This post is about that momma who may not want to start a full-fledged business but wants to make money from home. In this post, I want to describe7 activities that you can do at home to make money from home without necessarily running it as a full-time business. It does not mean it’s not hard work but it’s like a side hustle that brings you that extra income while you stay home to take care of your kids.
Most of this ideas are not full-time businesses, this is not the place where I ask you to start a Blog, because I know that Blogging is a full-time job if you want to make a success of it. These are called side hustles for a reason, they should not detract from you doing what you normally do.
So here we go
Freelance writing:
If you are what people call a wordsmith, then its time to use your skills to make money from it. When you go to places like Upwork and freelancer.com you will find that people are posting their Gigs, that is advertising their projects for someone to help them with.
Registering on such sites will give you the opportunity to sell your skills for potential income. If you are really good at copywriting you can have the opportunity to charge people who need copies written for their products which they want to sell. Another way you can make money is by registering with sites like Digital Nomads and watching out for companies that are looking to hire writers for their blogs or websites. The good thing about freelance writing is that you get to choose your own timing and how much work you want to do.
Delivery:
This a cool way of making money without having to carry people in your car.The good thing about this idea is that you can just load up your kids into the car, have a wonderful ride while making money at the same time, how cool is that.
Companies like Doordash have restaurants signed up with them who then have freelance workers like you sign up with them to help them do deliveries. The good thing is that you get to choose your working time. Another company that partners with people to help do their delivery is postmates, they do all kinds of delivery for their customers.
Personal Shopper
Are you a person who loves shopping, there is something for you to do, you can sign up with companies like thumbtack a platform that connects personal shoppers with those who need their services in that area. Personal shopping often is interwoven with personal styling, so you can find yourself thinking of taking it to a full-time business as you help more people do their shopping and styling.
Web search evaluator:
A web search evaluator analyzes search results for quality and relevance. It’s a job that algorithms do but the only issue is that it lacks the human angle to it. People are often hired by companies like Appen to help do these tasks.. You can also get to rate videos and ads quality while at it. The only downside to this job is that it is repetitive and boring and sometimes your project may end without you getting another.
Online surveys:
Online surveys are the king of side hustles if you are willing to sign up to as many as possible and be patient enough to take the surveys to make you money. It’s a major way some people make money from home, it may come in different ways, some require that you take their surveys as they are sent your way. Some pay you cash while for some you get points which you can trade for your own needs. Example of such survey companies is Swagbucks, pinecone researchopinion post, survey junkie.
Transcription:
You can join companies that are looking for transcribers for their business. A Transcriptionist help transcribe audio recordings into written formats. You can also join platform like Upwork where you advertise yourself as a transcriber and get to bid on transcription jobs posted on their platform. The good thing about doing transcribing as a side hustle is that it requires little skills, all you need is your ability to listen intently and write down what you hear. An example of companies that hire transcribers is Rev
Doshapp is a new app that is still in its beta testing phase but you get paid to do your shopping in participating companies.what is more, you get to make money from other people when they use your referral link to sign up. This means that you can use your Facebook page to invite people to sign up for the service and you get paid for their referral. Dosh app pays you some money when you shop and travel using hotels that are part of their network.
In conclusion, while you may not be able to combine all these activities at once, you can stager the activities by starting out this way
First, combine this set to start off by making money from home, this is because they require minimal effort and do not require much to start off.
They include Using the Dosh app, registering for online surveys, web search evaluator and delivery. As you become more comfortable, you can then add freelance writing, personal shopping, and transcription.
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How to Choose the Right Work at Home Business for You
Creating a work at home business is a great way to balance your family life with your need to earn money. But, you need to seriously sit down and figure out whether you want a product based business or a service based business.
Both product and service based business sell a product but in one case the product is tangible and in another, it’s a skill. In order to determine that let’s look at some differences between a product based business and a services based business.
Product Based Business
When you sell a product it’s usually a tangible item but with the advent of the Internet and digital products, the lines are being blurred. Today, you can offer digital products, courses, books, blogs, videos and information as your product as well as products you can touch like jewelry, art, and so forth. Don’t get tied up in thinking you must create the products. You can become an affiliate or reseller for the right products. To learn about affiliate companies that will easily accept you when starting out, read my post on affiliate network that will accept a newbie blogger.
Services Based Business
When you deal in services the client puts their faith in you and perhaps your staff to perform the services they hired you to do, depending on your skills and experience. These are things like bookkeeping, architecture, legal services; virtual assistance, graphic design and coaching services are all service based business.
You can combine both a service based business model with a product based business model on the Internet and have the best of all worlds. For example, you can promote a book and a course as a life coach offering your coaching services as your higher priced product over the books and courses.
In order to determine what services and/or products you want to promote in your work at home business take the time to do your due diligence.
-Make a List of Your Skills – It’s important to do an inventory of your skills. The first thing you need to do is to write down a list of what you already know how to do. Do you have computer skills, people skills, and knowledge that you can share with or teach others?
-Determine Who You Want to Work With – Do you love a certain group of people and what they do or what they stand for? For example, perhaps you are currently a paralegal at a law firm and you enjoy working with attorneys and helping clients who are dealing with divorce. You can still do that with your own work at home business. It’s important to identify the exact audience you want to work with whether you’re going to promote products, a service or both.
-Make a List of Things You Can Do for Your Audience – Once you have your skillset and audience determined now you can start figuring out how to solve their problems. Identify their pain points of the audience you chose, narrow it down to two or three pain points and then figure out how you can serve them.
-Match Your Skillset with the Services – A key in choosing products, creating products, and offering services is to match your skill set with what is needed to solve the pain points of your audience. When you take the time to do this you’ll find that your work at home business is going to be more successful.
Finally, once you’ve chosen your audience, and your niche within that audience and whether or not you’ll have a product or service based business (or both) you’ll have some other things to work out too. Ask yourself the following questions.
For more on choosing the right niche, get my Free e-book
How Much Startup Cash Do You Have?
The type of business you choose will be affected a lot by how much cash you have to get started. Service based businesses are a lot less expensive to start, depending on your skill set.
Digital products don’t cost much more to develop either, again depending on your own skills and whether or not you’ll need to outsource some of the work such as website design or product creation.
You can start a work at home business for relatively little money compared to a bricks and mortar business. You don’t have the high rent, utilities and so forth to pay for like a bricks and mortar business. Therefore, your startup costs can be a lot lower, but you still have startup costs.
-Business License Fees – You need to get a business license in most states and counties in the USA to run a business from your home. Usually, the cost is very low, so don’t allow yourself to be afraid of finding out the costs and rules in your area.
-Technology Costs – You may already own a computer and the technology that you need, but you may need to invest in some extra software too. Today you can “rent” software on a monthly basis which makes it a 100 percent write off like other direct expenses. For example, it costs $9.99 a month to rent bookkeeping software through Go Daddy. That is a cost you can write off as an expense.
-Contractor Fees – You may need to hire help such as marketing professionals, virtual assistants, web designers and others to help you get started and maintain your business.
But, there are also deductions you can count on when running a business from your home. If you can set up an exclusive area of your home to be the home office you can get quite a large home office deduction that makes everything even less expensive when starting a home business because these expenses you can deduct won’t go up, such as utilities, electricity, internet and so forth.
Another way of determining how much it will cost you to start up is by writing a one-page business plan. You can read how to go about that in my post: you don’t need a 100-page business plan to start one. In that post, you get a free template you can use to write your plan down.
Do You Like Being Upfront or Behind the Scenes?
Some people love the idea of their work at home business being all about them. They name their business with their own name, they are the business. This is common with life coaches, public speakers, and even doctors. They are the expert and the name behind their business. Others prefer to be more behind the scenes and not be a household name.
There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to this. What matters is that you are happy with your choice. Don’t try to push yourself into a position that you don’t like because it will make it hard for you to want to work your business each day. Be honest with your assessments about your tolerance for publicity.
Do not think that if you’re an introvert you can’t create an amazing home based business, you can. The Internet is the perfect place for that. Some very famous introverts are J.K. Rowlings, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. While they didn’t directly start an “internet based” business they all started at home.
How Much Time Do You Have to Devote?
Another important factor is the time it takes to do a business. A service based business essentially trades hours for dollars so you’ll need to have enough hours at a high enough rate to make the money you want to earn. With a product based business, you may be able to earn more without considering the hours as much.
However, with a service based business, you can earn money faster which is why combining a product based business with a service based business is a good option for many who need to start earning faster. For example, you can start with a book, and then offer a service described in the book. This works great with life coaches.
Answering these questions will help you identify what you can realistically do as a work at home business. Once you identify the niche, your resources, and narrow down what you’ll do to earn money in your work at home business.
In addition to these questions, it’s important to understand what goes into the business you want to start and that you have the skills necessary to do it.
Do Your Due Diligence
It’s important to check your facts before you get your heart set on any one business. Once you’ve matched your skills with your audience and identified their pain points now you need to dig in and do some more research.
-How Many People are In Your Target Audience? – This is an important question to answer because if there aren’t enough people in your niche to be profitable then you may need to choose a different audience. If you need to earn 100K a year, you need to know how many people you need to sell to.
-What Price Point Can Your Audience Afford? – In addition to how many people are in your target audience, you need to know how much they can afford to pay for your potential products and / or services. What is your offering worth to them and can they afford to buy them?
-Can You Earn the Profit You Need? – Based on the numbers can you become profitable? This is such a huge issue when starting any business. You have to perform an analysis, called a S.W.O.T. analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Don’t leave a stone unturned in your research to choose the right work at home business. You need to know the good and the bad of each choice that you make before you even get started with your work at home business. While doing your research, consider making use of my Resource library.
Other Things to Consider When Starting a Work At Home Business
There are so many things to consider when choosing a Work At Home business to start. Because you don’t just want to start, you also want to earn a living at it. Outside of the logical things to consider mentioned above there are some emotional factors to think about.
-Do You Feel Passionate About Your Niche? – When you have your own business you have to be willing to live it and breathe it. If you don’t like it, and don’t have a true love for doing it, whatever it is, you will not be happy doing it and you’ll likely not devote the time and effort needed to make it successful. Ensure that your choices come down to something you feel strongly about enough that you can envision yourself doing it every day 40 or more hours a week, happily.
-Does It Match Your Value System? – You may not realize that you even have a value system. But, when you start thinking about the type of people you’ll work closely with in the new business, and their values and moral code, you’ll soon realize that it does make a huge difference. For example, let’s say you want to start a paralegal business from home. Do you want to work with lawyers who defend criminals or who help people through a divorce? If either of these ideas goes against your value system you won’t feel good about it.
-Is it Viable Long-term? – A huge issue with any business is determining whether or not it’s a short lived fad, or a trend, or whether it can hold up long term. There’s nothing wrong with cashing in on a trend, but you want your main business to stand the test of time and last for the next ten or twenty years.
-What’s Your Exit Strategy? – When you work for someone else, you have an exit strategy built in. You pay into social security and usually a company retirement plan and that’s how you live when you stop working. But, when you have your own business while you do pay into and can collect social security, you’re 100 percent responsible for the payments and setting up your own retirement plan. If you create your work at home business right, you can actually sell it for retirement. It’s a real, viable business and you should think of it that way.
Developing a profitable home based business takes just as much work to start as a bricks and mortar business. You still have to do the work by the numbers, and meet the requirements of the law. Plus you want to actually like what you’re doing in the end. After all, it feels good to go to work if you like it, right?
Otherwise, it’s just going to feel like another job that causes stress in your life and makes you want to run away. If you do the work necessary to choose the right business for you, you’ll love it, feel motivated every single day, and end up happier in the end. You’ll have true time and money freedom with the right work at home business.
When you start any business it’s important, to be honest with yourself about what it takes to get things done. Keep track of the time, money and resources that you use so that you can project your future needs. Keeping the books balanced will help you keep your business on track.
-TimeFreedom – Knowing how much time you’ll really need to spend on your business is important. If you only have 2 hours a day to spend, you’ll need to ensure that you pick the right business to be in.
-MoneyFreedom – Keeping track with a bookkeeping system is important because if you don’t have money to pay your taxes and expenses you’ll go out of business.
-Personal Freedom – One of the best things about a work at home business is that you can adjust the time you spend on your business so that it works better with your life. However, sometimes you have to put the business first. If you always choose family and friends over your business, your business will fail.
By understanding the myths about working at home, you know – the sitting on the beach with your feet in the sand while your business magically generates millions of dollars is a fantasy. Now you can set up a more realistic business model that will be successful for you.
Marketing Matters
No matter what type of business you choose to run from home, don’t be shy about it. Once you make the decision, be proud of it. Tell everyone you know about your new business. Teach other people about your working hours so that they respect your time, project the type of professional image that you want people to see you as, and don’t hide. For doubters, show them the money.
-Website – Home based businesses even more than bricks and mortar business need a website. That is your storefront. You need to create an awesome storefront to market your business.
-Business Cards – Make some business cards to help you get the word out in person and locally. You can put business cards on tables, bulletin boards and in the hands of people you meet every day.
-Networking – Don’t forget that you can network online too with social media groups and forums. You don’t have to walk up to someone in person; you can instead engage people online to network.
Running your WAH business can be very satisfying if you go into it with your eyes wide open. Determine the best business for you based on facts, not myths. Craft a plan of action to get your business up and running and be proud that you’re a WAH business. After all, if you plan it right, you’ll have the business of your dreams plus the time to enjoy your life.
Ultimate Guide to starting a Drop shipping business
Drop shipping.
Drop-shipping is a form of business that allows you to list products that you don’t have but know where to find, you are kind of like the middleman who knows how to source for products and knows how to deliver it to the person who needs it, while you make a nice profit after your cost of sales.
In the product industry you have the following as the supply chain from: Product manufacture———–Wholesaler ————-Retailer ——–Consumer
Drop-shipping does not appear here because it’s a service, not a role, a drop-shipper can also be the manufacturer of a product, meaning that when you manufacture your own products and sell to the final consumer you are also drop shipping for your own products. A drop shipping merchant is that person that acts as a go-between, between the Manufacturer or Wholesaler and the final consumer.
A drop-shipping merchant, in this case, is responsible for finding the products, listing it on his site and selling to the final consumer. The manufacturer or wholesaler then ships it to the person who bought it.
HOW DROP SHIPPING WORKS
-Mr. Bon wants to purchase a new battery for his phone, he goes to Mr. Dav’s Ecommerce shop and places an order and makes a payment.
-Mr. Dav receives the order and payment and then, in turn, places an order with his suppliers which could either be the manufacturer or a wholesaler.
-When the supplier receives the order, he processes and fulfills and ships to the buyer. He then gives a tracking number to the Drop shipping Merchant who owns the eCommerce store
-The Drop-shipping merchant then informs the buyer that his order is on the way.
-When the buyer receives the goods, it’s only the logo of the drop shipping merchant he is aware of, the manufacturers or wholesaler, in this case, is invisible to him.
