Many people haven’t a clue where to start when it comes to figuring out just which business opportunity to try out.
Let’s face it, it’s not as if there are only a handful of money making plans out there competing for your precious time. There are thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of individual courses, seminars, ebooks, resale rights, software packages, schemes…
Which should you chose? Which one is right for you? Before you even consider the relative merits of the various opportunities you need to ask yourself some key questions.
Let’s first think about the most fundamental and limited resource you have – TIME.
How Much Time Does It Really Take to Make Money From Home?
Time is so important because there is little we can do to get more of it. While it is possible to leverage money, learn new skills or get the right mindset, the hours we have free to follow a particular venture are non-negotiable.
Yes, once you have found a solid business model, there are ways to leverage your time so that you can be more productive, but when we are starting out every minute is going to count.
How many hours do you have per week to commit to your money-making ventures?
What are the minimum time requirements for a business or income-generating venture? Of course, the more time you put in to many of these opportunities will multiply your potential income. But what I want to make clear today, is the bare minimum time you would need to make it worthwhile. Now my guess is that most people would like to make an extra couple of hundred quid per month minimum. So I’m using that as my benchmark.
Here’s a quick overview of what I believe are the average minimum times you would need to spend on a given opportunity.
Retail (online): 10 – 20hrs per week
Affiliate marketing (online): 10 hrs
Ezines/blogs: 5 – 10 hrs
eBay: 5 – 40hrs +
Financial trading: 5 – 15hrs
Betting (online): 5 – 15hrs
Right, let’s delve a little deeper and work backwards: say you have 40 hrs + free time per week. You don’t have a fulltime job and are prepared to put in full time effort. What are your options?
The good news is you can do just about anything!
Any traditional bricks and mortar business (retail or service based) will require at least 40hrs per week and probably a lot more whilst setting up. Same goes for franchising. I know it might sound obvious, but there is no point in even considering a traditional business model unless you are prepared to put in at least regular 8 hour day.
Another of my favourite ways to leverage time is to act as a broker (essentially bringing buyers and sellers together) – again I have covered these in depth and include broking parking spaces, sales leads, room rental and even setting up JV deals between list and product owners.
But I presume that as you are reading my article you are hoping that you can make a good income without having all the pressures and hassles of starting a full blown enterprise, so how can you run a business with high income potential in a fraction of the time?
Go online of course!
Look, I don’t need to bore you with the benefits of having a purely online business. We both know that the Internet gives you the chance to make sales 24hrs a day, without ever having to meet a single customer. You don’t have to travel. And you don’t have the hassles of looking after premises or managing staff.
Still, if you are developing your own products – whether electronic or physical – and your own website, the set up time is going to be significant. Thankfully these days there are plenty of ways for you to set up all the technical stuff without having to learn complex code or pay thousands for some tech geek to get you started. There are plenty of off the shelf packages that can create websites, broadcast emails, take payments and all the rest.
And then you have to consider marketing. You can’t just bung a website up and expect people to find it. If you already have…