Top 10 Unusual But Successful Online Homebusiness Ideas

May 20, 2007

http://www.hardtofindseminars.com

Michael Senoff has stumbled upon a perfect online home business opportunity – reselling old seminar materials. He was really impressed by Jay Abraham. The only problem was that it costs $20,000 to attend Jay’s workshops (no wonder the press called it, “the world’s most expensive seminar”). So he did some digging and managed to find a guy from Northern California who had attended the seminar, asking to buy seminar materials off him. He bought the entire set for … 50 dollars. He later found out that Jay’s materials are being sold on eBay for several hundred dollars. He broke up the original package (that he got for $50) in several pieces and sold items for $1700. Thus, his perfect online homebusiness was born. Michael now resells old seminar materials for dozens of marketing gurus, easily profiting over $1000 a day. Read full story in Mike’s own words.

http://www.hungrypod.com/

Catherine Keane, the owner of Hungry Pod, makes over $100,000 a year, uploading music to other people’s iPods. This online homebusiness idea came to her when an acquaintance offered her $500 to load his CD collection onto his iPod. Thanks in part to a small story in The New York Times, Keane’s advertising efforts on Craigslist and word-of-mouth, HungryPod has expanded to three employees and four computers, and has annual sales that exceed $100,000. Read The New York Times article about Catherine and her business.

http://www.idonowidont.com/

Joshua Opperman has his ex-fiancée to thank for his thriving online home based business. After the breakup, he was stuck with the engagement ring he paid dearly for. He went back to the jeweler where he’d bought it three months earlier, but found he could only get 32 percent of its original cost. Josh didn’t like that one bit, so he set up a site, where people in the same situation can sell their engagement rights for a better price. See the full profile of this online homebusiness here.

http://www.pickydomains.com/

This is a great online home-based business idea that requires no money and that anyone can start. PickyDomains is a risk-free domain naming service that got a lot of publicity and ‘blogtalk’ in Europe lately. This is how it works. A customer deposits $50 dollars and describes what kind of domain he or she wants. Domain pickers then send in their suggestions of available domain names. If the customer likes one of the domain names and registers it, the service gets $50. Otherwise the money is refunded at the end of the month. Read full article about how you can make money naming domains here.

http://www.greekgear.com/

Reading a business magazine in the doctor’s office inspired Joseph Tantillo to try his hand at online retailing. At the time, he and his wife were expecting their first child and wanted to work from home. An article about starting an online store jumped out at him, he recalls—and, as a member of a fraternity in college, he decided to sell personalized Greek apparel to that market. After setting up shop for just $79.95—the cost of a merchant account with Yahoo!— he began researching what kind of products his former fraternity brothers might like. Using the strong Greek network worked, as he’s built GreekGear.com’s yearly sales to $1.9 million. Read Joseph’s story here.

http://rickspicksnyc.com/

Rick Field, a Yale graduate and former TV producer for Bill Moyers, is a perfect example of how you can start successful home business out of a hobby. Field learned the art of pickling when he was growing up in Vermont. About eight years ago, gripped by a sense of nostalgia, he took up pickling again. In his tiny kitchen, Field made family recipes and then quickly began experimenting. People’s wildly enthusiastic response to his Windy City Wasabeans (soybeans in wasabi brine) and Slices of Life (sliced pickles in aromatic garlic brine) told him he was onto something. Read how Rick took his homebusiness online here.

http://www.militaryexits.com/

Karin Markley set her online business right out of home. Having 15 years of experience working in a civilian employment agency and knowing that companies value employees with military backgrounds, and she wanted to provide a one-stop link between the two. Karen contacted the Department of Defense for permission to use its seal on her Web site. It took months to get it, but MilitaryExits.com is now linked to all the military bases. Markley, who projects annual sales of $600,000, points to her biggest reward: “Helping the military. Getting the letters and phone calls from these people thanking me so much for what I’m doing for them.”

http://www.hotsauceblog.com/

If I told you that you can make $200,000 blogging about hot sauces, you wouldn’t believe me. Yet, this is exactly what Nick Lindauer does. In 2001, while still in college, he launched his online homebusiness then called Sweat ‘N Spice out of his Springfield (Ore.) apartment. He sold a few dozen types of hot sauces, packaged each order by hand, and shipped everything from his local post office, barely eking out a profit during his first year of operation. Today, Lindauer sells over a thousand products from some 300 manufacturers. In 2005, the business grossed around $130,000. He got $200,000 in 2006. One day, it’s going to be a cool $1000000. Full story.

http://amazingbutterflies.com/

Amazing Butterflies is really an amazing million dollar homebusiness idea success story. Jose Muñiz’s career began when a friend bet him $100 that he could not sell butterflies for a living. Now, seven years later, the former business consultant and his wife, Karen, own Amazing Butterflies, a live-butterfly distributor that generated $1 million in revenues in 2006. Though Muñiz is still waiting for his $100, he says that he has backed his way into a job that he loves. “I could never go back to consulting,” he says. “This is just too much fun.” Full story.

http://www.laneigepurse.com/

What began as a solution to her chronic back and neck pain is now a line of purses for women who share Kristy Sobel’s condition–or simply want a fashionable fanny pack. After three car accidents that resulted in extensive back and neck surgeries, the 35-year-old entrepreneur realized she couldn’t do the traveling her then-job required. To ease the weight on her shoulders, Sobel searched for a fanny pack that would accommodate her condition, but realized fashionable ones were nonexistent. So she created one. Before long, family, friends and even strangers were requesting this one-of-a-kind purse. She approached boutiques with her design after successful test runs at her friends’ shops, but the door-to-door routine eventually took a toll on her body. Sobel continued her venture from home, found a rep to promote her bags at a trade show and used her and her husband and co-founder Eric’s savings to launch LaNeige Purse. Last year she made over $200,000 from her purses.

Books on homebusiness:

The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online

Missed Fortune 101: A Starter Kit to Becoming a Millionaire

Internet Riches: The Simple Money-making Secrets of Online Millionaire


3 Keys for Making the Most of a Home-Based Business

December 31, 2006

If you operate your business in the friendly confines of your home, you may still be padding around in your slippers at lunchtime and darting out mid-afternoon to pick the kids up from school. But you also know how difficult it can be to live and work effectively in the same place, and you’re looking for every possible edge to help you succeed in your home-based business.

Three tactics can make a huge difference for your home-based startup business. They’re not going to rescue you from a poorly thought-out business model, or turn your company from a five-figure to a seven-figure affair. But fully leveraging these three tactics can ensure that how you actually operate is giving your home-based business strategy every possible chance of succeeding.

Outsource everything but the core functions in your home-based business

You started up a home-based business because you wanted to do something unique, or perhaps better than the competition. So you need to keep your eye on that ball, continually clearing the way for you and your company to focus on this “core competency” – just like larger companies do.

The difference, of course, is that as a home-based business owner, you’re just one person. Just to do business, your startup must handle lots of things beyond focusing on your founding idea, especially if you have larger competition.

“But you should do what you’re good at, and you can’t be good at everything,” says Barbara Weltman, a small-business expert based in Millwood, N.Y., and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business. “Small businesses have so many different responsibilities that you should outsource whatever you can so that you can make the most money doing what you do best.”

So if you came up with a product to manufacture, but the key to your business model lies in sales and marketing, farm out production. If you’re a consultant whose magic lies in your vision and your interaction with clients, outsource your accounting and other “back-office” functions. If you’re a web retailer who is drawing customers because of your product selection and brand buzz, outsource fulfillment and shipping.

Your home-based business should fully leverage the internet

Taking advantage of the internet can help you operate your home-based business with far more efficiency than was possible five years ago.

In fact, the biggest challenge for home-based operators is to keep up with the many new ways they can make the internet work for them. These days home-based businesses can send out e-mail blasts to their customer database – announcing a promotion or a new product – just as easily as any huge company. They can obtain merchant-bank authorization to accept credit cards online so they can conduct e-commerce; that wasn’t always the case.

And even home-based businesses can make themselves seem bigger than their local niche by setting up a website that positions themselves as an information resource on leaky faucets, or canine care.

Maybe Donna Maria Coles Johnson has found the ultimate application of the internet for her home-based business: getting away from her Washington, D.C.-area home and working from someplace that has a wi-fi hotspot. “I go to the local coffee shop a lot, and that’s where my daughter thinks that mommy works,” says Johnson, who is, among other things, author of several books on how people can make their own natural cosmetics. “Because of the internet, I can work anywhere and not be interrupted.”

Take greatest possible advantage of home-based business tax breaks

For many years, federal tax policy wasn’t very helpful to home-based business owners; for example, only very recently have individual business owners been able to deduct the entire cost of their health-insurance premiums.

And nowadays the biggest problem most home-based business owners have with taxes is that they leave too much money on the table by not availing themselves of many fully legal deductions.

The biggest of these, tax experts say, is that they don’t claim depreciation or the full extent of their expenses that are attributable to taking up part of their home with their office, or manufacturing operation, or warehouse space – or some combination of all three.

And while many home-based business owners take a deduction for the utility bills and other expenses that are attributable to their home-based business offices, they don’t always optimize these deductions. For example, you should consider claiming a “time percentage” of your heating costs rather than a “space percentage,” says Eva Rosenberg, a tax expert and author of Small Business Taxes Made Easy.

“It’s a matter of calculating how much more electricity and gas you’re using to heat the place in winter because you’re there working, compared with what you would use otherwise,” Rosenberg advises. “That’s normally going to come out to a lot more than just taking a percentage of the overall bill that matches the square footage occupied by your office.”

Our Bottom Line

Getting a home-based business idea off the ground can be challenging enough in itself. But by maximizing outsourcing, the internet, and your tax advantages, you can quickly add momentum and sales that will elevate your home-based business into a force in your marketplace.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/keys-home-based-business.asp


Home-Based Business Tax Write-Offs

December 26, 2006

If you’re running a home-based business, have we got some good tax news for you! By popular demand, here are even more tax write-offs that are especially suited to home-based businesses.

Employing your kids

Being around your children can be one of the biggest lifestyle advantages of a home-based business, of course. And if you hire them to help you with your work, having your kids just upstairs from your office also can yield significant tax benefits.

Whether they do internet research for you or comprise your focus group for the toy you’ve invented, paying your kids a wage can represent a legitimate expense. “You just have to keep really good logs of what they’re doing, and when they’re working, to prove that they’re actually performing a function,” Rosenberg says.

And, of course, you can’t pay them any more than what the market wage would be for their tasks.

Processing your expenses

Both to keep financial tabs on your home-based business and to maximize write-offs, you should organize your records in two ways.

First, thoroughly document expenses while you’re making the outlays. Don’t lose track of a single penny. Get receipts for everything, every day, and stuff them in an envelope; or at least jot your expense and date on a piece of note paper.

Second, organize a thorough record of your disbursements. Microsoft Office Accounting software (a StartupNation sponsor) or another off-the-shelf program works marvelously for this. And some home-based business owners hire a bookkeeper just for this and other mundane financial chores that they can’t or don’t want to handle.

You should consider obtaining a separate credit card just for business use and running all your expenditures through that card. “It’s a great organizational tool to make sure that everything related to your business is on your books, and you can maneuver the information however you need to,” says Stephanie Schank, a home-based corporate-meeting planner through her company SpotOn Events, in San Francisco.

And for tax time, most credit-card companies will give you a print-out categorizing your expenses over the course of they year, which you can then happily hand to your accountant.

Getting expert help

Hire a competent accountant to optimize your tax preparation. There’s just no substitute for a professional who can size up you, your company, and your particular situation to make sure no write-off goes unexamined – whether the accountant thinks you should claim it or is protecting you from yourself!

Our Bottom Line

Tax write-offs can be a fertile area for realizing some advantages in operating a home-based business. It takes planning, discipline, organization – and expert help – to make the most of the possibilities.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/articles/more-home-based-business-writeoffs.asp?src=nw