Finding the number 1 home based business isn’t easy. In fact, it’s different for everyone. Everyone has different goals, strengths, and timelines. Do you want a business you can use to generate additional income, or are you looking to replace your current job at some point? Do you mind putting the hours, or do you work too much already and are trying t spend more time with your family and friends? What type of exit strategy are you looking for? Do you want to sell your business in the future, or will you pass it on to your relatives when you decide to retire? Maybe you have bigger plans and want to you’re your company beyond the home based realm and take it public at some point.
All of these questions have an impact on how you find the number 1 home based business. What may be the perfect business for you may not work so well for someone else. You may be simply looking to supplement your income by a few hundred or a thousand dollars a month by working extra hours here and there. If that’s the case, you’ll have very different needs than someone who’s planning on having a full time business and income to replace their current employment.
There are many good candidates for a home based business. Your number 1 will be the one that fits your individual needs and strengths the best. Here are some great ones that have been well proven throughout the years, in no particular order.
1 – Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is a favorite of marketers everywhere. The affiliate marketer sells other company’s products and/or services and is paid a commission or finder’s fee for doing so. The advantages are that you have no inventory or customer support requirements. You’ll have nothing to store, no tech support or customer service phone calls to field, and no shipping to worry about. It’s perfect for the person who wants to operate out of their house and have very little overhead.
There are of course negatives to affiliate marketing. Depending upon what you’re selling, you may not make as much money sale as if you were selling your own products.(however, for some information products, the affiliate often makes more than the content owner) You also have no control over your right to sell the products when you’re operating as an affiliate.
Any individual affiliate, affiliate program, or product can be terminated at any time. This can be a real pain, not to mention expensive, if you devoted a large amount of resources to developing a website and marketing campaign around the product or program in question. It’s also frustrating to watch as a nice income stream evaporates, and you can do nothing to stop it, except another product, or program and hoe it performs as well as, or better than the old one.
Another disadvantage of an affiliate business, is that you can lose large sums of money through your advertising and marketing efforts if you’re not careful. It’s the same with many other businesses as well. There are many free or inexpensive ways to promote, but some marketers find that they achieve their best and quickest results using pay per click (PPC) advertising. The most widely known example of PPC is Google’s AdWords program.
2 – eBay or Other Online Auction Business – Here again is a way to generate fairly large amounts of money if you’re so inclined. eBay and other auction sites have large amounts of traffic that you leverage into a nice income and brand recognition. The upside is that there is practically unlimited income potential. The downside is that there are few barriers to entry. Anyone with a pulse can start a home based eBay business, and it costs little or nothing to do so.
While those attributes could be viewed as advantages, just know you have over 240 million potential competitors that are registered eBay users. Of those, 83 million are active users, so starting an eBay business gives you access to a huge potential market. Over 600 million items were sold on eBay in 2007. Some of that could have been your merchandise. In fact there were 532,000 eBay stores in 2007, and well over 120,000 people earn their full time income from the on-line auction pioneer, so you could be next.
Those are two of the most popular types and it could be argued that simply by virtue of their sheer numbers, eBay stores ranks as the number 1 home based business. However there are countless others, from consulting to landscaping firms that can be run out of one’s home. Actually firms such as consulting readily lend themselves to being run from home.
With the advent of the Internet and other modern communications systems, there is little reason to have a traditional office. In fact, keeping overhead low is one of the keys to success in your business, and a traditional office is one of the largest sources of overhead in many businesses. Eliminating the office adds directly to your bottom line, which is the point of having your business in the first place.