Find The Home Business That's Right For You By Ted Lewis

Find The Home Business That's Right For You
By Ted Lewis

FIND WHAT WORKS

Everything we’ve covered so far pertains to owning and operating a business, but if your only goal is to be able to earn your living from home there’s another, simpler option available to you. That option is to work at home for somebody else. Popularly called telecommuting, it usually entails you being hired to work some type of job that can be done remotely from home. You’re still an employee of some company, so if true financial independence is your goal, this won’t work. But if your desire is really just to avoid having to get up and face the daily commute, this might be the right option for you.

Telecommuting jobs aren’t incredibly easy to find though. Most likely you won’t be able to just answer an ad for a job and be allowed to work from home. Employers typically don’t trust their employees with that much unsupervised time, especially brand new employees who need to be trained. If you already have a job that could easily be done from home, you could try approaching your employer about becoming a telecommuter. This will usually only work if you have been a stellar employee and your employer has tremendous faith and trust in you, or if they value your services so much that they’re afraid to lose you. Even so, most employers are still not open to the idea unless the company already has some experience with telecommuters. It’s kind of a Catch-22, but this is probably the wave of the future, so if you’re willing to be patient about it, it might happen sooner or later. That’s about I’ll say about telecommuting, though, because our real goal is to talk about the great things you can achieve through your OWN business, not through somebody else’s business.

So, what kind of business are you going to start? The best way to find the answer to that question is to start by looking in the mirror. Keep in mind that a business, any business, can only sell one of two things: a product or a service. That’s it. Examine your own skills and job experiences to see what kind of services or products you might be able to capitalize on. Also consider what kind of assets you have readily at hand. Look for any tools, equipment or facilities you already have that can be profitably put to use. With that in mind, some examples of services you might could sell are:

· Word processing skills

· Sewing/Tailoring/Mending (have a sewing machine?)

· Tutoring

· Teaching music lessons (have a piano?)

· Swimming lessons (have a pool?)

Maybe you’d prefer to sell some type of product instead of a service. Essentially there are two categories of things you can sell:

1. Something you make yourself or have made for yourself, and

2. Something somebody else has made.

That’s it. It’s easier to start off by selling someone else’s existing product, because you don’t have to do all the testing, prototyping and market research to work out all the bugs. Eventually, though, you’ll want to start selling your own products, though, because you’ll make more money by selling your own products.

No matter what type(s) of products you settle on, you want to keep some basic things in mind:

· Choose products with accessory sales potential. In other words, whenever you sell something you want to create the possibility for an upsell with some type of additional accessory that will complement and enrich the original product.

· Choose products that have the possibility for back-end sales. This means you’ve sold a product, but at some time in the future your customer may need to buy something else to replenish or replace something that gets consumed in the use of the original product. (Inkjet printers and inks are the best examples that come to mind.

Some quick examples of homemade products you might consider selling:

· Homemade candles. Accessory products would include candleholders, and replacement candles.

· Jewelry crafts. Accessories would include jewelry boxes, display cases and jewelry cleaners.

· Homemade papers and cards. A truly upscale type of personalized product. Accessories might be custom stamps for creating cards, or fancy ribbons, etc.

You get the idea. No matter what your core business idea is, you want to offer as many accessory items as possible. The general rule is that when your customer’s wallet is open you need to get as much money out of it as you can. This sounds crass, but it’s true.

Craft-type businesses usually don’t have great income potential, but they are perfect for somebody who just wants to make a little extra money from their hobby. But if you’re reading this report, you’re probably not the kind of person interested in making just a “little extra money”, so let’s move on!

If you’re more interested in other people’s products, you need to do some research to find suppliers and wholesalers. Many wholesale companies will allow you to “drop-ship” items you sell, meaning you do the selling and simply notify the wholesaler where to send the product. They handle all the shipping for you, for a fee of course, which you pass on to your customer. To find ideas for products you can market, do a web search for direct marketing, drop-shippers, and wholesalers in you favorite search engine.

Ted writes about Internet and Home-Based Business at:

eBusinessMentor.com

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