by Charles Roring in Manokwari of West Papua - Indonesia
You can make money by combining your home based business with the internet one. Suppose to say that you are a carpenter who makes chair, table and some children toys made of wood. So far you have made substantial amount of income from that business. During the economic down turn like at the present moment, your revenue from the home bused business is going down. You get worried and intend to get more income by trying to enter an online business.
There are many ways to make money online. I will try to explain some of them here.
Sign up to ebay or Alibaba.com
This is the fastest way to make money buy selling your products online. When you sign up to ebay or alibaba.com, you will get a space where you can display your products to millions of people around the world who have become members of the respective business portal. When there is a customer interested in the products that you offer on your ebay or alibaba account, they will contact you. You need to offer your products in prices that are affordable to your customers. The possibility of other carpenters to offer similar products with cheaper price is big. You need to compete with them. Making money from ebay and alibaba.com is easy. You don't have to become expert in html or other internet programming language. All you need to do is signing up to those business portals and display your products in them. That's all.
Making money from your blog
This is another possibility of making money online. This is more suitable to those who can write short article explaining the advantage that customers can get if they buy your products. You can also explain how it is assembled or disassembled. Blog is my way of promoting my home business bookstore online. It runs well and I am able to sell books worth up to one million rupiahs this month.
Make money by launching your own online store
If you are serious with making money online, you can try setting up an online store. It is not difficult but it needs patience and perseverance. You can begin with contacting a webhosting company. Ask them if they have a webhosting package which has been installed with shopping cart software such as zencart or os commerce. If they have you can buy a domain name and pay the annual web hosting package for less than one hundred dollars. When you have finished paying and setting up your online store for instance furnitureworld.com then the next step that you need to do is taking pictures of your products and inputting them with the price and data of specification into your online store. Your online store should become another outlet for your home business.
Email list
This is one of the great ways which you can use to inform your friends or colleagues about products that you sell. You don't need to set up a website. Nowadays, you can set up your email list using yahoogrups or google groups. They are free and capable of serving thousands of members.
Well, these are some of my suggestions to you if you are interested in running an online business that supports your home based business. You can do your own research on the internet if you think it is needed before deciding on entering the online world. Also read: My first foreign customer and How to expand your home business