Five tips for making money from your home based business

Thinking of starting a home-based business? Here are five tips to help you make good money from it!

I’ve been filming some tips for starting a home-based business (for a local media company, I’ll pop a link to the videos when they’re up) and chatting about how it doesn’t matter what type of business you’re in – cake-making,  jewellery making, dressmaking, candle-making, music teaching, aromatherapist-ing, copywriting, graphic designing, wedding stationer-ing, whatever-ing, it’s totally possible to make a good income from a home-based business.

But it’s not always easy, is it?! So here are five tips to help you get the best start!

1. Pick your business carefully

While it’s a great idea to start a business based on doing something YOU love, you also need to make sure you sell something that customers actually want and will pay for at a proper commercial rate!

So while you maybe be terrific at making cakes, and while your friends might tell you that you “must” turn it into a business, you still need to be a bit cautious. .

Start with a bit of investigating. Maybe do a mini-trial, produce a small number of your product, do a little bit of marketing and see if customers will really buy!

2. Be different

Once you start investigating you’ll probably discover that there are lots of other businesses doing something similar to what you intend to do. But don’t let that put you off! It can actually be a good thing (yes!) as it means your business is selling something that customers want.

What you DO need to do however is to make your product a bit different to everyone else’s. This will make your marketing cheaper and your pricing easier.

And talking of marketing……

3. Whatever kind of business you start,  you need to get comfortable with the thought of marketing!

Lots of us start home based businesses because we enjoy making/doing the product or service. So we like making cakes, dresses, teaching music, whatever. But sometimes it comes as a bit of a shock to us how much of our time we’re NOT doing the stuff we love…….and how much time we’re doing marketing instead!

In fact I reckon the average successful home-based business owner spends about half her total work hours marketing!

Now, you don’t need to be a marketing whizz to start a business, but you do need to feel comfortable with the thought of marketing!

4. Set yourself a TIME budget

One of the big surprises about running a home-based business is how time consuming it is! Yes!

Remember I said that most of us spend as much time marketing our businesses as we do making our products? Well on top of that we have admin TOO! Gah!

So it’s super-useful to think about how much time in total you want to spend on your business, and how much you can spend on your product, marketing and admin.

With a little time budget like this you can make sure you are spending your time in the right areas and, by being realistic, you can stop your business taking over your life!

5. Be bold with your Pricing

My final tip is really the most important one: If you want to make good money from your home-based business you need to sell a quality product at a bold price.

Why? Well for a small business it’s super hard to make a big volume of cheap stuff and find enough people to buy it! You will always be better off making a better product for a smaller audience.

If you find it hard to be confident about pricing remember this, most of us judge the quality of a product by it’s price. So YOUR pricing is telling YOUR customers about the quality of your product. If you sell it cheap they’ll think you’re product is poor quality. When you’re selling GOOD quality, you need to price accordingly!

♡ YOU! ♡

They’re my top 5 tips, what would YOU add?!

MORE!

If you enjoyed this you might like our weekly Snacks! It’s a lovely email newsy thing with bits and bobs to sweet stuff for your small business. It’s FREE and you can get it here!

 

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