How to Build A Successful Home Business

If you are thinking of starting a home business soon, one of the first things that will be uppermost in your mind will be how to build a successful home business.

There are many reasons you may want to start a home business, it could be, the need to stay home and take care of your kids without necessarily losing your income— That was my own reason.

Or perhaps, you are just tired of the corporate world and want a small home business you can use to retire from the workplace.

It could also be that COVID19 pushed you out of the workforce and you are not ready to go back to earning peanuts all in the name of having a job that cannot even take care of you.

No matter what your reason is for wanting a home business, there is something you really want to do so bad, that is to succeed in your home business.

So that you can look back and be grateful that you made the decision to work for yourself.

A lot of people that start home businesses have no idea the amount of work it takes to actually take a business from an idea to a fully running business.

For example, when I started blogging, I did not know how many hours I had to put in to create a simple blog post such as you are reading right now( 4–6 hours)

To be sincere, I did struggle a lot and I almost gave up. I soon realized that if I wanted to make my blog successful, I will have to create systems and follow through so as to make it easy for my blog to succeed.

For me, my first stage of success was to replace my working income when I was at my corporate job.

This was important to me because If I could replace my income when I was working outside my home. I will then be much more comfortable to begin to pursue other financial goals.

The day I replaced my working income, I was overjoyed, I felt like I had hit the jackpot. I realized that for the first time my blog was not an expensive hobby but a real business.

This gave me the leverage to even put in more hard work to build a successful home business for myself and my family

I consider my blog as a platform to use in offering all kinds of services and products, so making my home business a success is paramount to helping me stay home to care for my kids.

I have come to that place that I realize that not everyone who is online doing a business knows how to make it a successful home business

So I decided to write this post on how to make build a successful home business- I dare say online because online businesses make it easy for you to work from anywhere in the world.

To help you build a successful home business online, here are steps you need to follow

Steps to building a successful home business online

1.Niche

Everything rises and falls on your niche

Elizabeth

Having been a small business owner for the past 14 years both as a co-founder and an owner-managed home business, I have realized that nothing destroys a home business like starting out in the wrong niche.

What is a business niche? A business niche is a set of people with specific needs that you want to meet. Defining your business niche is the first step to building a successful home business online.

Why is this so? because if you do not define your niche and understand your niche, you will spend a bunch of time, energy, resources, etc creating the wrong products, marketing to the wrong people, attracting the wrong people, and making zero sales.

I know that this seems so harsh but that is exactly what you will do if you do not take your time to identify the people you want to serve online. Not everyone is your customer.

Online business like an offline business requires that you understand who your real customers are, what their needs are, and how to meet those needs.

No matter what type of home business you want to start now, your main goal is to sell your goods and services to people that will pay you for them.

If you do not identify who those people are, you will end up wasting a lot of time.

So how do you identify your niche?

Here are pertinent questions you need to answer to identify your niche?

• Who are those that need these products?
• What do I want to sell?
• What are their problems?
• How does my product or services solve that problem?
• What is their age bracket?
• Where do they live and what characteristics will I use to identify them?
• If I were to see my customer now, what are the markers that will tell me they will likely buy from me?
• How much disposable income do they have to enable them to buy from me?
• Is my product an essential good or a luxury item?

Once you are able to answer the following questions you are ready to move on to the next step of building a successful home business.,

Some of the answers may not be clear to you at the beginning, but it is important that you have an idea of what your answers should look like, this helps you to build a Buyer Persona of your ideal client.

Having chosen your niche, I will need you to know that the basic test of your ideal niche will usually look like this

An intersection between your passion, your skills, and your experience pertaining to that niche

This is a basic test that you should submit your home business niche to, if your business niche passes these 3 tests then you know that you have arrived at your ideal niche.

The questions you need to ask about your niche are

• Are you passionate about this niche?
• Do I have the experience in this niche to make it a profitable business idea
• Do I have the skillset to execute my niche business idea

2.Learn & Research

Once you have started working on your niche, you will notice something, you have started researching already.

Researching and learning more about the niche you want to build your business in will help you know more about your business and also give you an idea of what is really making money in that niche.

For example, when I started blogging, I thought the only way I could make money in my blog was through affiliate marketing.

I was lucky that I had affiliate sales in my first year of business, so I felt I was on the right track.

But I soon discovered one thing, affiliate sales require massive traffic for the income to be tangible. I did not have that since it was a new blog. So I wondered if I will ever be profitable in my blog?

That was until I discovered more ways of making money through my blog, I started applying these ideas and my blog without the massive traffic began to make money.

To learn the ways that I could start making money on my blog, I had to buy courses, take them and implement them. I had to attend webinars and also buy ebooks.

Because I was taking advantage of the knowledge of those already ahead of me, I began to make progress.

If you want to succeed as a home business owner, you must be willing to invest in your business through learning and research. This will help you to ramp up on the knowledge you will need to build a successful home business.

3.Plan

To build a successful home business, you must start with a detailed plan that takes into account all the aspects of your business.

A good plan is one that enables you to see on paper all that your business is all about.

In your planning activity, you get to outline your business vision, mission, buyer persona, products, services, income streams, and even create a financial plan for your home business.

It is important to take the time to plan out your home business before you begin to spend money on any activity. The reason is that you get to identify what to spend money on and what not to spend money on.

When I started my blog, I started by creating my plan, I knew that I needed to purchase a hosting plan that will enable me to build my business online.

This part was very important to me because I knew I wanted to build and own a unique business name and brand online.

But I was not aware of how this right decision will impact my business later.

Some newbies have made the mistake of starting their blog on a free WordPress platform, when it began to take off, they found it hard to transfer their blog to a paid platform with hosting.

Some have lost their blog this way and had to start all over, I am glad I took the time to plan my business and identify my most essential business expenses before I started my home business.

Want to know how I did it? I created a home business planner to help you do the same with your new home business idea.

You can grab my home business planner below

It contains the following

• Idea generation
• Business goals
• Revenue and expense plan
• Marketing plan
• Product delivery plan
• Home business Checklist
• Business organization plan
• Pre-made excel finaincial plan template

Once you have purchased your planner sheets which are downloadable sheets- PDf, you will need a planner binder to hold all your planner sheets in place. Here are different types of planner binders to enable you to create a complete binder for your new home business.

4.Business Set up

Once you have finished planning your business, you must now begin to put action to what you have planned, your business success actually depends on the actions that you take in the first few weeks of starting your business.

When a new business is created online, it is like an open canvas that anything can be written on.

You need to ensure that you are writing the right type of information that will attract the type of customers you want.

To set up your business, here are steps that you need to take

Buy a hosting plan

A hosting service subscription is what gives you the opportunity to build an online website that you will use to showcase your business online.

A hosting provider is a company that leases a part of their online infrastructure to enable you to host your website so that customers can access your website anytime.

It is important that you buy a hosting service that is affordable, cost-effective, and also efficient. My go-to hosting service for small businesses is Ipage

I chose Ipage for the following reasons

• Good and simple interface for starting your website build
• Great customer service
• Uptime of about 99.99 %
• Cheap and affordable for $37 dollars you can host your website for the first year.

Build your website

As soon as you have purchased your hosting plan, the next step is to build your business website. Whether you want to sell goods or services, you will need a website where customers can interact with you, ask questions about your products and make purchases.

Having a website is one of the cheapest ways of launching your business online because you get to create your business at the very low cost of a start-up.

If you are a newbie that is just starting out and you worry about building a website, or perhaps you don’t have as much as $500 to pay someone to build for you, I created a course just for you.

I took all the experiences I had when starting out as a newbie in the online business and used them to create a course that will help you build your website as a small business person by yourself.

My course is called WordPress Without Tears. With less than $50 you will watch and implement step by step and finish building your website within one week.

This course will work for you whether you want to build just a website or an online store and you don’t need to have any techy skills to be able to use it to build.

Tap the button below to get my course, you can also watch a preview of the course here.

Please note that if you use the above button you will get a discount from the original course price which is on the course platform. The special price is for those reading this blog post.

Create your products and services

After setting up your website, it is time to add your products and services to your website, this will involve creating pages that describe your services and also adding steps that your customer needs to take in order to make a purchase.

If you want to sell goods in an online store, this could mean listing all your products in your online store, add pictures, product descriptions, and payment buttons.

This aspect of building your successful home business is very important because this is where almost all your work is. The ability to create your business lies in how well you can communicate to your website visitor what you are selling.

5.Tools

Online businesses like every other business have tools that you need in order to build a successful business online. These tools make it easy for your to run your business online without having to be hands-on all the time.

Your home business tools will help you navigate your business online seamlessly, here are some of them

Marketing tools:

These are tools that enable you to effectively market your business online and help to attract people to your business. Examples of such tools are

Social media share buttons: Enables you to share your content with those that visit your website

Email marketing software: An example of a good email marketing software is SENDPULSE

I recommend it because it is easy to start with, you get free registration and you can do a lot with the free package. The signup fee is just about $9.99

Social media schedulers: These are tools that help you schedule and post your social media handles without having to do it manually. Here are some examples

Social Pilot : A great social media schedular with analytics to track and monitor your social media postings, you can schedule your social media posts for up to a month ahead, up to 500 postings in just a few minutes You can also post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram at once.

Tailwind- Pinterest scheduler that helps you to create and schedule your Pins on Pinterest. You can start with a 100 free PINS

Canva– Design all your graphics including Pins and other creatives used for marketing your business, also a scheduling tool

Accounting tools

These are tools that help you with the bookkeeping aspects of your business. Your accounting tools will help you to create invoices, manage expenses, pay bills and collect payments. Examples of such tools

• Hiveage
• Zoho.
• Freshbooks
• Quickbooks

Storage tools.

These are tools that help you to store your documents and allow you to create shareable links for ease of access by your customers

• Gdrive-Google
• Dropbox.

6.Marketing

To build a successful home business, you need a solid marketing plan that will take your goods and services to the desired customer and reward you with payment for all your efforts

No matter how well put together your business is, great products, excellent website design, etc, they all mean nothing if you cannot get customers to come and purchase your products

A good marketing plan starts with creating a marketing strategy for your online business testing your marketing strategies to see what works and what does not and then redesigning or tweaking what is working to make it better.

At the back of your marketing strategy plan is a good analytical sense of the data that you collect as you market your business online

To create a good marketing strategy for your business, you must take into consideration the following factors

Where: This implies that you have to determine where you will be spending your Ad dollars online, you cannot market everywhere as you will spread yourself too thin and not make progress.

The best idea is to identify where your customers are likely hanging out, target them specifically and concentrate your marketing efforts there until you see results.

What: What will you be selling in your marketing Ad- This ties into your business vision, mission, and unique selling proposition.

Who: Who are you marketing to, this ties into your buyer persona

Why: Whey should they listen to your marketing Ad- ties into what solutions you have to offer.

Building an online marketing strategy is quite tedious and requires a laser-focused approach that will enable you to start your business on the right foot.

Part of your marketing strategy is also your ability to build a launch plan for announcing your new business to the world.

Parts of your online business marketing plan

Content Marketing: Your content marketing plan includes all forms of content that you create in other to promote your business online. These may include, Blogging, Videos, Infographics, WhatsApp, SMS, etc. Read more about how to use blogging to build your business

Social media Marketing: This includes all marketing efforts in your business that make use of social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest. Read more on how to use Pinterest to market your business

Email marketing: This includes direct response marketing where you get to have access to your customers via emails. You can read more about email marketing.

Offline marketing: This involves all forms of marketing that are offline, they could be flyers, brochures, meetups, etc

Referrals: These are marketing efforts that are based on word of mouth, testimonials, reviews, affiliates, etc.

Factors that makes your marketing strategy effective

Sales funnel

A sales funnel is a series of activities designed to relate different aspects of your marketing efforts and target them to one goal which is to convert website visitors to customers.

A sales funnel that is well planned and executed will deliver sales which is the main goal of any business.

Traffic

A business online without traffic is dead on arrival, traffic is what ensures that your sales strategy will work. If people are not visiting your website, your sales funnel will not work and you will not make any sales.

Discovering how to attract the right kind of traffic to your new business is the beginning of your making sales.

Designing a marketing strategy for an online business is quite tedious and difficult for new beginners and even you older small business people. To make it easy for you to create a good marketing strategy for your business, I will be sharing my system with you via an online marketing strategy planer for home businesses.

Tap below to sign up on my email list, you will be the first to know when I finish creating the planner.

7.Customer service

Once you have finished all the above steps, you now have customers, delivering excellent and above board customer service is what will help you to retain your customers, drive repeat sales and ultimately build a brand. This is the dream of every business person.

All the efforts you have put in to sell your business will mean nothing if customers leave with a bad experience.

Another reason you should take customer experience important is that testimonials or reviews have a very strong effect on online businesses.

People will only buy from you if others say you are good, no matter how great your advertising is, if bad reviews keep turning up, people will not buy from you.

Conclusion

Building a successful home business requires painstaking work and input if you are to succeed. Choosing to get the required knowledge before you start out is the most important favor you can do for yourself.

A home business like every other business requires research, learning, and product creation combined with a good marketing plan in order to create a business that meets and surpasses your goals.

Do you have any more ideas I forgot to cover in this article, drop them below

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