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Who is Edward W. Scripps?

Scripps is the person who built a media empire that includes daily newspapers in 20 markets. Some other notable assets of Scripps include Scripps Howard News Service, United Media, and the worldwide licensing and syndication home of Peanuts and Dilbert.

Scripps started his first business in 1878, after he borrowed $10,000. He launched a newspaper in Cleveland called “The Penny Press.” With the paper, he discovered a successful formula and used it to build the first chain of newspapers.

Scripps has prescribed the 23 code of conduct for success in business. These are taken from excerpts of his essay “Some Outlandish Rules for Making Money.” What are these?

1. Never spend as much money as you earn. The lesser your expenditures is compared to your earnings, the sooner you will become rich.
2. It is more blessed to pay wages than to accept them. At least, it is more profitable.
3. Never do anything yourself that you can get someone else to do for you. If people are doing things for you, you have more time and energy to do those things which no one else can do for you.
4. Never do anything today that you can put off till tomorrow. Today, you have so much to do and so do not waste any time and energy in doing something that you can postpone till tomorrow. Most of the things that you do not have to do today are not worth doing at all.
5. Always buy, never sell. It is always better to run one risk instead of two risks. In both buying and selling, you have the risk of getting the worst bargain. When you adopt Scripps rule, you you reduce half your chances of loss.
6. Never do anything, if you can help it that someone else is doing. It is not worth competing with other people in any occupation or business if it is Possible for you to have a monopoly in some other field.
7. If anyhow you need to take an occupation or do a business which has existing competitors, then you do your work in some other way than that in which it is done by the other. You need to remember that there always is a good, better and best way. When you take the best way then no one else can compete with you.
8. If you have done something once or have taken a way to do something, don’t do the same thing again or don’t do the thing in the same way. If you have used a certain way to do something, you know that there is a better way to do the same thing.
9. If you’re succeeding in anything you are doing, don’t let anyone else know of your success. If you let others know about your success, others will also try to do the same thing and some become your competitor.
10. When you become rich, as you will become rich if you follow my advice, don’t let anyone know it. Knowledge about your wealth will attract other people and tax gatherer and they will try to snatch away things fro you.
11. One of the greatest assets any man can secure is a reputation for eccentricity. If you have a reputation like that you’ll be able to do a lot of things. It will save you from enmity of others, even though you do things that you want to do. Eccentricity will save you from indignation, animosity and antagonism resulting from the acts that you perform, which otherwise will cause problems for an ordinary man.
12. Never hate anybody. Hatred is a useless expenditure of mental and nervous energy. Revenge costs much of energy and gains nothing.
13. The wise man regulates his conduct rather by reason than by instinct. If you find that many people applauding you and only a few are condemning, be sure that you are doing something wrong. If people ridicules and scorns you, be sure that you’re in the right course.
14. It is far more important to learn what not to do than what to do. It is possible to learn that in two ways- from your own mistakes and by observing the mistakes of others.
15. Posterity can never do anything for you. Therefore, you should invest nothing in posterity.
16. A man can do anything he wants to do in this world. If you want to do something badly, you can always do it. If you want to become rich, you can become rich.
17. After what I have said it goes without further saying that you should save money. Only saving cannot make you rich. Only you can make yourself rich. Savings are capital. You learn things by doing them and it is also true for capital. The capitalist who handles capital learns how to handle capital profitably.
18. Fools say that money makes money. I say that money does not make money. It is only men who make money.
19. There are two cardinal sins in the economic world: one is giving something for nothing, and the other is getting something for nothing. And the greater sin of these is getting something for nothing, or trying to do so. I really doubt if anyone ever does get some-thing for nothing. (Don’t marry a rich wife. Women are what they are. At best they are hard enough to get along with. They are always trying to make a man do something that he doesn’t want to do, and generally succeeding. When a woman is conscious of the fact that she has furnished all or any part of your capital, her influence over you will be so great as to be the worst handicap you can carry.)
20. I would advise you to refuse to be an heir. If you’re a prospective heir of your father or some other relative, you should also consider that a handicap.
21. Despise not the day of small things, but rather respect the small things. You can easily make a profit on a very small capital in comparison to a profit off of a large capital. You need to learn to make a profit on a business run with a small capital and then only you’ll be able to run businesses with higher capital. You must learn how to handle it profitably. Once you learn it, you’ll be able to create more profit from small capital.
22. It is far easier to make money than to spend it. As it becomes more and more difficult to spend money, you will spend less and less of it, and hence there will be more money to accumulate.
23. The hardest labor of all labor performed by man is that of thinking. When you become rich, you should train your mind to think about accumulating more wealth.

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What makes an effective business card, business card style taboos, and the importance of design versus delivery.

Even though the need and relevance of business cards is reducing in the New Age, but no other alternative has been able to replace them. So, it is better to keep a supply of business cards in your wallet and don’t forget to make sure they look good.

The two most important factors in case of business cards are a unique design and an engaging delivery. If you hand over a poor quality card, do not expect to get the best result. Again if you hand over your card without an exchange of pleasantries and ideas, even the best design cannot get you the desired attention.

Your business card is a tool to follow up with someone on a particular topic, which he is interested in. It requires some sensitivity. You’ll also have to be careful with your business cards; you should be proactive but not aggressive.

Here, we will help you to find out more about business card alternatives, how to get the desired outcome, how to tailor their card and about the information that should appear in your card.

How to Choose the Best Business Card for Your Company: Making Your Card Effective

Tactic 1

If you can make your card memorable and shareable, then it will definitely serve your purpose very well. If you can have a very interesting and unique design, then people will not only remember, but will also share it with others.

For example, Sean Kinney, the owner of Digital Fresh, a New York City-based marketing and communications firm, got a card, which was so sharable that it was not only passed from hand to hand, but photos of it got picked up online. His card has been included in Inc.‘s “10 Most Creative Business Cards” slideshow.

Kinney wanted to make his card unique and the first thought came to him was to use atypical materials. He used a sleek metal card that was shaped like a razor blade. The design was a result of some serious brainstorming. He wanted to encapsulate the company’s identity with his card. It is very important to make a strong statement about who you are; otherwise you may not have one.

There are a lot of people who just have business cards which are very generic. These cards do not hurt the business, but they do not help them either.

Tactic 2

You can make your card effective by tailoring it to different needs and situations. For example, if your clients can be classified into two broad groups- clients who hire you for speaking engagement and clients who are from the government agencies, then you need to develop a card that reflects interests of both the clients. You can create two different sides to my business card. In one side you can have colors, graphics, photos etc. and can make it intense. On the other side, which is for the government agencies, you can make it straight and old-fashioned.

Tactic 3

The design of your card will be different if you sell products or provide a service. If you sell a product, it is always better to provide a link to your online store along with one or more images of the products. But if you are providing a service, you need to narrate the story differently. Your card should be able to build a positive idea about the service you’re offering.

How to Choose the Best Business Card for Your Company: Design versus Delivery

There is a tussle between design and delivery. Designers believe that the design or the aesthetics of the card is the most important issue. Networkers believe that the delivery (how you get the card in the other person’s hand) is more important than the design.

Some businessmen will not hand over their cards unsolicited. When there is a good connection with someone they meet, they will ask for the business card of the person and will only hand their cards over if asked.

Instead of having more and more business cards, it is more important to have the ability to reconnect after getting the card. If you miss the point, you will not be able to get the desired results from your business card.

The way you hand over your card or the context is very important. If you hand over the same business card to different situations where the interaction level is different, you will find two different reactions. So, here the delivery is more important than the card. However, there are many marketers and business owners who believe that design is 90% of the battle and delivery is just 10%.

Memorable cards

If you want to design a memorable business card, then he will have to talk about your business in some engaging and intuitive way. Some examples of creative business card ideas-

Business card in the shape of blades

Salon business card in the shape of scissors

Landscaping company business with Astroturf-backed cards

These are memorable and engaging because at the first glance itself the card will tell you what the business is.  It will be tactile and creative enough for the person to want to keep it.

However, the design will depend on the field of your work and your personality. Based on your personality and the line of work, you may need or like to have a more traditional design.

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Rule No.1:

Pick a market where the competition charges money, and do it for free

If you can find a niche where people are paying money to your competitors and you offer the same service for free, then you are sure to get many things like lots of publicity, more attention from the prospects, lots of traffic to your site and more business. Such a strategy will help you to undercut the competition and it will also help you to grab market share real quick.

Rule No. 2:

Keep your costs low, Really low

You will need to limit your spending if you want to make it big right from your home. You don’t need to spend a lot to attract more business and more prospects. Your website may look ugly, have fewer features than your competitors and may not be updated regularly, but still it will make you rich if you find the correct niche and keep your costs real low.

Rule No. 3:

Use Web 2.0

Use Web 2.0 if you want to be rich in online business. There are many excellent and free web 2.0 services available which can help you to get more money and get more customers without spending anything. Google’s Adsense is a web 2.0 free service which can bring you lots of cash, when you use it correctly, without the need of spending anything and without much effort.

Rule No. 4:

Relax

That’s serious business advice.

You need to relax a lot. In general, entrepreneurs spend too much time and money doing work for work’s sake. Get less work, less staff, less employees, less space and everything else less and then earn more.

One example that will help you to understand the whole process-

Read about Plenty of fish’s Markus Frind. He has only three employees and he personally works only about an hour a day.

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If you have been working in a fully-equipped office with all the men, machines and systems, then shifting to a home-based office can be quite tricky. You may be confused about what elements are essential for your home-based business.

Here we will show you what elements are essential and what can be outsourced so that you can start your home-based business effectively and run and manage it.

There may be lots of problems arising every day. Let’s see how you can best tackle those issues so as to make sure your business succeeds.

Invoicing, time tracking, estimates, and information storage

Please understand that you need someone to handle your accounting and bookkeeping work. If you’re good with numbers, they can always do it yourself. But there is a problem, sometimes you may not be able to find out enough time to handle this, when you need to finish up a report for your client today.
A CPA can help you here by recording and tracking your time along with processing your invoices. They accept individual clients. outsourcing.org is a site that can help you to find a list of offshore firms looking for clients on a daily basis. If you do not like handing over your accounting and bookkeeping work to offshore firms and want to keep your business information private, there are many web-based programs such as freshbooks.com which will offer to you invoicing, time tracking and client information storage besides other options.

Storing

when you need to store your documents digitally so as to keep your living room free of mess, you can use programs like DocumentMall and Digitech ImageSilo which offer digital storage options for as low as $50 a month, depending on your specific needs. You will also find many digital copiers available which can act as scanners to your paper documents into digital files.

Merchant services and billing options

You need to accept credit cards for your home-based business. Especially people who are running an e-commerce business or website, it is very important. You can set up direct payment with a merchant services provider for credit card transactions.

In case of many businesses, companies and individual clients like to pay through a credit card instead of through an invoice. In such cases, the ability to process credit cards through a merchant account is very important for you and your business.

Web design, online marketing, and IT outsourcing

you will have to invest in online marketing options to promote your business. Promoting your business is very important for finding new clients. As you are working from home, and working online, so it is very much necessary to have a website to connect and to communicate with your clients and target market.

Starting a website is very easy these days. You can create a free website, create your own website or get a website done by experts. There are many Web hosting services which offer relatively economical web hosting. Web-hosting services such as Go Daddy offer templates for you which can be used to create your website within an hour. You just have to insert your company logos, content, information, etc. and you are done.

You have to be very careful in case of e-commerce sites because installations of some elements are very crucial due to the prevalent fraud and scam issues. It is better to hire an expert web designer to implement such technical elements such as shopping cart. A good web designer will be able to help you in case of technical issues.

There are many important elements of Internet are present today which are needed to be addressed by your online home based business or website. Issues like search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, pay per click advertisements, online marketing should be dealt with experts because they can make or break your business. Your online campaigns should be directed towards a particular goal of your work from home business.

So, you may find out that it is better to outsource all these operations to and IT programmer will be able to handle the issues and problems including your customer service issues. It is considerably less expensive than staffing someone and can save thousands of dollars.

Order Fulfillment

if you run an ecommerce or retail-based business, product storage can be an issue for you for which you will need enough space to spare. However, you can always outsource your fulfillment services. This is a great way to handle such operations. Most fulfillment companies can work with your product suppliers to ship from their warehouse location directly to your customers.

You need to sign a contract with a fulfillment company. The contract will list the details–storage, shipping, customer returns, order receipts and inbound customer calls. The company will do all these in return for a management fee of a few hundred dollars a month. As your volume grows, you’ll be able to negotiate the prices better.

Internet, VoIP services and video conferencing
when you work from home for your home-based business you will need special arrangements for keeping in touch with your suppliers, fulfillment companies, clients and business partners. A telephone is a trusted and old system of keeping in connection but it’ll be wiser to have another system in place so as to avoid long-distance and international charges.

You will need a good and steady internet connection. A good VoIP service that provides video conferencing, digital voice mail, hold music and more features will be your need for your home-business. Voice over Internet Protocol is a technology that is internet-based, which will lower your long-distance call charges.

Shopping wisely and running your living room

Your home office can be anything you dream of. It can be a huge office or simply your living room couches and a laptop. It depends on the necessity but it is always better to start small. You can keep adding other office elements once a business stabilizes.

Shopping around, researching your options and talking to your providers can save you money and these are very important parts of doing business. It can help you to build your company from the ground up.

A home-based business today offers many options dedicated specifically to work-at-home companies that offer resources, vendors and advice. You do not have to slog all day to make it happen. Using sites like Hiremymom.com and virtualassistantforums.com can help entrepreneurs like you by offering good advice as well as success stories for the newly self-employed.

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Many of the popular blogs and news sites agree to the fact that there are many eager, intelligent people in the communities looking to contribute. But up until recently, those people had only one way through which users can share their thoughts- through comments.

Now Grogger? brings a new service that will help community members or the general people to share their knowledge.

Why is this helpful for bloggers and Internet Marketers?

This will help bloggers and Internet Marketers to tap into this community knowledge. Using this feature, you will be able to create a site that includes posts written by both you and your audience. This means you can create content without writing it yourself. So, you can create a business out of other people’s knowledge and efforts.

Grogger is an easy-to-use blogging platform. It will allow you to edit the user created posts through a few site administrators. A user can visit your Grogger site and write an entry (called a Grog). The entry can be posted directly to your blog or added to a moderation queue for site administrators to edit it.  When approved entries are published, other users can vote it up using a ‘Like’ system, and administrators can ‘feature’ it to make it even more prominent. Users can also leave their comments on your blog and posts.

Grogger is now open to the public and is free, with plans to eventually roll out some premium options.

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How do you vent your frustration? By shouting at someone, by pulling your hairs or by breaking something at home? All of these have their equal, positive and negative effect on you. What if you break dinner plates and still nobody says anything to you, rather provide you as many dinner plates as you’d like. You think that is possible only in dreams! Think again. It is possible to do that in real life. Try Sarah’s Smash Shack.

What’s on offer?

Sarah’s Smash Shack offers a comprehensive menu of things that you can break

‘Main Courses’ – costs $30. Choose from a ten plate combination, a mystery box of ten mixed items, or a buffet of ten items of their choosing.

‘On the Side’ selection – This consist of smaller items in lesser quantities mostly various glassware.

If you want to bring in your own stuff (presumably stuffs of your ex or things given by your ex), you can do so by paying a fee.

Where to break them?

Sarah’s Smash Shack has specially designed ‘Break Rooms’ where you can release your frustration and anger. One room accommodates one and four people. It also offers you safety equipment so that you are not hurt in any way. You can play your own MP3 player and soundtrack while smashing all those stuff.

Who started it?

Sarah’s Smash Shack was founded by Sarah Lavely and Ed Smith, veterans of the veterinary field. The idea occurred to them that they can start a service where they would provide a way to release frustration and stress of people so as to prevent it from transforming to road rage, verbal aggression, or the destruction of personal possessions.

This is the business that was started with relatively low overhead cost. This is a very simple and functional idea. This shows people how an entrepreneurial mindset with little creativity can result in business success.

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