Now is the time for you to set up your own business. It really is. With the economy showing signs of slow recovery, and the job market changing beyond all recognition, now is the time to take the plunge – if you’ve always harboured the desire to work for yourself and generate your own income.

It doesn’t even need to cost you anything to get started. The rise of the internet makes this possible. In fact you can cast your net (to use a fishing analogy) and see what bites. You can even do this while working in a job if necessary. You might have an outside hobby or interest that you’re wondering if you could make any money out of.

Our top tip is create yourself a business profile on a site such as HotFrog. It is completely free and you can add searchwords and build your own business listing.  Follow the link http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/ So if you’d like to try your hand at jam making, or buying and selling cameras or floristry or palmistry, you can do all this for free. Then of course if you start to get some responses it will tell you whether you have a viable business idea.

Never has the opportunity for starting out on your own been so good. Most markets are likely to get more buoyant so if you can build an effective small scale business model that works now, your prospects should grow over time.

Everyone has skills, things they’re good at. Now is the opportunity to tap into your entrepreneurial spirit and give it a go. Best of luck !

There are many ways you can gather great business growth ideas at the moment. And many of the best ones are free !

You are surrounded all day, every day by people willing to share their wisdom with you. So have a coffee with someone who has a business idea or a product or service that you could learn something from.

There are an increasing number of free seminars being run at the moment. Apart from a little time, what do you have to lose ? 

And networking meetings – a great device for meeting new people – some of whom will know of people who could benefit from your services. You may be thinking that you can’t devote regular time to a networking group, or you can’t afford it at the moment. However most groups are always interested in attracting new members so it is always easy to attend as a guest. You can even stand in for regular members often. This will merely cost you your breakfast.

So get out there and circulate and you’ll be amazed how many new ideas you can pick up easily.

Some funded and free training is now available through Train to Gain. Our friends over at To Market who specialise in training and development work with customer service, telesales and telemarketing tell us they’ve got hold of some training funding for you. 

Partially funded customer service training - through Train to Gain

At the moment they are looking to offer both free and partially funded training to organisations In Leicester, Northampton, Cambridge, Bury St Edmunds, Coventry and Birmingham as well as wider parts of Northamptonshire, Leicestershire plus East Midlands, West Midlands and East of England. If  this is of interest to you, follow this link to http://www.tomarket.co.uk/blog/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=51. This gives details of the East Midlands training, the West Midlands and East of England will go live we are told over the next 2 days.

But this really is a chance not to be missed so have a look at the details and sign up ! Maybe you’ll even get to hear some of the material on the audio CDs you will find on this site.