We stress this option because it is what we believe in. But how are you going to find the money or the time to start your own business especially when you are short of money right now anyway? And what are you going to do? One company that has some great tools and resources is LLC company LLC.net

These concerns are all tied in together and basically boil down to “do what you love and the time will be there and the money will come”. The best way to explain this is to give you some examples. And remember that a lot of these can be done by anyone from 13 years old to 90 years old. And all of them take extremely little cash to start up.

Do you love animals? If so, you could try to get a part-time job with a veterinarian. Or you could start your own part-time dog grooming business. Sit down to your handy home computer and write up a flyer about what you will do, such as a complete shampoo and blow dry. Run off some copies of your flyer (this few dollars for flyers will be your only expense) and go out walking your own dog in a different area every evening. Every time you meet someone else with their own dog, hand them a flyer. It would be easy to fit this into a tight schedule.

Do you like flying kites? You could teach a class on Saturday mornings at your local Parks and Recreation department on how to build different types of kites and how to fly them (so they actually stay up, that is). Or you could start your own business by offering these classes in your own home. Again, your main expense will be flyers to post around town. However, learning how to get on the radio for free to preach the wonderful benefits of flying a kite would bring you even more customers.

Do you like spending your weekends biking around the countryside? You can offer your own tours and advertise them through bike and outdoor life stores. Or start a newsletter for bike riders about the most beautiful or safest or most kid friendly or easiest or more strenuous rides in your region, your state or even the whole country. You get to do what you love and still make money at it.

Do you love gardening? Again, offer classes on growing a healthy diet, one class for adults and one for kids. You don’t have enough room where you live to do this? Find a country person who does and offer to grow them so many pounds of whatever in exchange for a few month’s use of some land. Live in the city with only enough room for your own small garden? Teach the city dwellers about container gardening. You could even offer a class in your own kitchen on 50 ways to cook and enjoy broccoli. Sell your leftover vegetables to your neighbors.

If woodworking is your thing, you just need to focus on the area you like best. Do you like cabinetry and can, therefore, start a custom cabinet business? Or is furniture more enjoyable to you? Or do you like repairing old houses? Or do you and your spouse like doing the arts and crafts type of thing? Or do you want to teach others how to do these things?

In other words, think about what you really love spending your time doing and turn that into a part-time occupation. We all need time to relax during the day. What better way to spend it then by doing something you love and making a little extra money at the same time? On top of that though, you may find that you really love doing this thing and you are building up clientele so that eventually you can quit the job that you do not particularly like and have your own full-time business. This is truly the best of both worlds.

Starting Your Own Business, Part 2

The key to successfully building your own business is to do something you love. And do not fall into the trap of doing something that everyone says there is “a lot of money to be made in it”. It is actually much easier to start a business if you enjoy the work. As you may already know, spending long hours doing something you dislike will never make you a success.

As to the money necessary to start a part-time business, today is the best time ever to be doing this because virtually anything you can think of can now be done professionally from your home. This saves you the huge overhead of renting space somewhere. Also, get your families help as much as possible. Probably the biggest mistake we see people make when it comes to starting their own business is hiring help. With the associated paper work and filings for employees, i.e. taxes, withholding reporting and insurance, this is a huge expense that you cannot afford right now.

The whole point, however, is that you need to pay off your debts and starting your own business is another way of bringing more income into the household to do this. How much can you make? If you turn out to be a good business person (keep your expenses down and the cash flowing) you may only make a profit of a few hundred dollars the first year up to as much as several thousand dollars. But if you find that you really enjoy this new business and want to make it a full-time occupation, you will see your profits growing each year.

Other Ways

There are other ways to increase your income also. Some of these could almost be considered a part-time job or starting your own business but are not quite the same.

For instance, do you have an extra room in your house? Can you create an extra room? Could you get bunk beds and put all three kids in one room for awhile? If so, you now have an extra room to rent out to a college student or young worker. A lot of people find the idea of having a “stranger” living in their house disconcerting. Remember that you can set up acceptable criteria for the type of person you will rent to. A graduate student is going to be a more serious person than a college freshman. They have to be or they would not have made it all the way to graduate student. Depending on what you charge for the room and whether meals are including or kitchen privileges, you could add at least another $400 a month to your income.

We live in the land of opportunity but it is your responsibility to find those opportunities and put them to use for yourself. Instead of spending the next few hours watching TV, why not go lay down and think of all the other possibilities out there.

How Google Will (or could) Destroy Groupon In Less Than A Year

12/14/10

Mostly everyone seems shocked by Groupon deciding pass on Google’s $6 Billion offer. It’s rumored that they’ve been able to ramp sales up for a revenue rate of $2 billion dollars a year. Now there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, the total revenue figure is the amount of money that passes through Groupon. The amount they actually get to keep is going to be closer to $900 million. If they have a net profit of $300 million I would be very surprised. They’ve been adding daily to their huge sales force along with lots of customer service reps. Headcount is now somewhere around 2,500 people which seems unreal. All of this basically means that they have giant overhead and on top of that they’ve been making acquisitions of competitors in foreign countries and domestically as well. The point is, while they’re making money like crazy they’re spending just as quickly.  A major problem that Groupon faces (other than an ever growing legion of competitors with essentially the same business model) is that their hyper growth and all of the PR and hoopla surrounding their success has allowed them to ignore one very simple fact.

A lot of businesses aren’t going to want to continue to do business with Groupon once they begin to see exactly who they end up retaining as customers who participated in a Groupon deal.  Most businesses can’t afford to sell their products or services at 50% off. It’s an unsustainable business model. Selling something at fire sale prices once or twice a month to attract a lot of new customers is great if you’re looking for new customers who won’t buy anything for a regular price. If however you hope that you’re going to gain a lot of new customers who are then going to be cool with paying $100 instead of $50 from now on for that floral arrangement, well your SOL. What’s really alarming is that no one seems to point out that 8 out of 10 businesses fail and struggle to get businesses in the door immediately. Groupon is now making their way to those new businesses and many owners feel like its initially a success. To go from no business to a wave of business in a short period of time must seem like a prayer of relief. Until no one comes back, or the ones that do are asking for the “Groupon Rate”… I’m sure this isn’t always the case but I just don’t know of many businesses that can continuously sell @ 50% off.

Groupon now has a new offering where they will (for only a 10% fee) help you offer your services at unsustainably low rates online via their local deal feed and through your very own Groupon Store. So in other words; “We help you lose money, and we only charge a 10% processing fee!”. At what point does the math catch up with all of this? What’s ironic is that Groupon isn’t helping businesses connect with suppliers who are selling things at 50% off.

If you’re using other forms of advertising to gain new customers at least your not attracting customers who are always looking for a deal. So if you spend $10,000 to gain 20 new customers via PPC ads and that same $10,000 spend (with Groupon) gets you 100 new customers in the door at 50% off and you only retain 20 of them well you’ve just paid 100% more for those 20 clients and they’re not necessarily the ones you really want. Okay so all of the “boring economics” aside there are probably some examples where Groupon could work well year round.

Okay so now I know the title of this entry is more interesting than discussing the sustainability of the Groupon business model. So I guess it’s time to get to that….

This might seem to be kind of a stretch but I think Google might have been planning (or hoping they would) on getting turned down. Now it kind of gives them the green light to go after them in the most efficient manner. In order to destroy Groupon, Google only needs to cut them off at the search.

There’s a ton of consumers who aren’t even aware of Groupon yet. They’re still looking for deals on products and services the old (old / new) fashion way, by searching for it. So what is standing in Google’s way of offering up businesses a way to offer up daily or weekly deals on their wares at some incredible discount. It might look something like this. (Please pardon the crude Google Deals Coupon, but I’m no graphic artist)

Now I know what you might be thinking, how could Google go and do that? Simple, by contacting everyone who lists their local business with Google local for free and offering them the ability to offer a daily deal and create a coupon with the exact same system they use for creating an Adwords ad. Wait better yet, why not offer them a $500 incentive. Use some of that $6 Billion they just saved to offer them $500 of free Adwords ads if they set up an account and offer a daily deal. Better yet, Google can even offer to give them a free local phone number they can use to track all of the calls that come in. So now you won’t have to worry about making sure your employees ask how they heard about your company or service. Google’s got a record of all of it. Google could even create a check out process where you pay for your coupon (Deal) and set your appointment (when applicable) at the same time. But imagine if Google just used $3 billion of the $6 billion they offered Groupon to launch this new initiative. $2.5 billion to acquire 5 million new local businesses and $500 million for the development and launch….

Another (crude) example of how it could work is below.

Now you might be thinking that offering this kind of service is kind of anti-competitive. Well they’re already doing exactly this same practice in other verticals. Just take a look at the home mortgage industry. Search for “mortgage” or any number of related terms and in the first spot you’ll see one of Google’s very own comparison ads.

And finally I think that this daily deal thing is something that Google has been thinking about pretty early on….. (Maybe since 2004)

Groupon has executed well and built a great sales force which Google could use sell a lot of their different services. That could be a significant reason they were willing to pay so much for it, or the exact opposite. Knowing they might not even need that giant sales force they could cut headcount by 2,000 and enjoy even higher margins. That’s one reason why I could have seen Groupon not selling, if part of the deal was contingent on Google making assurances that they wouldn’t cut headcount with regard to the sales reps.

Regardless, Google just needs to chip away at the daily deal revenue that Groupon is generating by offering quite frankly an even better service. One that doesn’t rely on a business being willing to sell their product or service at a loss only to get people in the door.

Only time will tell if Groupon will continue to thrive, but my money says that a year from they’ll be another “Friendster”…

Talk about a loaded question.. Can you please specify which case you’re referring to exactly? It’s kind of hard to feel bad for what has become the “800lbs Gorilla” of the internet. Sure you might say that title clearly belongs to Google. Well there are some that think there’s a very good chance Facebook could one day be even more powerful than Google. It did just recently pass Google as the worlds most visited site according to Hitwise as well. There’s also that persistent (and pretty much acknowledged by Eric Schmidt) rumor that Google is starting its own social network, GoogleMe.

Well it just seems that you can’t turn on your Macbook without hearing news about someone trying to shake down “Zuck” for millions. The latest was that guy slinging wood pellets (and not very well according to the 5.0) claiming he was the majority shareholder in Facebook because of a contract that predated the launch and or when it was even conceived (or stolen from others, more on that later). But really the first person or persons to get litigious with Zuckerberg was the guys who started the ill conceived HarvardConnection.com. Essentially a dating site for Harvard students….

The two most interesting founders of Harvard Connection are twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. They attempted to hire Zuckerberg to develop their start-up. They claim he essentially led them to believe he was building it out for three months whilst really building out TheFacebook.com (as it was originally called). For well educated twins from a family that has more high profile lawyers on retainer than you can shake a stick at, they neglected to get him to sign anything.

Bottom line was of their suit is that he “Stole their idea”. But as Mark played by Jessie Eisenberg says in the David Fincher directed biopic says, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented it.”

The movie comes out today and with incredible timing and execution comes www.HarvardConnection.com. Seems the Winklevoss twins let the domain drop and now someone has created quite an entertaining site. Kudos! Let this be a lesson to all entrepreneurs. If someone screws you over in business and their company blows up and becomes a juggernaut sue them, cash out but hang on to all of the IP. That includes domain names, hell they’re only $10 a year to renew.

HarvardConnection.com
Harvard Connection

Why Does My Child Need a Tutoring Service?

If your child is making slower progress in school than expected — you shouldn’t be too quick to blame him or her. It doesn’t help that modern school curriculums, at even the earliest of grades, demand more from children than ever before. Moreover, while the materials being taught are ever-evolving, the learning methods used to convey concepts to our youth remain stale, in many cases.

The Advancement of Private Tutoring

There is good news, however, in the form of a new means to find private tutoring in no time at all. In the past, if a youngster needed the extra support of a tutoring service to keep afloat, having to rely on the few local tutors available was always be a bit of a dice roll; there was simply no guarantee that your child’s specific needs would be met.

Thankfully, a quality tutoring service is no longer hard to come by in this day and age. Online tutoring makes academic assistance accessible to all and almost fully eliminates the trial and error element that had occasionally plagued the tutor-finding process.

The parents on our staff are all agreeing that the resources of TutoringService.com are pretty much second to none. The information channels offered here enable students to quickly connect to tutors at the touch of a button — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Learning assistance is available for virtually every subject you can think of. Any questions you may have can be answered by contacting a tutoring service expert today!

One of the best sites that we’ve seen in terms of offering a great deal of information is by far, PCAT.com. It makes sense if you think about it. What else would you expect to find on their website. They have information of the test, links to PCAT study guides, PCAT prep classes where you need to go for PCAT registration and just a wealth of general information. In fact they even have links to information about finding student loans specifically for pharmacy school. That includes both University based programs and technical colleges offering Pharmacy Tech certification programs.

Another benefit is that the site isn’t selling any books or guides. It looks as if they have evaluated a lot of the different programs, PCAT study guides and materials and are helping to weed out the better ones. They provide links to find the materials and even have coupon codes on how to save substantially on them as well in some cases. For the individual who is interested in pharmacology and doesn’t have any real information yet, the site also offers a basic introduction guide and links to a number of colleges who have programs and free information.

Overall this is arguably the best PCAT information site that we’ve seen. Giving you a complete rundown and answering most if not all of your questions within what would require 45 minutes of reading time. The website can be found at, you guessed it PCAT.com.

Second Facebook Movie Trailer

One bit of evidence that we’ve found to support this therory. iPhone application developer Plumamazing Inc currently has the domain www.iPadPro.com re-directing to their home page. Hopefully we’ll have some real answers soon.

Many GT-R owners were learning the hard way that accelerating off the line like you’re being filmed for the latest installment of the Fast and Furious franchise and the mechanical damages caused by such shenanigans would NOT be covered by Nissan. You break it, you buy it. No doubt a firestorm of angry owners claimed ignorance and Nissan had no choice but to introduce features that would protect the new GT-R owners from themselves.

In all new 2010 models in order to accomplish your best acceleration time (regardless of VCD being engaged or not) the engine would now rev to a max of 3000 RPM and will blast you off to 60 in 3.8 seconds. Yes that’s right you’re losing a huge 6/10th’s of a second. This is nearly analogous to dating a Victoria’s Secret super model and then down grading to a Playmate of The Year. That’s a joke, it still rocks and it’s something most of us would nearly kill someone for. Alright, maybe just a serious beating. Okay okay, a harsh verbal berating.

Sure you’re no longer 1/10th of a second faster than an Enzo. Yes the new ZR-1 now holds both Nurburgring as well as short distance dominance over your head, who cares? In the end you’re still at the wheel of one of the most respected (feared) pieces of automotive art in the world. Let’s also not forget that you’re still going to be able to spank nearly anything (stock) on the road today and you paid a hell of a lot less to do it to boot.

Prospective Nissan GT-R owners accept your fate but fear not, should you burn a $20,000 clutch Nissan will pick up the tab. (Probably)

In doing some general research we stumbled upon something very interesting. In the last week there have been a number of domains that have been registered since the original story broke involving Rachel Uchitel (pictured below left). Many are combinations of Tiger’s name and the story. TigerWoodsScandal.com, TigerWoodsAffair.com and of course all three women involved in the stories have their name matching domains taken. Which truthfully is surprising especially in the case of Jaimee Grubbs. Ms. Grubbs seems to want some kind of career in entertainment, she’s appeared on “VH1′s Tool Academy”. It’s surprising that an aspiring entertainer/actress wouldn’t have secured her name months if not years ago.

Out of all of the domains that we discovered the one that was the most interesting by far is TigersGirls.com. (UPDATE: WARNING THE FOLLOWING DOMAIN IS NOW POINTING TO A PORNOGRAPHIC LANDING PAGE) Why is this domain so interesting you ask? Well it was registered nearly two years ago on January 17th, 2007. It was registered with private whois information, meaning it’s somewhat untraceable. So why and better yet who exactly would want to register that particular domain as far back as 2007?  The name itself seems to imply that Tiger had “girls”, meaning more than one with whom he might have had transgressions with back then. If I had to guess I would have to say that this seems more likely to be someone within Team Tiger. Perhaps a jealous golfing peer? I would imagine that the PGA tour is just as much a gossip filled boys club as some male dominated companies.

Still if I had to put money on it, I’d say it was someone close within his personal circle. Someone who has known about Tiger and his “transgressions” for some time. Someone who knows that eventually every celebrity cheater gets caught. Someone who might be thinking about possibly publishing a book perhaps. “Tigers Girls”, what a great title! No doubt a tell all story about Tiger and the women who he’s brought back to his den (please forgive the pun) would sell millions of copies. You might even be able to speculate that Tiger’s introduction to Jaimee Grubbs might have been a well-calculated move by an insider. I’m quite sure that no one gains access to Tiger without going through some screening process. After all, of the three women who are being linked to the golf superstar she seems to be the only one who is documenting it by saving voicemails and text messages.

Well if I were Tiger I’d act quickly on trying to first find out who exactly registered this domain. Second I’d move even more quickly there after to take the domain away (via WIPO) from this possible conspirator. It’s an unfortunate situation that he has put himself and his family in. Only time will tell if his marriage can survive this scandal.

UPDATE: Since discovering that TigersGirls.com points to an advertisement for a pornographic site we’re doing our best to track down who exactly owns this domain.

ImageShack continues to use the .us extension as their url address.