Looking For The Best Home Based Business Idea?

There is no doubt about it, good ideas are the basics of any business. Being able to create good ideas can turn an ordinary business into something extraordinary.

You can combine ideas that you see other companies using. You can experiment, come up with many ideas and take the best to use in your company. Ideas don’t need to be your own.

Most ideas are created by

Most ideas are created by research and experiment and the final idea may be one of many. The concept of ideas just popping up out of the blue can and does happen but rarely. Most of us can’t afford to wait.

Before you start to create new ideas you need to get into the right frame of mind. It is no good creating new ideas half-heartedly. You need to start optimistically and expectantly.

Your concept needs to be simple, workable, low cost and yet still unique.
You want to construct something that is unique and makes you stand head and shoulders above any competition.
You want your idea to be really dramatic: groundbreaking.

Because you have personal interests and have learned methods over the years, you can put together something that is simple for you, yet worthwhile for your customers.

At first we may think that our experience is nothing special, so we need to dig deep and we will find that you really have a mixture of unbelievable skills. Naturally the older you are, the more experience you can draw on, but it also makes it harder for you to catalogue them all for reference. The younger person may think his talents are few, but it is good that you can use your past interests to project your path for the future. To learn skills that you already want to learn.

There are many methods used for creating ideas but I consider the best to be Mindmaps and ‘The 20 Idea Plan’.

Using mindmaps we can jump about with our thoughts and still make sense of them. The mind doesn’t work as logically as we could like it to. We need a way to let ideas come from any direction and yet still be put down as a system.

A mindmap starts with your question being put in the centre of a blank sheet of paper.

Radiating lines from your central question carry at the ends main answers to the question.

Rather like the main trunk of a tree leads to branches, further branches and then twigs, you can take further lines from your main answer and expand on it.

With mindmapping you can work on any point at any time. You can even leave it and come back to it. You work in whatever way your mind takes you. I would suggest you start your mindmapping by putting the question, "What is my experience?" in the centre first, so you develop an overall view of the talents you can use or adapt.

Don’t worry if your mindmap goes off the page. Just start a new mindmap on a separate sheet starting from your main answer. You can do this as many times as you like.

Your mindmap of your experiences can be kept as a reference for ideas by writing them in list format as your mindmap will have put them in sections. You could also put them on computer. If you like the mindmap format you can neaten it by putting it in a draw program on computer. You can even add colour.

Ideas are created by asking many different questions, which is easily done with mindmaps.

"What would I want if I was my own customer?"
"What is needed?"
"What do I enjoy?"
"What is boring but necessary that I can make interesting and desirable?"

Each mindmap will give you a few ideas. They are not groundbreaking unless you are lucky, but you still need to keep your optimism high. Take these ideas further by asking more questions.

"How can I combine these ideas to create something new?"
"How can I make it better?"
"How can I make it more interesting and desirable?"
"Can I make the ideas simpler or less expensive?"

Spend some time on your mindmaps. If you take weeks, you will also be using your subconscious which should, every now and then, come up with something extra. Now we have a number of ideas we can take them further with another method. So far mindmapping has been easy. This method is a bit more pressure.

‘The 20 Idea Plan’ is simple to do, but hard in practice.

Lined paper is best for ‘The 20 Idea Plan’. What you do now is take just one of your ideas and put at the top of your paper a question like, ‘How can I improve on —– idea?’ In order to put pressure on your idea, you now need to put down 20 ideas within half an hour.

It sounds easy and for the first ten or twelve it is. Then you come under pressure to think of more within a short space of time and that is when the best results come.

You now have 20 ideas, most of which are good. Give each one a score. I do it out of ten. Those with the highest score can be put through the system again in order to produce something really mindblowing. You can find that over a few days your subconscious will come up with something even better.

The only way to learn to do it is to do it. I love creating new ideas.

This article was written by a good friend of mine, Ian Layzell. He has been running his own very profitable home based mail order business for over 20 years and has written some of the best guides about that subject.

You can find out more about is home income ideas at www.homeincome.co.uk He also helped put together a very open review of Website Content Wizard for those of you who may be thinking about buying it.

The bottom line is it is worth it but only if you know about the problem with it first.