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If you’re planning to start a business, consider the benefits of a home based business. There are many advantages to starting a home business compared to a traditional brick-and-mortar business. For example, as a home business owner, you don’t have to commute to an office or spend a fortune on renting commercial real estate.

A home-based business gives you more freedom than a traditional business. With a business headquartered at home, you have more flexibility in when and how you work. And because there are fewer expenses, home-based businesses are more profitable.

What are the advantages of a home-based business?

A home-based business is a reasonably low-risk type of business to start. For starters, you can run a home business part-time or as a side hustle before you turn it into a full-time venture. And because you are using your home, there are fewer expenses than traditional brick-and-mortar businesses.

In addition to the low-investment requirements for starting a home-based business, you may benefit from potential tax deductions. A home business allows you to be closer to your family because of the flexible work-life balance. You can run your home business as a family business to keep expenses low and profits high.

Additional benefits of a home business are:

  • Startup costs are lower with home businesses.
  • With a home business, you don’t have to waste your time commuting to your business.
  • A home-based business allows you to run your business while taking care of things around the house.
  • You can set your own hours. If you want to work early in the morning or late at night, it’s all possible with a home business.
  • You don’t have to rent space for your business. And, you may qualify for possible tax deductions.
  • When working from home, you don’t have to waste your energy on office politics.

What’s more, home-based businesses come in many forms.

Start a home business selling homemade products

If you’re a maker, you could turn it into a profitable home-based business. Even if you have started it as a hobby, it could help you make money on the side.

Use your home to create your products and ship them from your home all over the country.

What can you make at home and sell online for extra cash?

  • Jewelry
  • Art
  • Organic soap
  • Stock photos and videos
  • Bookmarks
  • Hats
  • Music
  • Pottery
  • eBooks
  • Natural cosmetics
  • Candles
  • Digital printables
  • Apps
  • Gift baskets
  • Lip balm
  • Voice over recordings
  • Enamel pins
  • Hand sewn clothes
  • Wedding favors
  • Candy
  • 3D printed items
  • Photos
  • Pillows
  • Bath bombs
  • Personalized chocolates or chocolate wrappers
  • T-shirts
  • Cookies or cookie mixes
  • Coasters
  • Artificial plants
  • Printed mugs
  • Perfume
  • Ceramics
  • Woodworking projects
  • Magnets
  • Party favors
  • Photo frames
  • Organic dog treats
  • Personalized wine labels
  • Paintings
  • Tote bags
  • Soap
  • Pet supplies
  • Online courses to teach people how to make things to sell in a home-based business

Start a freelance writing business from home

Many people enjoy writing. So, why not turn your love of writing into a home-based business. The business of writing offers many ways for you to make money. Perhaps not fame and fortune, but a highly profitable home business, doing something you love.

Here are several profitable home-based writing businesses you can start with no money.

Write blog posts for businesses

Companies want to publish regular blog posts, but they never have the time to write them. You could start a home-based blog writing business if you can offer this service to companies.

The beauty of writing blog posts for businesses is that it’s a recurring revenue business. That means, once you land a new client, you might be able to work with them for years to come. To excel in this type of writing business, you’ll need to combine a thorough understanding of the subject matter with good writing skills.

Build a home business as a niche site blogger

You could start a niche blog and turn it into a highly profitable home business. For example, you can build a site dedicated to a certain topic based on your personal interests or expertise. Some of the most profitable niche sites are about personal finance, hobbies, home improvement.

Once your blog gets enough visitors, you can monetize your business in several ways:

  • Sell advertising space
  • Accept sponsored posts
  • Make and sell your own books, courses, and tutorials
  • Earn money from affiliate sales
  • Offer consulting services

The prerequisite to building a profitable business on a niche blog is many visitors. Business-to-business niche blogs can be profitable with only a few thousand visitors each month. But if you have a recipe or gaming niche blog, your site better get hundreds of thousands of unique visitors every month.

Home-based proofreading business

Proofreaders play an important role in writing. They are often the final eyeballs on someone’s content. Smart businesses never publish anything without the approval of a proofreader.

To be a successful proofreader, you’ll need attention to detail and a solid understanding of grammar to do the job.

Write website copy for companies

Companies need to publish new content on their websites regularly. If you can provide this service for them, you are in business.

Teach English online from your home business

If you enjoy teaching, you can start a teaching business at home. The technology makes it really easy to teach from home. Teaching online requires no investment. It’s such a flexible home-based business that you don’t even need to be home to run it. You could run your business while traveling.

You can set your hours and rates as you wish. For example, if you are a night owl, you could teach kids English overseas and have your fun during the day. To increase your earning potential, you can simultaneously teach a group of students instead of teaching individuals.

Start a dropshipping business from home

You can start a dropshipping business from home if you like the idea of running an online store. A dropshipping home business is great because you can sell without paying for an expensive inventory of products to sell. Instead of investing your money in products, you partner with manufacturers or wholesalers who manage the inventory and ship products directly to your customers on your behalf.

To start a dropshipping business, you need either a:

  • Website
  • Email list
  • Social media following, or
  • All or any combination of the above

Because there is no inventory to buy or rent to pay for storage, this is a home-based business idea with low startup costs.

Start a print-on-demand home business

Print on demand is another low-cost home-based business. This type of business is perfect for those who enjoy creating art and eye-catching designs. What makes this type of print business even better is that you don’t have to do the printing. Instead, the printing is done for you and the printer ships the order directly to your customers.

Print-on-demand is similar to dropshipping, but it gives you more creative control. With this type of business, the products you sell are made unique with your special art and designs.

Buy products in bulk and sell them for a profit from your home business

Another way to start a home business is to buy products in bulk and sell them online for a profit. You can sell them individually for a hefty profit if you buy from the manufacturer in bulk or wholesale.

You can get a better price when you buy in bulk than purchasing them individually. Then, you can sell the products one by one. The difference between the price you paid and the price you sell for is your profit.

So, where can you buy products for resale?

You can contact factories, manufacturers and business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces like Alibaba.

You want to grow your home business, right?

Launching a business out of your home is a great way to start a business. It’s also a great way to keep costs low. But, what do you do when you want to take your company to the next level?

Here are the steps to start a successful and profitable home business.

How to stay focused on your home business?

It’s easy to want to put all your ideas into action at once, but you’ll be most successful if you start by focusing on the things you do best. Put your energy into marketing one or two products or services that you do really well, and you’ll have the best chance of finding a niche in the market.

There are several ways to keep your focus and succeed in home business:

  • Focus on what is really important if you don’t want to fail in business. Is spending more time with your family the most important to you, build your business to support that lifestyle. Do you want to double the size of your business every 12-months, no matter what it takes? Define your business goals and stay focused.
  • Have a plan and stick to it. It is difficult to make a plan, and it is even more difficult to stick to it. It requires a lot of confidence.
  • Focus on your customers. Who exactly is your customer? Once you define your customer, keep serving your target market. Don’t jump all over the place.
  • Focus on your product or service. For example, if you are a web designer, don’t start offering new services immediately. Wait until you have a more mature business. Keep offering your core services to your core customers.
  • Don’t get distracted by noise. A friend or customer might tell you to start offering a new service. Ignore them. Keep your focus on your core service offerings.
  • Don’t confuse new possibilities with distractions. Many entrepreneurs find it hard to focus on their product or service. The best entrepreneurs are able to maintain focus for long periods of time.
  • Seek out an accountability partner or a coach. Entrepreneurs are in charge. The only problem with that is they don’t always keep themselves accountable.

How to expand your home business?

Once you’ve mastered step 1 and gotten a foothold in the market, you’re ready to expand your offerings. Your customers will appreciate having related products to choose from. What’s really important about branching out into new areas is to continue to provide a high-quality service across the board. Branching out could hurt your reputation if you drop the ball in other areas.

How to grow your home-based business?

One of the easiest ways to grow your home-based business is by increasing sales to existing customers. Consider offering volume discounts, like two-for-one sales or offer discounts when people sign up for multiple services at once.

There are several ways your customers can help you grow your home business:

  • Offer a reward for referrals. You could offer a percentage of the sale or a discount in a future service if someone brings you a referral. Also, keep in mind that most happy customers are OK with referring you just because they like what you do for them.
  • Ask your customers to share their positive experience working with you through social media.
  • Ask for customer testimonials, then share them on your social media accounts.
  • Give your customers coupons to share with their friends.

How to hire for your home business?

You might not have the need or the budget for a full-time employee, but consider a part-time employee, intern, or freelancer. Building a network of skilled people can benefit you in the future, and having another person’s perspective can help you make better business decisions.

Create a website for your home-based business

Gone are the days when you needed a storefront to sell products. A website lets you sell to anyone, anywhere. Websites these days are cheap to maintain, on the order of $30-$50 per month. They’re easy, too: the internet is full of do-it-yourself websites that don’t require programming knowledge to build. If you want a website that is really special, you might want to consider hiring a professional web designer.

I recommend the WordPress platform for your website. It is a robust system. WordPress is easy to install, use, and update.

How to build partnerships for your business?

Working with other companies is one of the easiest ways to market your products. Sell baked goods? Ask local coffee shops if they’ll carry them. Are you a graphic designer? Offer to do low-cost graphic design for other businesses in exchange for referrals to their clients. There’s always someone you can partner with in a way that will benefit you both.

How to find the right strategic partner for your home based business:

  • Clearly define your target market. Look for businesses who serve your target market but don’t compete with you.
  • Find businesses that are, at least, a little larger than your business. Your business will benefit more if you partner with a more established business.
  • Conduct due diligence. Only partner with a business if it has a good reputation.

How to get more customers for your home business?

Think about customers you haven’t targeted yet. If most of your customers are 18-29 year-olds, you could start marketing to people in their 30s. Or if you market to new mothers, maybe there are related products or services that you could sell to parents of older children. You can also expand from retail to wholesale, or vice versa.

How to market your home business?

If you’ve mostly been buying print ads, consider web-based ads. If you have tried Google Adwords, you might want to try to advertise on Bing or Facebook. Try sending out a newsletter by email, and don’t forget about social media. If you have a B2B target market, you could start your own business networking group. The key is to always try at least one new marketing technique. If it works, great, keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, try something else. Entrepreneurship is about experimenting with new ideas.

How to grow your home business beyond your house?

These days, even a home-based business can afford to operate out of another space. Consider renting temporary office space to get benefits such as tech support and conference services, or to hold meetings with clients. Sharing office space with other small businesses can also be a great way to grow your network. A great way to get inexpensive office space is to offer free services to another business in exchange for office space.

Consider franchising or licensing your business

You may be able to license your product or service to another company who can market and sell your product for you. Piggybacking off another company is a great way to grow your business without increasing your overhead.