Internet allows us to live free and still stay connected all the time. It has created a lot of opportunities for businesses and individuals. Before the Internet came, everybody was suppose to go to work at a particular place (mostly the office, factory or field) but things have changed with Internet. It allows you to work from anywhere including the comfort of your home. Online businesses give an opportunity to create and sell things without moving out of your home.
People are making millions of rupees every year by working from home. Opportunities are numerous but there may be some lack of awareness. You can easily get anything between Rs. 50,000 to 90,000 every month by working from home.
Believe me, these are just starting numbers. One can easily scale the business and reach to a 6 figure income every month.
Here are few online businesses one can start from home and generate a dependable source of income.
Affiliate Marketing
You can earn good amount of money by promoting and selling third-party’s products (digital or physical products). For every sale, you can earn a commission between 5% to 75%. On Internet, you can easily find companies offering affiliate commission on their products.
By utilizing the platforms like social media sites e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or via your own website, you can promote the products. When someone makes purchase using your link, you get a commission.
For example, if you are promoting a product priced at Rs. 6,000 and you get a commission of 40% on every sale, it means you are getting approx. Rs. 2,400 on each successful sale. Now if you generate 10 sales in a month by your own link, the total commission will be Rs. 24,000 in just one month.
Selling 10 items in a month is not at all a big deal if you have good traffic source. Imagine if a single product can generate an income of Rs. 24,000 a month, how long one can go with the same.
There is no limit on number of products you can promote and that’s how many people are making good amount of money every month by using Affiliate Marketing.
Video Production
We are living in the era of videos and media. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are some platforms where you can go viral and earn good amount of money by working from home.
YouTube allows you to generate income by running the ads on your videos. If you upload the videos on YouTube, they play certain ads to the viewers before or in-between the videos and share revenue with the owner of the video.
Recently YouTube India has started getting a lot of new YouTubers coming with some creativity or review videos. I have seen housewives running kitchen recipes videos and generating good amount of income every month.
To record a video, you don’t need to invest much. A good Smartphone camera is more than sufficient to record and upload good videos.
Find out your interest area and something you are passionate about and start uploading good engaging videos.
Blogging
Blogging is free to do and one of the best opportunities to work from home and enjoy the freedom from regular job. Many people started blogging back in 2008-2012 and now they are making six figure income every month.
You can pick a broad topic and start writing about it. Some popular topics are technology, beauty tips, health and fitness, cooking, video games, entrepreneurship, finance etc. You can pick your favorite topic which you are passionate about and start blogging without having investment. You just need one domain, starer hosting plan and a laptop with Internet.
I believe, bloggers are the most free people on Internet making living out of their online business. They can write a blog post by siting at a cafe in a busy mall or home makers can wake up early and write a new article before other family members wake up.
Here are some opportunities to make money from blogging.
Google Adsense – It is a revenue sharing advertisement platform where publishers get paid for the ads running on their blog. You can register for Adsense account once you start seeing good amount of people visiting your site. I would suggest to wait till you get at least 10,000 visitors coming on your website.
CPA and CPC Networks or Direct Ads – Apart from Google Adsense, there are many other Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Action (CPA) network websites allowing publishers to make money by placing their ads. You don’t need to approach advertisers as these platforms do the same for you.
Affiliate Links in Blog Posts – You can always promote affiliate products through your articles in the blog. Traffic coming on your blog post may convert on the affiliate links and you may get commission from there too.
Paid Reviews – If you are writing about health tips, a new protein powder company may approach you to write a review for their product. You can charge for every review article. People charge anything between Rs. 6,000 to Rs. 60,000 per paid review depending on the popularity of the blog.
eCommerce or Drop Shipping
Apart from affiliate marketing, you can also start your own eCommerce website on Internet and start making good amount of money every month. You must be thinking about how to maintain inventory, what to sell etc. Well, there are some opportunities where you don’t have to maintain any inventory and not even have to run any manufacturing unit. You can do drop shipping.
Drop shipping is where you list a product on online sites like eBay or Amazon and when someone places an order, you will forward the order to the manufacturer or whole-seller and finally just ship the same item to the customer with your name and tag.
In this process, you make anything between 10% to 30% or even more per item.
With drop shipping, there is no financial risk of maintaining the inventory and warehouse. There are many people working with the same business model online and making good amount of money from home.
Freelancing
Finally, you can trade your expertise on online portals and work for clients as a freelancer. On a regular job, you need to go to office and wait for the job order from your project manager or seniors. You work on the projects which are assigned to the company. In freelancing, an individual or a company contacts you for the work using freelancing portals like Upwork, Freelancer etc. You will remotely work on the required job and deliver the task online.
Once the work is done, you will get paid via online transfer.
A freelancer can again work from home or cafe or co-working spaces. A freelancer can also open an office and work from there but I don’t see such need.
A good freelancer working on creatives and branding side or even on web development can easily make anything between Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 120,000 every month or even more. Most of the freelancing portals shows an average hourly rate Rs. 1,800 to Rs. 2,600 for such works. If the person works for 30 hours in that month, the monthly revenue will be Rs. 54,000 to Rs. 78,000. There are freelancers who work for more than 100 hours a month.
Conclusion
Like any other business, starting an online business also requires a strategic plan and effort. But with minimum investment and low risk, one can easily start an online business and earn more than Rs. 50,000 from home. These are few popular ways to make money through online businesses but once you start something, you explore other hidden ways and your own techniques of scaling the business too.
