When I started my home-based business, I was inspired by the many articles touting the benefits of self-employment for mothers. However, reality can be pretty different than ideals, so I would like to come right out and dispel some of the commonly-held falsehoods about self-employment: The lie You can save on childcare. Yeah right. Try getting work done with a kid on your lap tapping happily away on your keyboard, or pulling the pots out of the kitchen cupboard. Even when they're sleeping, you never know if they'll wake up in five minutes or two hours. The result – pressure! This does not yield high-quality results. The truth Get a babysitter, or a nanny. Or consider daycare. Better ...

A customer has walked into your store or has arrived at your web site. This person is interested in your product and plans to buy, whether from you or your competitor. Your price is reasonable and the quality of the product is good. But the person ends up leaving your store/site and buying the product elsewhere. Aaargh! So where did you go wrong? It's not always possible to say, but an important part of making a sale is erasing all your customer's fears and insecurities about buying your product from you. How do you do that? Use the shoe-burning method! Burn the Shoes One summer I needed sandals, and I headed to Jaffa Street in downtown Jerusalem. ...

Part of the Web 2.0 movement is the increasing ease of creating a web presence. Thanks to Blogs, Wikis, and other similar platforms, pretty much anyone can post content on the web. Weebly is a free service that allows users to create a pretty decent looking site quickly and easily. The site can either be hosted with Weebly under a weebly subdomain (i.e. example.weebly.com), or you can download your completed site as a zip, giving you greater flexibility in terms of appearance and hosting. Once you have registered with Weebly and chosen your subdomain, you can get to work. First, choose a ...

If you're in business, one of your main goals is usually to provide an income to yourself and your family. Now, you can't just be in business to make money - you have to love what you do and enjoy "helping" others, i.e. your clients or customers. But this kind of "help" does not fall under the category of charitable giving, where helping takes the form of aiding those who are less fortunate with basics, like food, clothing and health care. I realized recently that a person in business can use their business connections and knowledge to truly help others in a charitable way: by helping people reach a state where they can sustain themselves with their own income, rather than ...

I love Firefox. I loved it before version 2.0, and now I love it even more. With its shiny new interface, amazing tabbed features, and fabulous plugins, why would anyone use Internet Explorer anymore? And for anyone who cares about web standards, Firefox is it. But for some reason Israelis don't have a clue about Firefox – both designers and users. Too many Israeli web sites break apart in Firefox, or tell you that certain content can only be viewed with IE. I know that the huge majority of web users use IE, but a designer's job is to take everyone into account. And it's not like Firefox has ignored the Israeli community – there is a complete ...

The blogosphere is full of examples of how blogs can help you professionally. However, if you are not careful with your blogging habits, you may find that your blog can also harm you. Recently someone contacted me through my website with the following message (details changed to protect the innocent): "Your Google ad showed up on my blog, and I'm not so happy in my current job and am searching for something else. I have many skills that you could use, and was wondering if you would like an affiliate in my city." I'm always interested in connecting with talented people who have skills that I may need at some point, and his skills and experience sounded good. I noticed that ...

Israelis are a driven people. With less than 60 years of statehood under their belt, Israelis have built leading companies, developed ground-breaking technologies, and even managed to attract Warren Buffet's first investment outside of the US. So what drives them so hard? I recently held a meeting with a client about creating the content for the website of their new desktop application. I asked the CEO by when he would like the copy to be ready. He looked me in the eyes and said, half-seriously, "Today." He was actually demonstrating more flexibility than most other Israeli business owners whom I meet and work with, who when asked the same question, answer "Yesterday." I observed to this particular client that ...

About two years ago I decided that conventional employment was not for me and my lifestyle (i.e. mother to a bunch of kids who felt unappreciated by her boss), and decided to go the independent route. On my first try, I approached all the relevant Israeli tax authorities on my own to open files, and in response these tax authorities chose to define me as a high-end earner and tax me for everything I've got. I quickly understood that this was a mistake, and closed all my files and got a regular employee job. A while later I decided to really take the plunge, and I hired a yoetz mas, a tax advisor, to take care of all ...

You've heard about RSS, you've seen the little RSS icons, and yet it still remains a mystery. What does it do? What does it mean? Can't I live without it? RSS is actually really simple (it actually stands for Really Simple Syndication, so I guess it lives up to its name), but for some reason no one seems to be able to explain it in a simple way. So here's the lowdown - basically, RSS is a way for you to keep up with new information on web sites (such as blogs) via your web browser, without the need for emails updates. The RSS advantage - get information updates without subscribing to yet another newsletter that may just end up cluttering your ...

For months I had thought about redoing my site, and adding a blog. But I have a weakness, which is also a strength I guess in certain ways, when it comes to learning new things. Before beginning any kind of new project, I research the subject to death and only then begin the work. The advantage to this system is that I really gain a wide and thorough understanding of the subject matter. The major disadvantage is that it can take me months to begin working on something new because I won’t start until I feel completely prepared. In business, there are so many demands on your time that a) you don’t have the luxury of getting a PhD ...