By Rose Wheeler
One positive thing that the pandemic brought us was the increase in home-based business opportunities. With remote working opportunities rising, more people are realizing that they have the resources and ability to do their jobs from home.
It can be freeing to forgo the traditional 9-to-5 office routine while also freeing up time for family and reclaiming hours spent commuting with a new home-based schedule.
Here are some of our favorite home business ideas to pursue this year.
1. Start a service-based online business
A service-based online company is a great business to run from home. The overhead cost is pretty much $0 (all you need is an internet connection, applicable software, and your natural talents). You won’t need to invest in or maintain an inventory of products, though you will want to establish boundaries to protect your time; time is money, after all.
Some of the most streamlined and best home businesses are run by creative professionals. Are you a pro at copywriting? You can start crafting marketing copy for busy small business owners. Do you have professional graphic design skills? Start a design business where you can create branding, websites, or sell design kits to clients. Are you a marketing whiz? Is consulting your strong point? Launch a business helping entrepreneurs with marketing strategy or content marketing, or coach them to achieve their sales goals.
You can sell and provide your services entirely online, either by building a referral-based business, cold pitching, networking, and even using platforms such as Upwork or Fiverr to book gigs.
While there is some uplift in networking and cultivating clients, booking just a few regular clients for ongoing projects or monthly retainers will help keep you in business.
2. Blogging
There’s always room for a niche blogger, so if you enjoy writing, starting your own blog is a great home business idea. Find a topic you are truly passionate about and bring it to an equally interested audience.
You can, of course, charge for subscriptions, but the best way to make money blogging is by exploring avenues for monetization and ad revenue. Programs such as Google AdSense will place ads on your site and pay you when people click on them. You can also partner with verified merchants to advertise their products, and when someone clicks through your link to make a purchase, you get a percentage of the sale.
Of course, you will need a robust audience to make much of a profit, but you can build traffic by having a highly focused niche, engaging in digital marketing, and refining your SEO.
3. Turn craftiness into cash
Whether it's sewing, painting, 3D printing, jewelry making, or something else entirely, there is a huge market for handmade creations and a desire to support small artisans. If you have that crafty gene, you can look into selling your creations for cash online and running your business from home.
Marketplaces such as Etsy allow you to market and sell your creations in a dedicated space while controlling your branding and ideals.
4. Take over an existing online store
If you can't come up with a work-from-home idea that suits your skills, you can always look into buying and taking over an existing e-commerce business. You can slide into the entrepreneur role and turn it into your own successful home business. This way you can benefit from the cash flow of an existing at-home business without the uncertainty of building a brand.
Of course, this route does require a good chunk of cash upfront, but if you have the savings, it's a low-risk avenue to achieving a home-based business. There are even marketplaces set up already for this very purpose, such as Shopify's Exchange, where you can buy a functioning and profitable online store.
5. Do bookkeeping or accounting
You don’t need to physically be in an office to run numbers, and many small businesses prefer to outsource their accounting.
If you’re interested in bookkeeping, you don’t even need to be a full CPA—just take a bookkeeping course for certification from an accredited institution such as the National Association of Certified Public Bookkeepers (NACPB).
You can maintain a roster of business clients to run payroll, taxes, etc. all from your home office. You can even focus on doing bookkeeping for freelancers or entrepreneurs.
6. Bulk reselling
©David- Adobe Stock
Another small business you can run from your home is reselling items. You can look into buying in bulk from vendors and selling the products individually at a profit.
Reselling is a great way to hone in on a niche market and take advantage of the off-price market to buy pre- or post-season items at a discount and resell them at a higher price.
Often, many items can only be purchased en masse (such as international imports or certain candies), so they need a distribution point to buy wholesale and sell piecemeal.
7. Virtual customer service
Customer service jobs are almost exclusively virtual now, needing only a phone or the internet to connect to a chat.
Businesses are looking more and more to hire a fleet of freelance customer service representatives, so there are plenty of opportunities to put your customer service skills to use from home. Some of these opportunities are either as a remote full-time employee or an independent contractor.
8. Teach online courses
In lieu of a product or executing a business service, put your knowledge to use, teaching others a skill, a topic, a hobby, etc.
The homebound boredom is real, and people are turning to online classes in droves to learn something new and interesting, whether merely for fun or so they can further themselves in the business world. From yoga classes to languages to cooking courses and more, if you know how to do something and do it well, there is a good chance there’s a class you could teach. Popular online class platforms include Udemy, Outschool, and Skillshare.
There is also freedom around the structure of teaching. You can opt for daily or weekly live courses, one-on-one or group sessions, downloadable content, or prerecorded training.
There’s no wrong way to teach, and the flexibility makes it more enjoyable all around.
The at-home business model is here to stay
The world has evolved past traditional views on commuting to work. Many skills and jobs require only training and a computer to do, so why not take advantage and do them from your home?
Whatever your specialty or interest—whether it's writing, customer service, consulting, marketing, teaching, or crafting—you have many avenues of home-based work to pursue. Hopefully, one of these home business ideas will be right for you.
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