If you’re thinking of starting a business opportunity in selling cupcakes, cakes and the like, there are a few bases you will need to cover. The most important thing of course is the cupcakes that you intend to sell to your customers. It goes without saying that they should taste good and at the same time, you should provide a wide variety for your customer to choose from.

If you don’t know how to bake yourself, then you need to hire a skilled chef that specializes in baking and decorating cakes. Partnering up with the chef is a great idea as you can split the workload – you handle the business end and the chef will deal with the baking.

Next, is the presentation. If delivering cupcakes is part of your business model, you want to ensure that the cupcakes don’t arrive at your customer’s doorstep squashed or inedible. As such, you will need to invest in good quality cupcake boxes which come with inserts to keep each cupcake upright.

Now, let’s talk about sourcing cake boxes and its impact on costs. When you are running any kind of business, whether it is in the hospitality industry or food industry, you want to minimize your cost. This is particularly true in the current economic climate where it’s quite likely that sales may not be as good as they once were.

To help in keeping costs down, you should source wholesale cake boxes if at all possible. If you are only buying a very small quantity, then this may not be as necessary. Try to figure out early on how many cake boxes you need and aim to order them in bulk to save on money. Budgeting in all areas will help. Over the long run, this can significantly make a difference on your bottom line.

Are you looking for a great business idea. Would you like to work from a home base at times to suit you. Are you motivated, self disciplined, able to work away from the constraints of a factory or office framework? Are you happy to work long hours but hours that you choose? Can you keep a project going through thick or thin, good times and bad, and see it through to the end? Are you able to write articles using a computer on different subjects that interest you?

Well if you are saying yes, yes yes…but I do not think I could be an author or journalist – think again. Internet Marketing is a technique for selling anything. It is not the product that is important – but ensuring that you can get a web site ranked by Google so that it reaches the top of the page when somebody searches for a particular keyword.

A great work from home business idea would be to write articles, get them published on the Internet, and as a consequence your web site’s exposure increases. Write a 100 articles and you can get a web site to rank at number #1! Maybe. If a web site ranks at number one it is worth money – you could even sell the web site on the open market.

So it all sounds very vague. Is there a plan which can make money that you can follow? Yes, by following the Keyword Academy’s business opportunity method it is possible to make money. The steps you need to take are:

1. Choose a keyword that has potential – “laptops” might be a valuable word but the chance of ranking for it are non existent. “compact food mixers” might be a better bet.

2. Find a domain name that is suitable for this keyword and set up a WordPress blog.

3. Write articles for the blog – on all aspects of food mixers and their use.

4. Write articles on all related subjects and submit these to article directories around the Internet (there are 1000s). It is not quite so important that anybody reads these as having links on the articles back to your web site.

5. Add Google Adsense adverts to your web site so that when people start visiting you will get a proportion of them clicking through and earning you revenue.

Simple – yes but it takes hard work and perseverance. 100+ articles might make you $1000 per year – every year. So you need to keep writing! Many people are making a substantial living with this method. It is quite feasible to earn in excess of $5000 after 12/18 months with a lot of work.

For guidance in Keyword Marketing visit the Keyword Academy

One of the things that is often overlooked when a new business opportunity is embarked upon is the issue of any corporate or personal tax that might have to be paid as you go along. The penalties for getting your tax administration wrong can be quite severe so it pays to do a little research before you start a new business.

My first thought is to scare you a little in respect of problems that can occur if you neglect your annual tax return. I am a fraud investigator by trade and often have to deal with proceeds of crime hearings when a criminal has been convicted of some crime. Let me describe one unfortunate case I happened upon recently.

A sole trader bought and sold second hand cars. He was quite good at it and made a reasonable living. At some point he became aware that he should be paying value added tax (VAT) as he had exceeded the threshold for this particular revenue. So he registered for VAT and employed a friend who was also a bookkeeper to file his quarterly returns, at which time he would pay over around £5,000 in VAT to HMRC.

All well and good. However as he traded in cash, very successfully as it happens, he had no credit rating and he encountered a problem when he came to try to obtain a mortgage to buy a house. A sharp mortgage broker helped him to get his mortgage by being a little creative when filling out the application form. Even though the trader intended paying his monthly installments out of his business earnings, he was convicted of mortgage fraud and went to prison!

As he also had a minor offence of handling illegally imported DVDs - this allowed the authorities to assume that he had a criminal lifestyle. This meant that they could confiscate everything he owned – and ask for even more! If the businessman could not pay his confiscation order (he plainly had not enough assets) he would have a default sentence of 3 or 4 years to serve (with no time off for good behaviour). Normally a person in such a position can mount a defence to show that his business and income were all legitimate (even if there were digressions of a few pounds for the DVDs and – let us face it, nothing was gained from the mortgage fraud which wasn’t even his fault).

At this stage the businessman was unable to present his accounting records to explain his business as he dealt with cash – and it emerged that he had not paid any income tax for several years – because he thought the VAT was enough!

So we have a naive businessman who hasn’t really done any harm – has not received any appropriate advice and now finds himself with a bankruptcy order against him and another few years to stay in jail. When he gets out he will still owe the authorities around £200,000. All this was because he did not keep proper records and pay a total of around £30,000 tax over a few years.

Now we are not going to start a businesses with loans from dodgy brokers and we are probably not intending to dable in a few illegally imported DVDs. But we should take this story as a lesson to keep proper accounting records and ensure that our tax affairs are straight.

It is so easy to start a business and in the early days when you are not making a profit you might not need to think of the tax you will have to pay when you do. But remember, you future tax bill can be reduced by all the costs you are incurring now – so keep good records, register with the tax man and ensure you have the correct advice about all your obligations. It is easy to get free checklists from organisations such as Business Link.

There must be nothing more frustrating when you have to cry I have been cheated! I have been ripped off. I have been scammed….you get the message! There are more ways to easy riches being sold over the Internet than genuine business opportunities that work well.

Have you ever asked why this is the case? A business opportunity may sound very good on paper but if you are not able to fully test its feasibility and pay good money in the hope that this is the one that is going to work – only to find it does not provide the rapid riches and way to quit your day job – where do you go to get compensation?

This is where I have to be very careful – most of the business ideas that you do see on the Internet will work…to a degree. This means that they are not out and out frauds or scams but business ideas that you have not been able to make work. This might be for a number of reasons:

1. You might not have the skills needed to run the business – for example you might need to be able to write articles quickly and your writing skills are mediocre.

2. You might not be prepared to invest the required amount into the business. For example you might need to use “pay per click” advertising in order to make a profit. If you do not speculate enough you might not even reach the threshold where any return is made.

3. There may be so much competition in the particular business idea you have chosen that you do not stand a very good chance of making a mark.

4. It is possible that the seller of the business opportunity has exaggerated the potential of the business so much that it could never work regardless of the money or the time you invested or the skills you were able to utilise.

In the latter case the seller of the business has misrepresented what he was selling. This is against the Trade Descriptions and Advertising Misrepresentations Acts. It could also be caught by the Theft Acts and of course the more recent Fraud Act 2006.

So you have the option of reporting the scam to the police. Unfortunately the police will probably pass the report (or more likely tell you to do it yourself) to your local Trading Standards office. This department within you local council is responsible for investigating such cases and if there are enough complaints when collated from around the country it is possible that an investigation will ensure. However, do not hold your breath expecting you money back – the primary focus of Trading Standards will be to close down any inappropriate activity.

If the seller is a Limited Company, a complaint to the Insolvency Service’s Companies Investigation Branch may also trigger an investigation. If the business opportunity is a scam, and is trading not in the public interest, then it is possible that it will be closed down and even that the directors prosecuted. Again, it is unlikely that you will get your money back.

So how would you get your money back if you felt that you have been ripped off. How do you get satisfaction when you cry “Help, I’ve been cheated”? Apart from complaining to the authorities and helping to protect the public by making it difficult for these fraudsters to trade, writing to or visiting them persistently is probably one way of standing a chance of getting some recompense. If you sound as if you know what you are talking about (for example dropping the names of trading standards and companies investigation branch into your letter) you might be lucky.

The honest truth is that you should do your due diligence when choosing a business opportunity!