Absolute Beginners Part 2

How to get off to a good start with your home based business.

If you missed part one of this article, you will find it in my Home Business Workshop at http://www.huntingvenus.com/echbart1.htm

Once you have made the decision to work from home, you should spend some time in planning and preparation. Having decided that an internet home business is the right thing for you to take up, the decision needs to be made as to what type of home business would interest you and what type of business would be practical for you in your particular circumstances. I chose a Plug-in Profit SiteÔ (if you are not familiar with these, you can see all the details at my website) because it was ideal for someone like me who had no previous internet experience or technical knowledge, but also offered a great deal of flexibility.

Making a few basic preparations at the start will give you a firm foundation on which to build your home based business.

I assume that anybody who is seriously considering a career working on the internet will already have in place a firewall and good anti-virus software such as Panda, but I would suggest adding anti spyware and anti adware protection such as Spyware Blaster and No Adware plus Spybot Search and Destroy. These can be downloaded free. You are asked to make a donation to the site but it is not compulsory; you can go back later and donate if you are happy with the software. There is plenty of free software of this sort so, if you do not already know what you want, you can find plenty with a Google search.

Next download Roboform. Whatever business you work at, you will be bound to have to fill in various forms online. Once you have typed your name, address, email, birth date etc into Roboform it will complete application forms with one mouse click. You can set up more than one identity within Roboform so, for instance, you can have one identity which uses your main email address and a separate one for advertising with a secondary email address. Roboform will also store all your log in IDs and passwords for every login page you use. It really is a brilliant device and can be downloaded absolutely free.

Now that you have Roboform’s help it is time to get a new email account which should be kept entirely separate from your personal email account. You might need more than one additional email address depending upon what sort of business you are in. My first website was a Plug-in Profit Site (if you don’t know what that is you can see the details here: http://www.huntingvenus.com/pips.html) and one of the things I did when I started that, was to subscribe to several ezines. If you are going to join lots of mailing groups or subscribe to ezines, you will receive a great deal of email just from these sources; each one will send you at least one confirmatory email when you first sign up and these should be kept for reference. You can get free email accounts from Yahoo, Excite and numerous other places. AOL is to be avoided because of the way its email filters work (you might find that important mail is filtered out without you getting the chance to accept it).

Next, sign up for free accounts with Pay Pal, Storm Pay and Int Gold as most online companies will pay you (or require you to pay them) through one of these. It is worth getting accounts with all of them before you start signing up for programmes: it is very annoying to be halfway through signing up and finding that payments will only be made through an account you do not have. If you are undertaking several ventures, you might want more than one account with each of the companies. The reasons for this are to keep the money separate and also that some companies want you to sign up under the same email address as your Pay Pal account (not many but it happens). You are permitted numerous free accounts but I would suggest one account should be opened with each company to start with unless you know you will definitely need another account. It is important to strike a balance between keeping things separate and having so many different accounts, you end up confused. These things are supposed to help you, not become a task in themselves.

All this will not have taken you long to do and you now have the basis of an organised system to which you can add things as you go along.