I often see people say in forums that you don’t need to have a business license. The logic appears to be that since your business is entirely online, it doesn’t need to be licensed locally. It’s a nice thought, but if you look at things more carefully, that’s not true everywhere.

Many places require a business license even for home based businesses or online businesses no matter how much you’re earning. Olympia, Washington, for example, gives some very useful tips on which home based businesses need a license in that city, and they include internet businesses in that mix. In other words, it pays to check with your local area to see if you will need a license when you decide to start an online business in your home.

A business license isn’t all that expensive in most places. Mine is just $50 a year. The exact cost will vary by where you are and may also vary by what you’re earning and if your earnings come from the local area.

Many online businesses don’t bother getting a license because it’s so easy to hide. Who’s going to notice you when customers never come to your door? The problem is that if you get caught doing business without a license, the fines can be very steep. You can be caught out as a home based business when you file your Schedule C with your taxes, which is something your municipality can check for.

For this reason, you need to find a copy of your local ordinances online and read them. Find out exactly what the law says about needing a business license or home occupation permit for the kind of business you’re going to run online. If you aren’t selling physical products or if you’re doing affiliate marketing, you may not need a license. Then again, you might.

It doesn’t matter that you can say your business is located online. You are doing your business activities from your home (okay, maybe the coffee shop too, but you aren’t getting your mail there), and that’s what matters when determining where your business is located for most places.

You may also need a home occupation permit. Sometimes this is instead of a license, sometimes in addition to the license. Basically it means that the business you’re running from your home is acceptable for the zoning in your area. Online businesses are usually fine, unless all home businesses are banned.

If you have a homeowners association to deal with or similar organization, you may have to check with them as well. Of course, they aren’t terribly likely to notice a purely online business, but it still pays to know the rules.

If you aren’t sure about what’s required in your area, you may want to consider talking to an attorney about the matter. Sometimes it takes a professional to figure what exactly the rules mean.

Most people are uneasy at the thought of sharing personal information over the internet. Most of the time, that’s a good thing, but when it comes to looking for a work at home job you’re going to have to share some information. How do you know which information you should share when you’re applying for a work at home job?

Is Professionally Embarrassing Information Already Out There?

A lot of people have discovered that information they’ve shared online socially can impact them professionally. Some employers do check applicants out online, to see what’s out there.

No one has perfect control over what appears on a search for their name online. I’m not currently on the first page for my name, one of the curses of having a very common name. But since I’m not exactly going for the guru thing I’ve never stressed about getting my name up there in the rankings.

But the factors you do control you should take into consideration. Look over how you’re presenting yourself on social networks and anywhere else you appear online. Work at home jobs will mostly be concerned with your professionalism, and depending on the position you’re applying for these things can be quite relevant.

Pay Attention to Who You’re Sharing Information With

We all worry about being scammed when looking for stay at home jobs. It’s normal. There are a lot of scams out there.

This makes sharing even normal personal information requested on any other job application more difficult when you’re talking about applying online. You just don’t have the reassurance that you get from applying with a company you can more easily get information about and maybe even drive right by their location, as you could do with a local, outside the home job.

Fortunately, you can do a pretty good job of researching potential employers if you know how. The ones that more regularly hire work at home employees are usually well known on the work at home forums. Make sure you know the company’s name and do a little research on them before you apply for a job.

When in doubt, see if you can submit the online application without all the information filled out, and use the comment box (if available) to explain why you have left certain information out. A Social Security Number, for example, is necessary for a company to deal with taxes, and may be requested if a background check is being done. It’s really not necessary to share it otherwise, and you can take the chance of offering to provide it only if you make it that far in the hiring process that it become a necessary piece of information.

Keep It Professional

One important thing to do when you’re looking for a job online is to make sure you give a professional appearance with the information you do provide. This means you don’t want to have an email address that’s fun to have socially but might make a potential employer lose interest in you. An email address based on your name is best for most purposes, and it can be nice to keep your job hunting emails separate from the usual personal stuff anyhow.

Potential employers also aren’t going to be interested in your home situation. Even if they’re hiring you for a home based position, they don’t need to know about your kids or how you’re going to handle caring for them while you work. That’s your problem and the expectation is that you’ll handle it.

What they do want to know is why you’re the right employee for them to hire. Make a good impression in that area by emphasizing your relevant skills. Potential employers need employees who know how to separate their family life from their work at home life. If you can’t do that in the application process, they may feel that you won’t keep them appropriately separated when you’re working.

Hunting for a job always means sharing some personal information. Someone offering you a job (not a business opportunity) without wanting to know about your work history probably doesn’t have a real job to offer you. Make sure you know what the appropriate limits are, and if it feels wrong to share a particular piece of information, find out if it’s really necessary to share it.

Too often I see people just say they want to work at home so they can be there for their kids. They haven’t put much more thought than that into it. Many people don’t know what they can do from home, what the income potential is or what to look out for. This can cause problems not only when you’re trying to avoid being scammed as you look for home based work, but as you try to build your career.

1. Learn the basics of spotting a work at home scam.

It almost doesn’t matter what you’re going to do as a work from home job. You need to know what work at home scams look like, or it’s too easy to fall for one. Simply knowing that you shouldn’t pay to show that you’re serious about applying for the job and that pay rates should be realistic for the kind of work you’ll be doing will help you avoid a lot of scams. A bit more research can be necessary to spot other signs, but those basics will help you avoid the most obvious issues.

2. Know what kind of work you expect to do from home.

Don’t go around applying for every work at home job you hear about, whether or not you have the ability to actually do the work. It’s just not a good idea.

Employers want people who are interested and capable of doing the job they’re applying for. Your resume should show that you have some sort of experience relevant to the job. Training is a bit more challenging when you’re at home, so employers don’t want to have to do an excessive amount of it.

3. Is this a job until the kids are old enough for school or your career you’re planning?

Many stay at home moms only stay at home until the kids are old enough to go to school. They then head back to work. Others plan on staying at home pretty much forever, and want to build a career from home.

While you may be looking at similar jobs, they won’t necessarily be entirely the same. If it’s a career at home you’re after, you want to know if you can grow in the job and still stay at home. If you’re planning on going back outside the home to work eventually, you need to know that you can move the skills you’re using in the job to either move to the office with that company or move along to another business in your area.

4. Do you know how you’re going to work at home?

It’s easy to say that you’re going to work at home. Doing a good job of it is something else entirely.

Motivation is one of the first issues people face when they start out. There are so many distractions at home, and it’s often all too easy to skip out on work when you don’t have to report to an office. That’s fine, so long as you don’t mind risking your job. Home based employees do get fired for not working when they’re supposed to just as people do when they work outside the home. Just because you don’t have direct supervision doesn’t mean they don’t know when you’re working or how productive you are.

Children are another distraction even when you’re feeling motivated. It takes time to teach them to let you work, and very young ones won’t understand at all. Many work at home parents do use daycare or have a family member or friend take the kids so they can get work done. Have realistic expectations for your family.

5. Are you comfortable with all the technology you’ll need to use?

If you’re terrible with computers, most work at home jobs aren’t going to work out for you. They’re a big part of most positions.

You need to be comfortable enough that you can quickly learn any new software your job requires. There will probably be some programs you learn to use in order to do your job that you wouldn’t be exposed to otherwise. You may even use familiar programs in unfamiliar ways.

This includes knowing some basic troubleshooting. If your computer freezes up, what do you do? You shouldn’t need to call someone for help for minor problems.

6. How consistent is the work?

One problem many home based jobs face is that the work isn’t consistent enough for you to maintain a constant income. Some weeks your employers are begging you to put in overtime; others they have no work at all for you.

If you’re going to depend on the income, you need work that is consistently available. Depending on the industry, you may need to work for more than one employer to build a reasonably consistent income. Other industries, the one job is plenty.

This isn’t even about being laid off when the company is really low on work. Some jobs have times when they naturally have less work for employees, then a surge of work, and they’ll keep you hanging on even when there’s not much to do. Considering that many home based employees are paid on production rather than hourly, this can be terrible for your income.

7. Are raises available?

Some work at home jobs pay pretty respectably. Others not so much. But in either case, you probably want to know if you will be able to get a raise as your skills improve or for other reasons. The cost of living increases over time – odds are you’d like your income to do the same.

8. What about benefits?

This is particularly important if you’re trying to be the one to provide health insurance for your family. In some types of work at home jobs benefits are hard to come by while in others they’re about as common as they are in the office based versions of the same job.

Remember that benefits aren’t only about health coverage. Look at retirement plans, educational opportunities and other offerings that may be available to you.

9. Will you be considered an employee or a contractor?

The difference between an employee and a contractor is very important when it comes to handling your taxes and sometimes other issues. Companies that hire home based workers don’t always pay enough attention to the legal differences, and that can mess up your taxes pretty badly, as the difference determines factors such as who is responsible for certain taxes.

Do you have any further suggestions for things people should consider as they start looking toward a work at home job?

There’s something nice about getting into a good routine with your online business. You know what needs to be done and how to do it. You know about what response you’ll get for the work you do. But are you still taking new risks? Are you experimenting with new ideas to bring people to your online business?

Running any business is a risk, of course. Keeping with a single routine is even a risk in business, as you don’t know if something else will do better. That’s why you should be experimenting with new ideas regularly.

I don’t mean take constant big risks, making major changes and so forth. Going too wild with how you run your online business can take you in the wrong direction with it, and it may be difficult to recover.

More appropriate experiments, on the other hand, can help you figure which directions to take your business. They’re not only appropriate – they’re necessary.

From Beginner to Pro

Experimenting is a big part of how you go from being a beginner with your business to an experienced professional. You learn what works, what doesn’t and get some idea as to why things happen they way they do for you.

Just think about it. How much would you trust the expertise of someone who has always run their business one way and only that way? Would you consider them as much of an expert as one who had tried a lot of different things?

I don’t mean that you aren’t an expert in your business if you choose one way to do everything and stick with it. You could choose to have your expertise in article marketing, for example, and only ever work with that kind of marketing for your business. But if you only choose to market by submitting your articles to the same list of directories all of the time, never trying any other article marketing tactics, are you really an expert on the subject overall? Do you even know if what you’re doing works as well as it should?

Being an expert doesn’t mean you’re safe from making mistakes with your business, of course. We all make mistakes. It does mean you can choose the things you try more carefully. It also means you probably have the things you know work running well as you experiment.

Which Experiments Should You Try?

There are plenty of ways to experiment with your online business. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Offer a new product.

Have you been offering the same products for a long time? Try something new.

Think about your niche and why people come to your site. You should have a pretty good idea of what your visitors are after. Now think about what might improve the experience they have with your business. Is there something that really goes well with what you’re offering that you aren’t recommending yet?

This doesn’t have to be a product you own, of course. That’s what affiliate programs are for. Find a related product you can offer as an affiliate, and you don’t have to create something new of your own.

2. Change how you offer products.

There are a lot of ways to offer products for sale online. You can have an online store, post product reviews, link to products within blog posts, video reviews and so on. However you make it work, it can be worth your time to try a different way, just to see what happens.

3. Try a new link building strategy.

How are you getting links to your website? Is it working for you? Are the links good only for search engine traffic or do they bring traffic to your site on their own merit?

If most of your current linking strategy is mostly search engine food, look at techniques that are more about getting traffic from higher traffic websites. Try building a reputation through YouTube videos, and put your links into the video description. Get active on a relevant forum that allows signature links.

4. Try paid traffic sources.

If you’ve been avoiding pay per click advertising, buying ads in relevant newsletters and so forth, take a look at this option. Paid methods have the advantage of giving fast results and the disadvantage of costing money, which can add up fast. When you make them work, they’re well worth the money.

5. Do more networking.

How much networking do you do, online and otherwise? Is it more than putting up a Facebook page or doing a few tweets here and there about your business? Just a touch of blog commenting once in a while? Are you a real person when you do these things, or just a business with little personality?

Networking is more than announcing what your business has to offer. That’s certainly a part of it if you’re trying to promote your online business, but it’s not all there is to it. If you want to be taken seriously and really make the most of the time you spend networking, you have to be a real person and share advice, relevant links to other sites and be a bit social.

It’s all too easy to go overboard on networking, of course. You shouldn’t be checking your Facebook page or Twitter every few minutes. Many people find it helpful to set up a schedule. This keeps things under better control, so you keep working on your business in other ways as you network.

6. Attend industry events.

Going to an industry event can be a bit pricey, but as an opportunity the right event can be priceless. It’s a chance to get some great information from some of the top people in your industry and to network with others.

You probably won’t know what to do when you first go to an event. They can be pretty overwhelming. My recommendation is to pick the parts you really want to see and don’t go overboard looking for swag. There’s neat stuff to be had at most events, but really, they shouldn’t be the focus of your day. Learning to improve your business is much more important.

What experiments have you done to improve your online business? Any you’d care to share?

Most of us like to shop. It’s fun to see all the things you’d love to own, whether it’s new clothes or the latest gadgets. The only problem is that looking often leads to buying, and that’s bad for most budgets. How can you keep your impulse shopping under control.

My own preferred method of handling impulse shopping is to control the impulse part of it. I rarely allow myself to buy on impulse. I have to think about it first.

If you can get past the urge to buy right away, it’s really not too hard. Build the habit of walking away from something you want to buy on impulse. Go look at other things. Maybe even give it a day or several.

The idea is to give yourself time to think if you really need the item or if it’s just a want, and if a want, if it’s worth giving in to that want.

The thing to remember is that pretty much anything you see while out shopping will still be there later. Very few things are all that limited, and most really limited things you might buy on impulse aren’t things you really need. The things you need are more likely to be there day after day, week after week. Even if you don’t buy them right away, they’ll probably be there later.

Coming back to a potential purchase later works pretty well if you have a few options to consider. It’s time to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the things you’re considering. You might find that a feature that attracted you immediately doesn’t matter as much as one you notice with a little more thought.

This even works when it comes to buying snacks when you’re out grocery shopping. This can be good for your grocery budget and your waistline, depending on the kinds of impulse buys you tend to make there. Of course, better yet for controlling your grocery shopping is having a list and sticking to it.

Of course, if impulse shopping is a problem for you, the first step may be finding ways to limit how often you do any sort of shopping that can lead to impulse buys. If you like to just wander shopping malls or online shopping sites, or if you get easily tempted when you see an online review for a product, it helps to find ways to avoid those situations. Look at when you’re getting tempted and how often the temptation is to buy something you’ll be glad you bought in the long run. If you’re getting tempted into far more bad purchases than good, it may be time to find something else to do.

A little patience and a little planning can help you quite a bit when it comes to controlling your impulse shopping habits. What works for you?