Amazingly there are business opportunities around us everyday. Our biggest struggle is being able to recognized them when they are presented to us. Also with recognizing an opportunity, is learning how to capitalize on it financial? It can be a balancing act, especially for the Small Business Owner. Listing below are Five Ways To Discover An Opportunity.

BIG COMPLAINT OPPORTUNITY

A great business opportunity is to listen to complaints from customers, from other people, from clients, from customer service postings, from people within your industry, or within your circle or community. Look to provide your services as a solution. Learn what others are not offering and start to offer what’s lacking. Fill in the holes of what’s lacking from the services that your competition does not provide. For example, the complaint is prices are to high for small or private businesses to have someone to come and clean a small office space. You are the owner of a small Cleaning Service, that can’t really compete with larger services due to lack of staff. However, recognize this hole in a larger company services. They don’t really work with small jobs or provide one day Business to Business cleaning service at an affordable prices. Maybe if you contact, other small businesses, small apartment complexes, small unit business or private companies, this could be a better fit for your business. If nothing else you could certainly out price larger companies, due to lower over head.

HELPING OTHERS OR VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITY

I can’t count how many times volunteering and just helping other has brought me business opportunities. I volunteer just because I enjoy giving back. However, it seems that opportunities from me giving my time to others always finds its way back to me. I teach a class Facebook for Baby Boomers, at the local libraries or community centers. The Houston Chronicle Newspaper found out & did a feature article in the Senior Section. My business increased, because other senior groups offered for me to come and coach there groups. How can you use your hobby, skills and talents to give back to others?

TRACKING AN OPPORTUNITY

Tracking is really a simple and often under utilized way to gain business opportunities for yourself. By tracking Demographics or Social Trends of your industry you can place your business services right in the middle of the action, so to speak. Demographics are traits that can determine buying behavior or product preferences. Demographic tracking can include age, income, or geographical region. Determine which demographic area does your product or service include the most people, then market to them. Looking at the Social Trends as well, is also a good way to determine which direction your industry is going. Are they moving offline, or online? Are they using sources like Websites & Blogs,which are great social trends for most small business right now. Creating a Business Social Media site to track business opportunities can also be an inexpensive solution for small businesses.

CAPITALIZE ON NEW TECHNOLOGY OPPORTUNITY

Capitalizing on new technology is easy to recognize in the big picture. For example how computers replaced typewriters or how smart phones are replacing cell phone. Technology is always moving and growing in every industry. However, it is the business that recognizes the small needs and capitalizes on it that can really crave out an exclusive niche for themselves. Let’s go back to the Cleaning Service. If that same company integrates, Eco- Friendly Products for Offices, Homes, and safe for uses around kids. This business has now used new technology to increase business opportunities.

CAPITALIZE ON NEW LAWS OPPORTUNITY

Capitalizing on new laws can create needs for consultants, training, and products. So it’s important to stay alert to the opportunities these types of changes can bring. For a while companies like Amazon relished the opportunity of no sale taxes. It afforded them lower prices to consumers of products. The law is now changing, but what a sweet spot deal it has been for all these many years for Amazon. Can you find your sweet spot?

Product creation in Internet marketing is getting stiffer and stiffer nowadays owing to tough competition between Internet-based businesses. Putting up a new product requires plenty of brainpower and finances along with an ability to take risk. With that, even if you have the product well-set already, you have to position it strategically in the Internet landscape for others to notice. You should get the interest of Web users and turn them to actual customers. Aside from the usual physical products, many different products that thrive well on Internet marketing include E-books, membership sites, and video lectures.

The long and difficult process of product creation begins with ideas. They are easy to get – compared to the effort that comes with analyzing the market for that idea. Before the idea turns to a product, businesses often spend money, even amounting to millions of dollars, to ensure the success of the new product that emerges from an idea. Businesses undertake many types of market research and surveys before releasing their products to the public. Now, you may think that because your business is small, you can’t afford research or you don’t have to do research; you can and you should. The Internet allows you to disseminate materials needed for your market study to many people at once without your having to spend a cent.

It is a common maxim in business: Look at your destination first before mapping out your journey. So what are the goals you intend to accomplish with your product creation ventures? The everyday travails of your business may make you forget the end in sight. On the other hand, prepare to entertain new developments that come to your mind in your product creation. Your conception of a product may have started this way, but a few tweaks here and there along with some market research results and it ends up another way. Take it as the result of a creative process, not as a failure to reach your goal. After all, your product creation activities are intertwined with a long-term goal that you should strive to sustain at your utmost: profit generation. So if your less profitable initial idea evolves to a more profitable product, be thankful!

With your product made up already, start doing some aggressive Internet marketing. A product purchase typically comes after more than five times a customer is exposed to an informative call-to-buy message. Thus it is important to get the contact details, like the e-mail address, of potential customers who are on the brink of a sale. Use the results of your market research to determine the demographics to which you should concentrate your marketing efforts.

With consistent product creation, you can make an inventory of your products that you can market in due time. Just keep making products – the moment you succeed in making and marketing a product, customers are surely wanting more from you, so give it to them. Keep them on your side through constant product creation.

There are two groups of people that you should be thinking about daily as the owner of a home business: customers and competitors. You have to keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing to ensure that you win over your fair share of the paying customers. Without these two groups of people your home based business has no chance of surviving. This in turn means you have no chance of survival without home based business leads.Business leads are simply contact information for people who could become future paying customers. They are members of your target market and they are the lifeline of your business. If you don’t have the leads you don’t have enough customers to sustain a profitable business!The Importance of LeadsBusiness leads take on even more importance when you are running a home based business. You don’t have a storefront on a main road where passerby can stroll in and take a look around. You could be sitting at home in your underwear watching TV while making your business a success…and no one would ever know!The catch here is you have to do the work online to make your home business a success. This means advertising online and pulling in lots of home based business leads. Once you know how to do it, obtaining these leads online is even easier than it is to obtain business leads for an offline business. You may not have a storefront on that busy street, but you have something even better: around the clock information online.Every day, millions of people turn to the Internet to get information on products, services, medical issues, and even information on local businesses. Whatever your industry may be, you can guarantee that there are people online right now searching for information on what you have to offer. Some may be ready to make a purchase and others may need some convincing, but if you offer the right information online you can convince them to give you what you need: home based business leads!Securing LeadsSo, how is offering around the clock information online going to help you draw in home based business leads? When you offer information through a well designed website and/or blog you give these searchers (potential customers) exactly what they are looking for: information. In exchange, many will be willing to give you what you need: contact information which translates into business leads.The fact that these people come to your website or blog searching for information and then hand over an email address or phone number shows that they are within your target market. They are the best business leads you could ever ask for because they have at least some interest in what you are offering.All you need to get started capturing these easy home based business leads is a way to collect contact information online. You might offer them a free report or eBook in exchange for this information or you could just let the high quality information on your site do the convincing for you.You can consider every home based business lead you secure a leg up on your competition. That lead is your direct access to one potential customer and your competition wants to win them over. Unfortunately, the lead has fallen into your hands first!