Work At Home Musings

It doesn’t matter if you have clients, work in customer service or spend time on the phone doing insurance marketing, you need to have a good telephone presence. Here are some tips for making sure you put your best voice forward:

• In the morning, make sure that you clear your throat and try out your voice before answering a call to get rid of the frog in your throat.
• Drink plenty of water to keep your throat from getting dry.
• Try not to sound tired or irritable, callers can pick up on your tone right away.
• If you feel uncomfortable talking on the phone, write down what you need to say.
• Have information at your fingertips, callers had to be put on hold.
• Pretend you are talking to the caller in person. Put a smile on your face and your voice tone will change as well.

A friend of mine was in charge of her 25 year High School reunion this year. She worked hard to plan the event, get a great venue and provide goody bags for the participants. One of the ideas she came up with was a Custom flash drive. The drives were personalized with the school initials and the graduating year. Plus, they scanned in their senior yearbook and included that on the drive.

That got me thinking. If you have a small business with a catalog, give your customers personalized flash drives and include a copy of your catalog on it. Great advertising!

I have often been concerned with home business safety issues. It is not about fall protection or fire concerns, but more about keeping my family safe. Often when operating a home business, you need to give out your home address and phone number. If you do not have clients visiting your home, then you might want to think about obtaining a PO Box at the local post office and having a separate phone line. Google Voice, a service from Google, will let you set up a virtual phone number to forward to your home number. This way you can give out a number without worrying about calls on your family’s home number.

Other issues to be concerned about include:

1. Making sure that your home is secure. You should have locks on all windows and doors. Think about having a separate entrance for a home office that can be locked away from the rest of the home.
2. Use a business email address instead of a personal one. Keep your email separate.
3. Have regular business hours and don’t let clients come late at night.
4. Let others know when you have clients over and have a safe word to let friends and family know that you are ok.

We have almost become a nation without borders. Not only do employees work in different locations around the world, but international employees work here as well. This can prove difficult for an employer who should perform an international background check for each employee.

It is wise to make sure that you are hiring the best employee for the job, not just the cheapest. It is easy to check employment history and credentials on US Citizens, but not as easy for foreign workers. Make sure that potential employees are able to perform your specific tasks before offering the job.

There are a number of sites out there that will sell you items to sell on eBay. The problem is eBay is usually flooded with these items, making it difficult to sell or make a profit. If you want to sell new items, try Liquidation.com which features lots of items such as wholesale tvs or other electronics as well as clothing, jewelry , housewares, etc.

Another tip is to look for free or almost free items that you can buy at CVS, Walgreens or other discount or drug stores. These items sometimes fetch a good price on eBay. For instance, Baby Magic Lotion, which has been discontinued is selling for good price.

Used items can also be a good money maker if you are willing to shop at flea markets and garage sales. For example, a vintage Graflex Flash Gun can sell in the hundreds of dollars. These flash guns are used by collectors to make authentic Star Wars light sabers.

To find how much an item is selling for on eBay, choose Advanced Search and click on completed items. This will show you what items have been sold (or not sold) and how much each item was sold for. This is a great tool for pricing your items as well.

I know it is hard to think about, but could your family survive financially if you were disabled? If you are paying into Social Security, you can receive social security disability, but will this be enough? If you are working full time, make sure that you check out the disability policy that your employer offers. You may need to supplement this policy. If you work for yourself, make sure that you look into a disability insurance policy for yourself. Remember, it is not only the income that may be lost, but you may also need additional help around the house and with your children.

It is always wise to think about these situations before they occur and put a plan in place if they happen.

Do you own business insurance for your home business? If not, you might want to look into insuring your business items. You should be covering your inventory in case of a fire or water damage. Plus, you should consider covering any equipment that you own.

When my husband owned his own business, he did consulting work for companies that involved working on their business computers. He needed to also have liability insurance to protect him against claims from the companies. If you do any kind of service work, or consulting, consider investing in liability insurance as well.

If you own a business and are thinking of offering gift cards, SignatureCard.Net lets you design your own gift cards for your business. Your design can be reproduced with full color images or single color. Plus, they can encode the magnetic stripes, personalize the cards with embossing, sequential numbers, barcodes, names or even scratch off panels. They offer a fast turn around time as well.

Businesses are finding it more and more effective to offer plastic gift cards and are easy for both the customer and the business to use.

After Christmas, I pulled apart all the shipping boxes that arrived at my house. I did a lot of buying online so I had a lot of boxes. Of course, now I need new boxes to ship out a few items for birthdays, etc. Sometimes I use USPS Priority Mail, but other times I ship UPS and need my own boxes.

I found a new site that actually lets you order your own custom boxes. If you are a home business owner or eBayer and ship out similar products frequently, this might be a good option for you. Buying the right size boxes to fit your products will cut down on excess shipping costs as well. Pack N Box Now also have stock boxes and packing supplies.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I have been taking part in the Thirty Day Challenge and it is very valuable. We are just in pre-season lessons and there is plenty of time to catch up! Lessons so far have included:

• Flock - a new social web browser
• Flock Add Ons - some really cool stuff here
• Google Reader - reading your items much quicker!
• Tweet and Twirhl
• StumbleUpon

There are videos to watch and a forum as well. The Thirty Day Challenge is all about finding out how to promote your product or service and make money from doing it. BEST PART - all free. Yup! I haven’t gotten one bit of spam mail and no offers to buy something! It is worth a visit if you have a product that you sell online!