home-business

Think earning extra dosh whenever it suits you sounds too good to be true? Think again.
1. Trade on eBay
Figure out what's selling on eBay, then invest in setting up a professional-looking eBay shop from £14.99 a month. Popular (the new version of eBay Pulse) is a great way to spot what people are buying.
Once you're ready to go, check out our tips for selling on eBay here.

2. Sell stock photography

Sell good quality digital photos to sites like istock.com, shutterpoint.com and fotolia.com. But be warned: this is quite the slow-burner. If you dream of becoming a freelance photographer, check out our free guide here.

3. Personal chef

Invest in a good cookery course, then start offering your services to friends of friends in need of d4. Become a cookery writer
As above - then publish your own cookery book through blurb.com. Sales will come in from the site, and you can sell yourself to new prospective clients by saying you're also a cookery author.

5. Antiques trader

Do some serious homework on cheaper pieces - invest in an encyclopaedia and read mags like this one. Buy a few items to hedge your bets, then sell to antiques dealers and shops.

6. Virtual assistant

Sign up to a site like virtualassistants.co.uk (£2.95 to post a listing for 12 months). Invest in a secretarial or touch typing course to give you an edge over other candidates. More advice here.

7. Personal trainer

Proper training courses are several hundred pounds at least (recommended ones here), but if you're a marathon old-hand or a gym-bod you could entice some clients without. Pick up part-time work in a gym to find clients.

8. Snack stall

You can buy a stall for around £100 - £150 (from somewhere like this). Make sure you comply with all health and safety regulations and get a license from your local council if you're selling alcohol, hot food between 11pm and 5am or food from a stall or van on the street.
If you're looking for more tips, check out our guide on how to start a market stall here.

9. Late-night alcohol delivery

Supply the midnight masses and charge a premium on booze and snacks delivered after pub closing time. You'll need a personal license to sell alcohol, which costs £37 - get it online from your local council.

10. Cleaning company

Start this business with no overheads by using clients' cleaning products. Pay for Disclosure and Barring Service Checks (£26 each) for yourself and any other members of staff to reassure new customers once you get some money coming in. With these top tips, starting a cleaning company is the easiest way to change a chore into a business.

11. Focus group organiser

Target small businesses at networking events and with flyers to user-test their new products or websites. Then place free ads on Gumtree to find participants and skim a fee off their hourly pay. More info here on conducting focus groups.

12. Flyering agency

Call around all local business and clubs and say you'll find them someone to hand out flyers for a £3 charge (on top of their hourly rate). Then find students in need of work on Gumtree.

13. Pop-up restaurant

Decorate your living room, stick some posters in your front window and start a restaurant in your house. Technically you're meant to get a load of health and safety checks done for this, but there's a whole crop of people doing it on the sly. Check out our guest blog from Horton Jupiter to find out how it's done.

14. Treasure hunt business

You can start this business for next to nothing. Do some research on your local area and plant clues for family fun days and cheap office outings. Take a look at how Hunt Fun and Treasure Days are doing it.

15. Sell pot plants, herbs and home-grown veg

The whole of the middle class is into organic and home-grown veg these days, and with packets of hundreds of seeds coming in at around 60p, you can sell your own produce for a whopping profit. Or just take clippings of plants and herbs you already have, grow out into separate pots and sell to neighbours and friends.

16. Gardening and landscaping assistant

Got green fingers? Put them to use by offering your services to people in your area. Show them sketches of how you think the garden could be improved and you become a landscape gardener to boot (though you'll need to do careful research on what grows well in which places and at what times of year). For some helpful hints, read this free guide.

17. Meal delivery service

Capitalise on people too busy or too lazy to cook by offering to deliver delicious dishes of their liking, home-cooked by you. Check out our interview with the founder of The Pure Package for inspiration.

18. Walking and bike tours

Armed with nothing more than a map and a book on local history, you can guide tours around your local commons, hills or towns and share insight into the history of your area for a small charge.

19. Clothes repairs

Basic needlework is astonishingly straightforward. Offer to darn friends of friends' clothes for a nominal fee and take in too-big shirts and skirts.

20. Gift baskets

Knocking up ribbon-adorned wicker baskets brimming with Bon Maman jams, freshly-baked muffins and fruit is relatively cheap, but you can charge a premium.

21. Dog training

Easy if you know how. Getting a formal qualification will improve your chances of doing business with people you don't know. Check out the Association of Pet Dog Trainers for more info.

22. Pet sitting and walking

Most pet owners prefer one-on-one TLC for their animals than putting them into kennels. Keep your rates competitive and incentivise clients to refer a friend.

23. Event and party planning

Perfect if you've got a natural knack for organisation. Establishing cut-price deals with catering companies, florists, wine suppliers and the like will ensure you offer a competitive service.

24. Car boot sales

Have a proper clear-out of your junk to get started, then reinvest profits into buying stuff from any charity shop you have time to scour. Offer to take friends' junk off their hands to cut overheads.

25. Social media assistant

More and more small businesses are latching onto the fact social media can help them, so offer to maintain accounts for them for a small fee - you can keep business ticking over while still doing your day job. Tools like Tweetdeck will help hugely. More advice here.

26. Handyman

There are gutters to clean, tiles to be scrubbed, lawns to be raked and paths to be laid all around the country. Post friendly notes through letterboxes advertising a cheap hourly rate.

27. Home tutor

If you've got a degree, or good A-level results, you can offer to help out schoolkids with their homework and exams. Get a certification to make it more official if you struggle to find work.

28. Computer skills mentor

There are still millions of people out there who feel utterly confounded by computers and the internet. If you're a spreadsheet whiz or an Outlook old-hand, you can charge them for lessons.

29. CV consultant

If you've made it through the rat race and come out the other side older and wiser, you can help newbies tidy up their CV's. Advertise on Gumtree and ask friends, and keep fees low.

30. Second-hand clothes stall

Get yourself down to a retro clothes market in a university town, armed with piles of 70s, 80s and 90s clothes from charity shops, and you'll find you can charge anything from £5 to £50 an item. Ask the local council about renting a stall.
What business to start?

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Spirituality, New Age & Alternative Beliefs

Your true calling or what you really want to do with your life can sometimes only start to make sense over a lengthy period time.
While some have known what they want to do since they were young children – seeing something they liked in a movie for example – others might spend 30 or even 40 years trying to find their passion.
When I was growing up, I always had a rough idea that I wanted to be in the creative field, to create a difference, introduce something new that would change the way people perceived their lives, maybe even inspire someone to follow their own passion. As I graduated from university, the idea began to formulate more. By the time I joined the workforce, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and followed both my passion for writing and being a social cause advocate.
What helped me find my true calling is a combination of what others told me, analysing emails, attending various events and moving away from my comfort zone.
Perhaps what confuses the youth in our community is how things have changed over the last few decades, how fast that change is taking place, and not knowing whether to follow traditional paths or embark on new fields. When the United Arab Emirates was formed, there was a calling for engineers, doctors, and business graduates.
Fast-forward to the 1990s and the formation of the online movement and commerce, and communication took a different form. There was a need for different kinds of engineers and business people. The online portals I used 10 years ago as a teenager are obsolete now.
Then we entered the fast pace of the new millennium, with technological advancements gaining pace and the creation of jobs we would never have heard of a few years ago – social media managers, bloggers and social media influencers. It seems you’ve just got the hang of something, and then something else is introduced. If we do not evolve, we will not keep up.
I recall a conversation I had with a manager of a company two years ago. She was against the use of social media to promote her company. Just one year later, she was heavily investing in her company’s online presence. She was falling behind her competitors, and had to survive, even if it meant doing something she did not initially believe in.
Lots of people, especially the youth, are lost in this craze haze. They are torn between following traditional educational and career paths that their parents encourage them to follow, and trying new schools of thought. Within Arab society, many parents do not believe in the new age fields of study such as media, mass communication. Instead they encourage their children to follow “safer” and “traditional” paths such as medicine and engineering.
The work environment is no different. We have the older generation members of the team that do not want to evolve, and the new kids in the workforce who want to alter things altogether. And then of course you have those who are stuck in between. This can create confusion as to what the right way of doing things actually is, and it can divert some of us from following our dreams.
So how do you get yourself out of this rut? Whether you are in a cubicle at work, or work from home, find your true mission. You could be surprised that the latest craze, and the fast pace of life could actually inspire you to do something.
Find out what your capabilities are. Build your connections, and explore all options out there. Go with the flow, and evolve as businesses grow. If you stay behind the trends, your business and you could miss out, and it would be hard to catch up again.
What has helped me personally is expanding my connections and going beyond my comfort zone by attending networking events, talking to people from different walks of life.
With all the new trends in this fast-evolving business world, it’s easy to get confused about which career path to follow. The trick is to move with the flow and not against it. Expand your network, talk to a lot of people and put yourself in uncomfortable and non-traditional situations. It is strange how simple actions such as talking to a variety of business people can guide you towards your true calling.
Manar Al Hinai is an award-winning Emirati writer based in Abu Dhabi. Follow her on Twitter: @manar_alhinai
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Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/business/the-life/quit-your-comfort-zone-to-find-your-true-calling#ixzz3G3ZbG4Sk
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green-energy

Micro-hydro power

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Using water power to fight poverty

Micro-hydro power is the small-scale harnessing of energy from falling water, such as steep mountain rivers. Using this renewable, indigenous, non-polluting resource, micro-hydro plants can generate power for homes, hospitals, schools and workshops.

Practical Action promotes small-scale hydro schemes that generate up to 500 kilowatts of power. The micro-hydro station, which converts the energy of flowing water into electricity, provides poor communities in rural areas with an affordable, easy to maintain and long-term solution to their energy needs.

We have developed micro-hydro systems with communities in Peru, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, and Kenya. These systems, which are designed to operate for a minimum of 20 years, are usually 'run-of-the-river' systems.

bookbusiness

Should I Become a Bookkeeper? - Advantages of Becoming a Qualified Bookkeeper

Bookkeeping as a profession

It is a legal requirement in the UK for a business to keep accurate up to date records regardless of size, and indeed failure to do so can result in fines and even imprisonment for serious offenders, therefore it is vitally important for all businesses to have someone suitably knowledgeable or qualified to deal with the bookkeeping and accounts, whether it is the owner of the business when it is relatively new or a qualified Bookkeeper or Accountant.

Although we constantly hear about household names and brands disappearing from our High Streets, the current statistics show that the new generation of businesses and enterprise is growing at quite a steady rate. With recession people always lose jobs and for some it becomes the ideal time to take the plunge and make the big step into Self Employment. Some of these new businesses will become Household names and major employers in the future.

With around 3 million Sole Proprietor businesses, 1.3 Million Limited Companies and 448,000 Partnerships and only an estimated 3,000 registered Bookkeepers in the UK this equates to 1582 potential clients for every Bookkeeper. It is clear to see that there are is a huge shortage of Qualified Bookkeepers in the UK, and at the current rate of business growth we may never fulfil the demand.

Detailed statistics can be found in this article published by the Federation of Small Business http://www.fsb.org.uk/stats
dvantages_of_becoming_a_qualified_bookkeeper?gclid=CL_p96PNscACFRMatAodEkEAQQhttp://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/bookkeeping.html

jobs&carreers

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green-energy

1. Getting the work donehttps://www.gov.uk/green-deal-energy-saving-measures/overview
2. 5. How to pay
3. 6. Get money back from the Green Deal Home Improvement Fund
4. 7. Moving into a property with a Green Deal

1. Overview

Find out how to get money back from the Green Deal Home Improvement Fund.

The Green Deal helps you make energy-saving improvements to your home and find the best way to pay for them.
The improvements that could save you the most energy depend on your home, but typical examples include:

• insulation - eg solid wall, cavity wall or loft insulation
• heating
• draught-proofing
• double glazing
• renewable energy generation - eg solar panels or heat pumps

Find out if your home will benefit

There are various ways to check if your property could benefit from energy-saving improvements:

• use an online tool, eg the Stroma certification tool
• talk to a Green Deal assessor or provider
• use the energy grants calculator
• talk to Energy Savings Advice Service if you’re in England or Wales, or Home Energy Scotland if you’re in Scotland

The Green Deal may be right for you if you think your property could benefit from energy-saving improvements.

Energy Saving Advice Service
0300 123 1234
Monday to Friday, 9am to 8pm
Saturday, 10am to 2pm

Home Energy Scotland
0808 808 2282
Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm
Saturday, 9am to 5p

One of the more realistic ways in which that solar powered cars could become practical is to charge up their batteries when they are parked, during the day. Imagine driving the short distance to work and plugging the car into a set of photovoltaic solar panels. Whilst you are working the batteries charge up ready for use for the journey home. The same procedure could be carried out when the car is parked at home. A combination of solar power and wind power may prove to be a method of charging the batteries of ‘electric cars’.
	http://www.technologystudent.com/energy1/solcar1.htm

What is personal development?

Personal development is about improving your own personal awareness and also identity by becoming more conscience of your personal power by developing your talents, gifts, and natural abilities while at the same time creating amends with the limitations of the past. Once your personal potential is accessible to you, through the use of your innate talents, gifts, and natural abilities, you are in a position to improve the standard of your life as new dreams and aspirations are birth from your personalized power. When awakening one’s personal power, the natural pathway within personal development would be to improve self-awareness, your own personal self-knowledge, your own innovative potential, your general wellness, improving the quality of your life and lifestyle, your business, plus, interpersonal relationships, and you’re interpersonal financial wealth. Personal development is an arena of practice and research that the individual can easily get involved with others or even it can be done independently; regardless how it’s done the task is always to develop and support one’s personalized growth.

Personal development framework consists of goals and objectives that define an endpoint. These types of goals require strategies and a dedicated focus plan for reaching such goals and objectives, and also, such weekly and monthly goals and objectives becomes a means to measure the progress of your own personal development which is a feedback system to provide information upon change. This will assist your conscious mind to confirm and also to solidify your successes of your own personal development progress. In truth, developing yourself is a lifelong commitment, an asset for your life, an investment to reconcile with your past, an investment to live authentically in the present, and an investment for your future to come. Staying committed to your personal development will inevitably make you an authenticated satisfied person.http://www.thepersonaldevelopmentspot.com/personal-development/

what-is-personal-self-developent

Personal development is a lifelong process. It’s a way for people to assess their skills and qualities, consider their aims in life and set goals in order to realise and maximise their potential.

This page helps you to identify the skills you need to set life goals which can enhance your employability prospects, raise your confidence and lead to a more fulfilling, higher quality life.  Plan to make relevant, positive and effective life choices and decisions for your future to enable personal empowerment.

Find more at: http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/personal-development.html#ixzz313nBxgcr

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