online business idea

12 Home Business Ideas You Can Start for Cheap

1. Cleaning Service Offices, residences, retail, or restaurants are all potential customers if you want to start a cleaning service. You can even put a unique spin on it by offering “green cleaning.” For the cost of some quality cleaning products and supplies, you can get your first client as soon as you can make a Costco run. Cleaning service businesses typically don’t require a lot of advertising. When you do really good work, word-of-mouth referrals take care of new business for you. 2. Online Writing Services No list of home business ideas would be complete without mentioning online writing services. Copy editing, ghostwriting, and copywriting are super important in today’s online world of information. Companies from around the world rely on the service of writers to get them noticed in a sea of content. Think you need a lot of education and experience to start a writing career? Think again. You can start a freelance writing career with no prior experience. 3. Event Planner Some people just have event planning in their bloods (I, am not one of them). Taking care of the details of an important day and making sure everything goes off without a hitch, is what party planners are known for. Thanks to their fire-putting-out capabilities and knack for getting things done, people are willing to pay big bucks for a party planner who takes the reins while letting them actually enjoy their event. There are some great resources out there about starting your own event planning business from the ground up. 4. Household Organizer The saying, “Cluttered desk, cluttered mind,” are words I live by when working from home. The same can be said about running a household and having everything in a state of disarray negatively affecting how smoothly your days go. It’s no secret that organization leads to productivity, but getting (and staying organized) just isn’t everyone’s forte. If you’ve got a knack for order and can help others clear the clutter, you’ve got a home business you can start for dirt cheap. (Bonus points when you let clients know about Amazon’s trade-in program which allows them to get rid of their stuff and earn money back!). 5. Grocery Delivery Wouldn’t it be great if your car paid for itself? Well, if you use it to be a grocery deliverer, it just might! There’s a reason why services like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Amazon Flex have soared in popularity, people love the on-demand economy and convenience of getting things done when they need it. Cash in on the craze and start a grocery delivery business. This kind of service is easy to market towards busy parents, small business owners, and elderly or disabled individuals who might otherwise have difficulty getting their shopping done (bonus ideas: offer other errand running services to increase revenue!) 6. Property Manager I once filled in as a property manager for about three months while a former landlord (and good friend!) was away on personal business. Although she had just a handful of properties to her name and about a dozen tenants, I stayed pretty busy keeping up with collecting rent, fielding calls, showing vacant properties, and setting up work orders for repairs. Property owners need highly organized and efficient individuals to handle the day-to-day operations of having income-producing properties. 7. Social Media Consultant You’re going to pin, tweet, post, snap, and update anyway, so why not get paid for your expertise? Social media shows no signs of slowing down, in fact, there seems to be a new platform popping up every week. And that’s a lot of social media to handle. That’s why companies rely on social media savvy individuals to keep up with multiple accounts and help them stay relevant. If you can produce share-worthy content and know how to increase social interaction, you’re on your way to what can be a lucrative social media consultant business! 8. eBook Author Writing an eBook isn’t as hard as you think. The best part of becoming an eBook author is that you literally can earn money while you sleep (or eat, or shop, or any other time!). With eBooks, you do the work once and get paid over and over again. Deciding on a topic and writing your first eBook can be done in a month’s time, even if you have a full-time job and other daily commitments. The best way to earn money as a eBook author is to build up a portfolio of multiple books. The more you have, the more passive income you’ll generate! 9. Resume Writer Perfecting your resume is tough, but when you do, it can open many more doors than an outdated or out of touch one ever could. Job seekers recognize the power of a well-crafted resume and are turning to professionals to help them write an effective resume or CV that gets them an interview. There are tons of these kinds of gigs listed on the various freelance marketplaces. Networking on LinkedIn is also a great way to get the word out about your services and start securing work. 10. Virtual Assistant There’s really no limit to what a virtual assistant may be tasked with. Much of a VAs responsibilities will largely depend on the client’s line of business and needs. But if you’re a jack or jill of all trades, keep calm under pressure, and are generally pretty good at prioritizing and getting things done, you just might be the perfect VA. This profession has exploded in popularity in recent years. And now is as good as time as any to set yourself up as a virtual assistant and help busy professionals get more done in a day. 11. Blog Running a blog is very much the same as running a business. While you might not see a ton of money rolling in right away, with the right monetization strategies in place, you can eventually make a living blogging and grow it into your very own personal brand. The startup costs are pretty small and between affiliate marketing, ad networks, sponsored posts, and other direct ad sales, there’s many ways to produce income with your blog. 12. Get Crafty Crafting is big business! Just look at all the successful Etsy sellers raking in six figures every year. Etsy aside, there are no shortages of sites where you can start selling your crafts today. You don’t need a ton of inventory to get started, just enough to take some really good pictures and set up shop on whichever sites you choose. Many people start out selling part time and end up turning their hobby into a full-time home-based business.

Strategies to Help You Sell More Products Online

The great thing about living and working in the digital age is the ability to connect directly with your customers online. And social media sites are one of the most effective ways to access potential customers. As long as you know how to make your status updates, tweets, and Instagram or Pinterest photos stand out from the rest, you can lure in potential new clients and generate more sales for your online business.

Be Consistent in Terms of How Often You Post Updates

If you plan on using social media to target new customers, the key is consistency. You need to have a schedule that you can follow easily for posting new updates. If you are only posting sporadically on the other hand, you will not be able to generate enough of a buzz to get people interested in what you are doing, and you will not be able to reach the audience that you need to target in order to get more people to buy your products or services.

Be Consistent in Terms of the Subject of Your Posts

Another key component to a successful social media marketing campaign is the ability to be consistent when it comes to the subject of your posts. Rather than posting about one product or service in the morning and then promoting another product or service in a completely different category a mere few hours later, try to focus in on just one product or one service and then promote it consistently for a period of time. This will help you reach new clients more effectively than spreading your message too thin.

Keep Blogging

In addition to helping you with your SEO campaign, blogging on a regular basis also ensures that fresh content will always be available on your website. And by keeping your website fresh with new information and ideas, you will be proving to your audience that your business is on top of the latest and best trends and that you are knowledgeable and you work hard every day to stay ahead of the competition. By letting your blog stagnate, on the other hand, your customers will fail to realise just how good you are at what you do and they may forget about you altogether.

Use Images and Videos Wherever Possible

From your blogs to your social media updates, try to incorporate many graphical elements that are eye-catching and attention grabbing, especially if you use Instagram and Pinterest to get your message out there. Professional product photographs, for example, will ensure that customers see every detail of your high quality items, whereas videos can be a great way to show how knowledgeable you are or how effective your products are.

Post Statuses at the Most Opportune Times

People seem to use their social media pages more during specific hours of the day, such as during the lunch hour or after getting home from work, when they can relax and take some time to connect. Therefore, post your updates during these hours, as you increase the odds of more people seeing them.

Earn Money Through Buy and Sell Online

Online marketing is without a doubt the largest money making industry on the Internet today. Over the years, different tools for online marketing have emerged trying to outdo one after another. Now you can do online niche marketing, or you can use search engine marketing, and you can even use PPC and social media marketing. But before any of all these, there was the old fashioned way to earn money through buy and sell online.

When you talk about buy and sell online, EBay and Amazon will always come to mind. Most likely, they were the ones which started it all. At that time, all you have to do is to post on EBay or Amazon anything of value that you wanted to sell. It’s not even hard to think of anything to buy and sell because practically almost anything can be auctioned online. It’s really easy to earn money through buy and sell online during those days.

The success of online buy and sell schemes lives on until now. It has become even better with the association of other forms of online marketing. The tactics and strategies have reached the next level. The potential to earn money through buy and sell online is even higher. There has been a tremendous improvement in ways on how to do the business. With the proper incorporation of other internet marketing tools like PPC and social media marketing, success is undoubtedly just around the corner. The cyber industry which is already huge is still growing and definitely EBay, Amazon, and others of the same genre are here to stay.

In order to be successful in online buy and sell business, you just need to determine your area of focus. Study the needs of the market and be very diligent in finding items to add in your buy and sell inventory. Focus on a particular niche (ex. gadgets, automotive parts, household items, etc) and make a website or a blog that will look for potential buyers online. You may also want to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in order to increase the traffic of your website. More traffic means wider market reach. And wider market reach means more potential buyers.