Finding the right business is never easy.
The last thing you want to do is to start something and waste your time on it and later find out that it is not for you. Other concerns would be picking a business that may not fit your personality.
There are a lot of business opportunities out there and it seems that each one of them is promoted as the best business opportunity available in the market today.
So what do you do?
Where do you start?
And which one do you think is right for you?
A. Start with something that you are passionate about
1. Passion As A Business
The best place to start is to find something that you are passionate about. Someone said that if you do something you love, you will not work a day in your life. If you love something, you won’t consider that as work but instead as fun. Just check out those professional athletes who are getting paid big bucks. They have never considered playing basketball or football as work but more like fun. I know that it is not fair to compare ourselves to those professional athletes but this is just to illustrate the idea of having fun and making money off it. For example, if you love cooking, you may consider starting a catering business.
2. Your skill set or field of expertise
The next place to look is your special skill set. Do you have a special skill that you can transform into a business? For example, if you are very knowledgeable in designing websites, then you can make this a business by designing and creating websites for a particular niche like small businesses or non-profit organizations. What about if you are a certified medical biller, medical coder/transcriptionist, tax accountant or a certified fitness trainer? Do you see where I’m going with this?
3. Building a website and monetizing it
There is also one thing to keep in mind, just because you love something, sometimes you do not want to make a business out of it. What do I mean by that? For example, what if you love cooking but you really do not want the headache of operating a catering business, dealing with customers or even managing employees?
Well, one option is to write something about cooking. You can write about creating a special recipe, how to cook the food, the best place to buy the ingredients, the story where the recipe originated, famous authentic food of your country, etc. This can be done by creating a website just like this one where you can write a lot of information about it. In this way, you are writing on a topic that you love and making money from it at the same time!! Other people have created instructional videos and uploaded them in their own website or Youtube.
For example, if you love to dance and an expert about certain dance routines, then you can make instructional videos of those and upload it to your website. I’ve seen others who have uploaded MTV style video with them singing or others uploading videos showcasing their acting ability. In this day of information age, people are coming out with interesting ideas and making money off it by broadcasting it on the internet.
B. Become a distributor or a sales agent
What if you do not have a special skill set or you think that what you love cannot be converted into a profitable business?
Well, another option would be consider looking at companies or manufacturers that are looking for distributors to sell their products. This may not be your passion but if it gets you excited knowing that it could become a profitable business, then why not?
Have you seen doctors or engineers becoming realtors or mortgage brokers?
What about teachers and nurses changing careers by becoming network marketing distributors?
I am not suggesting that you should select a network marketing company, what I’m suggesting here is that you do not have to be an expert initially on a particular product, but you just have to be excited with the product and the business system.
C. Watch out for the Scams
Throughout the years, the home-based business idea has really exploded with more and more people considering on starting one. Although there are a lot of reputable companies out there, there are also a lot of scams that you may need to watch out for that are ready to prey on the uninformed consumer.
Watch out for illegal pyramid schemes, mail-order schemes, chain letter, envelope stuffing, Netmarketing (internet network marketing) schemes, some of the network marketing companies, etc. There is a saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.†It is always a good idea to do your due diligence before entering into any business venture.
Photo credit: Theabundancemachine
For me an ideal home-based business would be one that only requires a laptop & an internet connection. That would make it so easy to be mobile and flexible, and I think it would be a blast.
Kevin, I’m with you. I’d like to run a business without any borders and the one that I can do wherever I go. An online business perfectly fits this description.
I really would love to do that someday. It’s really hard to walk away from a good paying salary. I think if I were to do it, I’d have to start doing it on the side until I knew I had a chance to replace enough of my salary to quit my day job altogether. I don’t think I could just go cold turkey and live without a salary while my business was in it’s start up phase. I think I would quit too soon and go back to the corporate world.
That is very true. It’s tough to leave a job with good paying salary unless the business is flourishing so well. Running a business is very risky and as statistics show, more than half of the small business fail in their first five years of existence. As for me, I like the idea of earning extra income on a side business and investing that so I can retire early from my day job.
Whenever i talk to people about my internet businesses, they just assume that it’s easy because it’s something you can do from home. There are negatives and positives to working at home. And also not having a stable income can be pretty stressful.
It definitely takes alot of years to get the hang of it and diversify.