Home Business - Who Should Give It a Try?

Ladies and gentlemen, this week I'm going to discuss with you a relatively new field of employment - home business.  By this term I refer to a small business run from home.  This implies a business without a dedicated place (shop, office, workshop) being maintained for and generally without inventory being held for.

In this article I'll elaborate a bit on the following points:

1. What are the main business types relevant to a home business?

2. Advantages of running a home business.

3. Disadvantages of running a home business.

4. How to start a home business?


What are the main business types relevant to a home business?


1. Marketing - due to the fact that  most marketing campaign are carried out by phone or internet, there is a wide variety of marketing activities relevant to working at  home.  Examples to marketing businesses:

a.  Virtual store -  selling products online, as 10% of all commerce in the US gets performed through the internet.  The most prominent virtual store platform in recent years has been Ebay, where hundreds of thousands of merchants find work, many times in success.

b. Telemarketing - selling products of businesses online.  As it sounds, it's a great prospect of working at home, as its only infrastructure is a phone line.  The idea is that a business pays the marketer based on  successes.


c. Affiliate marketing - promoting products online and getting paid by successes.  This is done by  advertising products on sites and forums and promoting them by this.  The most prominent affiliate platform nowadays is Google Adsense.

2. Organizational home businesses


a. Event organization - help people run a party or a meeting at their garden  or at at a club.  Most people who need to run such events have no clue about this and get panicked.  This opens a wide prospect of employment for people with some organizational experience and motivation of working independantly.

b. Home arrangements - People nowadays tend to work long hours and need assistance in every aspects of their housekeeping.  Thus house cleaning, closet arrangement or  handymen services can be very lucrative.  Such businesses can be suitable to hard working people with some experience in such work.


c. Cooking - Many people just don't seems to have time for decent cooking.  Thus it's feasible to offer them cooking services, from sandwich breakfasts to familial dinners.  People who wish to engage in such businesses, need to have cooking experience and devotion to such kind of a business.


3.  Personal services businesses


a.  Information retrieval - many organizations need casual internet searching services, where experienced information specialists search the web for business, scientific or social information.  For example, engineering company would sometimes save engineer working hours invested in web search and give it  to information specialist who are often more web savvy.

b. Virtual Assistant - some business people hire assistants for  limited tasks such as: typing, phone call answering or  web searching.  This kind of  work lets the service provider work without any importance to physical location, and a wider range of service providers to the buyer.



Advantages of running a home business


Well, if you're over 18 years old and need me to tell you - I'm very sorry for you.   Anyway, I see a few main advantages to be your own boss and do it from the comfort of your home:

1. You don't have to maintain  a place - you don't need a shop or an office let alone not a workshop.  Your business is located at home and this saves you a fortune and increases drastically the survival prospects of your business.

2. You don't need inventory - this means that you don't hold stocks of merchandise that you don't need  to purchase beforehand and sell.  This feature gives you 2 advantages:  First, you don't need initial investment in order to form the business.   Second, the survival prospects of your business go up significantly.

 3. Less commuting -  while working from home, you travel much less (on average) than a person working otherwise.  The reason for this is obvious: you basically don't get out of home.  The average worker commutes hundreds of hours a year, which the home worker spares.


 Disadvantages of running a home business


1. Lack of social interaction - in many home businesses most of the work is done with a computer under little social interaction.  This can bring to feelings of social isolation and estrangement.  As the human being  a social creature, a home business owner should find complementary means of social interaction.

2. Limited range of business fields - most businesses can't be implemented at home due a need of space  for serving people or storing stocks.  The range of businesses relevant to an apartment is restricted to those who don't need a large space.

3. Can't attract customers by location - a shop or an office attract customers by the fact that they're located on a street and people go by them and are exposed to the services they offer.  A home business is basically invisible to the public because no one can see it.  Thus such a business needs to find complementary means of advertising itself.