One great way to take control of your financial destiny is by starting a home business. Unless you already have extensive business experience, the task of selecting the opportunity that will be best for you can be the biggest obstacle to actually getting started. With this in mind, here are some pointers to help you along your way.

1. The first thing you should consider is what you want the theme of your home business to be. This is called niche marketing, and by using this technique in your home business you now have the ability to get started in any type of business you want.

We suggest that you pick something that you have knowledge of already, is a hobby of yours, is a passion of yours, or something that you’re interested in and want to work on every day. This should give you plenty of options when deciding what the theme of your home business will be.

2. The second thing you want to do is go to Blogger.com and set up your own blog in three easy steps. In a very short space of time your new blog can be up on the internet, ready and waiting to help you start earning money fromy our home based business.

Google owns them, and as it doesn’t need any technical knowledge or experience on your part, it is a great way to begin to earn money online. Once your blog is set up you should watch the tutorials on how to maximize your blog to its greatest potential.

3. As a suggestion we mention the affiliate marketing

model of business when it comes to selecting the products you are going to offer. To get started, sign up as an affiliate with Google Adsense, and use your blog to place some initial ads from Google. Again, Google will show you the steps to take to get going, making it really very simple to understand.

You should look at AssociatePrograms to find more products which you can market and sell.com or CJ.com and look for merchants and that offer products relating to the theme of your business. Find one that appeals to you and go ahead and join the program.

4. The WarriorForum is an important place to look at and join at this stage, at WarriorForum.com and register as a member in this discussion forum. This is where you’re going to learn everything you need to know about making money on the Internet.

This is the largest Internet marketing forum in the world and is a great place to get free information on building your home business on the Internet.

Now you have gotten started, and you should be concentrating on developing your blogging skills. Most of your time now should be spent learning how to drive targeted traffic to your site. This is a very easy way to start your own home business and anyone can do it.

Corporate ERP is typically open for ecommerce shopping cart, item catalog, price list integration.  However if you are SAP Business One or Microsoft Dynamics GP customer, you may not know the right tool or integration method.  We often hear from our customers very generic ecommerce integration questions and even requests.  We assume that you are midsize or small company, and budget is important for you.  And we think it is very practical to publish SB1 and Great Plains ecommerce FAQ and guidelines:

1. Do I have to purchase third party ecommerce add-on?  The answer is typically NO.  Both SAP B1 and  Dynamics GP have Software Development Kits (SB1 SDK and eConnect for GP), plus both have Integration modules: SAP Business One Data Transfer Workbench and Microsoft Dynamics GP Integration Manager.  Why we are appending the adjective Typically – because in some cases Dynamics GP ISV and SAP Business One ISV partners have wizards and tools, allowing you to facilitate ecommerce to Corporate ERP integration programming, however those tools are optional and technically not required

2. Which tables or objects should I target in ecommerce integration?  In the case of SAP Business One, you should target Marketing Documents (for customer orders and invoices), Business Partners for new and updating existing customers.  In the case of Great Plains – please consider Sales Order Processing Documents (Quotation, Sales Order, Invoice, Return, Back Order), for creating new customer (in B2B ecommerce scenarios), please consider Accounts Receivable Customer Master record (for B2C ecommerce you can use one generic Walk In customer and simply add new address to this generic customer).  In both cases of SAP Business One and GP we do not recommend you to feed data directly to SQL tables, as both SB1 and GP Corporate ERP applications business logic is quite sophisticated, and it is easy enough to violate it via direct SQL Insert statements

3. Shopping Cart Credit Card Payments – how to handle these transactions?  You should understand that Corporate ERP software vendors are not the same companies, who do Credit Card processing.  You should check with your credit card processor or the bank to understand to understand the mechanisms.  Likely that you will end up calling to such CC processing authorities as ICVerify, PCCharge

4. SAP Business One eCommerce relates SDK Programming.  SB1 is very selective to ISV partners certification, and SB1 SDK certification is required for doing any SB1 SDK programming (and you should consider subcontracting SB1 ecommerce integration to SAP B1 SDK authorized partner).  In the case of Microsoft Dynamics GP eConnect SDK, requirements are more flexible and you can do eConnect programming in-house

5. Microsoft Dynamics GP eConnect.  If your customer is on current Dynamics GP version (GP 10. as we are writing these lines in October 2009), Microsoft is typically open to reveal its technologies to newcomers, and as Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB programmer you should be able to begin coding in eConnect right away

6. Hosting Questions.  In both scenarios: SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains the question is actual.  Your SB1 or DGP internet hosting provider may try to charge you per page view or per ecommerce transaction, in our opinion this is the signal to you to change you web hosting partner

7. Special Consideration to Dynamics GP Integration Manager.  This tool allows you to run pretty sophisticate integrations on demand or schedule them (you can schedule via Windows Macro add-ons) to implement quasi real time integration.  If you base your integration on Advanced ODBC Queries, you can cross limitations of simple tab delimited text file

8. Special Considerations to Microsoft Dexterity extensions to Sales Order Processing.  Dexterity is semi proprietary (meaning that it is not feasible to force your internal IT programmers to begin coding in Dexterity over night, over week, over month or in short term perspective, as Dex requires year long extensive learning curve) and it is not recommended for in-house programming.  However, if you need SOP Document interface modified Dexterity might be optional tool, as it is naturally integrates into GP Security realm and it looks as native GP interface (you should grant user, who is supposed to use Dex modification so called Dynamics GP Alternative Forms)

9. Modifier with VBA.  This is another option to modify SOP Entry form (you should have customization site enabler license to have access to VBA modifications).  Modifier allows you to place new buttons and editable fields on existing GP forms and VBA scripts could animate these fields.  In order to manipulate existing GP tables from modifier fields, consider traditional ADO connection to MS SQL Server database

10. Special Consideration to SAP Business One Data Transfer Workbench.  For ongoing integrations we recommend deploying DTW with Advanced ODBC queries – in this case you can base your integration on SQL Views in MS SQL Server (or even with heterogeneous queries, where data is joined from various platform: Oracle, MS Access, MySQL/PHP/Linux, etc).  If you integrate huge number of transactions (100+ per hour), consider switching over to DI Server (which could be programmed from SB1 SDK in XML)

11. Differences between SAP Business One and Dynamics GP in eCommerce integration business logic.  GP is more geared toward larger organizations and it has Batch Posting mechanism (with associated documents review and approval cycles).  SAP Business One doesn’t have batch posting logic, each customer invoice is posted all the way through General Ledger.  This may mean to you that ecommerce integration in SB1 is more straight forward, as in general it should be for smaller organization Corporate ERP

12. How to get help?  Please, feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, outside of USA: 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com  We are very technical and real Dynamics GP Dexterity, SAP Business One SDK and Microsoft CRM programming gurus.  We have Great Plains Software Development Factory and could support unlimited Dynamics GP Customization and Programming needs.  Plus we speak English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and not only as native speaking sales folks, but as real technical consultants.  If you prefer skype: albaspectrum

Online marketing how to tips…what would we do without them? I think there are more tips on how to sell on the internet than there is sand at Coney Island. But I truly have to ask this question. By the time you get a hold of these “powerful” tips, are they already outdated? Well, that kind of depends on what the tip is all about and how long it took you to discover it. This article is going to discuss about this problem briefly so you can get a good idea of whether or not to waste your valuable time with the hot tip of the day.

Let’s begin with the type of tip first. This is very important. The reason is because some tips are what I call evergreen tips and will probably remain for years if not forever. Other tips are what I refer to a flash in the pan tips. These tips are usually only useful for a short period of time. Alright, so how can you differentiate them? Well, after you’ve been at this for some time, it’s quite easy. But if you’re new it wouldn’t be so easy. So what are you going to do? Is there a pointer (indicator)?

I look for how specific the marketing tip is. In most cases, the more specific, the shorter the life span, though this is not often the case. For instance, if I read an internet marketing tip that says, “Use Twitter to send out tweets that your blog has been updated in order to drive more traffic to your homepage” that is an example of what I call flash in the pan tip. Why do I say that? Well, for one simple reason, nobody is certain on how long Twitter is going to be around. Of course, it’s the waves of the moment, but who knows what it’s going to be like a year after, or even a few months from now?

On the other side, an internet marketing tip that says “Give your list useful free content and you’ll stand a better chance of keeping them subscribed” is more of an evergreen tip because it’s a broad statement, and if you’ve been doing this for quite some, pretty clear. However, it may not be clear to an individual just starting a list. They may believe that every email has to be a sales pitch. This online marketing tip will tell them that they shouldn’t do that and instead focus on sending their list information that they can use.

Over time, you will develop a feel for these kinds of marketing tips. You’ll read something and instantly know that it’s something that is going to last for a long period of time or something that may already be obsolete. Always take the time to look at the date of the article. If it was written five years ago and talks about banner ads, there is a good chance that it’s quite old-fashioned.

If you deligently follow the above advice and I don’t think you’ll have any difficulties figuring out what to listen to and what to toss in the junk pile.