Five Popular Home-Based Business Ideas with Small Start-Up Costs
Posted on October 01, 2020 | by Fusia
There’s a reason people call the Internet the great equalizer. Everyone has access to its benefits, including stay-at-home parents and college students who want to make money from home but may have fewer skills and smaller budgets to work with.
The requirements are few. Find a desktop or mobile device with access to the Internet and find a market gap to fill. Don't be scared. The entry point is easy, and the potential is limitless.
Sounds good? Let’s dive into it.
Blogging
Blogging is a multi-billion industry that has been helping people make big bucks since the Internet began. It's one of the oldest jobs online. And although it's reasonably populated in 2020, there's room for more bloggers.
The rules for blogging are straightforward. Find a niche to target. Research profitable keywords and create helpful content around these keywords. Let’s use an example of meal delivery kits in Canada.
There’s a growing number of meal kit services, so targeting this niche could be profitable. Your keywords could include:
Meal kit Canada
Meal kit delivery Canada
Best meal kits in Canada
With keywords in place, the next step is to create helpful content. A case in point is a post about the best meal kits in Canada. It’s helpful and based on one of your keywords.
And as a result, it can attract web traffic to your website—traffic you can monetize through adverts, marketing, or selling merchandise. There's a caveat, though. Blogging isn't as simple as writing content on your blog.
A little bit of marketing and patience are necessary. It could take anywhere from three months to a year before you make money through blogging. But if successful, it could become a full-time job.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most profitable ways to make money from home. That’s because it’s a process you can automate. And then you can make money through the platform for months or years.
Like blogging, the process starts with selecting profitable niches. Here are five profitable affiliate niches:
Beauty: So, you have a passion for the beauty industry? You could create a website or Facebook group where you provide helpful beauty tips. And then you could partner with beauty companies to promote their products in exchange for commissions.
Fitness: This is a fast-growing niche. And that means it’s not as competitive as the finance or baby product niches. However, you need a great deal of knowledge about fitness to succeed.
Health and Wellness: Like fitness, people are increasingly paying attention to personal wellness. That includes healthy dieting, mental wellness, alternative medicine, and meditation.
Online Casinos: The goal is to create a website like this one that ranks the top online casinos and market it tremendously. The result is an audience that can click through your links to join casinos to get paid.
Finance: This is a pretty competitive niche. But it’s also one of the most profitable affiliate marketing niches out there.
Freelance Writing
If you’re looking for a home-based business that doesn’t take months to become profitable, join freelance writing. Depending on what you're writing on, training take as little as a few days or weeks. And then you start to make money immediately.
Where can you find freelance writing jobs? For starters, you can join content mills like Upwork, Crowd Content, and Copify. These sites connect you to businesses in need of writers, but they pay poorly.
As an upgrade, you can look for writing work at job boards like Pro Blogger, LinkedIn, or Glassdoor. They also connect you to businesses, but the rates are much better—usually, $50 per short article than the $5 to $20 you could earn at content mills.
The best paying writing jobs come from businesses. The thing is, you pitch your ideas to companies with an online presence. And if they like your work, you could earn up to $1000 per article of 1000 words.
Makeup Consulting
Contrary to popular belief, makeup consulting is a real job that pays an average of $40,000, according to Payscale.com. It's also a job you can turn into a home-based business. And the best part is that you don't need a college degree or a decade's worth of experience.
So, what do you need to start a consulting business at home? Create a website and social media accounts. Then learn as much as you can about cosmetics and start to provide consulting services for a fee.
Alternatively, you could provide consulting services free of charge but monetize your platform through adverts and affiliate marketing. Let's say you start a YouTube channel where you teach women how to pick and apply makeup.
After your channel gains a substantial number of subscribers, you can then activate adverts. However, if you don't want to disrupt your audience's viewing experience, you can recommend products from your favourite brands for commissions.
Sell on Amazon
Selling products on Amazon is much easier than most people imagine. All you need is a free account and a product to sell. And Amazon will do the rest. Let’s say you have a passion for makeup and writing.
You could create an ebook for teaching people how to pick eye makeup. Then you could hire an editor to polish up your content and graphics designed to create an attractive cover page. With a few additional tips, you can upload your ebook, write a description, and wait for the money to flow into your account.
If you're not a writer, you could sell products like electronics, groceries, clothes, shoes, or anything you've ever seen on Amazon. But like everything else, you want to research and discover an under-utilized niche.
With products, you also need suppliers. Most Amazon sellers ship their stock from China. And they send the stock to an Amazon fulfillment store. Amazon then handles the shipping process and any returns.
The alternative is to store products in your company's store, especially if you want to brand items before shipping them. There's also a cheaper option where you order products after customers place orders on Amazon. That way, you don't have to deal with storage issues.