Archive for Best Home Based Business
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?
Finding The Best Home Based Business – Part 1
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Image by fensterbme via Flickr
So you want to find the best home based business to start? Well, before we look at some great home based business possibilities, we need to make sure we’re on the same page here.
Now I’m going to assume that you’re not trying to start an accounting or law practice from home (or something similar, requiring a professional degree/certification). Because if you are you probably already know what to do, as there are plenty of stuff out there teaching you how to get clients, work referrals, etc. You are trading your professional time for money. There are pros and cons to this type of business, but that is another topic for another time.
Chances are, if you are here on this site, you were probably searching for ideas on the best home based businesses you can start and run from home, meaning you are open to new ideas and possibilities. You are probably a regular guy or gal looking for some ideas of businesses you can start from home. Ideally, one which you do not need a large capital to start with, nor require a professional degree.
Perhaps you still have your job but just need something to supplement your current income. Perhaps you are unemployed and finally got the motivation to start a business. Whatever it is, you’ve come to the right place. I’m going to show you some good possibilities that can become reality.
Here are a few things I look for when looking to start a viable home-based business (not an exhaustive list, but some very important points). Whenever I come across an interesting business idea, I’d pit it against these guidelines and make sure it qualifies, having at least three of the qualities below, if not all four. Helps me to fight a winning battle, if you will.
Here are the questions to ask when considering a potential business idea:
1) How many widgets do you need to sell or how many accounts do you need to acquire before you reach your income goal? Can you see yourself get to that number? Can you project how long that might take with reasonable effort? Be optimistic, but be honest and a bit conservative.
2) Does the product/service you are aiming to sell have residual characteristics? In other words, will it keep selling itself even if you are not constantly acquiring new customers? Imagine not having to sell to new customers every month in order to survive, but rather, have customers keep coming back to you due to the nature of the business and or what you are selling.
3) Does it require more than a few hundred dollars to start? Ideally, none of us want to risk any money on a business we have no control over. So unless you know you have a sure thing, a home business should not require much capital to get started. You can always start with no more than a few hundred dollars and use the money you’ll make in to further fuel the business. In the beginning, it’s more about your time and effort rather than some lump sum cash you don’t know what to do with. Visualize yourself doing certain activities that will directly result in revenue.
4) Is it scalable? This basically means once you get it going and start making some money, can you keep growing it? Can you eventually hire/outsource someone to do most of the work for you and walk away while the money keeps coming it? Let’s face it, none of us want to be stuck in a “business” where we are a slave of, and cannot get away from, because we’ve created a situation where no one can do what we do. Perhaps you don’t know all the details involved in the business yet, but do think in this direction and when the time comes, you’ll have created a business that you can scale up and up, even without you having to be there all the time.
Image via Wikipedia
In the next section I will explore some legitimate home business ideas that meet the above criteria and even show you some examples of real businesses that either I started in the past or have observed. If you are really serious about starting a viable home business, I hope this has warmed you up a bit. Part 2 coming up in the next week or so, so stick around.
