When I was just out of high school, I decided that instead of getting a regular job I would create my own business providing a service to the community.  At the time, I realized that there was a need for a company to provide inexpensive business forms to the business community and I took advantage of this need.

Thankfully, my parents were well versed in creating business forms and I borrowed from their strengths to create the forms that I would sell to other businesses.  They helped me to draft packages that would apply to the needs of the business community which allowed me to have a line of products to sell.

Some of the packages that I sold included deed polls, termination papers, forms for company resolutions, and many others.  I mainly sold these through door-to-door sales and it wasn’t until the popularity of the Internet increased that I finally had some competition.

Now, I have a website that is used to sell the same business forms that I created many years ago and it is doing very well.  Though it is not my primary source of income, every time I get a sale I still get butterflies in my stomach.

We have been trying different tactics to get more business and customers for my parents book store.  Quite frankly, since the dawn of the Internet, their business has been dwindling because people just don’t read as much as they used to.  If they need to find something, they can just look online now.

But, we have had some success with different promotions that have allowed their business to stay afloat.  Such things as book signings, a discount card, and a "refer a friend" program have all boosted business.

The promotions haven’t stopped there though.  Recently, we decided to offer our customers a free book if their purchase was over fifty dollars.  The book that we are offering is Stock Split Secrets, by Darlene Nelson, an informative guide on how to get rich by successfully trading on the stock markets.

So far, the response has been overwhelming, and they are on track to having the best month that they have had in the past decade.  I suppose it helps that it is a limited time offer - it really gives them incentive to buy right now.

When it comes to drawing, I’ll have to admit, I just plain suck.  I don’t think that I ever progressed beyond a grade two level, and I am almost embarrassed about it.  So, you don’t usually find me drawing anything, because I know it is my weakness.

But, we have been trying to come up with a few sketches of our new business logo design.  I have a rough idea in my head what I am looking for, but I know that I will not be able to do it.  But to convey the idea to a professional, these sketches will be needed.

Friday is the day that we are meeting with the graphics design firm that has been contracted to do the work, and I will be showing them the sketches so that they know what I am looking for.

I just hope they don’t laugh at what I have done - it is really bad…

I am not a big fan of keeping secrets and I would rather share my success with others so that they can benefit from my knowledge.  You see, I believe that everyone should have the right to succeed, but if they get a little help along the way, that should be allowed.

For me, I owe my MLM success to the MLM lead generation skills that I have developed.  Sure, they didn’t just come to me overnight, but it took many years for me to get to the level that I needed to succeed in my business.  It has involved a lot of trial and error, but I have honed my skills to an art.

Another thing that I did early on was engage in blogging for profit and not just for fun.  With the goal of making money in mind, I was catering to a different audience, one that had money to spend.  So, I found a lot of referrals and sales by following this practice, and it has helped my bottom line out immensely.

I would have to say that the biggest contributor to my success has been the support of my family - without them, I would have never taken the journey.

Things have sure been different this time around when I have tried to start a new business.  You see, a couple of years ago, I went bankrupt due to horrendous medical bills - I had no choice.  But the result of that decision was that I lost everything - my business, and my credit.

So now, a couple of years later, when I am trying to rebuild my life, I have run into some roadblocks.  We are trying to open a little music store in a local mall, but we have run into some issues such as financing and getting a merchant account.

Unfortunately for me, my bankruptcy is a strike when it comes to most merchant account providers and they want nothing to do with me.  But, I have found some high risk merchant accounts that will let me apply with no credit check at all.

So, I have applied and hopefully I will be accepted.  Otherwise, I might just have to scrap the idea for our business altogether.

My boyfriend has started his own company making jewelry. He is really good at it and we thought that we should get it on the Internet, allowing it to be seen by more people. As neither one of us are very computer literate, we decided to consult a friend as to how to get started in this process.

He told us that we would need to buy a domain name before we could do anything else and he gave us a list if sites to visit that offered cheapest domain names. He then suggested that we hire someone to help us build a site that would be easy to navigate.

We decided to go for it and asked ourselves what is in a name? We came up with a name that would tell people exactly what it was that we were offering and then got someone to work with us on building the page.

After the birth of my first child, it broke my heart when I had to go back to work and leave him with a babysitter. After we had our second child, I knew that there was no way that I could leave both of them and I decided that I was going to figure out a way to make an income from home.

I sat and came up with several ideas and weighed the pros and cons of each idea. In the end, I decided that I was going to start my own company that specialized in unique baby gifts. I knew this was something that would interest nearly everyone. We all know people having babies and it is nice not to have to worry about what to get them for gifts.

The company did so well that I decided to expand it so that it would include wedding, shower and graduation gifts. It has far surpassed any expectations that I may have originally had for it and I am home with my babies; right where I want to be.

I’ve come up with a few business opportunities for a clever inventor.

a. Patent a new kind of plastic packaging that is just as difficult to open in the store as current clear plastic, shoplifting-proof packages are — you know the kind I’m talking about. But once the item is scanned, the packaging opens readily.

b. Recreate the automobile fly window, aka the window vent. When air conditioning became standard equipment in cars, apparently the auto industry felt that the fresh air intake was a viable substitute for those versatile, triangular windows in the front seat.

They come in handy when it’s raining but the weather is too cool outside to run the air conditioning. They’re adjustable, pivoting well over 90 degrees, allowing for any number of custom adjustments for perfect fresh air redirection.

c. Create a viable raw sewage system for train and bus restrooms so that these closet-sized “rooms” don’t smell like outhouses.

Inventors, start your engines!

I’ve been thinking a lot about promotional products lately, as I am looking for something to advertise my business.  I want to do something different than pens or mouse pads or calendars and I decided to take a look at what else was available.

I’m not saying that the aforementioned pens, mouse pads and calendars are not nice and I am not saying that these are not effective but I want something that is different and unique, just as my business is.  I would like to have promotional items that I have not seen before because chances are other people have not seen them either.

I went to a website that dealt mainly with corporate gifts to find out what I can get with my company’s logo and advertisement on it.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had many items available that were both different and unique.

We have a small restaurant that sells pizza and pasta.  We have been operating it for a number of years now, and pride ourselves on the quality of food and service that we provide.  Looking at the number of repeat customers that we have, you can definitely see why we are better than our competition.

But the one challenge that we face is that we don’t offer debit on delivery.  The reasoning behind it is that in the past, the pricing for that kind of service has been rather expensive.  So, we have avoided getting portable credit card processing machines up to this point.

Thanks to a flyer that we received in the mail, we will be adding debit on delivery as a service that we provide to our delivery customers.  Our minds were changed when we learned that the price to offer such a service has dropped significantly and is close to being on par with a debit machine in our restaurant.

Hopefully, we will be able to try it out in the next week or so - I bet our customers will love our new service.