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If you’ve considered the possibility of becoming an entrepreneur there are eight traits that are important in describing the perfect entrepreneur.

1. Risk Taker – Entrepreneurs understand that in order to make a profit they will need to assume a certain level of financial risk.

2. Business Manager – Entrepreneurs have a keen understanding of finance and are well equipped to manage the finances of a business.

3. Organizer – Entrepreneurs are well equipped in the area of organizing all aspects of the business for current and long-term growth.

4. Marketing Expert – Entrepreneurs are capable of understanding and implementing marketing strategies both online as well as offline.

5. “People” Person – Entrepreneurs love to interact with people. They are proficient in customer service and have never met a customer they didn’t like.

6. Self Starter – Entrepreneurs understand that if something is going to be done right they need to be the one to do it. They are never lazy and are easily motivated.

7. Knowledgeable – Entrepreneurs understand the products and services they sell and have no problem explaining every facet of their business to interested clients or affiliates.

8. Initiator – Entrepreneurs are ready, willing, and able to take the lead on projects and assemble all the plans needed to move forward with any project. They always get more work done than anyone expects.

The truth is there are relatively few entrepreneurs that have all the skills listed above, yet their businesses are not only surviving, but their ideas are flourishing.

How do they do it?

Sometimes the best tool an entrepreneur can have is to pull together the right team. Very few people are gifted in all areas of business, so it just makes sense to find individuals that are a compliment to your business objectives. If you are strong in one area search out individuals who are strong in the areas where strength is required.

Chances are good that you will learn something from your employees while you work together to capture your vision for business success.

The World’s Most Perfect Entrepreneur is one that knows how to manage resources. Sometimes that means knowing when to call in reinforcements and not being embarrassed to acknowledge your areas of weakness.

In essence a weakness in an area of entrepreneurialism does not have to mean an end to a dream. It simply means finding the right running mates to give you a fighting chance at making it to the finish line.

Once a social platform for college students, the 40 million active membership site facebook is the latest buzzword in social media marketing. However, most members are extremely online savvy and they smell blatant advertisements from miles away. It is important to know some basics and gain experiences in utilizing the site and interacting with its members before you start planning your facebook marketing adventure.

1. Create a profile. The first step is to create a profile. Sign up using your real name and upload some pictures. If you do not have an email with a top-level edu domain, by default you join a regional network based on your zip code or international address. Later, you have the option to join your company’s network and change your regional networks. You can change your networks twice in a 60-day period.

Always upload a profile picture. If you don’t upload a picture, facebook places a default question mark icon. It is a good strategy to show your face in facebook. Don’t use group pictures for your profile because others may have difficulty identifying you in the group pictures. Don’t use logos, your cute cat or dogs’ pictures, or a picture of your expensive car and boat.

You don’t have to fill all the profile information. Fill only the information you are comfortable sharing with others. If you want to find dates using facebook, fill up the relationship status feature of your profile accordingly. Don’t change the status often because others will notice it and doubt your trustworthiness.

2. Make friends. The site can find active facebook friends for you using emails in your address books of a few free web email providers like yahoo, hotmail, gmail, etc. Once you get a few friends, new friend requests will pour in from your friends of friends. You can also search for friends and send requests. Work on creating a network of 100 to 200 friends. Don’t make friends with celebrities because in most cases these are fake profiles setup for marketing purposes.

3. Upload pictures and videos. Start uploading some interesting pictures and group them in albums of travel pictures, baby shower photos, bachelor party scenes, etc. Pictures help people connect with your life without meeting you face to face. Always upload a number of related pictures or themes.

Create a random albums and put all your random pictures in the random album. Tag your pictures to identify people on the pictures. When you tag your friends in your pictures, they show up in their wall. You can also share your albums with others outside facebook. You can upload personal videos using your browser or mobile phone and directly record videos to facebook.

4. Use friends’ walls and never post on your own wall. You have a wall in facebook for others to write notes. Don’t write in your own wall. Write in your friends’ walls. Your friends will write notes, share videos or links in your wall. You do the same in your friends’ walls. When a friend posts something on your wall, reply to the post. If you find the posting annoying, politely ask them to back off and clean up your wall.

5. Join a few groups. There are all sorts of organic groups in facebook. These are groups of people with similar interests. Find a few that interest you and join them. You can create your own group but first find out if one exists on the same topic. This is an excellent place to be creative and get support from a bunch of people for your cause.

6. Create events and invite people. If you want to host a party, this is the feature you will use. Create your events and invite others to join. You can make an event public for your friends to see or private for the invitees to browse. Under my event, you can browse your friends’ public events. You will immediately know who are your fake friends because they did not invite you to their gala dinner they are hosting.

7. Send notes and share links. You send notes to your friends. Depending on the topic, you can send a note to a few friends or to all friends in your network. Don’t send chain letter notes because people find these repulsive. Your notes show up in your friends’ news feeds or on their walls. A tagged note shows up on the wall, otherwise, it is found in the homepage news feed. Use share for sharing links, even though you can use this feature for sharing notes. Share that link of a cheap travel-booking site you have found while surfing the net with friends planning their upcoming vacations.

8. Visit your homepage everyday. Besides your profile page in facebook, you also have a homepage. You homepage displays collaborative news feeds of all your friends, event and group invitations, friendship requests, friends’ birthdays, etc. If you want to know what is going on in your facebook friend circle, visit your homepage everyday.

The other features of facebook are poke, marketplace, facebook mobile, and hundreds of applications that enhance the facebook experience. As the facebook awareness grows, online marketers have started pounding the facebook door to gain a foothold. Future articles will discuss different ways to market your products and services to facebook members without insulting their intelligence.

Staying motivated for the long haul is both challenging and necessary. We live in a fast-paced society where instant gratification is the norm. We may discover that we need skills and attributes to help us stay positive and on course as we deal with the ups and downs of business. We come to learn that growing a business is a process that requires patience, flexibility, trust, and the ability to deal with uncertainty, among other things.

It is important to note that we can learn new skills and attributes to help us in our business. Entrepreneurship is no longer something someone is just “born to do” instead it is something we learn. Through practice and patience, we have the ability to change what is not working and enhance what is working so that we can successfully grow our business.

Below are 7 ways to stay motivated for the long haul:

Make/Renew your Commitment – Being committed to one’s business venture is essential to staying motivated for the long haul. When we make a commitment to ourselves and our business, we are able to move beyond fears, doubts and insecurities that in the past may have held us back. I know this to be true because I experienced it. I didn’t make a commitment to my business until I was in business for almost three years. I would fluctuate in my commitment depending upon the circumstances. When things were going good, I was committed, when they weren’t, I thought about giving up. It wasn’t until I made a written and verbal commitment to myself that I was going to give this business my all, no matter what, that I began to reap the benefits of being an entrepreneur. What I learned is that when we are most challenged is when we need to be committed the most.

Be Agile/Flexible – Combined with being committed is being agile and flexible. Bill Rancic, winner of The Apprentice reality-tv series was recently a guest on my radio show, The Entrepreneur Hour. He said, “having a business plan is important but being flexible with the plan is more important.” Bill completely revamped his marketing strategy for his cigarsaroundtheworld.com business when his original business strategy wasn’t working. He shared about how we need to leave our egos at the door and just do what needs to be done.

Develop a support network – A support network includes friends, colleagues and family who celebrate our successes and help us through our challenging times. While it is easy to call a support person to celebrate a success, it can be difficult to call and ask for help or express a difficulty. It’s at the moment when we reach out and share our challenges, or ask for help that we begin to experience relief from the problem or challenge, see solutions and recognize the value of the people who support us. The support we receive is as strong as our ability to share the good times and bad.

Stay Balanced – When we are balanced within ourselves by getting enough rest, having healthy eating habits and taking take our spiritual needs, we are better able to cope with challenges. If you find yourself becoming irritable, impatient or the like, check first within your being – mind, body and spirit to see is you are in balance. We are always better able to cope and stay motivated when we take care of our human needs.

Be Realistic –Being realistic means that we know and expect ups and downs while growing and operating our business. These ups and downs may include anything from success to disaster. Our opportunity in being realistic is to know and believe that we have the skills within us to deal with any situation, regardless of the circumstances.

Choose a positive attitude – Having a positive attitude is a choice we can make at any moment of any day. We might be dealing with a difficult situation and while our natural tendency is to feel negative, we can choose to be positive. A positive outlook and attitude is a necessity in staying motivated for the long haul.

Stay Present – When we stay present to our business and to ourselves, we stay out of fear and worry. Staying present means that we “stay in the day” in our minds. We do this by not projecting our fears into the future or worrying about something that may or may not happen. Just like worry is a habit, we can develop the habit of staying present and being free from worry. Sometimes it helps to remind ourselves that all is okay for today.

Staying motivated for the long haul is a one day at a time journey. Enjoy the ride!

So you want to start an online business. You have surfed the web, read some blogs and have found that lots of people are making some decent mullah. But you are frustrated due to the lack of any new idea. Don’t worry. There are still many ideas that you can implement using a little money, lots of efforts, and some persistency.

1. Think about your hobby. What you would like to do in your spare time? May be you like to go hunting, or scuba diving. May be you want to make dolls. List some of the annoyances and inconveniences you encounter while pursuing your hobby. Search in Google to find solutions to your problems and then write a small e-book. Sell the e-book using clickbank dot com.

2. If you are an artist, crafter, or designer, check out etsy dot com. You create your own shop by signing up for free. Listing an item with photos cost 0.20 cents. The selling fee is 3.5% of the final sale price. You can accept payment through PayPal.

3. Start a blog. But don’t start a blog on making money. Find your niche and sign up for free at Blogger to create your blog. You need to select a name for your blog. Select the name of your blog carefully. Write down half a dozen names that tell something about your blog topic. Check out those names using the overture keyword selector tool for search popularity. Use a name that people search at least more than a thousand times every month.

4. If you decide to use the number 3 (starting a blog) method to generate incomes, sign up with ReviewMe, PayPerPost, and Chitika for writing paid reviews of other companys’ products and services. This will supplement your Google’s Adsense incomes.

5. If you are good at computer programming, write a simple online tool, e.g calculating carbon foot print of your visitors, or total body fat. You get the idea. The program should be simple to use and easy to develop. Build a website around your tool and sign up with affiliate programs for revenue generation.

6. If you frequently go on short trips or vacation, buy a good but small and high resolutions digital camera for easy carrying with you all the time. Take at least 200 pictures on each trip and put them for sale on shutterpoint dot com. There are a few other websites where you can put your photos for sale. Check them out by doing a Google search.

7. Participate in paid survey.But don’t pay to join any program for paid survey. Use Google to search for paid survey and visit a dozen paid survey websites. Review their offerings and write those down. Now search webmaster forum in Google and then sign up in a couple of webmaster forums. Ask about others experiences with paid survey companies and pick a good one.

Now you have these seven unusual ways to make money online. You will not make a ton of money overnight. But once you gain experiences in online money making opportunities, you will explore other methods to earn big bucks.

Sales letters, whether in actual mailed letter or email format, is probably one of the most tedious and annoying means of advertising ever devised. From a customer perspective, getting your physical mail box flooded with flyers and your email inbox stuffed with spam is NOT a good way to start out the day. From a salesman or business owner’s perspective, trying to offer people a product that you KNOW will actually help them becomes more difficult because the public in general is becoming more jaded from all the trash letters being sent out by half baked marketing groups with substandard products. To this end, here are 7 tips from an irritable consumer to give some advice to people making sales letters:

Honesty is the best policy – nobody likes a scammer, with the sole possible exception of the scammer himself and any associates who make a profit alongside his sales. Those “wonderful” people aside, everybody else would rather take a scammer, disembowel him, and hang him from a flagpole by his intestines. So first thing’s first: you want us to read your letters? Shoot straight and don’t hide or lie about facts.

Get to the Darn Point – you’re not writing a novel, are you? It’s a sales letter. Keep it short so you don’t waste our time, and if something can be said in 5 words, why phrase it in 20? Granted, some of those lengthier statements may be intended to amuse us, but if we wanted a quick laugh, we can always just go out and watch a mime getting run over by a truck.

Talk TO your Readers, not AT Them – a lot of letters come across sounding like they’re being delivered from a stage or a pulpit. Talk TO your readers, person to person, not AT them like you’re making a grand speech. Again, if I wanted to fall asleep listening to a speech, I’d just go to church or a corporate meeting at work, or maybe watch TV and look for a politician.

What’s In It for The Reader? – yep, that’s the bottom line bubba. What’s in it for me? Your new fangled high tech swiss army bulletproof cell phone may come with more processing power than an entire network of PCs, it might be made from materials that theoretically shouldn’t exist through modern smelting methods, and may even include a tazer gun in case I get mugged. But what do I get out of it when all I need from a phone is a longer battery life, a built in MP3 player for my tunes, and a high powered “babe” magnet?

Fine Print Makes People Nervous – use large, clear print for your letter text. Nobody likes having to use a magnifying glass to read a letter. Fine print, from the stand point of a consumer, will often hold various arcane stipulations designed to squeeze extra bucks out of our wallets. We like knowing what we’re getting into and what we’re buying without any hitches, snags, and hidden agendas, thank you very much.

Concentrate on Getting Interest, Not a Sale – if you try to push your product off on me, I’ll shove it back into your face and down your throat. There’s an old adage: Don’t call me, I’ll call you. This applies to most any potential consumer. As far as I’m concerned if you push for a sale, then all you want is my money. If, on the other hand, you catch my interest and give me a good reason to call you, THEN we can talk about my buying your stuff. Make it worth my while.

Let The Reader Know How to Reach You – one of the most irritating aspects of business sales letters is incomplete or vague return contact information. I know that being “mysterious” and “hard to get” is a common ploy. News flash here: playing hard to get makes people walk out on you, and being mysterious usually means you have large skeletons in the closet to hide. So, that translates to you’re being a scam. If you want to talk about making a sale, let me know how to reach you quickly and easily.

Coming to the point in your business where you can begin to think about quitting your full or part time job is an exciting time! Don’t let the excitement cloud your judgment. Begin by thinking carefully about this next big step. Here are 7 things you’ll want to consider when quitting your job becomes a possibility:

1. Money – You knew this one would be in here, right? It’s so important that you take the time to figure out exactly how much money you will need to work from home full time. There have been many an entrepreneur who’s skipped this step and succeeded but you don’t need to take that chance. Plan ahead to make sure you will make enough money to support yourself and your business.

2. Time – now this one is obvious but you need time to run your business. Some moms get an idea in their head that they will be able to work around their kids (at naptime, after bed, etc) and still create a thriving business. This is not a realistic way to think. If you have young children, plan to have a child care provider take care of them while you focus on your business – you’ll get more work completed and be much less stressed this way.

3. Set a Schedule – Before you get into the day to day of running your home business set up a schedule of work hours that you and your family can respect and live with. Print out the schedule, have it laminated and post on your fridge or other prominent place so everyone knows when you will be occupied with business. Family and friends seem to have a hard time with the fact that you are actually working and can’t stop anytime you feel like it for phone calls, outings, etc, so setting them straight from the start will help you get your work done efficiently.

4. Leave that Door Open – When you let your work know that you’re leaving, do it properly. Make sure you give the appropriate amount of time to find a replacement and leave on a good note whenever possible. You never know when you might need your job back or a good reference so always leave that door open.

5. Money Saved – It’s always a good idea to have money in the bank but when you are quitting a job this becomes more important than ever. Tuck away two or three months worth of pay and you can be sure you’ll leave work with some peace of mind.

6. Taxes – As a small business owner you will be responsible for paying your own personal taxes at the end of the year. The best way to prepare for this is to put 25-30% of your income into a separate account for when the taxman comes knocking.

7. Time to Enjoy – Where’s the fun in working from home if you don’t take time to enjoy what you have created for yourself? Make sure that you don’t book yourself so solid that you have no time for anything but work. Working from home is about working smarter, not harder!

As you know there are many things to consider on our journey toward working from home. The list above should give you some things to start thinking bout. Whatever you do, make sure to set yourself up so you have the best possible start to working from home and you’ll be so glad you did. Best of luck on your new work at home journey!