Why Price Point Is Crucial When Choosing A Home Business.

How important is the initial start-up cost (price point) of an online or home based business opportunity? This is a very delicate subject that is often not credited with enough significance. Hitting the right “sweet spot” with start-up costs can literally make or break your success in the online entrepreneurial world.

Call it what you want – ”price point”, “start-up cost”, “price threshold” (the initial fee to get registered and started in an online opportunity), but it is crucial that this amount is not priced too low, or too high.

TOO High Priced Business Opportunities

The problem with high ticket business opportunities are twofold: 1) your field of prospects is radically reduced, and; 2) most newcomers underestimate the additional costs of getting a business started. Most people who join high ticket business opportunities ($2,000 to $10,000) are not told about the high cost of making each sale (the average cost of acquiring a new customer). Advertising is your most significant ongoing investment. Online beginners hear that an opportunity is… $3,500 (for example) and forget that this amount will only get them started. What about advertising? What about ongoing maintenance fees? (turn-key websites, accounting and training services, etc.) For an opportunity with a flat start-up cost of $3,500, your average cost per sale can range from $1,000 to $4,000. Why you ask? Because, as mentioned above, businesses with higher price points narrow your field of prospects dramatically, so you must advertise more to adjust for the waste, or pay significantly higher rates for upper income prospects. You would be shooting yourself in the foot if you didn’t expect to invest a minimum of $1,500 to $4,000 per sale to advertise it right. So you really need $5,000 to $7,500 to start this business correctly. On top of that, if this business is a 2/up system (where you owe your sponsor your first two sales), you’ll need another $6,000 to $8,000 for these training sales. That’s a total of about $12,000 to $15,000 to get you started right. A brilliant man once said that before you start anything, “count the costs”.

Bottom line, “High Ticket Home Business Opportunities” can be great if you have a lot of money. Again, the problem is that most people do not plan well enough in advance. In fact, they usually don’t know what they don’t know to even ask the right questions.

Here’s something else to consider – when you sell a program that exceeds $1,000 for sign-up fees, you’ll need to be good on the phone (or be a fast learner) since most people will not invest much over $1,000 without talking with someone.

TOO Low Priced Business Opportunities

The problem with business opportunities that cost $10 to $100 is that they’re just so difficult to turn into serious money. Let’s compare $10 to $100 price points. If you stand to earn $10 to $100 per sale, you will invest the same amount of time, energy (and usually advertising costs) to make 1/10 to 1/100 the amount of money. You’ll have to make ten to one hundred TIMES the number of sales to make the same amount of money.

Most people don’t realize that the cost of making a $15 sale is almost as high as making a $500 sale. Especially when you consider one of your best sources of advertising…Google. The average cost per click for the “Business Opportunity” related category cost about $0.75 to $1.50. You would have to sell one in 10 people who come to your site…just to break even (with no net profit). There are free advertising vehicles of course, but these require massive amounts of time and oversight, which ultimately limit you quite a bit.

So what’s the best price point you might ask? In my opinion, it’s somewhere between $300 to $1,000.

The article is brought to you by Peter Grundner at P&T Enterprises

At What Point In Your Business Should You Incorporate?

If you have been doing business, and are wondering about when you should become incorporated, you should know that at any time, you can make your business official. Perhaps you are a representative for a company, and have been selling their products? Maybe you have a lawn mowing service and are worried about doing business and being incorporated? There is no special time in the business world that you should become a legal business. However, if you see that your business is taking off, and you are wanting to become a LLC or incorporated, there is no reason to put it off.

Becoming a legal business, and having a license to do business in the state you are operating in makes total sense. Especially if your business has really taken off. Being incorporated can protect you and your personal assets. If your business were to be sued, or go into debt, having that LLC at the end of your name would definitely pay off.

With the many different entities to choose from when you become incorporated, you will have some decisions to make. All of the entities offer personal protection to the owners except for one, and that is DBA, also known as Doing Business As. This entity requires that the owners are personally held responsible for all legal matters, as well as debt. However, the other entities all off coverage for the owners, or members of the business.

Whether you are just starting out in business, or have been operating under your personal name for a while, it is never too late to become incorporated. Just be sure that you understand the entities and choose the one that is best for you and your business. If you need some help choosing and understanding the entities, a business attorney will be able to help you with those.

Business Letters: Keep Them Short and To The Point

you ever draft letters, or any other documents where brevity is important, you'll want to pay close attention to these little practical "tricks of the trade".
The following is an abridged excerpt from a chapter I have included in a couple of my Writing Kits.

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Anyone who has read any of my articles on the subject of letter writing or resume writing will know how important I believe it is to minimize the number of pages, preferably limiting them to one page wherever possible.

And we all know how tacky it looks when we put the finishing touches on a letter and it overflows onto the second page by one or two lines. Very unprofessional!

So, there are a number of handy little tricks that I've used over the years that will help “squeeze” a letter or other document onto one page without it being noticed by the average reader. These tricks can be applied using any standard word processing software program.

I’m not sure whether a purist at a secretarial school would approve of some of my methods since they may deviate from certain technical standards, but I have used them hundreds of times and nobody has ever been the wiser. The main point being that I was able to keep a letter on one page when the first version overflowed by a few lines onto a second page.

Below are my “page compression tips”, listed in the order in which I suggest you apply them:

1. Move both the left and right margins out about 1/4 in. closer to the edge of the page.

2. Move the top and bottom margins out about 1/4 in. closer to the edge of the page.

3. Edit out the one or two word “overflows”. What I mean here is this: After the letter is drafted take a good look at each paragraph. See if there are any that have an ending sentence that “overflows” onto an additional line for the sake of one word. If so, make a minor edit or two in the paragraph that shortens it a little so that the last word or two will not overflow onto the following line. Using this method, you can often gain two or three extra lines in a one-page letter.

4. Adjust the line spacing on the page. You can gain considerable space on a page by adjusting the line spacing of the text. For example, if the default line spacing is set to “single” at 12 points try setting it to “exactly” at 12 points if your font size is 12. If that doesn’t do it, try “exactly” at “11 pts”. Often you have to experiment a bit with this one to get the look just right.

5. As a last resort, try reducing the size of the font by 1 point size, say from 12 to 11 points.

6. If it still doesn’t “fit”, there’s one final thing you can try if you’re the author of the letter. Go back and edit it one more time. Look for redundant thoughts and phrases, or those that can be combined into one sentence rather than two. Is every word and phrase absolutely essential to your message? You’ll be amazed at the space savings that this process can result in.

As I said earlier, try the above methods in sequence, one-at-a-time, checking each time to see if your latest change has done the trick for you.

What happens if it still won’t fit?

Now, if you’ve used all of the above tricks and you still can’t get the letter to fit onto one page, it’s time to admit that you’ve got a real two-pager. In which case, you should then think about “reversing” some of the compression tricks that you applied when you tried to “squeeze” the letter, and then concentrate on making a balanced looking second page.

There’s nothing worse looking than a letter with a one or two sentence second page! So in this case, you may want to actually “stretch” the letter out a bit.

Often, at this stage I actually increase the line spacing and reduce the margins slightly so that there will be a decent sized overflow onto the second page.

For example, try reversing steps 1, 2 and 4 above. So instead of decreasing the top, bottom and side margins on page one, try increasing them by 1/4 in. all around. Then increase the point size and see if that helps. Ideally, try to get the page to break cleanly at a paragraph break, for a nice tidy page-to-page transition.

Again, I have used these little “compression” tricks thousands of times, and nobody has ever pulled out their ruler and chastised me for inaccuracy.

The important thing is to end up with a professional "looking" letter.

In fact, if you do a very detailed check of the real-life templates included in any one of my Writing Toolkits you would find that I have used one or more of the above tricks on many of them. But, I’m not telling which ones!