Monday, August 24, 2009

Home Based Business Opportunities: Now Is A Great Time To Start Your Own Business!

By Danielle Martensen

Lots of people are trying to find methods for adding to their income in the lousy economy, whether it's because they lost their job or their wages were frozen. Home based business opportunities are a popular solution, but some people avoid them because they think the cost or the difficulty would be too high. Because of reasonably priced and value added web hosting, home business opportunities are within reach for anyone with a little bit of time and less than five hundred dollars to invest.

If you want to pursue home based business opportunities, the first thing you need to do is select an area of business you want to operate in. Some common home based businesses are consulting and direct sales.

Consulting is one of the easiest home based business opportunities if you have knowledge in any specific area of any kind. Become a consultant in your field and people will look to you as an expert and a problem solver. Consultants are increasingly relied on to solve many problems rather than hiring employees to fulfill tasks.

Direct sales have been around since Colonial times when people went door to door selling stuff out of wagons, but the process is a lot easier on the internet. There are hundreds of direct sales companies out there, from time-tested brands like Avon to Web 2.0 companies. The term "affiliate marketing" is another fancy way of saying direct sales as well. Anytime someone buys a product or service from an individual salesperson rather than from a store or directly from the company, that is direct sales.

Whether you're doing direct sales, consulting or some other kind of home base business opportunity, you need a website to look professional. Reserve a domain name, put up a website and you're in business!

If you're a computer genius you may not need more than basic web hosting, which is very inexpensive, but many people need help designing their sites, and web hosts will do this for you. Some of them rely on templates that you work with yourself through tutorials, while others will custom design a site for you. If you look around carefully you can find a good web host that does everything you need for only a couple hundred dollars a month. One thing to keep in mind is outfitting your site with a shopping cart, especially if you're doing direct sales. People have come to expect this service and you won't be as competitive without one.

Once your website is up and running, the final step is to advertise it. You can do this through traditional advertising, pay per click Web ads or promotion like putting your URL in sigs and posting to bulletin boards, commenting on blogs or social networking.

Home based business opportunities armed with good websites can be very successful. With an investment of no more than a few hundred dollars and a week or two for site design you can be making money in virtually no time. The greatest thing about home based business opportunities is that the internet gives you the chance to have a professional business presence at little cost.

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