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Welcome to AFRICABIZ,

Welcome to Africabiz Online Synopsis RSS Feed edition. Previous issue available at this link

Dear reader, Africabiz is honoured to introduce to you a guest writer: Mr. Vishal P. Rao.

His interesting article below posted will help you avoid the pitfalls and strings attached to some home-based business opportunities available on the World Wild Web. Enjoy!

SHOULD YOU PAY to JOIN A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY?

If you spend any time online, surfing the Internet, or even if you spend any time reading magazines that deal with business topics, you will more than likely run across countless business opportunity offerings.

Business opportunities are in essence, "turn-key" operations, where a major company, or even a smaller company, is offering what are basically franchises or memberships in the company. Any person that joins, becomes entitled to use the company name, company marketing materials, and of course, company reputation. It is therefore, an easy way for many who have no inclination to start their own business, or who have no ideas of their own, to start a home-based business.

There are, however, as in anything, "pitfalls" and "advantages" to joining any type of business opportunity. Many times, one of the "pitfalls" is the fact that there is a membership price to pay when joining, which depending upon the business opportunity, can be quite a staggering fee. It is wise, then, before paying any fees to join a business opportunity to research and ascertain the following aspects of the opportunity:

1. How long is the business opportunity "in business"? Longevity is important. You don't want to join a biz op that's "here today, gone tomorrow", taking your fees with it!

2. How do other members feel about the business opportunity? If you can speak with other members, this would help immensely in any decisions.

3. How much money overall can you expect to make from the business opportunity within the first month? You should at least be able to recover any fees you've spent within the first few months.

4. How many others belong to the business opportunity? Too much competition with other members will make it difficult to make sales, while too few members indicates that it is not a popular business opportunity, so how can it be sold?

5. How often will you be paid? Some only pay when an associate reaches a certain amount of revenue (which if you're a newbie will tie up your money quite conceivably for a while).

6. Are there any "undisclosed" extra fees, such as fees for checks or other payment methods? This will cut into net revenues.

7. Is there a money-back guarantee? If you don't succeed, will the business opportunity supply at least a partial refund?

8. Does the business opportunity supply mentors and marketing materials that can be used? It's easier to start and maintain a business opportunity with these components already in place.

9. How well known is the business opportunity? Whether it's online or offline, some business opportunities are "household" names and are easier to promote and sell as a result.

10. What is the turnover rate in the business opportunity? Those that have a large turnover rate among members are usually poor choices. Turnover means simply the number of members that leave the biz op within each month. A large turnover usually indicates that members are not happy with their experiences.

11. How much overall does it cost? You need to be able to comfortably afford the fee of the business opportunity, or you will start out "in the red" which is not a good way to start any home-based business.

12. How much control does the corporate entity have? If everything is controlled by the corporate entity (the "home" office of the business opportunity, so to speak), your creativity and the way you market may be hampered severely.

There are many business opportunities from which to pick. Everything from larger scale offline ventures, to smaller scale online ventures exists. Research into all the above is necessary when choosing an appropriate business opportunity. Fees are sometimes necessary to cover the costs of shipping and handling, or the costs of the marketing materials. Others charge fees simply because their "name" is important to them as they have spent years building their reputation, and they only want "serious joiners".

There also exist many free opportunities that cost nothing to join and can be a good way to experiment with marketing and the world of home-based business.

The choice of whether to pay or not is an individual choice that should only be made when weighing all possible factors. If in doubt, simply research and patiently wait a while. After all, the biz op will always be there tomorrow (if it's a good one)!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vishal P. Rao is the owner of Home Based Business Opportunities - One of Internet's leading website dedicated to starting, managing and marketing a home based business. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HAPPY AND SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS YEAR 2005

AFRICABIZ Online and Email editions' team wishes you all and your loved ones a very festive Xmas 2004 and a successful business year for 2005.

"CONTRIBUTOR'S GUIDELINES" are available here. We invite you to contribute to AFRICABIZ ONLINE MONTHLY ISSUE - with articles related to "How Africa Could Bridge The Developing Gap".

Many thanks for subscribing to Africabiz. See you here on January 15, 2005.

Dr. B.M. Quenum
Click here for contact & support console

Business Opportunities

FOWL BREEDING AS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY - PART III: - INTRODUCTION TO THE SETUP OF A SMALL SCALE POULTRY BREEDING OPERATION

As shown here, South Africa is the only sub-Saharan African country that cover 93% of the national demand for poultry meat and eggs - producing 460,000 metric ton of poultry meat and 342,000 metric tons of eggs for a population of around 43 million people.

Owing to the fact that other sub-Saharan African countries (around 650 million people) are net importers to the level of 90% of the demand, one could estimate the potential market existing in Africa to be in the range of [460,000 divided by 43 and multiplied by 650] = 6,953,500 metric tons for poultry meat and [342,000 divided by 43 and multiplied by 650] = 5,169,800 metric tons for eggs.

Both products representing a total minimum market value of around 20 billions US$.

The development of poultry breeding industries (through a combination of small scale family operations and big broilers corporations) would provide jobs and revenues to rural folks around the continent, develop food industries related to poultry meat and egg transformation, help solving the hunger problem, participate in boosting the global developing of African nations. And help African states garnering substantial budget revenues through taxes.

Table below lists figures about Total Poultry Meat Consumption in Africa compared to Europe.

One sees that Africa is a net importer of poultry meat and that production has ups and downs, year in year out. From 1999, the production level dropped sharply due to the competition from imported frozen chicken from Europe.

Therefore, in spite of the unfair competition exercised by import from Europe, there are opportunities throughout the continent to establish chicken breeding companies to cater for national demands provided that operators take necessary managerial and production decisions to control costs of production.

However, many prerequisites should be met by interested investors for the setup of a successful profit making small scale chicken breeding operation. Click here to read more.

In next delivery dated January 15, 2005, the amount of investment to setup an operation that produce 50,000 birds a year (broilers and layers) and 2,250 eggs per day (when the business is operating at full steam) will be exposed.

MORE ON FOWL BREEDING

1- Poultry Breeding and Genetics by R.D. Crawford 2- The Dollar Hen: The Classic Guide to American Free-Range Farming. by Milo M. Hastingd, Robert Plamondon 3- Small-Scale Poultry-Keeping: A Guide To Free-Range Poultry Production. By Ray Feltwell 4- The Encyclopedia of Farm Animal Nutrition by M.F. Fuller, et al 5- The Mating and Breeding of Poultry by Harry M. Lamon, Rob R. Slocum. 6- Modern Livestock and Poultry Production by James R. Gillespie

7- Success With Baby Chicks: A Complete Guide to Hatchery Selection by Robert Plamondon. 8- The Classic Guide To Poultry Nutrition: Chickens, Turkeys, Ducks, Geese, Gamebirds, and Pigeons. By Gustave F. Hauser 9- The Strange History of The Ostrich In Fashion, Food and Fortune. By Rob Nixon 10- Ostrich's Avian Incubation: Behaviour, Environment and Evolution. By D. Charles Deeming

Control Your Desktop

WHICH BROWSER DOES THE GOOD JOB? MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER OR MSN EXPLORER?

A strange question as both are Microsoft products and are bundled packages delivered with windows operating systems since Windows 95 up the the XP brand.

However, there are some differences between the two clients. A main difference is that Microsoft Explorer is "a sort of public source browser" as Microsoft does accept Add-ons to the client. In the contrary MSN Explorer is a private client browser for msn.com (such as AOL, CompuServe; Yahoo and the like private browsers) that does not allow any Add-on from third parties.

And that difference is important.

As we all know, Add-Ons may get messy with each other and with Microsoft operating system's Dynamic Library Links (DLLs) stored in Windows System Folder - particularly when your computer is operating under Microsoft brands other than XP.

Indeed, developers, instead of keeping all DLLs of their product in the installation folder, used to replace some DLLs in Windows System Folder with DLLs from their own products. This is particularly true for Windows 95, 98, Me and 2000.

The "intruding" DLL may then perturb the harmonious functioning of the operating system and might become the cause for hang ups.

XP operating system is protected against such intrusions, which partially explained the stability of XP compared to previous Microsoft operating systems. Third parties cannot anymore replace XP operating system's DLLs with their own in the System Folder. However, they have the possibility to modify registry keys. (You also do have the possibility to control even that occurrence if you have AdWatch from Ad-Aware SE Plus from Lavasoft.de installed)

Further, since XP Service Pack2 hit the counter, you may have experienced some glitches in Microsoft Explorer's performance such as links that do not open when you click on; or that do not open when you right click to open in another window. You may even have experienced that links to media do not start the media player. Etc. Africabiz dedicated a delivery to the problem that is here to review.

TRY MSN EXPLORER

Till now we have not noticed any of such nuisances when using MSN Explorer. Even under Service Pack2, which highlights the difference between Microsoft Explorer and MSN Explorer as exposed at the beginning of this delivery.

Then it is worthwhile then to use MSN Explorer. You will experience a better web browsing, media playing and video watching.

To be able to use MSN Explorer, you do not need to have Microsoft as your Internet Service Provider.

What you absolutely need is a Microsoft HotMail account, which gives you a Microsoft Identity composed of your HotMail Email address (something like johndoe@hotmail.com) and a Microsoft Password (you password to login to your HotMail account) that together are the sesame key, which permits you login to your MSN Explorer account. Additionally you must also install Microsoft Messenger or Windows Messenger.

Click on the MSN Explorer Logo that is right on the desktop or available through "Start" and follow instructions on-screen.

Freebie Of The Month

A VERSATILE WEB PUBLISHING TOOL

Here is a free PDF converter / Web Publishing tool called PDFmoto that is useful to publish and manage documents on the Internet.

PDFmoto is capable of converting any Microsoft client - Word, Excel - and Visio document into PDF format and automatically upload it to your web site, create an index page and linking to the files.

In fact, it can be used to create entire web sites, fully automatically.

You just need to specify a local folder, in which you load documents you wish to publish. Any document saved to that folder will be automatically converted and saved to a publishing folder. From there, it can be uploaded to your web site. The entire process goes on smoothly and can run fully automatically.

1- You save a Word document to your specified folder, it is converted and added to the web site without further interaction on your end. 2- Navigation and linking are automatically created. 3- And the look and feel can be matched with your existing designs using a powerful XML template system.

You can even choose to create PHP or ASP pages. PDFmoto monitors the source document structure, detects documents that have been added, deleted or amended and reflects these changes by automatically updating the site.

The package includes an internal browser for document submission, a document management tool. It also has a support for Meta schemes.

The free version only limitation versus the pro version is that the number of webpages to load to your website is up to 50 documents. It also adds a discrete `Create with PDFmoto` foot-print to the pages.

The package is delivered with a comprehensive 60 pages Manual in Adobe PDF. Click here to download PDFmoto freeware edition