If you're considering making the move from 9-to-5 to a work from a home business of your own you'll need to do some research first. It's just not as easy as all the over-hyped late-night infomercials and spam mail would have you believe. There are five big steps to being a work from home success, and every one of them takes work, research and persistence. If you're willing to follow them, though, you'll find yourself on the road to being a successful business owner working from your own home.
1. Pick the Right Business and the Right Market - Your best chance for success is to find a niche and provide the product or service to fill it.
2. Get Organized - Being disorganized will take money out of your pocket. It's as simple as that.
3. Promote, Promote, Promote! - Advertising is the only way to let people know about your business. If they don't know you, they can't buy from you.
Take Your Business Seriously
If you think work from home means take it easy, this isn't the business for you. You'll be working harder when you work for yourself than you ever have in any other job. The key difference is that you're working to put money in YOUR pocket, not someone else's. This is especially true in the first several months to a year when you're getting off the ground and establishing a reputation. Expect to work every day on your business, and keep at it till you start seeing results.
Work from home businesses that succeed do so because their owner takes the business seriously. Your profit is directly proportional to your work.
Never Stop Learning About Your Business
There are new developments, new techniques and new products every day. Don't stop researching and learning once you get your work from home business established, or you risk becoming obsolete. Take courses about advertising and marketing, or learn new skills to keep your skill set current and marketable. Whatever you do, be sure to invest time in keeping up on the latest developments in your field, whether it's web hosting or real estate, cosmetics or desktop publishing.
Here are three of the most popular options. Is one of them right for you?
Reseller Web Hosting
One of the newest wrinkles in the Internet marketing world, reseller web hosting, can be a work from home business that offers excellent earning potential with a minimal financial investment from you. All you need is a stable internet connection, a reseller hosting account, and some internet and marketing savvy. You pay for a reseller hosting account that entitles you to X MB's of space on the web company's servers. You then place your own logo and name on their templates (or design your own), and sell that space out to others for a profit. Think of it as subletting virtual space.
Startup Costs: Reseller hosting accounts average $29.99 monthly to $199 monthly, depending on space, bandwidth and services.
Skills: Enough web hosting knowledge to provide answers to customer's usual questions, and marketing skills to fight in a fiercely competitive field.
Strategy: Find a niche market. The Internet is a huge sea, and little fish tend to get lost. Pick a niche to target with your marketing, and build in inducements to that niche.
Internet Storefront
There are so many different ways to sell products on the internet that it's almost scary. Whether you sell products that you create yourself, use a storefront to do drop shipping, or create a portal where others can sell their own products, internet storefronts can be a very profitable way to work from home. Like web hosting, though, the market is fiercely competitive, and you'll need a good strategy to get noticed.
Startup Costs: Free to $100s depending on hosting company and licenses.
Skills: Organization and marketing skills are the two major skills you'll need here. There are low-cost ways to find professional site designs, and many companies that will drop ship.
People order from you, you order from the company and the company does the rest. You don't need to maintain an inventory, and in some cases, the company will even do all the billing and collection, and send you your profit.
Strategy: Pick a market and target it through search engine optimization, link exchanges, targeted email newsletters and other promotions.
Affiliate Marketing
According to Fortune magazine, targeted online advertising is the hottest growth industry in the high tech world, with annual revenues approaching $5 billion dollars, growing at 40% annually. Why shouldn't some of that end up in your pocket? You can work from home to create a steady income stream from affiliate ads and marketing as long as you have a good internet connection, and a web site that attracts attention.
Startup Costs: Under $20 monthly for web hosting and internet access. Add on search engine submissions, and search engine optimization services later if you need to.
Skills: The ability to create a good, focused community or personal web site, and the marketing savvy to pick the right products to promote.
Strategy: Create a focused web site around a niche subject, and optimize it for search engines. Community web sites work especially well, since forum posts and blogs create new content frequently and invite search engines back to visit often.
Join an affiliate ad program which will place targeted ads on your web site based on the content, or choose one that will allow you to pick the ads you want to appear on your site.
Where's the best place to get free help starting your own home business? Would you believe it's the United States Government? The Small Business Administration is one of the best resources available to a new home business owner. A visit to their web site will turn up easy to understand articles about startup costs, calculators that help you figure out your tax responsibility and access to support groups, forums and information that's invaluable to anyone starting up or running a home business. Here are some of the services that you'll find from the SBA.
Also on the SBA web site, you'll find the government gateway to bidding on contracts offered by the U.S. government, and the newest postings of contracts, grants and other money that's available to home and other small businesses. You'll also find a wealth of other information, including step-by-step instructions on how to incorporate your business, what your health insurance options are as a self-employed business owner and much, much more.
When you're starting a new home business or looking for a loan to expand one, you need to make use of every possible resource available. The Small Business Administration is one of the most valuable resources that you'll find. For more information on business plans, mentoring, contracts and more, visit the Small Business Administration web site at http://www.sba.gov. It's all free
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