With the Great Recession still lingering over America – and most of the world – like a heavy black cloud, people are looking for more and more ways to save money. Blogs and websites providing tips on how to budget or how to cut corners are cropping up all over the web. The advice that most of these sites are giving: stop buying stuff. Not a pretty picture for us retailers.

Unless you know how to roll with the punches.

Retailers, like Wal-Mart and The Container Store,...

People have been hit very hard with this recession. The job market is lousy and the August unemployment rate was as high as 9.6%. That percentage may mean nothing to you (unless you are one of the over fourteen million Americans included!) until you consider that the historical norm was 5%.

Of over eight million jobs lost to the recession, the employment experts are predicting that many, perhaps most, aren’t coming back. What jobs will be available as the economy slowly gets back...

For the next couple of weeks we’re going to step away from the Niche of the Week Series, and bring you an introductory series on getting your 4-Hour Workweek job off the ground. Initially, everything takes some extra effort, so be prepared to work a little on getting the ball rolling. I hope that the next eight or nine posts will help make the way clearer and therefore a whole lot easier.

I’m going to start by discussing something that, here at Muse Tester, we know quite a bit about:...

Ever hear of SWOT, and the Four P’s? Read on!

This is Part 2 of a four part series on Testing Your Muse. If you haven’t already read Part 1, you can find it here.

In the Part 1 post, we discussed the importance of “test before you invest”. We aren’t heading to Las Vegas to play the slot machine; we are hoping to start a business and therefore need to make an educated guess before putting our money down. It’s all about calculated risk.

The...

This is part three of a four part series on Testing Your Muse. If you haven’t already read part one or part two, you can find them here.

Now that we have all the abstract ideas and terminology down, I would like to attack the practical side of things. How do we actually go about conducting a test? Let me teach you how to do it – the simple three step Musetester way.

Step 1: Set up a site
To sell any product you need a storefront. If you are looking to do online...