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Jeff Bezos built the foundation of Amazon.com from the garage of his two-bedroom house rented outside of Seattle. He fashioned his first office tables from wooden doors, angle brackets, and two-by-four lumber purchased from Home Depot.

This article summarizes the recognizable aspects of Amazon.com's success and lays down lessons learned in the form of tips. You have the opportunity to analyze the tips given here and apply them with prudence to your own business.

You as the owner of your own home based business started - or about to embark if you have not as yet started - with the same resources as Jeff Bezos. You are in a similar situation - if not much better position - than the Amazon founder because you have the secret to his success to learn and apply into your own business.

Tip No. 1: Be modest in your initial investment. For example, your laptop or PC shall not necessarily be top of the line. Your office location could be a corner of the house or your room, basement or garage. Save on office rent by all means. Be like Jeff Bezos and other successful marketers who spent prudently and succeeded.

Motivation

You should motivate yourself to succeed. When Amazon was struggling to make profits for the first time, only its founder Jeff Bezos believed that the business goal could be achieved in a year's time. Everybody was astounded when Jeff Bezos achieved his goal after one year.

Tip No. 2: The lesson that could be learned from the above account is to lay down and make known in clear fashion your goal to every stake holder of your small business. They include your spouse and your web designer, among others.

Write down this goal and post this on the wall beside your desk. Save this goal in your hard disk and make the text the start up page when you boot your computer. You can convert your goal into a screensaver. Read your goal to yourself every day as you go about your business on the Internet.

Tip No. 3: You should motivate yourself every day and pass this motivation on to every one who's involved in your business. To paraphrase the author Wallace D. Wattles who wrote The Science of Getting Rick in 1910, envision yourself right now as having a very successful business and do every which legal and ethical way to actualize your vision. FYI, Wattles' book is featured in my web site.

Change

It is said that change is the one single permanent thing on this planet. Amazon changed the way it does business through the years. First it was an online book seller. Next it expanded into selling music and videos.

Then it offered toys, consumer electronics and software to its customers. These were linked with a host of new products until this very day. Amazon has a constantly evolving product line. Its competitors have a hard time catching up with the innovator.

During its initial years of operation, Amazon was not making any real profit. It practiced instead the habit of reinvesting its income into new markets. This it did to make possible for its customers to make wider choices for the company's offerings.

Tip No. 4: Your home based business should be run like Amazon. You could be selling your single information product now. Two weeks from today you will have added another back end product. Next month you will have introduced into your product line the inventory of the affiliate program you have joined in.

Tip No. 5: If your web site is content based, you should be adding new content every day. Casual visitors to your web site will become your regular visitors when they see new content every time they come back to your site. And these visitors will in the end become your regular customers.

Be a Generalist

A generalist is one who does a multitude of things. In computer language it is known as multi-tasking. This has been the culture at Amazon.

Tip No. 6: You as the single person in your home business must be a generalist, too. This means doing and knowing everything that goes in and out of your business.

You don't know any HTML coding? This is tolerable. You must strive however to understand at least the basic formatting that goes into you site code. This way you can make small insertions into your web pages when your web designer is nursing a cold or is out of town. Or you can learn a thing or two on scripting. By the way, HTML tutorial is one of several categories among the home based business free learning stuff presented in my web site.

Work Ethic

Jeff Bezos was the company CEO and he and his wife were the first workers at Amazon. Their work ethic was marked with hard work and consistency, among others. These traits were handed down to their employees through the years.

Tip No. 7: To succeed and last long in your Internet business, you should work hard to put your business online in the fastest and frugal manner possible. The important thing to consider is to start up and put your small business online early and rapidly. If you have to wake up at two in the morning to do your Internet work, by all means stick to this routine.

Tip No. 8: You should be consistent in your business-related tasks. If your content needs updating twice weekly, follow this schedule with devotion. Visitors to your web site will notice even slight changes to your content when they go back to visit your web pages. Not to mention the search engine spiders which would just be too glad (i.e., in electron manner of speaking) to index new contents to your web site.

Be First to Embrace Technology

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

Tip No. 9: New technologies come and go almost daily. Some of these technologies enable you to run your business fast and easy. Other technologies rob you of your investment. Your duty is to examine each technology and assimilate into your business the best.