Your first step to a successful work from home career is picking the right business. There are literally dozens of ways to make money working from home. Pick through your interests and skills and decide which are the possible money-makers for you. Do you have a service to sell, or would you rather sell concrete items? Do you have marketable skills? What products, services or skills are in demand, and which can you build a market for? Do you want the support you'd get with a home party plan or a franchise?
Organization is far more important when you work from home for yourself than if you work for someone else. In order to grow your business and make money, you'll need to track your income and expenses, deadlines, delivery dates, ads and revenues - in short, you'll need records of absolutely everything you spend and take in. You'll also need to keep track of the work you're doing - and that's true whether you're taking orders for mail order, booking parties for a home party business or doing freelance work through an outsourcing service. Start out organized, and you'll find it easy to keep it up.
The best business idea in the world will fall flat if no one knows about it. The key to making work from home work for you is promotion. No matter what business you choose, you need to get the word out, and get it out to the right markets. Figure out who is most likely to buy your product or pay for your services, and target them with marketing and promotional offers. Depending on what you offer, that may mean spreading your flyers around the neighborhood, taking out newspaper or radio ads, sending out email newsletters, posting on bulletin boards and other Internet services, asking for referrals or any combination of the above.
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.
If you're considering making the move from 9-to-5 to a work from a home business of your own, here are some of the most popular options. Is one of them right for you?
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.
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.
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