Women who would like to apply their talents and skills in entertaining and accommodating guests pursue a home based business. There are lots of choices and opportunities of home based business available and one of those is homestay hosting. This is opening your home to paying guests.What is homestay? According to Cheryl Verstrate, an experienced homestay host and author of Homestay 101 for Hosts, it is a home-away-from-home. It is different from a hotel, a motel, or a bed and breakfast home. The primary purpose of the home is a residence and the secondary purpose is opening your home and offering a room for paying guests.Anyone could be a homestay host but most of the time, women engage in this kind of home based business because of the following reasons: loves to cook and bake and wants to showcase their talents and skills to guests; spend more time at home; wants to focus more energy at home and family; seeks opportunity to meet people from different walks of life and from other countries; earn additional income for the family; and open to learn other cultures.The best way to know if you are into this home based business is to evaluate yourself and lifestyle. Here are 10 questions that you could ask yourself to know if you are for homestay hosting business:
Do you enjoy meeting new people from different cultures and countries?
Do you have spare room/s to accommodate your guests?
Do you enjoy cooking and/or baking for non-members of your family?
Can you stay calm when unforeseen events and situations arise?
Are you comfortable having strangers inside your home for a short or long period of time?
Is your home and community has a safe and healthy environment?
Are the members of your family open to the idea of living with guests under one roof?
Are you open to the beliefs, customs and cultures of your guests?
Are you organized and systematic?
Are you and your family open to communicate and accommodate your guests’ needs?Homestay hosting business is not for everyone. This kind of home based business is challenging but rewarding and fulfilling. If you answered yes in all of the questions above, homestay hosting business is for you.If the homestay hosting is not for you, you may need to look further at what you would like to do. Home based business for women has increased 10 fold over the last few years and one of the major increase that has been seen, is for women starting their own internet business.
Homestay Hosting: A Home Based Business for Women
A Guide on Successful Product Creation and Internet Marketing
Product creation in Internet marketing is getting stiffer and stiffer nowadays owing to tough competition between Internet-based businesses. Putting up a new product requires plenty of brainpower and finances along with an ability to take risk. With that, even if you have the product well-set already, you have to position it strategically in the Internet landscape for others to notice. You should get the interest of Web users and turn them to actual customers. Aside from the usual physical products, many different products that thrive well on Internet marketing include E-books, membership sites, and video lectures.
The long and difficult process of product creation begins with ideas. They are easy to get – compared to the effort that comes with analyzing the market for that idea. Before the idea turns to a product, businesses often spend money, even amounting to millions of dollars, to ensure the success of the new product that emerges from an idea. Businesses undertake many types of market research and surveys before releasing their products to the public. Now, you may think that because your business is small, you can’t afford research or you don’t have to do research; you can and you should. The Internet allows you to disseminate materials needed for your market study to many people at once without your having to spend a cent.
It is a common maxim in business: Look at your destination first before mapping out your journey. So what are the goals you intend to accomplish with your product creation ventures? The everyday travails of your business may make you forget the end in sight. On the other hand, prepare to entertain new developments that come to your mind in your product creation. Your conception of a product may have started this way, but a few tweaks here and there along with some market research results and it ends up another way. Take it as the result of a creative process, not as a failure to reach your goal. After all, your product creation activities are intertwined with a long-term goal that you should strive to sustain at your utmost: profit generation. So if your less profitable initial idea evolves to a more profitable product, be thankful!
With your product made up already, start doing some aggressive Internet marketing. A product purchase typically comes after more than five times a customer is exposed to an informative call-to-buy message. Thus it is important to get the contact details, like the e-mail address, of potential customers who are on the brink of a sale. Use the results of your market research to determine the demographics to which you should concentrate your marketing efforts.
With consistent product creation, you can make an inventory of your products that you can market in due time. Just keep making products – the moment you succeed in making and marketing a product, customers are surely wanting more from you, so give it to them. Keep them on your side through constant product creation.
How to Succeed at Getting an Investment Green Card in America
The U.S. Investor Visa program, also called “EB-5″, is a popular federal program with two goals: first – stimulate U.S. economy through capital investment and job creation, second – enable foreign investors to obtain their permanent resident visas (“Green Cards”) through such investment. Any investment under the EB-5 program could therefore only be successful if it keeps these two goals in mind. An uninformed investment, which centers only on the amount of investment, and not the end result of creating jobs through a successful enterprise, is far less likely to result in a Green Card.
In other words, an EB-5 investor must make thorough due diligence to ensure that his or her investment is a “good investment”. Only then is such an investment more likely to fulfill the rigorous requirements of an EB-5 program. The first step to success in ensuring this is understanding the two different ways to make this investment: investment through a “Regional Center” (hereafter “RC”) and investment through a “traditional” EB-5 program (without a RC).
Investment Using a RC
In 1992, the U.S. Government created the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program which provides for economic units known as “Regional Center(s).” These centers are private entities which submit economic growth proposal to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They explain to the USCIS the mechanism of how their center will have a positive impact on the job market in the geographic region of the center. This allows the foreign investor to piggyback on the RC’s explanation and the economic proposal. The Center then seeks funding from numerous foreign investors, compiling each of their investment to create a more successful economic strategy than the one in which an individual investor attempts to fulfill different job creation requirements.
Nevertheless, foreign investors are wary of these centers because the investor does not have a control over their money once they invest through a RC. This is a legitimate fear. However, the advantages in an investment through a Regional Center far outweigh its risks. It is imperative that an EB-5 investor understands these risks before ruling out a Regional Center route to EB-5 Green Card.
The first advantage is benefiting from an expansive definition of “creating jobs” in an investment through a Regional Center. An EB-5 investment must create or preserve at least 10 full-time jobs for qualifying U.S. workers within two years (or in some other cases within a reasonable time after these two years) of the investor’s admission to the U.S. as a Conditional Permanent Resident. Usually, these jobs must be direct, that is, these must be identifiable jobs located within the commercial enterprise into which the investor directly invested his or her capital. However, unlike the traditional EB-5 route, an EB-5 Regional Center investor can also take advantage of the indirect jobs that will be created in the geographic region as a result of his or her investment. Indirect jobs are defined as jobs created collaterally or as a result of the capital investment in a commercial enterprise affiliated with a regional center by an EB-5 investor.
Secondly, an “approved” RC has a stamp of approval from the US government that the center’s business plans are likely feasible and will directly or indirectly lead to job creation. Although such designation does not mean that an investment in those centers is backed by the government, it is easier to convince USCIS that the investment will lead to its proposed goal of job creation if the RC is approved.
Investment through a Traditional EB-5 Program – Without a Regional Center
Investment in a traditional EB-5 program is generally trickier and more complex than an investment through RC. Here, the investor must come up with the entire business plan of how he or she will generate the requisite number of jobs. The complexity is brought about by the numerous USCIS requirements for such a business plan.
Firstly, the capital requirement for an EB-5 Green Card is a usually minimum of $1 million. The exception is that such investment may be $500,000 if the investment is in a targeted employment area (TEA), that is, an area of high unemployment or a rural area. Individual investors often find it hard to explain that the area they are investing in is indeed a rural area or an area of high unemployment. Therefore, they often end up investing the higher amount – $1 million for their green card. On the other hand, most of the approved RCs are approved as TEA investments, and thus qualify for the reduced $500,000 requirement.
Secondly, all EB-5 investors must invest in a “new commercial enterprise”, that is, a commercial enterprise established after November 29, 1990, or established on or before November 29, 1990, that is either purchased and the existing business is restructured in a way to result a new commercial enterprise or it is expanded through an investment so that there is a 40 percent increase in the net worth or number of employees. While the definition of a commercial enterprise is broad, many investors do not have the requisite technical or managerial skills required for such businesses, and resultant, their investment is not very successful. Good RCs, on the other hand, have tremendous technical, engineering and managerial expertise at their disposal which allows them to run create new commercial enterprises without much of a difficulty. Consequently, with a Regional Center EB-5, the foreign national does not have to be tied with the new commercial enterprise. He or she can live, work, or travel far more easily than someone who has to continuously manage and control the EB-5 business to fulfill USCIS requirements.
Conclusion
As explained above, the standards for individual EB-5 petitions are very restrictive, and therefore, Regional Center EB-5 petitions now amount to more than ninety percent of all EB-5 petitions filed. At the same time, there are more than five hundred Regional Centers approved by USCIS. The benefits of a Regional Center EB-5 do not in any way imply that investing in any Regional Center is always a better strategy for a successful U.S. Green Card. Only a handful of Regional Centers have an established track record of returning positive investments. The investor must conduct a thorough due diligence of different Regional Centers and decide which one to use only after consulting various experts in this field.