Four essential tasks when starting a new home business.

Writing for Suite101.com, Jean Sarauer offers an excellent guide to some of the essential tasks every new home business owner should complete.

Task #1: Create a Professional Work Space
As Jean points out, the most successful home workers have a dedicated work space. Part of the beauty of working from home, Jean says, is the ability to function in a more casual environment; however, the chosen work area must still meet parameters that allow for quality work.

Certainly if you will be having face-to-face contact with clients, a professional office area is essential.If that isn’t possible, the best solution is to meet with clients elsewhere, such as at a local restaurant.

Task #2: Purchase the Supplies and Equipment You Need
Rather than risk running out of essential supplies like copy paper or toner, Jean suggests making a list of all necessary equipment and supplies and have these items in place before the first day of at-home work. Stock up on frequently used items, such as printer cartridges, copy paper, and pens.

Task #3: Set Boundaries for Family and Friends
Make the transition to a home business as stress-free as possible for everyone. Let your family know your expectations before you start your new business. You should post your work hours where family can see them. Let your friends know your work hours, too. Tell everyone that personal calls and visits are not acceptable during work hours. “Standing firm on work-related boundaries in the early days of a transition sends a clear message that this is a serious work endeavor worthy of respect,” says Jean.

Task #4: Prepare for Distractions
Distractions in the home abound. Home workers are constantly in danger of being distracted by household chores, TV sets, and online chats. Self discipline is essential. As Jean explains it, one of the advantages of working at home is the ability to toss in some laundry or walk the dog on a break, but it takes vigilance to keep these activities from creeping into work hours. Simply knowing there will be a temptation to veer off the path of productivity is an advantage that helps establish good work habits at the outset.

Read the fine print to avoid work-at-home scams.

Sometimes in our eagerness — or desperation — to try a new business opportunity, we get careless and make mistakes. Often those mistakes can be costly.

Not every work-at-home opportunity is a scam, but one way to end up losing instead of making money is by not reading the fine print before you give your credit card information or provide personal details.

In this story about a work-at-home ripoff, Joe Ducey at an ABC affiliate in Arizona, tells the story of would-be entrepreneur Jerry Landers. Jerry paid $1.97 to get more information about a home-business opportunity from Income Easy Street. Not long afterwards, Landers learned that his credit card was charged another $129 because he didn’t cancel his membership within three days.

Income Easy Street claimed that customers were given a notice about the three-day cancellation policy. We’ll never know if they were telling the truth. If they were, the notice was likely not very prominent. In that case, it is up to the consumer to look carefully for any fine print, asterisks, or other indications that there is some legalese that they need to read.

Is it fair that we have to be so careful and hunt for disclosures? Clearly, it is not fair, and in many cases state consumer agencies have forced Internet marketers to make their disclosures easier to find and understand.

In the meantime, you have a choice: get ripped-off and wait to get justice from a slow-moving bureaucracy, or take the time up-front to make sure what you are buying and what it really will cost you.

Study shows strong relationship between social media and email marketing.

Back in October after reading a Wall Street Journal story about the demise of email, I asked the following:

Is the growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter slowly killing off email as an effective marketing tool?

“Death of email” articles like the one from the Journal assume that two methods of communication cannot coexist, each having a unique role to play. For decades now, television and radio have managed to survive — and even compliment each other — even though many media experts believed that TV would kill off the radio box. Likewise, the Internet was supposed to kill off everything — but it hasn’t (though I know some magazine and newspaper publishers who believe the Net gave them two shots in the hat).

Email and social media both have a specific utility. One does certain things better than the other — and that utility can and will change over time. Right now email works best for longer messages, communicating with more personalized, targeted audiences, and adding embedded content. Social networking offers greater immediacy, ease of use, a sense of personal empowerment, and potentially higher levels of frequency.

Email and social networking sites are used in different ways and communicate different kinds of information. One easily compliments the other. Like many of you, I tweet, participate on social networking sites, and send out and receive tons of email.  (I also blog, manage several web sites, and participate in various forums, but that’s another story!)  I don’t see the two as competing for my attention. I use them in the way that I need to and choose my tool according to the task I have in mind.

We’re also finding out that heavy social media users are also above-average users of email play. A Nielsen report back in September showed that social media use did not decrease email usage but actually increased it.

Says Nielsen’s Jon Gibs –

It’s perfectly logical that as people make connections though social media, they maintain those connections outside of the specific platform and may extend those connections to email, a phone conversation or even in-person meetings.

For marketers who worry that social media are making their email programs obsolete, nothing can be further from the truth. The strategy, as always, is to use media that mirror your target audience’s media behavior. In many cases, that means developing your presence in social networks and having a robust email marketing program.