Are you looking for simple home based business ideas? There’s many things you can do from home to bring in an extra income. Some of them take more time and others take more investment.
I first started looking to the internet as a means to make an income in the early 2000’s. I was trying to sell my own ebook from a website but was struggling to get traffic. So I put myself on a marketing course and discovered an online business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers make money by promoting and selling other people’s products and services online. When they make a sale through their unique affiliate link, they earn a commission. See what is affiliate marketing for more on this.
There’s many ways affiliates promote products and services on. On my quest to make a living from the internet I also discovered several other strategies to make money from home.
Simple Home Based Business Ideas: eBay
I was selling my stuff on eBay when it began back in 1995. It’s still a great place to sell your wares and even make an income. There’s a few strategies you can use with eBay:
- Buy wholesale from Alibaba.com or similar wholesalers and sell items individually from a buy it now listing
- Find misspelled items on the site and re-list with better listings (and correct spelling) – see this article
- Buy from junk shops, car boot sales, antique fairs and charity shops and re-sell on eBay
- Find local items which are collection only and re-sell with postage as an option
- Buy items which need mending and repair, fix them and re-sell
Simple Home Based Business Ideas: Affiliate Marketing
- Blogging
- Video creation – YouTube/TikTok
- Paid advertising
- List building using email marketing
- Social media marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- niche website building
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to build a regular and even passive income from the internet:
Affiliates can even advertise offline if they choose, they only need to send people to products and services which will sell. Then they can earn a commission based from the sales they generate. Learn more about affiliate marketing here.
Simple Home Based Business Ideas: Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool which anyone can use to generate a free listing for a home based business. This can be a good thing if you have some service or skill to offer. I actually used this little idea and set myself up as a handyman in my local area. But you could use it with any service you can think of offering:
- Music lessons
- After school classes for students
- DIY/ home help/handyman
- Foreign language lessons
- Computer skills for the elderly
- etc
It’s relatively simple to create a free business listing and you only need to verify you’re operating from a physical place/house to get up and running. Checkout Google My Business here to create a free listing.
Publish On Demand
Amazon offers a publish on demand printing service for book publishers. It’s relatively easy to self publish using their site too. So if you’ve ever thought about writing a book, or have some specific knowledge of some sort, why not upload your written book to Amazon and earn from it?
You can access Amazon’s self publishing service here.
You can also sell your book directly from a website when you have created something too. I use an ebook I had published as a lead magnet for my online business. Check it out below:
Ebooks
Ebooks can be sold directly from a website or uploaded to Amazon’s self publishing site. You can use ebooks in multiple ways to earn some extra cash but they’re particularly useful as lead magnets in conjunction with an email list and affiliate products.
A lead magnet is a free digital offering or legitimate bribe of some sort which is used to encourage website visitors to opt in to an email list. An email list is useful for marketing purposes and often used by affiliates to promote and sell their products.
Here’s another ebook I published which is used to build an email list of subscribers from my website:
See also how to sell ebooks on your own website.
Email Marketing
One of the best “from home” business ideas is email marketing. With an email autoresponder anyone can build a list of subscribers and either promote their own services or affiliate products.
As your list grows you can send automated messages out to a growing number of subscribers. You can even promote an autoresponder software yourself to your email list and earn a subscription income from any sales you make.
You can access a free email autoresponder here and start building your list.
Blogging
Blogging is a strategy often used by affiliate marketers but you can also monetise a blog without becoming an affiliate. Bloggers also make money through their writing by advertising on their content using Google Adsense. Adsense lets content marketers place advertising on their site and earn from clicks. When you have a lot of content and drive a lot of traffic from a blog, you can even earn a passive income through blogging.
You can also monetise video in a similar way although there are strict criteria to follow on YouTube if you want to do this.
There’s also a load of free blog platforms you can use to do this so you don’t even need your own website to get started. Hubpages.com and Blogger.com are two such platforms which allow free blogging.
