Before I take a look at the pros and cons of various different types of new business opportunity in the coming chapters, I have included some information about how you can go about seeking a new venture. Problems arise if you simply launch yourself into Internet search mode – hoping to find inspiration from the web.

You already have some idea for your new income opportunity

Some people have a very good idea of what they want to do. Many others know the sort of new business opportunity idea that they would like to pursue. If you are one of these lucky persons then your task is much simpler – but you still have a lot of work to do. For example, you might know a friend who maintains a blog about his spare time interest – say golf. You know that he earns over $1000 every month from the blog and you would like to do the same with your own interest in high performance road cars.

You have to find out a lot of information before you also have a chance of earning this sort of money. Questions that will need answering will include (but are not limited to):

• How long has the blog site been running?
• How often must new information be added to the site?
• How do you set up a blog site?
• What sort of information would people be interested in?
• How do you get them to visit your site?
• How do you convert visitors to your site into earnings?
• How much competition will there be?

However, you have a good starting point – a new business idea that you can build on and develop. You will also need to establish whether or not you have the time and enthusiasm for this new business opportunity. You may be basing your income aspirations on your friend’s web site but it may be hard to match his success. Even if you do, will the income be enough in five years time, in ten years? Will you want to set up more sites to increase revenue? Will the venture become a general Internet Marketing business?

So you have started to identify variations within your chosen area, and need to build enough knowledge so that you can define your new income opportunity and prepare your business or marketing plan that will tell you whether or not you have a good chance of success.

If you do not have a good idea of your new business opportunity yet

For most of us that are keen to work for ourselves it is more of an overwhelming desire to “go it alone” than a clearly defined business path. We hate going into work every day and yearn to run our own business. At this stage I will say that the information in Chapter 5 should be considered seriously. If you start a consultancy based on your existing skills used in your current career and follow a sensible approach of business planning and research into your market – you have every chance of making a success of your new business. You will probably be basing your own business on a proven framework using tested skills – it will be your motivation and drive that is key to success. This is probably the easiest and quickest route into self employment.

However, you may be tired of your day job – including the field of work that you do. You may be bored and looking for something different to do – a change.

This is where there is a danger of logging onto your computer every evening (or even during the day at your current place of employment when you should be working) and browsing aimlessly for new businees opportunity ideas on the Internet. If you enter keywords into the search engines like “profitable business ideas” or “new business opportunities working from home” you will receive countless hits from people trying to sell you “get rich quick” schemes that will never work.

There are a few schemes and programs amongst the marketing hype and scams that do work – but even these do not work as well as described.

There are even fewer sites that will provide you with interesting and valuable information and which are not obviously trying to sell you anything. Even when you visit this site you are currently on I am hoping that you will click on an advertisement to earn a few cents for Business Opportunity Market!

So what is the best approach to discovering a new business opportunity idea that will interest you? I would suggest not starting with the Internet is the best approach. Leave the Internet until you have some subject areas that you have considered, know a little bit about, and now need to research in depth.

For example, I found out about Internet Marketing through a contact in my daily work. He informed me that he had given up his normal marketing job within industry to pursue a property development career. When this did not work out due to a depressed property market, he decided to set up an Internet Marketing business. He told me about it, showed me some of his web sites and gave me a “Search Engine Optimization – How to guide” that he had written after a lot of research and wasted expenditure. It sounded interesting so I also bought a book about Affiliate Marketing from my local bookstore.

Now I was getting to the stage where I knew that $billions are paid out every year to web sites that include adverts for companies involved in the massive and growing online industry. I also knew that it was very easy to waste a lot of money on programs that showed you how to make millions from this area. But I was in the process of building up knowledge and enthusiasm for a possible foray into Internet Marketing – and I hadn’t even browsed the subject on the Internet yet. However, now I was ready to do so and I was ready for all the very well written money grabbing ventures that came out top of my searches!

In this manual you will find information that tells you how to set up a blog site, how to “monetize” it so that visitors will earn you money, how to increase your traffic to your site so that your revenue will go up and how to develop such a business so that it will start to almost work on its own (an often used term is “auto pilot” – this does not work per se, but it is possible to remove yourself from the coal face to become a “hands off” manager of such a business). However, you will also learn that substantial work is required building traffic and maintaining such a blog – you could start spending your whole working life developing a business that paid you at most $12,000 a year!

So you need a starting point – such as the blogging idea. Once you find out more about it you can determine the best way to develop the idea in a way that suits you. Starting points include the various different businesses found within the next few chapters in this manual. You must use them as starting points and accept that it is up to you to delve deeper and create a detailed profile of any idea that interests you.

Research methods for new business ideas

• Reading the newspaper
• Watching the news
• Browsing through business directories
• Spend time in your local library
• Browse the business section of your bookstore
• Talking to business owners

A great starting point for your new business venture

As with the golf or fast car blogs mentioned above, look at your own interests. Whatever business type that you choose, if it has anything at all to do with your current passions you will find it all the easier to develop. Imagine writing a blog about something that you were not interested in!

For example, if you are a keen fisherman/woman you could start a business in a number of ways:

• Open a fishing tackle store
• Start an online fishing tackle store
• Start an eBay online fishing tackle store
• Write a blog about fishing tackle
• Write a blog about where to fish
• Start an online fishing holiday company
• Manufacture specialist fishing tackle
• Import fishing tackle or act as an “agent”
• Specialise in fishing clothing

There are always lots of different ways to start a business surrounding a specific subject area or business idea. It is great if you can find the idea first – then research ways of setting a business up around it. However, it is also possible to develop business opportunities the other way round. For example, you might be attracted to the idea of importing goods and selling via online auctions. This is a proven business method that has made many people into millionaires – it has also reaped very meagre rewards for others – as usual it is the way the business is developed and the effort put into business planning that is the key to success. Choice of items to buy and sell are also critical and selecting your subject area can be quite difficult.

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.