Finding the Best Home Based Business – Part 2
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Image by rintakumpu via Flickr
Introduction:
Okay, this post is a bit overdue. I got a bit busy with other projects but I had been brainstorming this topic in the mean time in order to provide a pretty good overview of each of the viable home based business models.
Now, obviously this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the best home based business models available–These are the ones I have experience with and what I would recommend wholeheartedly from what I’ve learned so far in business life. That should count for something, right? These are also business models that meet the criteria as listed in the previous post (Finding the Best Home Based Business – Part 1).
For each business model I will give you a brief rundown of how it works and how you would monetize with it. They may not be step by step but should suffice for comparison and introductory purposes. I will attempt to elaborate each one in separate posts over time. Here it goes. The top 5 best home based businesses in a nutshell.
1. E-commerce: Selling Products Over The Internet
The Basics: This is basically where you either make something yourself or something you get from a supplier. You can either buy the products and stock it yourself or you can have the supplier drop-ship it for you (they keep the stock, and ship to your customer on your behalf, at a premium of course).
Building Your Website: You can would either go with an all-in-one service like Yahoo merchant solutions (affiliate link) where you get everything including the domain, hosting, shopping cart software, payment gateway/processing, etc., all integrated for you at one monthly fee, or you’d get everything separately and select your own preferred domain name provider, hosting company, ecommerce software, payment processing, etc. There are pros and cons to either option, but for beginners, the all-in-one service is much easier.
Sell through Ebay and Amazon: Another option would be to skip the website altogether, and create a store or list your products directly on sites like ebay and/or Amazon. The advantage is that your products would be listed in their search database right away and interested customers already looking for products like yours would see your products along with your competitors on these sites. So if you have the better price or other features that makes you better than your competitors such as faster or cheaper shipping, etc., then you will likely start getting buyers almost immediately. Again, there are full blow courses on selling on ebay and amazon, so google these topics to start learning more. I will also link to some good courses/systems in the near future.
Once you have your site built, products added online, and ready to make those sales, keep in mind that if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. It’s true. In online business, it doesn’t matter if you have the greatest looking site with good products. If it is not marketed well, it won’t be found, and if it’s not found, no one will buy, and if no one buys, you won’t make any money.
Marketing: In a nutshell, you need to get your potential customers to come visit your site, and when they come, if you have what they want, at the right price, a percentage of them will buy. Now what are some of the best ways to get these targeted, likely to buy, prospects to your site? Three basic ways. Search engine optimization, paid advertising (such as Google Adwords), and social network marketing. I will elaborate on each of these in separate posts. Coming soon. In the mean time, google them to start learning about how they work. Learn the basics first, and as you have time or the interest, you can go as deep as you like.
2. Affiliate Marketing: Getting A Commission For Referring a Customer/Lead to a Product or Service Vendor
Basically, as an affiliate marketer you would normally have a website on a particular theme, and when you recommend a product which the reader ends up buying by visiting your site and clicking on your link to the product, you makes a commission on that sale. This is good in that there are no products to stock, no orders to take, fulfill or keep track of. You simply publish content on your website, link out to related products using a special link provided by the vendor or an affiliate network, and any sales will be accurately tracked and paid out to you.
Signing up with an Affiliate Network: Before you can do anything, you need products to promote. To do that you would start by signing up with one or more affiliate networks. This step is usually completely free so there’s no reason not to get started. Some examples of affiliate networks are Clickbank (digitally downloadable products only), Commission Junction, and Amazon, etc. Commission payouts vary depending on many factors, but normally digital downloadable products pay out much more than physical products.
Building Your Site: As a publisher of content in the affiliate marketing world, you will need a website to publish your content on. There are couple of ways to do this. You can either have the site published on a free publishing platform such as squidoo, hubpages, wordpress.com, blogger, or on your own hosting service (not as easy to setup as the free publishing platform but more customizable). By the way, the hosting service link is an affiliate link.
Marketing: In the case of marketing a content site for affiliate marketing, the concept is similar to marketing for an ecommerce site. You basically need to drive targeted traffic to your site and as visitors click through the affiliate link to the vendor, a certain percentage of them will buy the vendor’s product, resulting in a commission for you. And how do you driver targeted traffic to your content site for affiliate marketing? Pretty much the same as you would for an e-commerce site. You can do it through search engine optimization, paid advertising (Google Adwords is easiest), and social network marketing, for starters.
3. CPA Marketing: Affiliate Marketing of Generating Leads to Vendors
CPA marketing is basically a specific type of affiliate marketing that deals with leads rather than sales. Basically, when your website visitor click on a link on your site and goes over to the vendor’s site, you are paid when the visitor simply fills out a form, sometimes just a email or zip code! You will be paid regardless if the visitor buys anything from the vendor’s site. How are the vendors able to do this? Well, basically they are buying potential leads and they know how much they can spend to acquire a lead. This is often times easier to get a commission from because the visitor do not have to buy anything. They simply show interest and give the vendor their info in order to receive more information or learn about something they are already interested in.
Signing up with an Affiliate Network: Just like a regular affiliate promotions, to get started in CPA marketing, you’d first need to join a few CPA networks too so that you can start selecting offers to promote, generate those links, and then placing them on your site. Some of the best and most popular CPA networks are (these are affiliate links):
Building Your Site: With CPA offers, search engines will expect good content from your site. They certain do not like to rank a made for CPA site highly. They want to see that your site helps people in some way with your good content and site features, etc. A site that is thin in content and merely tries to get people to click over to CPA offers for a quick buck will likely be not rank very well. And further more, if you are using pay per click advertising like Google Adwords and your site is “thin” in content, then your site will get a low quality score, making your bids more expensive and difficult for you the make a profit.
Marketing: Essentially, you will do marketing pretty much the same as traditional affiliate marketing. See above marketing section for affiliate marketing for more details. Keep in mind that with CPA offers, especially if you have an email submit or zip submit offer, visitors will visit your site and with an enticing enough of an ad/text link, they will click through quickly and leave their information thereby making you a commission. Understand that mentality to your advantage.
4. Google Adsense: Write Good Content on Something You are Good at and Monetize with Google Adwords
Yet another viable home business is to start a blog on a topic you are good at or at least interested in. Basically you come up with good content because you know your stuff. Organize it well, be helpful to your readers, and rather than recommending some product to them directly or indirectly, you simply place Google Adsense ads (or something similar) on the website in strategic locations. When an interested reader clicks through because the ads offer something that interests, you get paid. The payout varies from niche to niche, but you get the idea. I have sites that regularly make $5-30 a day and I haven’t updated the contents for several months. Writing more content (or hire ghost writers) can really help it get more traffic, and most likely more ad revenue.
Site Building & Marketing: Similar to the above models.
Conclusion:
As I was writing these overviews, I found it extremely difficult to not get into too much detail, as there are many, many more steps involved in order to explain it fully. But for the sake of this overview post, I really needed to keep it simple, because as you can see, this post is already quite long! More detailed posts on each of the above will be featured in their own posts in the near future. In the mean time, I will need to organize my thoughts well and break it down into logical components. That’s what I struggle with the most, but hey, nobody ever accomplished anything meaningful by doing only what is easy, right?
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It’s nice to see all the options laid out and described.
Which option do you feel is best for someone just starting out? are there a couple that you recommend using together like adsense and cpa marketing?
which way do you recon would be the most profitable ? there must be a formula to a one success way of success in this kind of business and I am thinking about is it possible to find a formula for the best way, will your own website be better then opening a shop at famous providers ? one will obviously need to spend a lot of time and money to try each way, I understand the need to point out all of the options, but these are all just options… people need guidance. hope you will able to share more of your thoughts.
I personally have more experience starting with the adsense model, as it forces you to focus on good content as you build the site, and just let adsense do its thing and not worry about it too much. However as you gain some traction with readership and more traffic, you can start to experiment with some relevant CPA offers.
For example, if you have a blog on, say, mortgage/refinance tips, starting with good, helpful articles, and some promotion for the site, you can already get some nice adsense payouts per click as it’s a very lucrative niche. I’m guessing at least around $1 per click for a valid click.
As you get the site going and build up good content, you can then look into putting in some CPA offers where you get paid when a visitor clicks on a banner on the side bar or top of page and becomes a lead for the CPA merchant. In this case, you may get paid up to $30 or $40 for a good lead. Of course you need to run some tests to see if you’d make more with the adsense or the CPA. Sometimes a combination of both is best.
For one of my ecommerce sites I actually started with the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions as it was all in one and easy to setup. The draw back was that it was not as flexible as my product line grew and needed regular import and export of products via excel. So later on I bought a software and hosted on my own. As long as you have some decent products to sell and you have decent margins, it’s quite easy to create it through something like the Yahoo Merchant Solutions as mentioned in the above link.
I didn’t like the ebay store or amazon option because the nature of my products. On those sites it’s like a price war and since I didn’t import my own stuff from China, I didn’t have enough margin to compete with those other guys as far as selling it dirt cheap. By promoting my separate site on my own domain (via the yahoo merchant solutions or my own ecommerce software hosted on a server), I was able to attract people who found me via search engines and were not in the mindset of who has the best price. I prefer that more. Sell less items at a higher margin. It’s less work too. Hope that makes sense.
Of course, if you have a good relationship with say a factory and you can get super good prices, better than most competitors, then by all means sell on ebay stores and amazon and go with the price war strategy. Of course you can also have your own ecommerce site at the same along with the Ebay and Amazon stores.
I have tried the e-commerce route selling physical stuff but moved on to affiliate marketing because I find it too troublesome. To ship goods and handle returns is a nightmare. Maybe I chose the wrong niche then!
Anyway, affiliate marketing works for me because I just don’t like to be bothered with the actual sales part. Let someone else handle the sales side of the business and I’m happy just earning commissions!
Unfortunately the web has now become over-run with affiliate marketing, it is no way as effective as it was 3 years ago. It would definitely be worth checking out some affiliate networks so you could at least only deal with trustworthy and authoritative merchants.
A nice through post on the subject. The 4th one is what I frequently do take my income to the next level. I have also tried Affiliate Marketing and CPA Advertising etc. But my Google AdSense monetized sites beat them in competition.
To work at home successfully, it requires some due dilligence. You must know what you want to do and all that is required to accomplish this. I realy appreciate your comprehensive list and I am looking forward for some more details. I am working exclusively in affiliate marketing.
Great Post. This is the kind of information we need to help us build our business on-line. I like some of the people above am working in the area of affiliate marketing as well. There is a lot of time spent doing our homework to get our business up and running, but it definitely pays off. I despise working for other people and love the challenge of working for myself. Thanks for your input on this site!
I really like everything you wrote here and also the helpful pictures. My setup is nothing like that at the moment, but I hope to change that soon. Could you please cover a bit more about the affiliate marketing aspect? I know those companies you listed but I’ve heard there are many more. Which are the best or highest ranking/payout affiliate companies? Thanks! Kim
Haha, this picture looks soooo familiar to me. But the only case when you need plenty of displays is when you do day trading (stocks), right?
I strongly believe that nowadays many companies look like this
@ Kim: There are several good affiliate networks out there and payouts depend on the product. But in general, I’d say that Clickbank has the highest payout by far, and products are digitally downloaded. It is also quite competitive, so many things have to be weighed out. Best of luck in your affiliate marketing endeavors!
Most clickbank products are information so they offer highest payout since production and manufacturing cost is small. But physical products has higher production and manufacturing cost, so the commission rate is smaller. The only consolation we got in physical products is it is easy to sell compared to informational products. So it depends to an affiliate marketer which products he is more comfortable with.
@Mary Jane: Good points on the difference between clickbank/downloadable versus physical products. I’d add that informational products can be easier to sell when the sales copy is strong and if you are targeting the right people looking for the solutions which the informational product offers.
I have a little experience of affiliate marketing.
One thing I learned from it is that you should be able to offer a great user experience in order to turn viewers into buyers.
A creative mind can do wonders with a home based business.
I am currently involved in e-commerce and affiliate marketing but have wanted to add other avenues to generate income. CPA does sound like the next natural step and with your recommended sites I think I will be giving this a try.
I however am looking forward to viewing your more focused post on point 4 above, Google adsense and how to go about implementing this step successfully in order to earn an income from one’s focussed efforts.
Thank-you for highlighting these home business opportunities for others to consider and benefit from.
To work from home, you need to be determined about what you want to do. I mean, passion is very important.
Thanks for the tips. I’m going to be working from home starting next month and I’m excited to see what I can do to set up my home office. This should help quite a bit.
Affiliate marketing has been one of the most successful ways to earn money online. There are so many people nowadays who simply stick with affiliate marketing alone. Just like any other money making activities online, it is important for an affiliate marketers to find ways of increasing their link visibility online. That’s the point where the true internet marketing job starts…
I’ve always found that CPA is the most honest method of working online – if the business you are advertising is making money, then you should make some in return – that’s the basis of affiliate marketing for me and works really well. Some work on a revenue share basis, which is great for a long-term relationship – of course, only when the business gets repeat business from the customer over a long period of time! Clickbank, however, is usually unethical but I guess it’s all about making money
In my opinion Affiliate Marketing is the most powerful way to Home Based Business as it easy to run and handle but it depend on the commission how much they offer.
Regarding Google Adsense I have used on some sites but google don’t pay much according to traffic & click.
I appreciate you to mention the e-commerce site to be the one of best home based business. As most people are merging towards online, selling or buying products online makes the things easier on doubt. Thanks for sharing useful information in this regards.
This is a good description of the options available for making money online. I personally have tried the adsense model which can b productive, but like most methods requires a good knowledge of SEO – a field that is constantly changing.
Affiliate marketing or CPA is by far the easiest way to break into a low risk online business. Specifically having a niche blog that you constantly update is a great homebase.
eCommerce can be profitable, but many people underestimate the amount of complexity involved. Sure you can probably get a plug n play hosted eCommerce shop up and on the web, but there are so many nuances you didn’t know beforehand like dealing with abandoned carts, trigger email systems, inventory management (if you stock), getting orders into your accounting system, product based marketing, and the list goes on.
It’s best to get your feet wet with a blog, stick to a publishing schedule, learn to market it and test out different affiliate offer.
I’m starting to work from home and I am puzzled by the change. I need to get into a routine of working at home urgently. If not I will have to be re-employed.
Affiliate Marketing is definitely a great business model for anyone just looking for making a residual income online too. There’s a great amount of opportunities on the web. Helping people select good products to buy that can solve their problems while earning a commission is great.
Great post. You really put together a comprehensive list of options and how to get them going. I agree that affiliate marketing is probably the best and easiest out of the list..
Starting you own home based business is never easy, but it’s definitely doable. You have to put a lot of hours, talent and definitely patience into it. Not a lot of people succeed in it since it’s along process, but those who do – they really benefit from it. Good luck to all of the beginners! Thanks for the great and informative article!
Very good and thorough article. How have to be careful with both Ebay and Amazon. They are both great ways to earn some extra income but you have to stay on top of their rules.
I just wanted to say that I recently used the open source ecommerce software ‘oscommerce’ which was relatively straight forward to implement and great for my client as it keeps their start up costs to a minimum.
I like the adsense route as Andy mentions as it installs the quality content work ethic and then build up combinations such as some CPA and affiliate marketing. The important thing for me is using tools to track and monitor the fruits of the seo and sem campaigns to drive traffic and get the clicks and goals on pages.
Very good and thorough article. How have to be careful with both Ebay and Amazon. They are both great ways to earn some extra income but you have to stay on top of their rules.
@Wink – I agree. I have had friends caught out this way before.
already sign up for affiliate marketing and begin promoting soon
Affiliate marketing has been one of the most successful things I have done for my online insurance brokerage. I work from home and online marketing can be extremely difficult. Tapping into these networks has doubled our traffic and significantly increased sales.
There are many good options you have enumerated. I’ve tried google adsense and it didn’t work out. Hard to make good content. Been having better luck with selling products and services in the net. Hope hear more of you getting more into each of them. Would be great to get more tips on how to be successful in each niche.
You don’t mention network marketing… I use to do it and was successful but at the end of the day having a website that makes money is like having a good piece of real estate. Everyone should have a blog to generate something extra.
For a successful home-based business, by best bet still goes towards building authority sites and affiliate marketing websites
Me and my some friends are going to be crazy to start some home base business but we didn’t find any way that it was easy but I get much information from your blogs…Thanks for sharing with us…!
When choosing the Best Home Based Business, it is very important to choose the right leader. The leader should be a person who knows what they are doing in business.
i also do not use adsense on site that i am selling a product on. I find that making a sale earns more money than what google pays for the click so i would make seperate sites for adsense and affiliate sites selling something.
I believe that we must factor in the total cost involved including the monthly budget for advertising when choosing the best home based business.
Andy, it’s okay to be well detailed because it explains all the factors on how to do it and it’s more understandable than to those short phrases. Probably those successful businesses out there considered most of these five. I suggest that you must be prepare in all the risks of starting a business and study all the possible solution.
The first thing you need to do to find the best home-based business is access your wants and dreams. Before jumping the gun, really sit back and ask yourself, “What could I see myself being good at?” “What kind of business would I want to do from home that I would really enjoy and work towards everyday?”
When you do find the best home based business idea, you will need to take the time and learn how to follow the success system very carefully so that you can get the best results.
the hard part is marketing, get potential costumer is a big dream for every bussiness.
For now I have been using Google Adsense and I am happy about it though it is not making that much yet but I am hopeful and and will be patient for it to finally provide me a better income. Also another money making way is about Over the last four months I have been learning from an Aussie guy named Timothy Marc on how to build a business that allows you to live a freedom lifestyle. Without a doubt, I have learned some amazing skills in business from this guy, and I am currently seeing some great profits from my own business.
I know this post may raise scepticism with some of you, but if this does sound interesting to you, here is a link to my success story on is blog: http://www.freedombusinessblog.com/freedom-business-success-story-tim# and be sure check out his free audio if you like his vibe.
Ask a question on the blog too and I will help you any way I can.
Cheers, Tim.
It is really a nice post. To work at home successfully, it requires some due dilligence. You must know what you want to do and all that is required to accomplish this. I realy appreciate your comprehensive list and I am looking forward for some more details. I am working exclusively in affiliate marketing.
The best home-based business is going to be a business that you are excited about, passionate about and can’t wait to do every single day when you get out of bed.