I was always on the lookout for home business ideas with low startup costs. It started back in the 90’s when I discovered eBay. eBay is a great place to make a little extra cash by selling stuff from your home. This is where it started for me. I opened an account with the auction site and started selling things from my house which I didn’t need any more.
It wasn’t a business, as such, in the first instance. But eventually it led me to look for other home business ideas with low startup costs.
Home Business Ideas With Low Startup Costs – eBay
Having an eBay account does open some doors to home business ideas with low startup costs. You can obviously sell your unwanted junk, but you can also sell anything you can find for cheap. From selling stuff in my house, I used my then hobby, which was browsing car boot sales and charity shops, to find bargains to sell. Anyone can do this and you can even use the site itself to find how much things are worth.
Simply use the advanced search tool in the top right hand corner of the site. This little tool lets you find items like the ones you’re looking at (to sell), and determine whether they are even worth buying. Click on the link (you’ll need an account to use this feature). You’ll get a drop down menu. Then type in the description of your item and click on the box underneath for completed listings.
Home Business Ideas With Low Startup Costs – eBay Misspell Search
If trawling through car boot sales, charity shops and antiques fairs isn’t your idea of a good time, you can find items on the auction site itself to sell on for a profit. This little tool lets you find misspelled items which are sitting on the listings in eBay, and which you can buy and then re-list with a better title.
You’re basically finding items which have been badly listed on eBay. Because of a misspelling, or typo, people aren’t finding the item and hence not bidding on it. Because of this, you can find bargains which sell for much less then they’re worth. Of course, you need to find items with few bids and a low starting price too.
You can even use this strategy to find items for yourself – never pay full price again! Checkout my article on how to start a profitable eBay business, which covers this strategy in more depth.
Home Business Ideas With Low Startup Costs – Digital Products
After playing around with this little strategy for a while, and making some nice little sales, I decided it wasn’t going anywhere. It was far too time consuming and I wasn’t making enough for the effort I had been putting in. It did work and if you enjoy what you’re doing, it’s a nice little extra income. But I wanted something bigger.
I found the strategy from an eBook I had purchased on eBay. The eBook seemed like the perfect business model to me. It was downloadable, automated and could be accessed from anywhere globally. This made sense for a business: automated income from selling digital and downloadable products.
After some wasted time trying to make my own products, I found a great business model known as affiliate marketing. This strategy lets anyone use other people’s products and sell over the internet. Digital products in particular offered 40% commissions. This was the business model I wanted. You can work from anywhere and start from very little cost.
I found a training and education platform which lets anyone sell a range of digital products from an online sales platform and learn multiple online advertising strategies. You can access here through this free video series. What’s great about this business model is you can earn 40% commissions from a range of products which is delivered over the internet automatically. You don’t need to personally sell anything or speak to any customers.
Home Business Ideas With Low Startup Costs – Affiliate Marketing
So how does this business idea work and what’s involved? As explained in the video series, you’ll be able to access a range of digital products which you can market online as an affiliate. Because products are digital, anyone globally can access them which means you’ll be able to work from anywhere and promote products anywhere globally too.
You’ll be learning aspects of online marketing such as paid advertising and content creation. This means you can choose your own marketing methods to suit your budget and preferences. If you don’t have much time, you can choose paid advertising. Or, you might prefer to create content online which is a cheaper option.
Home Business Ideas With Low Startup Costs – Pay Per Click Advertising
You don’t need to become a blogger to earn an extra income from affiliate marketing. Many affiliates earn income by sending website traffic directly to other people’s products. They do this by learning how to use pay per click advertising and then automating their campaigns. This is probably the quickest way to build a profitable internet based business.
However, there is a lot of testing and measuring involved in running an advertising campaign. Once a campaign is successful though, you can simply leave it running, making sales for you which are delivered by the product owners.
Affiliate marketing lets you focus only on the traffic generation towards a product or product range. The product delivery and back end of the business is then fulfilled by another company. It’s a great way to start a business which lets you focus on only the front end marketing, without having to be personally involved in the back-end delivery of products and customer service part of a business.