‘0’ onto the end of the figure you came to; how does that make you feel? If you thought ‘there is no way I am worth that’, then you are a poor thinker.

This article will show you 10 ways to get out of the ‘poor thinker’ mode and open up a wealthy mindset.

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The Five Roads to Financial Success in America and How to Choose Your Own

There are basically five ways that you can become wealthy starting with nothing in America based on over 25 years of research into American millionaires. Number one, you can inherit it. Less than 10 percent of wealthy Americans inherited any of their money, and it’s less and less every single year.

The Second Way
The second way that you can become wealthy is you can achieve it professionally. You can become a doctor or a lawyer or an architect or an accountant. You can become extremely good at what you do, be paid very well, and hold on to the money.

The Third Way
The third way you can achieve it is you can become a senior executive of a large corporation. You can be highly paid; you can have stock options and bonuses. And if you stay with the company long enough, for enough years, you can be paid enough to become wealthy.

The Fourth Way
You can win it. But only a tiny fraction of one percent of wealthy Americans got that way by winning their money some way or another. As a matter of fact, the odds against you winning the lottery are the equivalent of lightning striking twice in the same place. They’re millions and millions to one.

Learn the Way To Wealth System

The Best Way
The fifth way that you can become wealthy is you can start your own business and earn it all by yourself. Starting your own business has been and will always be the high road to becoming wealthy for most self-made millionaires. Entrepreneurship in America offers more opportunities and opens more doors than all other possibilities put together. This is why it has been said that if you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you are a fool. I’ll repeat that. If you have the ability to start your own business and you don’t do it, you’re a fool.

Where do you start?
You start by getting your finances under control. The very first thing you do is you make a decision to get your finances under control. Some years ago, a man named George Classon wrote a book called The Richest Man In Babylon. It’s a classic on financial success and what Classon said in that book was that the key to becoming wealthy is to pay yourself first. Take ten percent off your earnings, off your gross income every month and put it aside. Learn to live on ninety percent or less of your gross income. So the very first thing that you do is you begin to save your money.

Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put yourself onto the high road to personal wealth:

First, resolve today to begin saving your money a little bit at a time. Set a goal to save 10% of your earnings, to put it away and to never touch it. This will change your life.

Second, immediately register your own business or sole proprietorship. Open a bank account, get business cards and letterhead and create the corporate entity under which you can do business. Your business opportunities will appear far sooner than you think. If you build it, they will come.

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