Knowing how to start a home based business is first step to actually creating your own home based business.

But knowing how to write effectively is difference between “having a home based business” and “having a very successful home based business”.

There is an old adage in bridge: “Everybody makes mistakes, beginners and experts alike. But by time expert makes a mistake it usually really doesn’t matter; beginner has already lost hand!”

These words of wisdom apply equally to effective writing: either you have already learned to write effectively, you are going to learn to write effectively, or you never will learn to write effectively.

50 years ago a friend of ours, John, started a business raising chickens. He did all work himself – fed, watered and cared for chickens, butchered them, took them to market and sold them. He made his first couple of million doing business this way. And he didn’t hire outside help until his volume of business forced him to do so – he did it all himself.

The first secret of a successful business – Do it yourself until you can afford and need to hire outside help.

John decided that he’d been doing chicken business long enough and he wanted to do something new with his life. So he “leased out” his chicken business and bought a 48-acre farm. Now you may wonder what, in this modern day and age, you can do with a little 48-acre farm? Well, John planted trees – nuts – on 10 of those acres. He turned several acres into blueberries, more into red currants, more into black currants, more into raspberries, more into thornless cultured blackberries, more into several other fruits. And he devoted central 4 acres to his home, a bar for his farm equipment, and a couple of larger outbuildings for this ‘n that.

This ‘n that turned out to be a jam- and jelly-making enterprise. He made specialty jams and jellies. Well, how are you gonna compete with big jam and jelly makers, Kraft, , etc., nationwide, with only 44 acres of fruits? You aren’t. Well, John found his niche. He began producing specialty high-quality products for sale from his farm in gift baskets and stand-alone. And he began producing little packages that you get in restaurants with your toast, and developed a local market for these products

The second secret of a successful business – Find your niche, make sure it fits what you are doing and can do, and develop it. Expand only to meet expanding demands.

In part 1 we covered:

The first secret of a successful business – Do it yourself until you can afford and need to hire outside help

The second secret of a successful business – Find your niche, make sure it fits what you are doing and can do, and develop it. Expand only to meet expanding demands.

The third secret of a successful business – When you need help outside your area of expertise be very, very careful. A degree in a field does not mean a person is expert in that field. Particularly true of writing.

The fourth secret of a successful business – You must know that you are at least equal to best alternative out there….then make sure that your clients do benefit from your expertise more than they expected.

Well, glory be! We have only just begun.

The fourth secret of a successful business was first one which dealt with effective writing.

The first secret of effective writing. In this article we’ll deal with another aspect of effective writing: becoming expert. We’re talking writing here, but it equally applies to anything else which requires writing about it.

How do you create that one of 250 resumes that gets job?

How do you create that business plan that successfully raises funding money?

How do you write grant that achieves success?

How do you write an article which gets message across?

How do you create brochure that stands out from rest and is picked up? Oooops! That’s a different article – later!

The second secret of effective writing – Whatever your language – and yes, I still speak and read and write a little Spanish and a little German – is know your language and use it correctly!

There’re catchwords which’ll trip you up, especially if English is not your first language. Contractions are a fine example. Slang, even that accepted as mainstream, is a killer for an ESL (English as a Second Language) person. Hyphenated words cause problems for many, me included. Homonyms are serious pitfalls: words such as to, too and two; there, their and they’re; red and read; read and reed; site, cite and sight; write and right and copyright and copywrite (copywriting). And my old personal bugaboos, who’s and whose, and who and whom!

Even more, your punctuation will set you apart from crowd. In spoken English using right word sets you apart from people who use wrong word but you can actually slide by with spoken word and not betray your shortcomings. However, in writing you definitely need to be aware of all of above, particularly commas, semi-colons and colons.

In written English you sink your own expertise with a simple little thing like a comma fault. What’s a comma fault? Well, using a comma, which really shouldn’t, be used – lie two in this sentence! Or worse, when stringing together words in a series such as to, too, and two – a comma virtually never precedes an and.

How about using a semi-colon? This is a toughie! Generally you just should never use semi-colons. Then, when you do get to a place where neither a comma nor a colon fits, you might try semi-colon. When reading back your sentence you might also decide to break it down and make two or three sentences instead?