Home Based Business Opportunities – Online and Offline Aspects
In one of our previous articles, we talked about self employment, alongside some of its pros and cons. This article is in continuation with the previous one, but it is more focused on different self employment opportunities. In other words, if you’re thinking of starting a home based business, what kind of options and business opportunities are available to you?
Bear in mind that home based business has several types. For instance, you can start your franchising business from home, or you can open up a small shop of some kind, by converting one of your spare rooms into an outlet. More so, the most common form of home based business is the online mode – this is where you slog in front of a computer, all day long and make money through various methods.
Home Based Business Opportunities – Common Questions That Are Commonly Overlooked:
Before delving straight into the “opportunities” section of home businesses, we’re going to have to talk about various neglected questions first. These are the questions that can either make you a regular employee who occasionally gets scammed, or a pro who knows how to make money and keep himself on the safe side of the road.
Most of these suggestions and answers came from a very reliable source. Ever heard about Anna Laura Brown? Well, rumor has it that this woman is one of the most established names in the home business industry, so whatever she says, it can be taken with a glass of water easily.
According to Anna, it is extremely important for every single person who’s considering getting self employed, to research the market and evaluate the pros and cons of this business. Therefore, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that you should do your homework before directly jumping into a home based business, or a home based job of some sort.
Yeah, we get it, you want a home based job, or you want to start your own home based business because you want to be your own boss, or you want to be your loved ones and all that. But believe this thing that once you have actually taken this whole thing as a profession, there’s no going back. The fun will frizzle, you wont be able to give time to your “loved ones”, and you’ll feel lonely after the first couple of years.
Take a look at some of the popular questions and topics associated with home based business opportunities:
• Initial Startup Cost of Starting a Home Based Business?
The initial cost factor can vary from $0 to anywhere way above several hundred grands. It all depends on the type and nature of the business you’re willing to start. What’s more important is the fact that whenever you’re about to start a business from your home, you need to know exactly what type of business it’s going to be and the estimated amount of money required to build your empire.
A good plan will always go a long way for you.
• The Self Training and Support Modules:
Most of the home based businesses fail because people don’t know how to manage them. Take it as a downside but for most of these businesses, there’s a minimum number of training classes. It means that you’re going to have to teach yourself the ins and outs of this business.
A good approach is to download videos regarding your business, off the internet. This way, you’ll know exactly what to do and what not to do.
• Ground Rules for Advertising Your Business:
Yes, there’s no point in starting and founding a business that’s not even remotely heard or seen by your customers. The current advertisement game is mostly about social media and Google Adwords advertisement. Just make sure that you have a unique company name because most of the big sharks out there, will squander you for “infringing” trademark policies.
• Realistic Income Vs. Expected Income:
Part of starting and carrying on with a home based business, is the income factor. Though it does feel good, thinking about all the possibilities and the supposed amount of money that you make in your head, but by the end of the month, all that matters is the actual number of dollars in your account or rom safe. Here’s the bottom line: you should know what your real income is, as opposed to the expected income.
• The Better Business Bureau Accreditation:
This is a caveat, which you need to get through as soon as possible. Obviously when you have newly established home based company or a business, there’s no way that the BBB will recognize your practices. On top of that, if it’s a company that you’re planning to open, the BBB and several other organizations have standards that you’ll need to comply with.
For instance, you’ll need to have an X number of employees, you’ll need to show X number of tax payer records for the company, you’ll need to have X number of square feet covered as the company’s physical asset area. Don’t worry, these things will fall into their place after some time. Just keep working hard and start to build your business through a step by step approach.
• Are Your Products Affordable?
That’s a really important question that needs to be answered by you, and only you. You just started a home based business, and you’re either selling products, or maybe you’re just providing services. Let’s say you’re a barber or you have a home based beauty salon; are your rates affordable? You do know that you’ll have competitors in this field, doing the very same thing as you are. Who knows, maybe there’s another home based salon several blocks away from yours and their rates are really competitive; it’d mean that you’ll either need to revise your rates, or introduce some incentives to attract customers.
Anyway, let’s take a look at various home based business opportunities, since this article is now getting a tad bit in shape. First of all we’re going to make you go through real life home based business opportunities, and then we’re going to look what the online world has in store for you.
Also the fact that both men and women want to start a business these days, especially because of the down trodden economy of ours, we decided to write down several home based business options that appeal to both sexes.
Real Life/ Land Based Home Business Opportunities
• Day Care Center or Day Care Operator:
The world is getting bigger day by day. Specifically speaking of the United States, the average number of children is increasing by leaps and bounds. All these kids need to be taken care of. All thanks to the strictly professional society and the fact that we don’t have time for our own kids, these little midgets need to be taken care of by someone else.
Yes it is ironic that we’re paying someone else to take care of our kids, but that’s how it is. Oh, never mind, we’re not talking about our kids, here; we’re talking about opening a day care or child care center where other people can drop their kids and we get to take care of them. It’s a good home based business opportunity for all those people who have a history of taking care of kids, and that too from a professional aspect.
All you need to do is get an approval from the licensing committee and fulfill certain regulations, before starting this business. The guys in the suit are going to ask you all sorts of questions that are related to the nature of your business, your previous experiences and stuff like that.
If you don’t hold a degree or a letter of recommendation, or if you never even stepped in a day care center, you can still start this business. In this case, the cost factor will be a lot more , but if you tell them that you’re going to hire professionals, you’ll get a green signal sooner or later.
• Gift Basket and Gift Tots:
So you figured out that the daycare home based business opportunity was a little too tough for you. Never mind, as you get to start your very own gift basket shop. You probably wont need an approval license from some big organization, as this is a small scale business. However, some mediocre level investment may be needed in terms of advertisement and stuff.
The important thing which really matters is that you have to have an eye for creativity. You need to make attractive gift baskets, and you’ll need to come up with catchy and cute names. You can start off by selling products to your neighbors and then grow this business by taking baby steps.
• Affiliate Marketing for Mary Moppins?
Mary Moppins is a well known name in the cleaning industry. This company encourages marketers to market its business, and in return they’re all rewarded with fat commissions. Real life affiliate marketing may be a little tough as compared to the online world, but the commissions are quite worth the hassles. Start making door to door calls or hire someone to sell Mary Moppins super friendly cleaning products.
• Home Based Pet Services;
Moms and dads who love the idea of grooming pets, they can take this business with high heels. If you’re starting this business for the first time, you can start off with pet sitting. Later on, you can provide professional pet grooming services, so that once the pet owner is away for a couple of hours or a few days vacation, he doesn’t have to worry about anything back home.
• Scrapbooking:
People love the idea of preserving their memories. However, they have to be convinced about preserving them because they normally don’t have time to sit down and contemplate such things. With your own home based scrapbooking business, you can start touting out services that help people keep their memories safely and creatively tucked inside the covers of a wonderful scrapbook.
If mastered and advertised correctly, this business can be very profitable. You’ll only need to spend extra dollars on glazy papers and cardboards, while the pictures and details will be given by your clients.
• Home Based Confectioners and Bakers:
The food business will always be in demand as long as the last person is living on this planet. Speaking of food, a lot of people love homemade food items because it gives them a sense of security and trust. If you’re good at baking several different cakes, brownies and such other things, you can start your own home based bakery.
For starters, it is strongly recommended that they place their items for sale at their nearest local store. A homemade cheese cake, freshly baked and wrapped in an attractive manner, is really hard to pass up on. Especially when that cheesecake is sitting right on the sales person’s counter, every single visitor will at least consider buying it. Slowly when you have saved enough money off those food item sales, you can move on to opening a fully loaded bakery in your own house.
• Babysitting Services:
You don’t have to open a baby or a childcare center for babysitting services. You can either convince a couple of ladies to work as nannies for you, or you can become one as long as it takes for you to breakeven the expense chart.
Nanny services take some time to get established but there are different popular services that are running on a wide scale, and all of this stuff was achieved in a period of over 1 year.
Online Home based Business Opportunities
If you thought that we were acting as cavemen, while touting out our suggestions about real life business opportunities, you should take a look at the appended online home based business options. These business opportunities appeal to a wide variety of people on daily basis, but only a small percentage seriously succeeds in this field.
• Freelance Writing:
Freelance writers are a dime a dozen these days. In our opinion, writing as a freelancer online is the easiest and the most common job that people do this time around. You can start off by registering yourself at oDesk or Elance and then make your way towards the top of the ladder.
The expansion possibilities in freelance writing are unlimited. Either you can be a professional writer, who writes news for MSNBC, CNN and BBC websites, or you can just hire other writers and make them to the bidding.
More so, through writing online, you can easily save money. In the United States, it is very difficult to earn enough money as a writer to support your entire family. Let alone, even if you’re a professional writer who has very good credentials at Elance or any other freelancing website, your energy will eventually wear off.
Our advice is that you take freelance writing as a side gig, or a part time job, while having a day job or a home based business as your primary source of income. Once you have saved enough money, you can then hire writers and start your own online company that excels in providing content to large scale website owners. Do bear in mind that every freelance writer starts small as a lone wolf, before growing to his/ her full potential.
• Full Time Blogging:
If you already have some savings, you can create several websites or blogs about different topics. On those websites, you have to write good enough content to attract a huge flow of visitors. Once the visitors have started showing up, you can then sign up for Google Adsense to generate passive income on auto gear.
Blogging is a fun profession and it tends to get more rewarding after you have paid your dues through those 10 – 15 hours of constant content writing. Each day, millions of bloggers sign up at some kind of blog network. 98% of these guys don’t have the guts to face the heat. They quit when the going gets tough, or when they’re not making enough money.
Some of these fellas quit because they cant keep making posts on daily basis, which is really the biggest mistake in this profession. Blogging requires dedication because a website is like a baby. It needs constant care and grooming. Once your website or blog is 2 or 3 years old, it will start paying back in a very generous manner. You’ll realize that at a further stage, you wont have to spend a lot of time updating your blog, because of the heavy flow of visitors on daily basis.
• Online Affiliate Marketing:
Online affiliate marketing is similar to real life affiliate marketing, except that the online world probably requires a lot more effort. However, once your affiliate marketing is in full auto gear, you will be making thousands of dollars every month. This road is not for everyone to tread on, because of the fact that most people just quit after first 2 months.
Anyway, if you want to start affiliate marketing, know this that it’s a simple process where you advertise other people’ or other company’s products, or services, and then get a commission every time when someone buys something through your link.
The biggest online affiliate networks are run by:
- ClickBank:
• Clickbank is a common place for all the software related affiliate marketing stuff. The most attractive feature of Clickbank is that you can sign up and get approval within minutes. Once you have created an account at their website, you can then start selling products through a unique product Hop Link.
• Some retailers give up to 75% commission on each sale, while others don’t give that much commission.
• Also notice the Gravity factor about each product or service at Clickbank. Lower gravity usually indicates that the product is on a slippery slope and not worth your time and effort.
- Amazon Affiliates:
• Who hasn’t heard about Amazon? Of course no one. This online retailer has an affiliate network where you can sign up for an account. As a pre requisite, you’re going to need to have a blog or a website of some kind. Usually they check out your website and then grant approval if it fulfills their requirements criterion.
• After signing up, you can start selecting products and advertising them on your website.
• You can also write product reviews and embed product names with your Amazon affiliate URLs.
• Amazon commissions are really low because this giant retailer is all about the volume of the sales. So if you’re making more sales, your commission rate will increase by a certain percentage.
- eBay:
• Some people call it eGay because of their strict policies. It is really easy to sign up for eBay affiliate network but it is even easier to get banned. However, there’re millions of people who’re selling eBay products as Affiliates.
• First of all you need to sign up at eBay as an affiliate.
• You’ll have to verify your account through whatever means that eBay deems necessary.
• Afterwards, you can take off with your affiliate marketing ventures, the same way as anyone does with Amazon, Clickbank or Commission Junction products.
A Few Words of Advice and Caution:
- Never ever quit with your home based business or online ventures. Eventually this gig will pay off and you will be happy that all those days of hard work and hopelessness were worth it.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It means that you should get registered at various affiliate websites and should be promoting products from different networks.
• A lot of people, who used to rely on only one affiliate networks, lost it because for some reason their account got banned. You don’t want that, do you?
- Always keep yourself updated regarding the latest market trends. A little bit of who’s who will save your hide.