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Business As Usual?
By Kimberley Barreda
May 19, 2007, 05:09

Ready to get your piece of the pie? It's right there waiting for you. Now that it's well into 2007, the opportunities for the community to do well financially are becoming more numerous and less expensive.

If you've decided to test the waters and become an Entrepreneur, or if you already have a business and are looking for something more or just don't want to waste your time or money.. read on for info on..

Business Opportunities Under $1000

Seriously. A real business for under $1000 is completely doable.

And your options are possibly more varied than you might expect. The list of opportunities is growing all the time so get ready to make some money and ideally have some fun in the process.

I'm not including envelope stuffing, home assembly or other SCAMS that are simply designed to separate you from your money. These are actual real opportunities that offer you an opportunity to gain.

ONLINE BUSINESSES

If you can do it in the real world, it's likely you can do it online.

Do you have anything of your own to sell? Experience, products, ideas.. Can you help someone ELSE sell their things? Companies like CafePress and Zazzle make MILLIONS of dollars selling prints of uploaded artwork and you already know about Ebay.

Those types of sites and services are not out of reach of the average person and with a few good ideas and an investment of your time and a bit of money into the right tools and you are well on your way.

Take this site for example.

www.disthis.com was started for under $1000.00. The software we use to serve our article is a content management system and the software we use to serve our realty listings is an open source php application.

disTHIS.com is powered by:

ARTICLE MANAGER by InteractiveTools.com, OPEN-REALTY by OPEN-REALTY.org with the BOOKING CALENDAR Add On by JNT Computers and PAYPAL LISTINGS from PBFlash.com.

The artwork is a tweaked template from Template Monster.

The reason we chose and recommend these products is the double barrelled business opportunity they present. Not only can you use the software to manage your business and present in a professional manner, you can use your experience with the software to write modifications and add-ons and earn money for yourself.

Open Realty is one of my favorite scripts. I use it on lots of sites and only one of them is a real estate site. It is so configurable that you can use it for just about anything.

You want to sell cars? No problem. Change the language files to reflect cars and you're good to go. Make quilts? How about soap? Maybe you paint or draw? Have you written a book? It doesn't matter what you have to offer, you can use this software for just about anything. The low low price of free makes it an even better deal.

The Add-Ons from the site are quite impressive too. We use quite a few.

BOOKING CALENDAR Add On by JNT Computers lets us offer scheduling and reservation services to our listing customers. In addition to the Booking Calendar, you can choose from the numerous additional services there, including some free Add-Ons to enhance your site.

We also use PAYPAL LISTINGS from PBFlash.com. It's a processing script that helps automate the site by integrating the front end with the backend allowing our site users instant access to the services they've purchased. It's just one of many scripts available at the site and even the free ones have support boards.

What we like about this whole thing is these are add-ons written by customers turned developers who offer their own support as well as support to the main project.

There is an entire section in the documentation on how to write your own add-ons which are not only supported by, but promoted by the developer so everyone can benefit. And did you happen to catch the fact that Open-Realty is FREE?

Article Manager is another one of our favorites. So much so that we have four licenses. This is because it is a great product and their customer support is phenomenal. They also have numerous customers who write ancillary scripts to enhance the features and those scripts are promoted by the developer as well.

To add to our happiness with this company, we had an issue with software on a different site, and by the time we fully gave up on the implementation, we were beyond the refund date. Well, Donna at Interactive Tools took care of us and gave us a refund anyway. So, if you were afraid to spend the money, don't be.

While both these scripts have a bit of a learning curve, the end result is a fabulous addition to your skillset and a financial goldmine.

Template Monster fits in here because the quality of the artwork and the ability to modify it to use with scripts like Article Manager and Open Realty make them VERY popular.

The income opportunity here is for anyone with graphics and html integration experience.

The templates come with bajillions of tables and lots and lots of extra bits and pieces like search forms and contact pages and links, but these are REPRESENTATIONS of functionality and not actually usable from the start so someone with little or no html, graphics and integration experience is lost. Using your experience with templates and one or two pieces of software can keep you quite busy.

Read my review of OEM Pro email list by Octeth Technologies here.

In the next installment, we'll explore how to start your own business like Ebay, CafePress or Zazzle.

If you'd like to be kept informed of Business Opportunities Under $1000.00, you can sign up for the Email Business Opps List on the right. It is a double opt-in, so you'll receive an email to confirm.

You can opt out at any time using the links in each email or using the console link in your welcome email.

If you've got a business opportunity under $1000 that you would like to share, please contact me at kimberleyb@disthis.com


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