At one time, starting a business involved things like stock, employees, and in most cases, renting premises to run things from. That’s all changed thanks to the Internet. More and more home-based businesses are popping up. Many of them you can act out online using your existing means, and you don’t need to raise anything like the capital needed to run a typical brick-and-mortar outfit. 

To start your home-based business, this post walks you through each step from conceiving an idea to writing sales copy and driving valuable targeted potential customers to your website. You’ll notice when it comes to building a website, I go straight in and recommend WordPress. That’s simply because it’s a great platform that lets anyone build pretty much any type of website, for free, and with little to no web dev skills to their name. Plus, you can create all of the business types mentioned on this page on the WordPress platform. 

With that, let’s get started.

Home-Based Businesses You Can Start Today

If you haven’t seen any business ideas that stand out to you yet, take a look at the following examples. Sell your homemade products If you make things already, why not turn the fruits of your labor into a business? Whether you make candles, cosmetics, hot sauce, or ceramics, you can start selling on your own branded storefront. Without any site-building experience, you build a fully operational e-commerce store with a WordPress WooCommerce plugin. Buy products in bulk to sell Importing products in bulk and selling individually for a profit is a tried-and-tested business model. Are you invested in a niche and know just the right products for your target customers? Perhaps you’ve been on holiday and seen something great that’s not readily available in your home country. If you can find underrepresented products that are easy to ship and store, such as bamboo straws or jewelry, this is the start of a viable business idea. Just make sure you’ve got space for an inventory at home. For online retailers working from home, managing inventory efficiently is becoming ever more critical. The Inventory Turnover Ratio is very useful to understand how much you need to keep on hand, and how many times you’ll need to restock during a given period. Start an e-commerce store without any stock With the drop shipping business model, you don’t need an inventory of stock at home. Instead, a third party like Amazon, or Alibaba stores and ships products for you. That just leaves marketing and customer service as your main responsibilities. Start a blog and monetize itStarting a blog and writing about the things you love, and use is a great way to make money. If you’ve been wondering how influencers and content creators create a sustainable income from their blogs, it’s likely due to their affiliate marketing efforts.  You can recommend products, and receive a commission when people click on your link and buy them. Creating content about something you love can be an exhilarating process giving you the flexibility to do what you love, on your own terms.Sell your servicesRather than sell products from home, you can sell your services (or expertise). Many traditional service-based businesses made the switch to online including:Graphic designersPersonal trainingYoga instructorOnline TutoringMarketingVirtual AssistantCreate a Digital Product or CourseGo one extra and ‘productize your service’. Create digital products or courses to package up your expertise. Some ideas include merchandise, industry insights, licensable assets like music or photos, digital templates, and ebooks. Best of all, since most of these products are digital, they won’t crowd your house with stock.