Monday, August 24, 2009

Great Home Based Business Opportunities To Overcome A Bad Economy

By Danielle Martensen

Lots of people are trying to find methods for adding to their income in the lousy economy, whether it's because they lost their job or their wages were frozen. Home based business opportunities are a popular solution, but some people avoid them because they think the cost or the difficulty would be too high. Because of reasonably priced and value added web hosting, home business opportunities are within reach for anyone with a little bit of time and less than five hundred dollars to invest.

Your first step in taking advantage of home based business opportunities is to decide what type of business you want. Consulting and direct sales are good choices for most people.

Consulting is one of the easiest home based business opportunities if you have knowledge in any specific area of any kind. Become a consultant in your field and people will look to you as an expert and a problem solver. Consultants are increasingly relied on to solve many problems rather than hiring employees to fulfill tasks.

Another of the best home based business opportunities is direct sales. Having a website is much more professional than the old method of direct sales, a paper catalog, although some people combine both efforts. Direct sales is a distribution method for all types of products and services, from cosmetics to home goods to education courses. Affiliate marketing is a new twist on direct sales that's hugely popular at the moment.

Whether you're doing direct sales, consulting or some other kind of home base business opportunity, you need a website to look professional. Reserve a domain name, put up a website and you're in business!

If you're a computer genius you may not need more than basic web hosting, which is very inexpensive, but many people need help designing their sites, and web hosts will do this for you. Some of them rely on templates that you work with yourself through tutorials, while others will custom design a site for you. If you look around carefully you can find a good web host that does everything you need for only a couple hundred dollars a month. One thing to keep in mind is outfitting your site with a shopping cart, especially if you're doing direct sales. People have come to expect this service and you won't be as competitive without one.

When your website has been launched, you need to promote it, which can be done in one of several ways. Internet advertising, regular advertising, or surreptitious promotion through forums, sigs, e-mail lists, comments or social networks will all accomplish this goal. You can do the latter yourself or hire people to do it for you through one of the freelancer websites like Get A Freelancer or Elance.

Professional looking websites are the key to successful home based business opportunities. The good news is that they don't cost much and don't take much time to get started. You may find you're doing so well with one of your home based business opportunities that you're ready to try another. - 16890

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