For most folks who contemplate a home business, a low-cost or no-cost solution is not only nice, but also very necessary. Many also seek to find a home business that will permit them to maintain their regular day job in order to protect their base income.

Taking cautious approach to a home based business and keeping one's job during start-up period is often a very good decision. By maintaining one's job, one can maintain health of their personal finances while permitting their home business grow healthy and strong.

Fortunately, most home based businesses can be started with little or no cash, can be maintained on a shoestring budget, and can be operated successfully with only a part-time investment.

One day, business will be strong enough to support itself and its owner. When that time comes, it will make good sense for business owner to leave his or her outside job to dedicate more time to growing and maintaining their new thriving home based business. You will know when that time has finally arrived.

The nature of a home based business makes it easy and very realistic for most folks to take plunge into home business ownership.

Yet, many folks put off starting their own home based business, because they have misconception that they will have to risk thousands of their own hard-earned dollars at start-up. Then later, if their business fails, they fear they may be forced to take out a second mortgage on their house just to stay out of bankruptcy.

Are you one of these folks? Do you let your fears of failure keep you from reaching for your dreams?

If so, then allow me to introduce you to a few home business ideas that you can start for less than $100 and can be started and operated very profitably as a part-time business.

THE LIFEBLOOD OF ALL SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES

First of all, let me advise you to search out a business model that will deliver steady and repeat business. It is one thing --- above all others --- that will assure that your company can survive test of time.

HOME-BASED MAIL ORDER: Home-based mail order is a good example of how one can quickly grow a home business income. Mail order is a low cost start-up business that can be launched for around $100 USD.

With proper planning, your home-based mail order business will not require up-front inventory purchases. In mail order business, it is not uncommon to rely upon drop-shippers for product fulfillment services.

By utilizing drop-shippers, we can sell products, collect money and then purchase products from wholesale outlet. The wholesale outlet will then put a return address for your company on product packaging and deliver product directly to your customer.

There are three primary email applications on market that folks use to manage their incoming POP3 email. Those three are:

· Microsoft Outlook Express · Eudora · Netscape Mail

In order to get most from your email software, there are three key processes that you should learn. These processes are concerned with data organization, saving time and email database management.

SET UP EMAIL FOLDERS

Organization is key to any emails that you intend to save. Having 2000 emails in one folder is a sure-fire road map to confusion and lost communications and information.

You are best judge as to how to organize your email into topics that provide an easy method of retrieval of information when you need it most.

Fortunately, primary email browsers make it easy to organize your information. By allowing you to create folders within your email software, you can file specific emails into folders dedicated to topic of email.

To create new folders:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: 1. Click File - Folders - New --- alternatively, you may also right click an item in Folder window --- and then type in name of your new folder. Highlight folder above where you would like your new folder to be placed, and then click OK.

EUDORA: Click on Mailbox - New --- or right click on Eudora in folders window and then click on New. When window opens, type in name of your new mailbox and click OK. If you want to create a folder to place other mailboxes into, click checkbox before clicking OK.

NETSCAPE MAIL: Click File - New Folder. Then from drop-down menu, select folder that you wish to be folder directly above your new folder, before clicking OK.

FILTERING EMAIL

Email filters are a tool to help you save time and frustration. Have you ever lost an incoming email under deluge of email coming into your mailbox? With filters, you can direct important email or not-so-important email into certain pre-ordained folders.

As part of war against spam, most ISP's use filters every day in an attempt to keep spam out of your mailbox. In fact, I even use filters to sort my incoming mail trying to catch spam my ISP missed.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you need some special software to filter your email. Setting up filters is actually quite easy.

To setup email filters:

OUTLOOK EXPRESS: Click on Tools - Message Rules - Mail. A wizard will open to help you create your new email filters. Just follow instructions provided to direct mail based on certain criteria into certain folders.

EUDORA: Click on Special - Make Filter. Once again, just follow instructions in Filter wizard.