Real World experience with Business Funding

When you have no money to start out and your job is keeping you busy from doing much otherwise, one area to consider is selling information on a topic that is in demand. In every field people are searching for the right information to help them do things better. This could be from areas such as an hobby or basically how manage their lives.

The advantage with information is that you can present without too much overhead. The information could be in Writing, Audio, video or live in person or conference call format. Another important factor is that you do not have to be the person generating the information. You could locate an expert in the field of choice and interview them. Then market the interview either as audio or video and make a written transcript of the interview.

The most important thing about selling information is to make sure that the outcome of the product would generate results for the client. No point in taking up a cheap PLR book online to sell without knowing that it will bring real results.

The best way to sell or advertise information is on the Internet or you can use some cheap classified ads in your local area. In terms of the Internet you need to have keywords related to the product or problem you are trying to solve.

How would you go about this?

First lets say you have several areas you know well or have strong interest, you would then do some research to locate keywords that are related. Once you find those general keywords, you would then research what are the demands for each keyword on a daily or monthly basis. This is your first step to see what makes sense to pursue. Best tool to test is the Google Adwords tool.

Once you nail down one area to pursue further, the next step is to generate content for your product. Now, this content could be a online booklet, video or Audio file or combination which is highly recommended. To speed things up you could find an expert in the field to help and share the proceeds. You can look at existing articles and form your own product based on these contents.

To deliver the product, you could use a basic blog well presented with the necessary buttons to purchase and download the information right there. You could use wordpress.com or blogger.com for the blog if you do not want to pay for a site. Paypal.com could be used for the payment button side of things.

How do you get the word out?

So far, everything looks good to do. The biggest challenge is to get the word to the right people. The first thing is to make sure you have good presentation of the product and your site. Make it look respectable and have the interest to grab clients. Once that’s done, you could approach people who are established in the related area and ask them to market to their clients. In this way, you could already have 1000s of potential clients to look at your product without any upfront cost. This will need work to call the prospective partners and show them that your product is really worth the effort.

The other way to get the word out is probably to give away some preliminary free information using advertising on social sites and free classified sites. Once people get the free stuff that is good, they could decide to buy the full product.

Lets say you want to market locally. Then you could use local community notice boards, get event planners to present the free side of the product to their audiences etc..

In the end, we all have skills that can help to solve someones problem, we need to get out of our comfort zone and achieve our vision for life.

Well, this is a topic that will always keep coming up as long as you need funding for your business. First of all there are few persons who have the privilege to decide of if you get funding. They are an authorize Bank officer, Wealth Venture Capital Investor and authorize personnel for investment funds. Bear in mind these funds could be private investors or a standard investment fund.

I bring this up to highlight that regardless of how many offers out there to help you get money, you need to meet the requirements of these people. Yes, you have different form of brokers that will help you meet some requirements but bear in mind that there is always a risk despite their past success. Risk in the sense that the people who control the money can change requirements any time they wish.

How can you be sure to get past the need for business funding regardless of the funding source? Lets first look at common factors.

1. Corporation – You will need a corporation either new or old. Old is great if in good standing as it can get you past the initial scrutiny but by itself won’t work. In fact you can get an old corporation cheap with permission from the existing owner.

2. Credit Profile – While people will charge you 1000s to do this, most of this is free. You get an EIN free, DNB number free and I think all the other credit agency numbers are free.

3. Credit Activity – Show some activities on your business profile to get a score that is minimum for consideration. The Paydex 80 is the usual minimum – The cost to do this is very cheap.

4. Business Plan – While banks may not ask for this, it’s critical to make sure you have a good purpose and plans for the money. Can’t just say you want to borrow some money. You need to have good plans to pay back. Investors would want to see your plan to even consider lending the money in the first place.

Now with those basics out of the way, you may be able to get $50K or so depending on the bank without doing anything else. Lets look at some advance areas to consider to more credit.

1. Personal/Business Guarantor – Once you get up in the $100K range, you will need to show some kind of personal guarantee to the bank which means they will check your personal credit score and other factors. This is where you may need to get a service if you don’t want to do it yourself.

2. Company Financial – When you present a aged Corporation for large sums, they will want to see your finances with activities and most likely tax returns proving that. Typically when people go and buy corporations, this is one of those services that they want to have. be careful with this route as the bank could catch any bogus documents used

3. Large Trade Lines – This area is critical especially to apply for large amounts of capital. You could take time and apply for trade lines directly with stores and vendors but some companies may be able to get large lines attached to your profile. This would show good business practices over a period of time and give the funding source some confidence in your business.

The main reason I am writing is to warn people again about dishonest providers. First they do not know how to do things right, second they do not have much success in the past and finally they will not take blame for failures. As I said early there are risk in this field when you ask someone to do it for you, however, they need to be above board and have the best of integrity.

As I said before, make sure the payments are protected.