Getting started with your business has never been so easy.
As the internet-of-things grows, more and more people begin to work from home, as freelancers, or open an eCommerce store. A study of the Global Workplace Analytics and Flexjobs showed that working from home is becoming more prevalent; over the last five years, the number of people working from home grew with 44%. It’s not only good for the culture and job morale of companies to be able to work more flexibly, but 80% of the asked survey group also showed that they experience less stress than before.
But with so many different home business opportunities out there, it can be hard to find one that makes a difference. After all, if you want to swap your nine-to-five job for a flexible job that you can do from anywhere, you don’t want to lose anything financially.
And as we know that finding a profitable home business idea can be tricky; we deep-dived into the subject. We found the following five options will give you the best return on investment, guaranteed.
Affiliate Marketer
You are waking up in the early hours of the day, driving to the office or standing in the overcrowded bus, streets filled with inpatient, tired commuters. Going through email after email and task after task until finally at five o’clock, you can go back into the traffic to go home. If this sounds terrible to you, you might want to look into becoming an affiliate marketer.
The concept behind affiliate marketing is to be able to make money from anywhere and anytime you want. Sounds too good to be true? And yet, it is possible. Affiliate marketing is a popular tactic in marketing to promote products and services. And it is highly beneficial for both companies as affiliates. Affiliate marketers make their money by earning a commission for marketing a company’s products. The affiliate searches for products they enjoy and promotes them to gain a piece of the profit of each sale they make. Purchases are tracked via affiliate links that are placed on their website, blog, or social media profiles.
How do affiliate marketers get paid?
So, how does an affiliate paid after linking themselves to the product and company? One misconception in affiliate marketing is that the consumer always needs to buy the product or service for the affiliate to get paid. But this isn’t necessarily true. It all depends on the program, and you can get paid in a few different ways:
Pay per sale – this is the most common and standard affiliate marketing structure. The affiliate gets paid per sale that they make through the link on their Social Media channels and personal blog.
Pay per lead – with this program, the affiliate gets paid based on the conversion rate of their affiliate link. The affiliate has to make sure that the consumer goes to the companies website and completes a desired action. Which doesn’t have to be buying something per se, signing up for an email list could also be the desired action, for example.
Pay per click – this program focuses only on redirecting consumers to the website of the merchandiser. In this case, the affiliate will be paid based on the increase in web traffic.
A question asked regularly is: “can you make money with affiliate marketing?”. The answer is yes, on average affiliates earn around $100.000 to $200.000 a year. The return on investment for affiliate marketing has four different categories; these are:
- Apprentice affiliate (just starting) – losing money, so don’t give up on your day-to-day job yet.
- Low-level affiliate – anywhere from 0$ to $300 a day.
- Intermediate affiliate – around $300 to $3.000 a day.
- High-level affiliate – anythings above $3.000 a day.
Amazon Affiliate
Similar to the affiliate marketer job, an Amazon affiliate makes money by promoting different products, brands based on Amazon. There’s only one requirement for being able to become an Amazon affiliate, and that is that you have a blog or website.
To start, you’ll have to sign up, after which, Amazon takes a quick look at your details and the given website address, to make the approval. Once approved, you can select the kind of products that you’d like to promote on your webpage. You add the links to your webpage in the form of image advertising or product links. You’re also able to share the links on Twitter and Facebook.
The amount you can earn depends on the number of users that come to your website and the products that you’ve selected. For example, promoting kindle books leaves you with a fee of 4% from the selling price, health and beauty products have a fee of 10% (of the selling price). Since Amazon is one of the biggest online retailers in the world, it’s definitely worth becoming an affiliate for them. However, just like with other affiliate programs, you’ll need to be patient and put time and effort into your website traffic generation.
Online Business Manager
If you don’t feel that becoming an affiliate marketer is for you, maybe being an online business manager will be more your cup-of-tea. Even though this profession has been around for quite a while, not many business people have heard about it.
An online business manager is a virtually based support professional who manages online-based businesses with tasks such as day-to-day project management, operations, team member guidance, and metrics. If you think that an online business manager is the same as a virtual assistant, you’d be wrong.
A professional business manager runs the daily operations of a company, which gives the owner of the business time to focus on strategies and growth, unlike virtual assistants who take away most administrative tasks such as note-taking and booking conference rooms, etc. The offline equivalent of this job would be a general manager.
Most online business managers work as freelancers, which is why this could be an ideal home-based business. But how do you know if you’re ready to become an online business manager? Well, if you studied in a business-related field, have experience as a project manager or virtual assistant, and aren’t sensitive to stress, you’re probably ready to get started. Use freelance platforms such as Upwork.com or Freelancer.com; you’d also be able to find job ads on Indeed.com and LinkedIn.
Now, let’s talk about money. Earnings of online business managers and all freelancers for that matter have a wide variety. However, you don’t have to invest any money beforehand, which helps to take the step to freelance. Keep in mind that you can ask for a higher salary, depending on your work experience. The median salary for a business manager in 2018, was around $100.000 a year. The best-paid 25% of the market made about $157.000, and the lowest-paid earned $65.650.
Freelance Writer
If your a content writer or if you simply love to write, becoming a freelance writer might be just the thing for you. There are many ways to get into the freelance writing business. Sometimes, people start finding small writing jobs online; others work in related fields and are looking to generate some extra income.
So, how does freelance writing work? As a freelance writer, you create whatever text your client needs, such as blogs, magazine articles, website copy, press releases, or newsletters. You should spend about 40 percent of your time searching for new business opportunities. The rest of the time is all about writing. Finding new jobs can be done on different freelance platforms, LinkedIn, Indeed, or through networking.
Getting paid as a freelance writer can work in many ways and usually depends on the client’s preference for processes and payment type. Often the writer will send an invoice after the project is complete, or in the case of long term projects, both parties agree on a payment schedule. Commonly bank transfers or PayPal is used to send the money. It can be a bit of a challenge to get paid in a timely fashion, and most freelancers have to manage their time and money efficiently. Payment differentiates, depending on your experience and the size of the project.
Start A Blog
If you don’t want to become a freelance writer, because you prefer to focus on subjects that you like. Consider starting a blog. Be aware that starting a blog and building a loyal audience is the hardest of all work-from-home-businesses mentioned in this article. There are five steps to becoming a blogger:
- Decide on the name of your blog, and it’s a domain name.
- Start your blog by adding WordPress to your domain.
- Select a blog theme that correlates with the goals of your blog.
- Add plugins to track your readers.
- Start creating content.
Writing a successful blog is about building a community of interested people that like coming to your blog. Use organic advertising on social media and guest post writing as outreach programs to gain more traffic to your website. After a lot of trial-and-errors and a substantial amount of time, you’ll be able to build a great, profitable platform.
Conclusion
All of the above-mentioned home-based businesses can be highly profitable. Becoming an affiliate marketing, amazon affiliate, or starting a blog are prevalent and revenue-driven online business opportunities. However, they are time-sensitive, and patience is critical when it comes to building out your community and engaging consumers. Also, if check us out if you’re looking for the nitty-gritty of how to start an online business from home. We’re the best at it.
Becoming an online business manager or a freelance writer are faster ways to start making extra money. Make sure you train your skills and that you’re confident about your abilities. Sign up for a freelance platform, or look for jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed. We hope that after reading this article, you have a realistic idea of what it takes to start making money online.
If you’re thinking about starting your own business and need resources, here are our top recommendations to set you up for success:
- Secure your business through worker’s comp insurance from Cerity
- Learn about Why Marketing Matters Now More Than Ever
- How to Grow Your Business During A Pandemic