The key to stress-free living is to find the balance between your work and your home life. Running a home based business gives you the freedom and independence to financially support yourself while allowing you to spend more time doing what you want to do. As the owner and manager of your business, you have the power to make managerial decisions regarding the direction of the business and make your ‘work schedule’ fit into your schedule. With the use of advancing technology, the number of home based business opportunities for women is unlimited. You can take advantage of these opportunities and with careful planning, and determination, turn any idea into multiple money making streams of income.Many legitimate home opportunities for women have low start up costs. Often after few months the business profits exceeds the amount paid in start up costs. Due to the nature of the business, you never have to worry about requesting time off and missing important events since you have the ability to work from anywhere at any time. In home businesses provide an instant source of income that allow you to determine how frequently and how much you are paid.Although you can operate certain businesses inside your home such as an answering service, a home-based child care center or provide in home training, the most lucrative businesses are online businesses. You don’t have to worry about damage to your home, and online businesses allow you flexibility from day to day. When you are working online from a computer, your overhead cost is minimal.Through the use of the invaluable internet, you have the ability to tap into unused and underused markets. Developing your business and marketing online helps you reach a wider scope of customers, thereby increasing your profit margins. If you go online and do your research, you’ll find plenty of online tools and resources available to help you build and maintain your website as well as teach you how to direct your traffic to your site.Home based business opportunities for women are for the serious minded woman who is independent, fearless and not afraid of taking risks–or testing her ideas. This is a woman who knows no matter what it takes, is willing to learn how to run and operate a successful business, because she knows that a successfully run business will eliminate her financial worries associated with today’s unstable economy. So now that being said…ask yourself…are you this woman?Yes anyone can start a home based business. You don’t have to be a specialist, but to be successful, you must be a self-starter, motivated, business-minded and determined individual. This combined with a focused mind and effective marketing, are the pillars that you need to insure your success. Are you ready to get stated?
Home Based Business Opportunities For Women – Are You Daring Enough To Take Advantage?
Social Media for Small Businesses
Social media has become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. Businesses of all size and shapes have started making the most of available mediums. Today we will try to anatomize tips on social media for small businesses. There are a plethora of small businesses eyeing social medium to promote their business/services. However, majorly these small businesses are failing or not being able to make optimum use of social media for their business growth. There are many theories and strategies on how to effectively use social media for established brands, but the topic social media for small businesses is seldom addressed. According to Digital state of eMarketing India 2017 Octane Research:60% small businesses promote their business on social media. 50% focus on SEO and 35% use multichannel marketing funnel.
70% small businesses consider content strategy as their primary marketing activity.
52% business owners are using social media as to efficiently address customer engagement.
More than 20% of business owners said that they are making 50% plus profit using social media.The primary reasons for the low turnout are uncertainty on an application of social media, calculating return on investment and persuade employees/stakeholders to clinch social media. Hence it is important to address the elephant in the room and analyze how beneficial is Social media for small businesses.Social media for small businesses is a great way for emerging businesses to generate lead and build a reputation. If regularly updated, social media can deliver more results as compared to traditional mediums. Social media for small businesses gives brands an edge of control over the content that they want to post. Also, since social media is a two-way dialogue process, it helps businesses to instantly identify what is benefitting them. Social media for small businesses also helps generate Word of Mouth, which is one of the best tools for emerging businesses.Social Media for small businesses | 10 Tips to effectively use Social MediaDefine your Target Audience
The first and foremost important part that small businesses should focus on is to define their target audience. This helps small businesses to device their social media strategy accordingly. The target audience should be defined basis age group, sex, location, users’ online behaviors, their likes, interests, and preferences. For niche products, business owners can even target users based on their birthdays, anniversaries and important milestone. Audience targeting plays a very crucial role in the outcome of the results. For e.g.: a local shop selling footwear should not target users with interest in entertainment. The shop definitely won’t get the desired results.Set achievable goals
Overnight success is a myth. Small businesses must understand this basic fact. Generally, when a new business starts selling on social media, there is palpable excitement is achieving more than set targeted sales. Businesses need to set goals which are upwards and forward. To achieve enormous goals, small businesses start updating social feed with multiple updates in shorter duration. This leads to user’s disinterest in the product/service. The set goals should be in sync with brand’s core capabilities and expertise. For e.g.: if a business is into selling shoes, they shouldn’t set a goal to repair maximum shoes in their area.Choose the right medium
By now everyone knows, social media is for free. Even paid campaigns can be conducted at a relatively low cost as compared to traditional mediums. It is in this scenario, that we often see small businesses jumping the bandwagon and creating profiles on all the available platforms. Creating social profile doesn’t hamper brand image, but aggressively promoting a brand on wrong platforms can lead to brand losing its potential customers. Hence it is advisable for SME’s to first identify the right platform through which they can maximize their business. For e.g.: If a shoe selling brand tries to aggressively sell on LinkedIn, they won’t get a plausible response as compared to promotions on Facebook/Instagram.Promote your core product/services
Since each and every business is riding in the social media wave, it is important for a them to promote their core product/services. Nowadays, we see a lot of businesses promoting their services as well as promoting peripheral products/services, which revolves around their core product/services. Majority of the times, this SME’s doesn’t have capabilities to fulfill a requirement, which can lead to a bad word of mouth for their business on social media platforms. Let us go back to our example; if a shoe seller is trying to aggressively promote socks instead of shoes, it is not going to benefit the business in the long run.Create quality content
Now that we have covered the topics of identifying the target audience, setting achievable goals, choosing the right medium and promoting the right product/services let us now take a look at the type of content a business should promote on their social pages. A business should always focus on creating good quality content rather than not-good quantity content. Even if the business updates their page once in a day as long as it is relevant to their business, advocates about its core products send across a clear message it is considered as a good quality content. Antagonistically, if a business posts multiple updates which aren’t even relevant to the business’s products and services leads to users considering the business as fake/spam. Also, new businesses should try and refrain from promoting other businesses on their social platforms initially.Create a content calendar
Making a small business successful on social platforms is no small task. It takes a lot of efforts for the businesses to keep up their conversion ratio. One such effort is to create a content calendar. Small businesses must anticipate important events and create a content calendar accordingly. Ideally, a content calendar must be planned a month in advance but an even weekly content calendar is highly recommended. This helps businesses to avoid any last minute hassles, strategize much more effectively and it also helps in creating curiosity amongst its loyal fans/customers.Test and re-test
Social media is highly unpredictable. The content a business posts today, might not work for tomorrow. Hence, small businesses must always test their content before publishing it on their pages. Testing content also applies to the platform a small business chooses to promote. Small business owners must always don the consumer’s hat before posting about any product feature, updates, schemes or offers. A consumer’s perspective is the key when testing the content that has to be uploaded.Look for inspiration
Small businesses must always look for inspiration from a competitor who is successful in the same category. Copy pasting competitors idea or content is not the answer. Small businesses must look for the kind of content its competitors are putting up and derive their own strategies subsequently. Inspiring content/stories always make a business to strive to create their own content that is appreciated by one and all. It helps in increasing brand consideration, brand visibility thereby increasing conversions for the business.Calculate ROI
Even a small promotional budget is not justifiable if there is no mechanism to calculate its return on investment. It is more important in case of small businesses. It is very important for a small business to keep a tab on the budgets allocated to any promotions and the subsequent ROI related to it. If a certain promotion is not doing well or the business is not getting desired results, the brand custodian can always look for other platforms to generate quality conversions.Analyze and Re-strategize
There can be umpteen instances where a particular campaign/promotion might not work for a business. That doesn’t mean that the promotion is wrong or the product/service is not good. Doing an analysis of the campaign is as important as setting the objective. This helps the business to formulate their upcoming strategies in more effective ways. At the end of every campaign, brands must note down the learning’s from that campaign and identify if the content/idea was appreciated by their fans or not. This helps businesses to skip the non-performing updates from future communications.Final Thoughts
Social media for small businesses is definitely beneficial and fruitful. If followed correctly, small businesses can benefit tremendously from the power of social media promotions.
Deaf Parenting – An Individual Education Plan (IEP) To Effectively Meet Educational Needs
It is important for parents of deaf and other special needs children to understand what an Individual Education Plan is and how to ensure your child’s education needs are being met in his or her IEP.
In this article, I will discuss:
What is an IEP
Give tips for having an effective IEP that meets your child’s educational needs
An IEP is a document that details the special needs services for special needs students. The IEP includes any modifications that are required in the classroom and any additional special programs or services. In the USA an IEP is mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA 2004). The IEP will address your child’s educational needs, and contain specific, measurable short term and annual goals for each of those needs.
This written statement is developed by your child’s teachers, and is reviewed and agreed to by your child’s special needs education funding organization and you, the parents. The IEP describes the goals the team sets for your child during the school year, as well as any special support needed to help your child achieve his or her educational goals.
In our case with our deaf son, Larry, we lived in Marlboro, MA and Larry attended school at The Learning Center for Deaf Children in Framingham, MA. The town of Marlboro funded the cost of his education. So we dealt with the special needs education supervisor in Marlboro and Larry’s teachers in Framingham.
The IEP meeting is usually attended by the child’s classroom teacher, the child’s department supervisor, the funding special needs education supervisor and the parents.
The IEP document can be very daunting lots of pages with a lot of official sounding documentation.
Here are tips based on our experience on ensuring your child has an effective IEP that meets his or her educational needs:
Tip#1: You as parents need to be proactive and take an active role in developing the goals for your child’s IEP. You need to have regular interactions with your child’s teachers and school supervisors to understand what your child is being taught, how your child is progressing and what your child will be taught next. This will help you in 2 ways: firstly you will be able to understand what is being stated in your child’s IEP and you can make sure which educational needs will receive the most attention. Secondly your child’s teacher will realize that you are interested in your child’s education and they will make extra efforts on behalf of your child. I firmly believe that it is always good to set high expectations for the people working with your child.
Tip#2: Usually your child’s special needs education funding organization will have meetings a few times a year to discuss their plans etc. Attend as many of these meetings as possible and develop a relationship with the supervisor for your child’s special needs education. This relationship will allow you to discuss and make requests suited to your child’s educational requirements.
Tip#3: We requested a copy of Larry’s IEP 2 days before the IEP meeting so my wife and I could review the IEP. Your child’s teacher is usually very busy developing IEPs so you need to give the teacher early notice that you need the IEP for review. Having a relationship with your child’s teacher and the funding special education supervisor will really help here because you will already know what level of education your child is at and what is the next level of education and services to be addressed in the IEP.
Tip#4: You need to remember that you as parents can bring with you to the IEP meeting others involved with your child that you feel are important for the IEP team to hear, such as, your child’s psychologist or tutor. I would recommend keeping surprises for the IEP team to a minimum and again your working relationship with your child’s education team should help you resolve issues and have agreements on your child’s educational needs before the IEP meeting.
Tip#5: Parents should remember that IEPs can be updated any time during the year. For Larry, he was very good at mathematics and we had the IEP amended during the school year to provide Mathematics tutoring during the summer for the next level of Mathematics. Since we had a good relationship with our town’s special needs education supervisor, this was easily done and Larry had his Mathematics teacher as a tutor during the summer.
Tip#6: Here are a couple of things I wished we would have done differently. In middle school Larry was struggling with Reading and English. He had a literature class where the reading material was Shakespeare. We knew he was struggling with Reading and English and this class was frustrating him a lot. We should have had a discussion with this teacher and the Middle School supervisor and find a solution that met Larry’s needs and have his IEP amended. In addition, we should have requested a tutor for Reading and English where the tutoring was done in American Sign Language