Though the leaves have only just started to fall in many places you can be sure that those ads for holiday shopping will start appearing everywhere in just a few short weeks. Most retailers don’t even wait for Halloween to go by anymore before they start stocking their shelves for Christmas.

The holidays can provide great opportunities for the creative home based entrepreneur. Even in a recession most people loathe to cut back too far when it comes to holiday spending so the market really is always there at this time of year, as long as you know where to find it.

One way a home based entrepreneur with an artistic side can cash in on Christmas (and Hanukkah, Kwanza and New Years too) is by creating and selling their own greeting cards. Not the kind you make with construction paper, glue and a little glitter like you did when you were a kid, but by signing up with sites like Cafepress.com , Zazzle.com and Greetingcarduniverse.com. These sites allow artists to upload their greeting card art to their site and make money off of a portion of the sales.

The sites themselves do all the leg work, the printing and shipping and so forth, so obviously they take a cut of the profits. But a clever design (you don’t need to be Picasso) can end up be a nice little money maker, and if you have a number of them all the better.

Of course, these sites do not just limit the greetings card designs you can submit to holiday themes. Any and all occasions are acceptable. The only limitation is that of course, you cannot use copyrighted material that does not belong to you.

Whatever line of business you are pursuing at home there are software products available that can make every aspect of running your concern a little bit easier and far more efficient. Here are a few that you should definitely consider purchasing;

Microsoft Office: Almost an essential for any home based business. If you do not own it yet, or are considering an upgrade Office 2007 is well worth the investment. In addition to the standard offerings of the 2003 version – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook – the 2007 version adds Publisher, which is an incredible desk top and web page publishing tool and Access, a powerful database application.

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Working from home sounds great, but if you are not really interested in the business or project you undertake the chances are that you will fail very quickly. Working from home takes a lot of time, effort and discipline and if you do not like what you are trying to do you will inevitably find it impossible to stick with.

The key to a successful work at home career is finding something you are truly passionate about, whether it is a product that you sell, a service you provide or a combination of the two.

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There is no doubt that almost any home based business, whatever the industry, whatever product or service they offer, can benefit from having an Internet presence. But having a bad website can be more damaging than not having one at all. Here are just five of the most common mistakes that new website owners make that serve to devalue, rather than enhance their businesses’ reputation.

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Google Local Business Center is the one place that many at home business owners just do not make enough use of, which is a shame since it is a very effective way of promoting your business or service within your local area. Best of all it is completely free to list your company and it takes just a few minutes to set up.

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