I spent years searching for smart earning ideas from home. Initially I used ebay to sell items I had around the house. Then I moved on to selling items from charity shops and car boots sales. Before long my house was filled with stuff I was buying from the charity shops and car boot sales!
Earning Ideas From Home – Ebay
I went on to discover another method of selling on ebay which I share in my article how to start a profitable ebay business. This involved finding items on the auction site itself which were badly listed. Because they were badly listed not many people were bidding on the items so I could land a bargain! By re-selling the item with a much better listing, correct (and more) keywords in the title and much better pictures, I made a profit almost on every item. At the very least I would break even.
It’s a great little method and you can start from a very little amount. Check out the full article here. While I was doing this I was also on the lookout for other online earning ideas from home. I was loving the idea of working from home from the computer.
Earning Ideas From Home – Downloadable Products
I had been working away doing this method for a while. My room was filled with stuff and although I was earning money on items, it took a lot of time and energy to find the bargains, relist them, and weigh items at the post office ready to send out. I seemed to be working all day at times and not really getting anywhere. I was still effectively trading time for money, even though I had some leverage as I bought and sold increasingly higher value items as I progressed.
I had found the initial strategy while I was searching ebay for “how to” business ideas. But it was the simplicity of the downloadable product which really struck me as the most perfect business system! I had bought the item from ebay and was able to download it instantly. No-one had to post anything out and the process was completely automated.
Autopilot Business From Home
I tried several other online courses too, and learned how to build websites, make ebooks and create the online checkout process. I was constantly searching for the best earning ideas from home. An autopilot money making machine was what I had in mind! Selling things on autopilot seemed to me the most perfect business model. It was like an online vending machine!
It wasn’t until several years later that I really knew the full potential of this and it was after a lot of trial and error. The basis of it was to create a website which sold things automatically. If I could do that, I thought, I would have it made! This led me to a business model known as affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing lets anyone promote and sell other people’s products over the internet. You can do this simply by joining an affiliate program and getting an affiliate link. You then use this link in online advertising, on your website and basically anywhere you can put it!
When someone uses your link to buy a product from a website, you earn a commission. Affiliate marketing is the strategy I was trying to use. But I was trying to do it all on my own! That’s why it took so long! I was trying to create my own products, build my own websites and learn how to generate traffic all by myself! Looking back I could have done with a future version of me travelling backwards in time to warn me of all the time I was going to be wasting! But still, I learned a lot, even if I could have learned quicker by following a better system.
Affiliate Marketing – Earning Opportunties From Home
The problem with my ebay business was that I was caught up in it. It was a time heavy system. You can however, generate more leverage by choosing increasingly more valuable products. This is the way to grow it. However, by the time I realised that I was on to another business model – affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing seemed better because it was scalable. I could set up a website and grow it to ultimately work by itself generating leads through a sales funnel (see done for you sales funnel). Plus, I could advertise a pre made landing page to generate sales. I didn’t even need a website. If I had only known all this when I was building websites every week and not selling anything!
The Best Business Model
I tried and failed with affiliate marketing for a long time. I was picking digital products from clickbank and then trying to sell them on my website. The thing was I didn’t get any traffic for ages because I didn’t know how to generate traffic. At first I thought I could just throw up a website and people would come. “If you build it they will come” kind of mentality. Little did I know that the Field Of Dreams rhetoric doesn’t work when it comes to websites! When I did eventually come to getting traffic I was only selling the occasional product. Not really enough to make it work. I was almost ready to look elsewhere for other, less difficult earning ideas from home.
Although there’s lots of different strategies online to build a profitable online business, one thing which all successful online marketers agree on is that building a list of subscribers is the way to go. And the fastest way to do this is with paid traffic. But you also need the right products to promote to your list.
The ‘Right’ Products
The ‘right’ products could be anything. So long as your traffic is a suitable match. However, you will earn substantially more if you choose a good business model. This means choosing digital products because they pay more (around 40% - much more than physical products). You can also pick products which offer:
- Subscriptions – Which continue to pay you over and over for the duration of a membership
- High Ticket items – Let you earn more for each sale
- Up-sells – Choose products which reward the affiliate for later sales closed by the company
- Multi-tier products – Allow you to earn from a team of affiliates whom you have referred.
With the right products, training, an email list and paid advertising, anyone can build a successful online business with no previous experience. Learn how you can access all the tools, products and training needed to build you own online business from scratch here.