Did 2008 whiz by like greased lightening?  It did for us, underscoring the fact that time is by far our most precious resource.  So make full use of all this marvelous, increasingly cheap technology and automate, automate, automate.  And as soon as you are generating some decent cash flow, consider offloading routine tasks on a virtual assistant.

Keep better company.  Weed the naysayers and dream stealers out of your life, and mix more with people who inspire and stretch you, and maybe even threaten you a little.  Find a good mentor if you can.  And don’t bury yourself at home; make an effort to get out and about and mix with the right people.

Always do your due diligence, very diligently!  Things that appear to be too good to be true, usually are.  Remember, misplaced optimism can be more destructive than unwarranted pessimism.  Don’t go around giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, because a lot of them don’t deserve it.

Be ethical.  Don’t cut corners for some short-term gain, because it will be very expensive in the long run.  Reputation is EVERYTHING in this world of networking and relationships and affiliates, and bad news about you will propagate through the global ether like a virus.

If you are providing a service, make sure you are charging enough.  It’s tempting to cut prices in this uncertain economy to get and hang onto customers, but such a tactic will backfire on you.  What you charge is a measure of your value.  Charge every single cent you possibly can, and people will value your work more.

Don’t try with your resolutions to be too perfect.  Perfection isn’t attainable, and people who aren’t making a lot of mistakes aren’t attempting much or going anywhere.  You don’t get to be a homerun champion without leading the strikeout chart as well.  You probably haven’t made your biggest mistake yet—but that’s actually a good thing.

Here’s to a 2009 full of peace and prosperity and seized opportunities!

Management is trying to put the best possible face on this development, calling it a “new, more dynamic business model,” and assuring people that they will be able to buy a hard copy at newsstands the other four days.  However, picking up a copy on the way to the office is not an option for the increasing numbers of us who work from home or have a homebased business.

This move makes Detroit the largest metropolitan market to lose daily home delivery of a newspaper, and it is a clear signal of the ascendancy of online information and online markets.

As a professional journalist and avid hard-copy reader, I can’t help being saddened by this development.  I love pouring over an actual newspaper every morning, and I can scan its entire contents a lot faster than when I am dealing with its online equivalent.  I resort to the online version mainly when I am searching for specific information.

But as an enterpreneur pursuing an online business opportunity, I see it as one more affirmation that those of us  seeking to make money on the Internet with an online home business are in the right place at the right time.  Knowledge in the 21st Century is less about what we know (such as the information we read in the newspaper every morning and retain in our heads) than about knowing how and where to find the information we need efficiently.

The obvious corollary to this is that business success in the Internet era is directly proportional to how easy we make it for people to find us and our products and services online.  And, increasingly, we won’t accomplish that by placing an ad in our local daily newspaper.

That started me wondering how much people really did tend to lie in business e-mails.  The percentage of business communication taking place via e-mail has been trending upward steadily for the better part of two decades, so if people are more likely to lie when using that medium, then the content of business communication is becoming more and more unreliable in general.

I couldn’t find any figures on current percentages, but IBM reportedly estimates that about 90% of all work-related communication is now taking place online.  And a study by the Radicati Group about a year ago revealed that the average businessperson sent and received 600 business-related e-mails per week.  That’s a lot of potential lying.

A pair of more recent university studies indicate that these fears are well-founded.  One study set up a situation that gave subjects an incentive to misrepresent the facts, and then compared their veracity when using e-mail versus pen and paper to communication about it.  The results:  Subjects misrepresented the facts 92% of the time in e-mail, compared to 64% when using pen and paper.

The researchers conducted a related study that basically looked at whether the propensity to lie in e-mails correlates with how well the sender knows the recipient.  It does.  There is an inverse correlation between e-mail lying and how well sender and recipient know each other, but it’s a matter of quantity; even e-mails sent to close contacts contain lies.

The researchers wrote their results up in “Being Honest Online:  The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining.”  They speculate that people worry more about putting lies down on paper because it seems more permanent, although the reverse is actually true.  Once you send an e-mail message out into cyberspace, you lose all control of it; in a flash, people can replicate it around the globe like a virus.

An earlier study by one of the same researchers looked at how people rate others when using different media.  As you can probably guess, people were a lot more likely to trash others when evaluating them via e-mail, versus on paper.  Apparently, our feelings of social obligation are much stronger when we have to commit our comments to paper.

So we online business entrepreneurs need to keep this in mind as we make business decisions based on evaluations, recommendations, and other judgments conveyed purely by e-mail.  It’s the medium of liars.

In The Decline of Men, Guy Garcia reports that in the 21-to-30 age group, women are earning 117% of the wages of their male counterparts.  This isn’t likely to change any time soon, as 60% of all the degrees in U.S. colleges and universities are being awarded to women.  Jokes about “No Man Left Behind” programs are starting to circulate.

Thanks to the effects of estrogen on our developing brains when we were very small, we women tend to be inherently better at communication, networking, collaboration, multitasking, and consensus-building—skills that are particularly well suited to 21^st Century business.  The round-the-clock responsibilities of motherhood and the 24×7 customer service needed in a global economy have a lot in common.

Women are even encroaching on the male bastion of software development.

“A lot of what I do involves overlaying keen listening and observation skills with intuition,” Angela Shen-Hsieh, president and CEO of Visual i/o, told Entrepreneur magazine.  “These are often skills associated with women.”  The result is software with a more intuitive user interface that makes better connections between human decision makers and the data they use.

You men had better start embracing your feminine side.

According to Jeffrey Grau of eMarketer, the year-to-year growth in online holiday sales will decline sharply to about 10% as the online shopping channel matures and the economy weakens, but that still leaves online businesses with $32.1 billion to divvy up.

Most of the growth will come from existing online shoppers making even more of their purchase online, so that’s who marketing efforts should target.  The shoppers who have yet to make their first online purchases intrigue me, frankly.  But they are clinging stubbornly to tradition, and there aren’t enough shopping days left to win them over this season.

Money more than convenience seems to be the driving factor this year.  Shoppers are looking to the virtual Internet mall to save on gasoline expenses, come up with ideas for gifts, hunt for bargains, find free-shipping offers, and locate the best retailers for items they want to pick up in person.
 
If you do have a retail location, redouble efforts to use the Internet to drive customers to it, and offer shoppers something they can’t get online:  a tactile holiday experience that engages as many of the senses as possible.  And don’t forget scent.  It’s the most primitive and memory-evoking sense we possess.

One of my online businesses is an online travel site (BroadbrookTravel.com) , and a colleague and travel industry veteran, Mike Reams, recently sent me this rather eye-opening analysis.  United Airlines just doubled the charge you pay for checking a second bag.  Starting November 10, it will cost you $50 each way, or $100 round trip.

So if you check a second bag AND it is oversized (the sum of its length, width, and height exceeds 62 inches) and weighs more than 50 pounds, you could get charged an extra $600 round trip to bring that extra baggage with you.  Now, I just went online and found a round-trip ticket on United going from Los Angeles to Seattle and back for $169.  Taking that extra bag would push the price of the trip up to $769, and if I had two such bags, it would be $1,369.  About a year ago, Mike points out, those two $600 bags would have traveled for free on this $169 ticket.

Now, it’s easy to vent a lot of anger at the airlines, which made very convenient scapegoats even before they started all these extra baggage fees.  But the reality is that they are functioning within a very heavily regulated environment, and many were losing money even before fuel prices started to soar.

To me, the lesson is more metaphorical.  It should make all of us entrepreneurs in the online business world stop and think about the price of all the extra baggage we are carrying around.  Online business moves at light speed compared to traditional business—“light” being the operative word.  When speed is essential, extra baggage becomes a bigger and bigger handicap.

Whether this extra baggage takes the form of bad habits, a poor self-image, insufficient automation, improper application of technology, associating with the wrong people, or clinging to outdated business paradigms, it just keeps getting more and more expensive.  We can’t slow down the pace of online business, so we need to learn to travel light.

One thing about a homebased business is that there is always a TV around, and if you aren’t used to it, it can be pretty seductive.  I’ve personally turned mine off for the duration, to avoid the pack of power-lusting parasites (a.k.a. politicians) on the November 4 ballot who are polluting the airwaves incessantly.  (BTW, how do you know when a professional politician is lying?  Answer:  His or her lips are moving.)

But I have heard newly homebased entrepreneurs say the proximity has them wasting more time watching TV.  If you find yourself in this group, here are some facts that might help scare you away from it.

Studies indicate that as little as one hour a day of TV watching can permanently impair frontal lobe development in children, crippling them with attention and impulse control problems for life.  It has also been linked to myopia, sleep problems, obesity and Type II diabetes, among other problems.

So if you are doing more of your own childcare now that you work at home, and you are using the TV as a pacifier or babysitter to buy yourself some quality work time, don’t.

Adults are at risk, too.  TV watching has been correlated with a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.  And it doesn’t matter if you are watching an actual TV, or sneaking some TV time on your computer via the web—it’s all non-interactive, one-way viewing.

It does something to us neurologically and metabolically.  When I was recovering from shoulder surgery and determined to avoid opiates, I found myself suddenly watching TV for hours at a stretch.  Though I am a lifelong bookworm, the very process of watching—not the quality of the programming—mesmerized me and dulled the pain in a way that other distractions like reading did not.

Computer games and social media on the web don’t have the same mesmerizing and dulling effect, because they are interactive (although I’m guessing they are also contributing to myopia).  It’s good to take regular breaks from work throughout the day; you will actually get more done in the course of a day or week if you do.

But watching TV isn’t a good break time activity.   Go for a walk, or potter in the garden, or jump onto the stationary bike, or medidate.

I’ve been hearing these litanies since I was a kid–and I’m a boomer. Back then the big public companies recited them over and over, while actually focusing a lot more on shareholder value.

They mean it more now, but studies show that the average company still loses more than half its customers every four or five years. Which means companies have to go out and replace more than half their customers every four or five years just to achieve stagnation.

We continue to see these poor retention numbers despite the fact that it’s always been much easier to retain an existing customer than to land a new one. It’s probably even more so in the global economy of the Internet Age.

October is the official Customer Service Month, and we should observe it by reminding ourselves that in the world of online business, customers don’t have to walk or drive away; they can reach our competitors with just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes.

If we are smart, we’ll treat every day of the year like it’s Customer Service Month.

One caveat, though: If you are in a service-intensive business, customer quality can contribute more to profitability than customer quantity. Losing some of your most high-maintenance customers can actually improve your bottom line, even if you don’t replace them right away.

But a dispassionate look at some of the facts paints a different picture.  A recession has always been defined as two consecutive quarters of GDP decline, and we haven’t experienced that at all.  The most recent quarter saw GDP grow an impressive 3.3%, and the OECD now expects the U.S. economy to grow 1.8% in 2008—the highest of all the G-7 countries.

“There isn’t any recession,” Geoff Colvin states flatly in a Fortune magazine column.  Why then are Americans feeling so much pain that the politicians are exploiting so blatantly?  While the globalization of our economy means that the rewards of growth might be bypassing people in certain professions and companies in certain industries a bit, Americans are caught up in a “psychological recession.”  We feel vulnerable and seek control through knowledge, but end up exposing ourselves to more and more of the bad news the media delights in dishing out, and get caught in a downward spiral of fear.  Historically, people who work their way into this state have become perfect patsies for aspiring dictators…but I digress.

What struck me about all this is what it means for those of us embracing the global online business world within the homebased business paradigm.  Opportunity abounds, and our limits are largely self-imposed.