Top 4 Legitimate Home-Based Businesses Available Online

It wasn't always as easy to start a legitimate home-based business as it is now with the advent of internet. There are numerous home-based businesses out there but the sad part is that there are even more scams. If you can weed out those scams, the possibilities of legitimate home-based businesses are limitless. I am sure that you know several such success stories where people started their home-based business and went on to become successful millionaires.

In this article I am going to list top 4 legitimate home-based business opportunities available on the internet that can be started with little or no capital.

Information Product Promotion

People are hungry for information. There are thousands of paid information products available on the internet and marketers promote them every day as their full time business. If you are an expert on a topic, you can create your own product or you can promote other people's products as an affiliate. Many websites provide affiliate programs where you can promote products created by other people and earn 30% to even 90% commission. ClickBank is one such website that provides a variety of good quality product that sometimes can also be very easy to sell because all the work from developing a product to creating a sales page has already been done by experts and all you have to do is send visitors to the sales page through your affiliate link. This is probably one of the most profitable legitimate home-based businesses.

Services

There is a huge market on the internet for service providers and freelancers. If you have skills you can leverage on your entrepreneurial drive such as graphic designing, copywriting, web development or maybe you are a research expert - you will always be able to find a huge demand for your services.

Consultation

If you are an expert, having a legitimate home-based business should be no problem for you - you can provide your expert advice through consultation services. For instance if you are a child psychology expert or a business reputation management expert, you'll find that there are plenty of people out there who need your expert advice and are very willing to pay for it. Usually social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are great places to build credibility and find clients who need your help. Having a business website and writing for different publishing networks as an expert is a great way to promote your consultation business.

Blogging for Money

The best thing about making money with blogging is that you do not have to be an expert on your topics. Some bloggers would disagree with this but the fact is that there are many well monetized blogs that are not maintained by experts. You can monetize a blog by contextual and banner advertising using programs like Google AdSense. Lead based CPA offers - provided by sites like NeverBlueADS are also great for monetizing a blog. Another great way to monetize a blog is by posting paid reviews for other websites. There are different websites that can help you find clients who want to buy reviews on your blog. SponsoredReviews is one such service but there are many more out there. Last but not the least, you can promote affiliate products from your blog by posting reviews with your affiliate links. These are some of the reasons why blogging has gained so much popularity as one of the legitimate home-based businesses today.

Ses Peroy manages several websites on different topics such as Legitimate Home-Based Business and many others. She is passionate in helping others through community service and building educational sites for others to learn from.

Setting a Plan to Make Money Blogging

The idea that most people have is to make money blogging, despite what many of you'll say about just being online to have a bit of find by letting other people know your thoughts and feelings, after all, there's a number of social media sites you can use to do that. So what's your strategy?

In this article we're going to have a look at a few of the crucial things to think about when planning your strategy in order to make money blogging.

What ways can you use to make money blogging?

First off you have to think about what you're going to be writing about as some topics, or niches, lend themselves more to some of the blog monetization methods that are about.

For instance, if you have a blog that has health as a broad topic you're going to have more opportunities to find affiliate products to use in conjunction with it. If you narrow that health niche down to something like 'weight loss for the over 30's' you'll tend to find that you get a tighter match between your blog posts and the AdSense ads being displayed.

If, however, you go to niche you may find that none of the main blog monetization methods are an option, and you have to create your own product in order to make money blogging.

What you want to write about is going to be vital to how you go about trying to make money blogging. Here are a few of the most common blog monetization methods, and a couple you may not know about.

Google AdSense: most people know about this method. While still popular, mostly due to the fact that it's so easy to setup and forget about, this method isn't as effective for most people as it once was.

People seem to have developed an 'ad blindness' when it comes to the usual places that you'd place your Google AdSense ads, so they aren't showing the same sort of returns as they were in the early to mid 'naughty's.

Still, making sure that any fresh content you add is very keyword orientated may make the ads more relevant and clickable, and with them being so easy to install, and see as having fresh content that's keyword orientated is a must, there's really nothing to lose by using it as one of your blog monetization methods.

Using contextual ads: this is a slightly less obtrusive method that may work better for you. The contextual ads look like normal hyperlinks in your blog post, but, they actually show ads as the reader passes the mouse over them.

This is great if it links a relevant ad to something that the reader is looking at, at that moment; the fresher it is in the mind the more likely they are to click through.

Using CPA offers: this method lets you get paid for people passing on a certain amount of personal information in exchange for a free gift or product. The amount you get paid is linked to the amount of information they have to giveaway i.e. you get far less for someone passing on a zip code than you do if they complete a survey.

One thing that can stop this from being the 'make money blogging' strategy of choice for many people is the fact that some of the CPA networks can be difficult to get approved to join.

Monetize your blog by becoming an affiliate and promoting other people's products. There are almost as many minuses about doing affiliate marketing as there are pluses - but only almost.

The biggest pluses about affiliate marketing are that you have a product in place to promote, the affiliate networks are nowhere near as difficult to be accepted into as the CPA networks, there's no fulfilment problems for you to worry about, and you don't have to deal with customers.

The big draw backs if you want to make money blogging and choose affiliate marketing are; the fact that you don't make 100% commission on the sales; the product could disappear at anytime, leaving you to look for another to promote; the fact that you aren't growing a buyers list; and you may have hundreds of other people to compete against to make your commission.

Create and sell your own product: this is possibly the only option if you decide to go for an obscure niche, but it has many benefits.

Unlike affiliate marketing you can be growing a list of buyers so that you can contact them when your next product is available, and you can keep all of the profits. You may decide to put it on one of the affiliate networks and have other people sell it.

What's the downside to creating your own product? You have to either spend the time, or the money, to get it developed. It may not be successful. If you join an affiliate network to sell it you'll be paying out up to 75% in commission per sale, but, just think of it this way, you aren't having to make those sales, and probably never would have sold to those people, so you're actually making a minimum of 25% because of those affiliates.

Make money blogging by getting people to download files. Ok, that sounds like it's going to be a scam of some type but, there are a number of (legitimate) file sharing sites where you'll be paid when people download from them. So, if you have a free product to give away you can put it on one of these sites and make money giving it away.

Using shortened URLs to make money blogging. There a number of companies that let you shorten long URL's, and they are especially good where you have a limited space to send a message e.g. Twitter, and some have come up with an interesting new idea.

Some of the places will show an ad before sending the people off to the site you're redirecting them to in the shortened URL. They don't have to sign up for anything in order for you to get paid, and they can press a button to move quickly past the advert.

One thing you could try is to send people, via the shortened URL, to the place where they're going to download your free gift. They get something for nothing and you get paid in two ways.

And there we have it, just a few ways for you to make money blogging.

Start with a plan of what you're going to be providing fresh content on, and then see what blog monetization methods are open to you. Remember, the wider the niche the more options you have open to you, but the tighter the niche the more targeted the buyers are likely to be.

So there you are there are always options available to make money blogging.

Do you have what it takes to be a sucessful Blogger?