The globeandmail.com reports on Canadian entrepreneur Brian Alger who runs a soft drink business from his home apparently finishing his day by 1pm on most days. He has tapped into the nostalgia for a 70′s discount brand, Pop Shoppe, even re-registering the trademark and relaunching the brand with bottle custom designed to resemble those from the 70′s.
Last year the re-born Pop Shoppe sold over 6 million bottles making it Canada’s second largest selling premium soda. Remarkable enough though when you consider the man knew nothing about the soda business and actually has no empoyees you can’t help but admire him all the more. He runs the entire operation from home its all outsourced meaning his workload is really all about co-ordinating the efforts of the various partners involved.
Of course it was no easy ride to success, the article explains how Alger got started, the costs involved and the many failures and disappointments before the first glimpse of success. Now with sosme success under his belt Alger is looking to make a dent in the much larger US market!
This is a well written article by Joanna Pachner an inspiring story of how one entrepreneur’s journey had lows before the highs, check it out here.
Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer in the Southern. It got me thinking just how many little opportunities the seasons can bring for making a little extra cash. The harsh northern winter this year has seen some enterprising individuals offering snow and ice clearing in their local neighbourhoods and we’ve heard of some also offering to de-ice cars and even warm them up ready for the morning commute!
What is such a service worth? Charge what you think you can! Personally having the driveway ready to drive out of and the car de-iced ready to roll would be worth a few dollars to me! The tools required to provide the service are minimal, some warm water and a can of de-icer for the car and a shovel for any snow clearing. Read more…
When looking for small business ideas to make money at home with, you’ll find that there are many sites which are aimed solely at removing money from your wallet and another whole bunch which do not see the difference between work at home and work from home!
There is of course a huge difference and if you’re looking for something that you really can do part-time, then its likely you’ll be looking for a work at home idea.
Let’s bear in mind all those self-employed electricians, carpenters, plumbers and gardeners are all working from home. They do not have an office in town with a staff to answer phones and take care of accounts etc. They probably have an office (or something that substitutes for one) at home but the majority of their work is undertaken elsewhere. They are not working at home.
Small business ideas tend to fall into three broad categories; Read more…
Social Media and marketing explained
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Most small businesses including home based ones end up with a website, whether to sell products or to catalogue services or just talk about the business. Whether you build it yourself or have it professionally built, your next task is to get people actually using it.
As any web designer who handles small business clients can tell you, there are a huge number of people out there who still believe in the maxim “build it and they will come”. This unfortunately is simply not the case.
Unless your site is one of a small few that deal in the subject matter you are fighting for attention with all the other sites out there that want to get listed for the same search terms entered into a search engine like Google. Even if you are one of a few, you still need to get the search engines to realise you exist.
That is where we start our search engine optimisation journey. So let’s look at what we can do to get listed in Google. Read more…