Geo Tracking or location based marketing is a relatively new social media platform that allows small business owners to engage and reward their customers. Home based business owners have different concerns for safety and promotions than those small business owners that operate a store front.Three tips for using location based marketing as a home based business owner:1. If you are a home based business you must use your own discretion on deciding if you will participate in listing your business on the various location based marketing sites. Remember, social media is about “compound friending” so friends of friends will see that they are at your business and know where you are located. If you meet with clients at a public place consider using that address. Encourage your clients to sign in for their outdoor fitness class or program.2. You can still reward your customers by using Merchant Circle coupons, Twitter Coupons or other various applications. Do you have a referral or rewards program? As a home based business owner you can encourage loyalty by having a rewards program. It is OK to let your customers know that you appreciate their loyalty. You may offer a program where after so many purchases they get an item for free or receive a discount. Incorporate a discount day. You can use social networking to promote a product or discount on a certain day of the week such as Twitter Tuesday and provide a discount for your Twitter followers or Facebook Friday for your Facebook followers.3. If you are a home based business owner you can still actively participate in location based marketing. Use this as an opportunity to promote other business owners and engage them in conversation. Use it as a rapport building tool or use it to keep an eye on the competition. Review what your competitor who has a store front is offering.Location based marketing is growing. Is your business ready to embrace this new avenue to promote your business online? Are you ready to let your loyal customers help you promote your business by increasing your online presence? When you employ my three tips for the home based business owner you will be able to make the decision that is right for you and your small business.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.

Unfortunately there is this false notion that operating an online business from home somehow does not call for a healthy work ethic. This is dangerous and if you have bought into this notion, you need to get it out of your head now.Because if you allow yourself to be sold on this myth, you are setting up your online home based business for failure. You see, it is so easy for this myth to be reinforced online.Just take a look in the majority of sales or what is popularly called squeeze pages pushing online business opportunities. There is this false narrative surrounding most of these offers that everyone should or wants to achieve a lot overnight without having to do much of anything.The man who thinks he will not have to work, most likely won’t.Well this could very well be so for quite a number of people who are very mistaken about what it takes to have success in business. But the reality is that if you are going to have any success at all with your online home-based business it requires quite a bit of effort on your part and anything that you see to the contrary is very misleading and even dangerous.Moreover, even if this was remotely true, not everyone wants to be able to sleep late, seven days a week, work 15 minutes per day, play golf or go fishing the rest of the time.Of all the multimillionaires or billionaires you may have heard of, which one of them had this lifestyle before they made their fortune or even now that they have made it big?Not Oprah Winfrey, not Warren Buffett, not Bill Gates, not Donald Trump.In fact these people work very hard and love to work hard. Why would you let a sales page convince you that you will never have to do any hard work?The problem of course is not hard work. The problem is that the type of work you choose to do is hard on you. The solution therefore, is to find something you love to do. And find a way to make money from it. You can do this.Believing in the notion that you will not have to put in the hard work in order to make your online business successful is a dangerous myth.Never having to work hard is a myth that is meant only to play on your emotions. Resist that notion. Your hard work does not have to be hard on you. It can be fun.