Step 1. Choose type of service or product you want to offer.

Step 2: Certify that you have adequate knowledge, skills, ability, and industry experience.

Step 3: Lock down your business niche (your market) and specialize in two to three core service or product offerings.

Step 4: Evaluate how much time and energy you have to commit to getting your virtual business launched. Be honest!

Step 5: Identify who your clients are and how you will reach them.

Step 6: Ask yourself hard question: Is there a need for my service(s) or product(s)? Use following to make a true assessment: a customer, or a prospective customer, has to have three things: Need | Money | Authority | and all three must be present or else you're just wasting your time.

•Need - Do they need it - that is, do they have a problem which they recognize as needing to be fixed, for which your service or product is a good possible solution?

We think of creative people as being inspired and ask about their work. What inspired you to paint, draw, produce this piece of work? What inspired you to make this? Usually answer is: a book, poem, film, experience, person, a place or in Cole Porter’s case ‘phone call from director’.

Something else or someone else inspired artist, songwriter. But what about person in a regular job? What inspires you?

“Inspiration is a desire to live life without flinching. To take a risk and possibly fail. To act on your emotions, creativity, ability and beliefs. To take criticism but have faith in yourself to do it anyway. Bloody hard work, but then hard work never killed anyone (or so my Dad says). Oh, and I find foster parents inspiring. They pick up pieces when fundamental teachings and rules of our society fail. If I were religious I'd ask God to bless em.” Carolyn Tomley (Sydney Morning Herald website).

What is it that inspires you?

You can begin to see that if nothing inspires you or excites you or lights up your life you are really missing something. You are just like a robot performing task after task. We believe that deep down you have a place where you can be touched. You have a place that is solely ours. Solely for you to show world. Can you name it?

What inspires me, is thought that I am more than my body. My limitations are only down to my thoughts. Thus I want to keep pushing boundaries to find out what is there. Find out what I can communicate to world. I am inspired by fact that through what I do I may enable another person to open their mind. To remove blinkers and reach their possibilities.

Julie is inspired by life. All that is around her. To Julie, inspiration is a rush of adrenalin, a rush of energy that creates a clearing in her thinking. It’s that time when you see something from a different perspective and say to yourself, Why didn’t see it like this before?

For Julie, inspiration is like prisoner who says you can do whatever you like to my body but you can’t touch my soul, my reason for living.