The economy in the United States is in a pretty serious downward spiral right now. Too many major companies are needing bailouts or having to close down. It’s not a pretty sight.

Does that make now too risky to start your own business?

Not at all! Some businesses thrive even during recessions. It may mean that you have to be cautious about the risks you take, in case your financial position turns out to be more precarious than you thought.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a chance.

What you’ll want to look at is what will continue to sell. It’s not like people quit buying things completely in a poor economy. Their priorities will shift instead.

Will Scams get worse?

One of the big problems can be that the more desperate people get to earn money, the more scams come out.

Be careful in joining any opportunity. Do your research, get opinions from other people and listen to your gut. You need to be passionate about what you do, but that doesn’t mean you should forget common sense.

I recommend finding out who is generally trusted in whichever industry you want to get into. If they have a website or blog, start reading. Find out what resources are worth paying for to shorten your learning curve. More important, find out which are a complete waste of time and money.

What Kind of Business?

There are too many possibilities to name just offhand in one post.

One possibility, of course, is to sell to the other people starting home businesses. I expect a lot of people will be starting out.

But this is not something I recommend unless you have already had some success in your own business. If you’re doing well, you may be able to help other people succeed in your industry and earn some good money doing so.

If you’re starting out, it’s probably not your best choice. Lots of people try it because they see so many ways to earn money. But too many of them end up propagating the scams that are such a problem to so many people. You’re better off earning a living doing something you can be proud of.

You may also consider starting a home business with products that people will use up and reorder. This is why so many network marketing opportunities do well in better times. Some will continue to thrive. It’s up to you to figure out which.

Know Your Limits

Not just your financial limits, although these are very important. Know your time limits. Your skill limits.

Knowing your limits doesn’t mean you can’t work your way past them. Matter of fact, it’s a good idea to stretch yourself. You just have to know when and how.

Sometimes the solution to a skill limit will be to hire help. Other times it will be to learn that skill. Still other times you may decide that you don’t need that particular skill just yet.

If you’re working hard on your home business you should be able to get past some of your financial limits over time. Make sure you reinvest in your business whenever possible. The more you can increase your budget for your business, the easier it is to build it up.

Time limits can be tough, especially for those working a regular job plus raising a family. Your time limitations can be somewhat overcome by outsourcing parts of your business. There are plenty of freelancers out there who would be glad of the work.

You will probably also have to sacrifice some of your family time, leisure time and/or sleep. You decide what is worth sacrificing for your own situation.

Don’t let a bad economy scare you off starting your own business. It’s possible to succeed despite the economy. And if you can succeed now, how much better can you do later?

Having a website can sound like a big deal if you’ve never had one before. You look around, and you see all these huge websites with thousands of pages. Is that what you need to do?

No. Fortunately it isn’t.

How complex your website needs to be depends on what you need from it. If you’re going to be an online writer and want your own site, just a page or two explaining your services is plenty to get things going. But if you’re going to be selling things, you will need a more complex site. How complex depends on how complete it needs to be for you to get a start.

Example 1: An Affiliate Website

If you’re going to be doing affiliate sales, you need a site that drives traffic through your links and helps you to build a list. But we’ll take the building the website step first.

There are a couple of ways to build an affiliate website. I suggest reading Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook if this is the kind of marketing you want to do. It’s a good place to get some solid information if you aren’t experienced in the affiliate arena.

One way is to build a site with product reviews. This kind of site can be started pretty small. Just start working on reviewing the kinds of products you want to sell. I suggest one review per page, and if the items are competing, a page where you compare them.

Another way is to use datafeeds in one form or another. Datafeeds allow you to create very large sites very quickly. There are some advantages to that, but they can also be a lot of work. Then again, there are a lot of tools, such as Build a Niche Store, which works through the eBay affiliate program, or PopShops, which allows you to build sites based on the datafeeds from various retailers whose programs go through Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, LinkConnector, Red Galoshes and Performics. They have both a free and a paid version, and they handle updating all the information for you. All you have to do is pick the products.

There’s good and bad to these, of course. The bad is that it is harder to customize your pages to make them more unique. The good is that they save you a TON of work in trying to keep your pages updated. Datafeeds can be pretty tedious to customize and update. But customization means that your pages won’t be exactly like the ones on every other affiliates’, and that is a very good thing.

A key thing to remember, no matter what kind of affiliate website you get going is that you cannot just fill it up with affiliate banners and expect to make money. I make very little use of the banners most merchants provide because I prefer to use either datafeeds or posting the links as text in a review or mentioning products in context. A page full of banner ads is not appealing.

I’ve done well with both kinds of sites. I like writing about the products when possible, but it’s pretty hard to keep writing enough. I’ve had a couple of Build a Niche Store sites do really nicely for me as well. My other datafeed sites have done all right, although truthfully I haven’t focused on them too much. But they do well sometimes when someone is searching for the exact item, and my site comes up in the results and gets the sale.

When it comes to designing the site, stick to fairly simple early on or hire someone to do it for you. There are places you can get free templates, places where you can buy individual templates, or places where you can sign up once and download as many as you want.

Another option is Ezy Websites. Their service helps you to learn to create your own templates. While you may not want to learn website design right away, I do recommend that you eventually understand at least the basics. Hiring someone to do it may sound like the easy way, but then you are at the mercy of their schedule for even the smallest of changes. You don’t want that all the time. Knowing something of what you’re doing will help.

Example 2: Blog

Blogging is a great way to start a website. The advantage here is that you don’t have to pay someone to design your site or know too much about doing it yourself… early on. I do recommend knowing the basics in the long run.

I’ve seen two schools of thought on blogging. One is to start right away on paid hosting with Wordpress or similar software. Others say start a throwaway blog on a free host to get a feel for things, then start the real one on paid hosting.

Yes, in the long run, paid hosting is the way to go.

I love using Wordpress because there are so many options available. You can use it as a blog or as a website. I strongly recommend buying Wordpress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin if you’re just starting out with it.

Wordpress is really not all that hard to use. Once you’ve learned how to upload the theme you want and any plugins you want, you’re in good shape. Some plugins will require that you find out where to place a bit of code, but in most cases they tell you the kind of thing you’re looking for, and in which file. Sounds hard, but it’s rarely that bad.

I’m the sort who likes to customize free themes. The theme on this blog was customized from a theme I found that most closely matched the rest of this site. I then worked on it to make them match more completely. But customization can be as basic as changing the header graphic or as complex as reworking much of the CSS and rearranging the different parts of the sidebars. Just depends on what you need.

What can be a real delight about blogging or just using Wordpress is that it creates your pages for you. Once everthing is set up, you just have to type your posts. It can be a huge time saver.

A blog can work for just about any kind of website. Affiliate marketers can use them to post reviews or just generally talk about their products. PopShops even has a free Wordpress plugin. People in direct sales can use them to build their businesses. So can website designers, writers and so forth. The flexibility is much appealling.

Here’s the fun part about blogs - you have the chance to allow people to participate in your website.

You can ask them questions, they can ask you questions. Readers can comment on what you’ve written.

Getting people to participate isn’t as easy as that in most cases, but if you build up a readership it can happen. And you can turn off comments if they just aren’t working out for you.

What About Search Engine Optimization?

SEO can be a tough topic. It’s not something you’re likely to excel at right away. It’s important to a website’s success, but if you focus too long on learning it before you launch your website, you’ll never get anywhere. Join forums such as Digital Point and Search Engine Watch. Consider investing in an ebook such as SEO Book. Read and learn.

Just don’t obsess about it. You will learn the most by doing and making mistakes. You’re not going to learn it all in time to launch your website. There’s a lot of information and it changes quickly.

This is one of the most important lessons you will learn in starting your home business.

Don’t overthink. Action is the only way you will succeed.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be? (current page)
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

When you want to start a home business you need to figure out what you want to offer. A solid brainstorming session can get you on your way with some solid ideas for what you want to do. There are 3 basic areas you need to consider:

Product, niche, marketing style

I’m focusing on online options here, which really doesn’t limit things all that much. There’s still quite a bit to consider.

Product(s)

What is it you want to be offering? Even if you want to have a primarily informational website, that’s a product.

You don’t necessarily have to create your own products. You can do affiliate marketing, drop shipping or direct sales if you like. What you need to consider here is what you want to be dealing with.

Especially for first home businesses, a strong interest or passion for your area is recommended. It’s really hard to work online much of the time. Success takes time, anywhere from a few months for the lucky and hardworking, to a few years. And your family won’t always understand. You need something beyond “I’ve heard you can make great money in this niche” to keep you going.

And you may be surprised at the areas you can succeed in. This is why I encourage you to think about what you would like to work in, even before you start looking at programs and potential earnings. Those are relevant, but not quite yet.

Remember that just about anything can be sold online, and you can often find a way to earn commission from other people’s products. It really simplifies your home business if you don’t have to worry about product creation or carrying an inventory.

Then again, your product could be a service, such as writing, graphic design or website design.

Write out several ideas. You don’t need to get too detailed yet, although if you prefer you can. You aren’t committing to anything just yet, but you will want to be considering if you are making your own products, joining an affiliate program, a network marketing opportunity, etc. Start investigating what the various possibilities offer in terms of commission, repeat sales and so forth.

Niche

This is related to your product selection, but getting more detailed. It’s time to consider who you will be selling to. You can’t just sell to everyone… well you could, but having a target audience simplifies your marketing tremendously.

Too broad a potential audience means that you will have to put more effort into marketing. It’s harder to appeal to people if you don’t understand their interests. Your niche helps you to define your target audience so that you can figure out how your products will appeal.

For example, you could decide on website design. You can do well as a general website designer, but if you focus on a particular market you can use your expertise in designing for that field as a selling point.

Keep writing out ideas. You can get a little silly when brainstorming, but random trains of thought can come up with brilliant ideas.

Marketing

There are many different ways to market an online business. I always recommend some sort of website that you own, rather than sending people to a merchant’s website or to a cloned site such as some network marketing opportunities offer. You’ll have more control and can stand out better.

You can do this as a traditional website or a blog. Pick based on how you want to run your site. You can combine the two if you like as well. Blogs are good if you are adding information at least weekly.

Some sort of newsletter or e-course is also a good idea. It gives you a chance to expose potential customers to your offerings repeatedly, rather than on a single visit. Blogs give the advantage of allowing people to subscribe via RSS.

Most often you will want to market your site itself in a variety of ways. Build it and they will come doesn’t work. In this series I’ll be touching on pay per click advertising, article marketing, light website optimization and so forth. You don’t want to rely on just one form of marketing, of course.

But this early on you can start to learn what each of these requires, and figure out which learning resources will help you the most. Forums such as the one at Digital Point can be very helpful, so long as you learn to weed out the hype from the solid information.

Depending on which kinds of marketing you want to focus on first, you can decide what resources you want to buy. While great information is available for free, you do have to search for it and weed out the junk. Finding quality resources to learn the various marketing tactics for your preferred business means shortening your learning curve. That’s important, and an expenditure early on means you improve your chances of earning more money sooner. I’ll recommend resources as I go.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas (current page)
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

This is a great time to get a home business going. Actually, any time that you have the time is a great time to get a home business going, but that’s beside the point.

So how the heck do you get started?

This seems to be a sticking point for many people. So many opportunities out there, so many scams. What do you do?

I’m going to go through some online ideas for the next however long it takes on this blog. I’ll cover a variety of businesses you can do online, including the basic parts of getting them started.

But the absolute first thing you have to do for most businesses is to pick a niche.

Think about it. You say you want to do direct sales? What are you going to sell? To whom?

Same for affiliate marketing, writing, offering a service and so forth. With any business you pick you have to figure out what you are going to offer and who you will offer it to.

The answer should never be ‘everyone’.

What I love about online business is that you don’t have to leave the house, unless you want to. Often you don’t even need to carry any merchandise. You have tremendous flexibility in the hours that you work.

Please share any questions on getting started that you may have, so I know what people really want to see covered.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting on brainstorming tactics.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year (current page)
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?