Business Ideas | Online Home Business Ideas

In this article I'm going to give you some online home business ideas to help you understand the different ways to make money online. There's more than one way to make money online, despite what some people will tell you. The one thing that is true though is that it's easiest to make money online when you build up multiple streams of income .

Online Home Business Ideas - Retail

One of the first things people think of when coming up with online home business ideas is "What can I sell?". There were a lot of people that made it big with eBay by retailing, so many people try and take this approach now. While it's not impossible to make money on eBay now, their high fees and competitive prices mean that it's hard for people to get started without having masses of discount stock or rare items.

Retailing online with your own website is an option, and not as hard as it sounds. When you are selling from your own website you avoid the fees from places like eBay and Amazon, but you do have to learn to drive traffic to your site and convert that traffic in to sales. This really isn't that hard to learn, and once you have those skills you can apply them to any niche for any product, building up multiple streams of income.

What to sell? Some people have a product idea or passion and choose to sell items around that idea. Others choose to build multiple websites that get on the first page of google for related keywords and sell affiliate products for those niches. There's also network marketing or multi-tier affiliate marketing which allows you to not only sell the products at a commission but gives you a percentage of the volume of those you recruit into the business too.

Start with a product that you know well and can write about (as your website will need content to start getting traffic) and learn how to drive traffic and convert that traffic in to sales. You can then repeat the process with other products in the same niche, building up your streams of income from the one site, or you can make more sites for different niches.

With retailing online you need to remember that in order to keep making money, you need to keep making sales. This can be a tough road to go down which is why I highly suggest that you look at finding a company that not only give you good commission for selling their product, but encourage you to build a team of people that also sell the product, creating leverage for you. This now means that instead of just trying to get more and more traffic to your site, you can help others start selling and get rewarded for doing so.

Online Home Business Ideas - Recruiting

Another online home business idea is to build your business around just recruiting people in to your network marketing business. This approach can, in theory, allow you to build a larger income faster, but you need to be able to demonstrate to those people that you can help them make money, so it's important that you have some training in place or can train them yourself so that they can start to recruit others in to their business.

One thing that seems to be happening too much online, is that people are so caught up in recruiting people and getting those people to recruit people that they forget there's actually a product to sell. If you are going to go down the road of heavily recruiting people, make sure the people you recruit are genuinely interested in the product and use it themselves. Otherwise it's going to be really tough for them to build a business when their heart is not in the product. By recruiting people that will use and love the product you find yourself with a happy team and bank account.

Online Home Business Ideas - Consulting

Another online home business idea is to start consulting on something you know about. By setting up a website and generating targeted traffic of those looking for your services you can start to charge people for the consulting you offer. You can do these by phone, in person (although limited by location) or webinar.

The benefit to this is that you get to teach people about something you know (and are probably interested in) but the downside is that there is not much leverage, unless you train up staff to do the consulting for you. Most likely you will be getting paid for the hours you put in, which is just like a job...

So what's the best online home business idea- a combination of the three?

As I said earlier, the easiest way to make a lot of money online is by building multiple streams of income through multiple products, niches, team members and approaches. This doesn't mean spreading yourself too thin, but rather learning the basic skills that can apply to multiple, profitable income streams.

The example that I'm about to give you is one that I am striving to help more people to achieve, so that they can have a solid home business, that provides a genuine service to the world and can in turn help others do the same, creating leverage through a team.

Learn how to set up a profitable website that gets traffic, leads and conversions > Start to recruit people that you can show how to do the same > Now that you have experience in getting results you can charge people for your own consulting.

All of these areas take the same set of skills - website, traffic, leads, conversions. By working on these core skills you can build a well rounded business and multiply your income streams.