Choosing the Right Work at Home Business

You already know working at home is a great way to balance family with the need to earn money. And a home based business of your own is a perfect solution. It gives you the opportunity to be your own boss, to work as little or as much as you need. And you reap the benefits… and profits.

Will it be a product or service based business? That’s the first thing you will need to decide. I guess you could say both product and service based businesses sell a product. It’s just in one case the product is tangible and in another it’s your skills and knowledge. So, let’s look at some differences between the two.

Product Based Business

When you think “product,” your generally think “tangible.” More likely you also think of it as something you can hold in your hand. That might be a piece of jewelry or baked goods. Lots of people make good livings from creating their own products and selling them at craft shows, local retail outlets or on Internet platforms such as Etsy.

Another type of product is something you buy at a good price and then resell for a profit. These product might be bought through wholesalers or even at your local Wal-Mart. They can also be sold through a lot of venues, say flea markets and local shops or an online retailer such as Amazon.

With the advent of the Internet, products that are “digital” can be also be sold. Those are products such as online books, courses blogs, videos and information.

To give you one more thing to think about… you don’t actually have to source and ship product to sell. You can also become an affiliate or reseller for the right products and make a commission.

Services Based Business

A service based business allows you to use your skills and knowledge to help clients solve problems. That might be providing bookkeeping, writing graphic design or virtual assistance.

You can combine both a service based business model with a product based business model on the Internet and have the best of all worlds. For example, you can promote a book and a course as a life coach offering your coaching services as your higher priced product over the books and courses.

Decision Time for Your Work at Home Business

There’s only one way to determine what services and/or products you want to promote in your work at home business… make a list. Then sit down and give it a lot of thought.

• Make a List of Your Skills. Do an inventory of your skills and write down a list of what you already know how to do. Do you have computer skills? How about people skills? Is there some knowledge that you can share with or teach others?
• Decide on Your Client/ Audience Base. Do you love a certain group of people and what they do or what they stand for? For example, maybe you’d like to help other young moms with their problems. Maybe that’s finding the right toddler clothes or maybe how to help them cut costs. You can still do that with your own work at home business. It’s important to identify the exact audience you want to work with whether you’re going to promote products, a service or both.
• Identify Their Problems. Once you know your client/audience base, it’s time to figure out their pain points. What do they need? Want? Narrow it down to two or three pain points and then figure out how you can serve them.

A key in choosing products, creating products, or offering services is to match your skill set with what is needed to solve the pain points of your audience. When you take the time to do this you’ll find that your work at home business is going to be more successful.