Contrary to popular belief, those who work from home, or to be more specific, have their own Home Based Business, are successful. In 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report that there are 7 million people that are working from home in the US alone. That was five years ago, imagine how many more successful people are there in the US alone now, those who are successfully working from home.There must be something good about having your own Home Based Business for such a large number of people doing it and successfully at that. How do you make yourself one of them though? Being disciplined would be a good start.The honest truth is, having your own Home Based Business doesn’t come without its challenges. The term ‘motivation’ takes on a whole new level of meaning. You are now no more an employee on the monthly payroll. Instead, you are now an employer and employee, all rolled into one. You no longer have a boss who tells you what to do and who has the power to fire you. You also no longer have a subordinate whom you can delegate mundane tasks to.You will now play the role of management in your Home Based Business. You’ll be in control as its now your Home Based Business that you’ll be running and well, everything that happen or doesn’t happen will be your problem. It’s from this control where you’ll get your motivation. Motivation will tell you what work needs to get done and self discipline will make sure you get that work done.In your Home Based Business, all you ‘office equipment’ is right there; your computer, phone and fax. You don’t ever have to leave you home now, because well, your home has also become your office. This is where the tricky part comes in. You have to find the right balance for yourself, as to when do you actually do the office work, that is work on your Home Based Business, and when do you do your household duties. To overcome this tightrope, its best to actually set yourself ‘working hours’.These working hours are entirely up to you. It can be early in the morning or even late into the night, depending on what else you have going on in your life. Whatever you decide, it’s important that you stick with those hours and actually work on your Home Based Business at that time. This discipline is important as it not only sets the momentum going, it also give you and you clients guidelines as to when you are available to talk business.The common sense here is, to be truly successful in your Home Based Business, you musty truly work.On the other hand, when everyone else is physically away in an office and your office is actually your home, family and friends tend to jump to the conclusion that just because you are at home everyday, you have tons of free time in your hands. They will then start thinking that you’re free to help then do stuff that they can only get accomplished during the weekends, etc. Family commitments like children and duties around the house will easily lure you away from your Home Based Business.This is where more discipline comes into play and you have to put your foot down and say ‘NO’ to these distractions. This is where your set working hours will help you decide what you can and cannot do. With a little bit of persistence, your family and friends will start to understand your Home Based Business better. As long as you keep giving in to these distractions, your cash flow will be affected. Hence, discipline plays a vital key in making your Home Internet Business a successful one.

Product creation in Internet marketing is getting stiffer and stiffer nowadays owing to tough competition between Internet-based businesses. Putting up a new product requires plenty of brainpower and finances along with an ability to take risk. With that, even if you have the product well-set already, you have to position it strategically in the Internet landscape for others to notice. You should get the interest of Web users and turn them to actual customers. Aside from the usual physical products, many different products that thrive well on Internet marketing include E-books, membership sites, and video lectures.

The long and difficult process of product creation begins with ideas. They are easy to get – compared to the effort that comes with analyzing the market for that idea. Before the idea turns to a product, businesses often spend money, even amounting to millions of dollars, to ensure the success of the new product that emerges from an idea. Businesses undertake many types of market research and surveys before releasing their products to the public. Now, you may think that because your business is small, you can’t afford research or you don’t have to do research; you can and you should. The Internet allows you to disseminate materials needed for your market study to many people at once without your having to spend a cent.

It is a common maxim in business: Look at your destination first before mapping out your journey. So what are the goals you intend to accomplish with your product creation ventures? The everyday travails of your business may make you forget the end in sight. On the other hand, prepare to entertain new developments that come to your mind in your product creation. Your conception of a product may have started this way, but a few tweaks here and there along with some market research results and it ends up another way. Take it as the result of a creative process, not as a failure to reach your goal. After all, your product creation activities are intertwined with a long-term goal that you should strive to sustain at your utmost: profit generation. So if your less profitable initial idea evolves to a more profitable product, be thankful!

With your product made up already, start doing some aggressive Internet marketing. A product purchase typically comes after more than five times a customer is exposed to an informative call-to-buy message. Thus it is important to get the contact details, like the e-mail address, of potential customers who are on the brink of a sale. Use the results of your market research to determine the demographics to which you should concentrate your marketing efforts.

With consistent product creation, you can make an inventory of your products that you can market in due time. Just keep making products – the moment you succeed in making and marketing a product, customers are surely wanting more from you, so give it to them. Keep them on your side through constant product creation.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.