This is not selling for immediate gratification and there will be no instant success but it is the biggest step you can make towards financial freedom. You are going to need to work hard, control your own time in the process of building your own dream rtaher than someone else’s. So be resolute in your determination for a better life, whilst embracing realistic goals and challenges.
What Do I Need?
Well this depends on what business you decide to go into but for a start, you
need to have a web presence, so the very minimum would be a computer.
Nothing fancy, with reliable internet access… And you also need time.
Starting a business online and working from home is a daunting thought, but think about starting it with the safety net of your regular job. Set goals. You can bootstrap – this means doing the job as a side hustle, one day you can give the day job upbeat it is perfectly doable to work a regular job and have no financial risk so you can start with certainty. Reinvest your income into your business and allow it to grow.
I am advocate of this method, its how I started out, learning from the ground up as a side hustle and its been very successful. There is no need to take the risk of loans repayments.
You don’t need a financial outlay to start an online business from scratch, no fancy gadgets needed, no bells or whistles, but there area few things you will need to pay for – domain name purchase and hosting costs but they are not expensive.
So bootstrapping – a side hustle from your main daily work, would be a great way to start. You have none of the worries or anxieties about money and ease into your online business, taking time to learn the business with out time pressures. Go full time once you are earning regularly to replace your day job.
Entrepreneurship starts in many different ways, low-cost is just as acceptable as taking out a loan.. It doesn’t validate your business anymore than starting out without a debt.
Of course if you really want to get out of your job, a bank loan or savings could be a possibility but a risky one, not knowing when you will start earning.
How Do I Start?
There are different directions you could go in to start your own business. If you have a niche product or service that you are already experienced in and you want to set your own business up, then you are already ahead… You should test the water and do diligent research to discover what sort of income you can expect before you set off. If however, you are unsure what niche to work in or indeed what a niche market is, perhaps my eBook – ‘Choosing Profitable Niches would help you’.
A niche market is created by indentifying needs, wants, hopes of your target market, by answering their questions, questions that are not answered by other products or services.
Choosing Profitable Niches eBook
‘………manufacturers and retailers have saturated the market with the conventional marketing strategies and as a result, it has changed consumer reaction and interest. In order to grow a customer’s interest along with a business’s sales, it is vital to build your business in a niche market.’
If you would like a free copy of this eBook, subscribe to my website using the form in the side bar.
Thankyou!
High Profit/Low Cost?
Various home based businesses are possible but with very different potential outcomes.
If you are starting from scratch then you have a blank canvas to choose what you really want to spend your time doing. But as I mention in my book, you have to have a passion for it. Its going to be something you do, hopefully for a very long time, so you have got to want to do it and be passionate about making your business earn you money. No point turning your side hustle into another ‘day job’.
But, considering it purely from a monetary view point, the image on the right shows where each main home business category sits in the cost of set up against the profit you are likely to make.
What Can I Do?
What Can I Do?
Software – Got to be the first thing you think of when you think about working online but not everyone can write code. I can’t… Well I’ve learned how to add certain things but there is no way I could write code for an app for example… but can you? A great skill you could offer.
What Can I Do?
Physical Product – Do you have a product that you have been developing that will answer the questions of your audience? Maybe it’s an underwater drone or a natural product for the bathroo, a great prospect to take your own product to market.
What Can I Do?
Advertising On Your Site – As an offshoot of your online business you can add advertising to your site to bring in an income every month. It starts as a trickle but as your business gets more traffic, the trickle will turn into a gentle stream etc. Google Adsense is worth taking a look at. They have criteria to be accepted. I choose not to use this method because I personally don’t like the intrusive ads on websites.
What Can I Do?
Afflilate Marketing – Do you have a product that you have been developing that will answer the qestions of your audience? Maybe it’s an underwater drone or a natural product for the bathroom. A great prospect taking it to market.
What Can I Do?
Physical Product – Do you have a product that you have been developing that will answer the qestions of your audience? Maybe it’s an underwater drone or a natural product for the bathroom. A great prospect taking it to market.
What Is The First Step?
So, you have decided what you want to do…
But what do you do next ?
If you are conversant with making websites, buying a domain name and sorting out a hosting site, you are probably good to go…
But if you need any help with this, I can help you with all the training and support you will need to be able to run an successful online business. There is not any need to think you cannnot run a business because you don’t know anything about building websites. You can learn ‘on the job’.
I started my business by learning on the job with Wealthy Affiliate. If you would like to know more, click the link below and read more about it. Good Luck!
Your article on Wealthy Affiliate is very enlightening and useful and your personal storytelling is very important to us working with this great platform. Google Adsense is one of those who are very interested because I believe it can make a lot of money on the site. Thanks for the excellent and enlightening post.
I personally dont use adsense, I find it breaks up my articles too much and makes them difficult for my readers to follow. But each website is different and it may work well for you.
Hi there. Thanks for sharing this article on how to start an online business and work from home. I know it is 100% real that people make money online. I saw you wrote that there there will be no instant success; I want to know, like how long do you think it would take before I start making money online?
Thanks for your time.
A really good question and this really depends on how well you choose your niche. If you are diligent in the research you do before starting out and have a strong niche, you can be starting to earn money within 4-6 months. This gets pushed back depending on the time you have to spend on your business, how much experience you already have and how in-depth you made your niche research. If you have not drilled down far enough with your niche and are still at the level of competing with bigger companies, it will take time. likewise if you don’t spend enough time writing articles for your business and getting your business out on Google, the traffic to your site will be slow and sporadic. These have effects on your ability to earn.
Making money online has now become the real deal and very many people are already going into this particular business. Personally, I think that affiliate marketing is a very good way to make online because this is also the same method that I make use of. One thing to notr though is that one will need to put in hard work for everything to work out at the end of the day. Nice post you have here.
Thank you for your comments. Its certainly something that has to be worked on, not something you can set up and forget about. It takes time and consistent effort.
This is a lovely article that gives plenty of food for thought as to what people can do to earn money from home and work for themselves. I especially liked your idea of keeping your current job while starting your on-line business so as to have a safety net. I really think that is the only way to go. I love your book give-away – that could really help people in the beginning.
Thank you for your comments, I hope it will encourage people, with a little extra support, to start their own businesses.
In starting an online business, business its required one have a good knowledge about the whole thing before getting involved in it. Starting an online business is quite easy, but just a few things a needed to be in place which for me the right mindset is the first thing to start such business. You should have a mind that you can be successful in the business and be hardworking .
Very true Benson. I think that wealthy affiliate encourages this, by offering so much to the affiliate marketer and helping them keep in a positive mindset about their business.
Wow, this is really cool because I can see here that there are so many ways that one can make money online. Currently, I work as a freelancer but I am looking to try other avenues to make money online and you have here written quite a number of them. I would like to know the difference between selling physical products and being an affiliate marketer!
Many thanks John, and yes, there are so many ways to be able to improve your income online. An affiliate marketer would review and recommend other merchants products, receiving a small commission for this, but this in no way increases the cost to the customer. The merchant offers this commission to improve his visibility through the use of affiliate marketers and accepts that a small commission to them is worth it to get his products sold. If you sell you own product clearly you get all the income but have the overheads of producing that product which you wouldn’t have to do with a merchant’s product. But either way, you will definitely improve your income!
I like the manner in which you lead a visitor to your website to think about setting up an online business as being low risk and can be accomplished while working a day job. I like the hustle approach. One of the biggest challenges in setting up and running an online business is learning the process on how to do it successfully. When I found out that the company you were recommending to provide the training and tools was Wealthy Affiliate, that didn’t surprise me.
The cartoon video introducing your visitor to Wealthy Affiliate was brilliant. It was interesting that you provided two approaches to make money online. The first was to market products from various companies as an affiliate. And the second was to promote Wealthy Affiliate as an affiliate of them. Makes sense. Why should Wealthy NOT offer an affiliate program since that is what they are all about.
All in all I liked what you did here.
Thank you Edwin, you comments and observations are hugely helpful to me.