When you set out to label something "best", a careful selection of criteria is always in order. The criteria you choose has a lot to do with your reason for wanting to label something as "best". If your goal is to sell something, that leads you to one specific set of criteria; obviously, criteria for which the thing you're trying to sell scores highly. In this case though we're not trying to sell you anything. Instead, we're going to pick criteria that you would probably pick - that is, if you had already chosen poorly on several occasions and knew more about what you really wanted to get out of a home-based business. You see, most people do a pretty poor job of choosing these criteria the first time around. For most people the only criteria that comes quickly to mind is "I want to make insane amounts of money". We've got no problem with that for a starting criteria but it is just a start. There are some other ones that should come to you pretty quickly like, "I want a business that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to start". That's pretty practical, another money based criteria - - but let's think a little bit outside of that box. How about, "I want to take lots of vacations". Without some experience, most people would not realize that this is an important criteria that will help to weed out unacceptable home-based businesses. Consider for instance a service based business. If you will lose important customers because it seems like you're always on vacation, obviously, that clashes with an important criteria. Let's look at another example relating to that same criteria. Is a business that you have in mind one that will require you to be there to take orders from your customers? Or does it, like many home-based business possibilities, lend itself well to having other people take your orders for you - - and even do all your shipping and billing? The best home based businesses take these things into account, but let's think even further outside of the box. Here's one which, remarkably, winds up pretty far down on most people's list. "I want a business that's still fun for me even after I've put in over 1000 hours building it". Some of you might be thinking, "that's not important, I can tough it out, as long as there's big money in it". What if we told you that that's a recipe for failure? A willingness to "tough it out", is never an adequate substitute for "I forgot to go to bed last night because I was having so much fun working on my business". This same basic idea brings us to yet another criteria that very few people would think of unless they had already tried and failed at home-based business and managed to track it back to this criteria. That criteria is, "I want a home-based business that I feel good about". Most people are actually more moral than they give themselves credit for. It can be easily demonstrated that most people will shy away from doing things that they don't feel good about. It says something about human nature that this is even stronger than greed in many cases. As a simple example take the case of an online business centered around sending out tons of unsolicited e-mail. If you dislike spam and spam is your business, your business will fail. |
