Starting from your garage! Jeff Bezos laid the foundations for Amazon.com from the garage of his rented two-bedroom house outside of Seattle. He made his first office tables out of wood doors, angle brackets, and two-by-fours purchased at Home Depot.

This article summarizes the recognizable aspects of Amazon.com’s success and lays out the lessons learned in the form of tips. You have the opportunity to review the advice given here and carefully apply it to your own business.

You, as the owner of your own home business, started, or are about to start if you haven’t already, with the same resources as Jeff Bezos. You are in a similar, if not much better, situation than the founder of Amazon because you have the secret of success from him to learn and apply in your own business.

Tip #1: Be modest in your initial investment. For example, your laptop or PC doesn’t have to be top of the line. Your office location could be a corner of the house or your bedroom, basement, or garage. Save on office rent by all means. Be like Jeff Bezos and other successful marketers who spent wisely and succeeded.

Motivation

You must motivate yourself to succeed. When Amazon was first struggling to turn a profit, only its founder, Jeff Bezos, believed that the business goal could be achieved within a year. Everyone was stunned when Jeff Bezos achieved his goal after a year.

Tip #2: The lesson to be learned from the account above is to clearly state and communicate your goal to all stakeholders in your small business. They include your spouse and your web designer, among others.

Write this goal down and post it on the wall next to your desk. Save this target to your hard drive and make the text on the home page when you start your computer. You can turn your target into a screensaver. Read your goal to yourself every day as you go about your internet business.

Tip #3: You must motivate yourself every day and pass this motivation on to everyone involved in your business. To paraphrase author Wallace D. Wattles, who wrote The Science of Getting Rick in 1910, imagine yourself right now with a very successful business and do everything you can ethically and legally to actualize your vision of it. FYI, Wattles’ book is listed on my website.

Exchange

It is said that change is the only permanent thing on this planet. Amazon changed the way it does business over the years. First it was an online bookstore. It then expanded into music and video sales.

It then offered toys, consumer electronics, and software to its customers. These were linked with a number of new products to this day. Amazon has an ever-evolving line of products. His competitors have difficulty catching up with the innovator.

During its first few years of operation, Amazon wasn’t making any real profit. Instead, he got into the habit of reinvesting his income in new markets. It did this to make it possible for its customers to make broader choices for the company’s offerings.

Tip #4 – Your home-based business needs to be run like Amazon. You could be selling your only information product right now. Within two weeks, you will have added another back-end product. Next month you will have introduced the inventory of the affiliate program you have joined into your product line.

Tip #5: If your website is content-driven, you should add new content every day. Casual visitors to your website will become your regular visitors when they see fresh content every time they return to your site. And these visitors will ultimately become your regular customers.

be a generalist

A generalist is one who does many things. In computer language it is known as multitasking. This has been the culture at Amazon.

Tip #6: You, as a single person in your home business, should also be a generalist. This means doing and knowing everything that goes into and out of your business.

Don’t know anything about HTML coding? This is tolerable. However, you should strive to understand at least the basic formatting that goes into your site’s code. This way you can make small inserts on your web pages when your web designer is out with a cold or out of town. Or you can learn a thing or two about scripting. By the way, the HTML tutorial is one of several categories among the free home based business learning material featured on my website.

Work ethics

Jeff Bezos was the CEO of the company and he and his wife were the first Amazon workers. His work ethic was marked by hard work and perseverance, among others. These traits were passed down to his employees through the years.

Tip #7: To be successful and last long in your Internet business, you must work hard to get your business online as quickly and frugally as possible. The important thing to consider is to get up and running and get your small business online early and quickly. If you have to get up at two in the morning to do your work on the Internet, follow this routine.

Tip #8: You must be consistent in your business-related tasks. If your content needs to be updated twice a week, follow this schedule devotedly. Your website visitors will notice even small changes in your content when they revisit your web pages. Not to mention the search engine spiders that would be too happy (ie, in an electronic way of speaking) to index new content on your website.

Be the first to adopt technology

Amazon was one of the first, if not the first, to adopt online book retailing. When major book sellers, Barnes & Noble and Borders Books, among others, caught on to this new way of selling books, Amazon was way ahead. Jeff Bezos surveyed the internet horizon and embraced the best technology in sight.

Tip #9: New technologies come and go almost daily. Some of these technologies allow you to run your business quickly and easily. Other technologies steal your investment. Your duty is to examine each technology and assimilate the best into your business.