Affordable Home Based Business Opportunity

If it is cheap, it is not an affordable home based business opportunity.

Why?

Any home based business needs a certain amount of input: Your financial investment, your time, your skills or a combination of all of these things.

If an opportunity is cheap, it is likely to need a lot of your time and your skills to make it work. Otherwise, why would anyone want to sell it? They could just put a bit more money into it and get even better returns.

After all, any business is about generating an income (and doing the things you love).

So whenever you are presented with an affordable home based business opportunity, ask yourself what other input is necessary to get a return. And is the return likely to satisfy your needs.

Estimating the Return

This is one of the secrets I still have not understood. How is it possible to estimate what the return will be for a certain offer or promotion?

Have you had a look at an affiliate network (e.g. ClixGalore and Commission Junction)? You will notice that they show the average earnings for affiliates from each merchant.

I had found this merchant whose EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) was around $50. So on average, every click would earn $0.50. That sounded pretty good. At the time I had just discovered Google AdSense (Google’s advertising program).

It was possible to get some great keywords for $0.10 per click. That was a pretty easy calculation: Each click I paid for would increase my investment 5-fold! On average that is.

So I wrote some ads, set my minimum daily budget to $100 and kicked the campaign off.

Wow, I would earn $400 per day, just for having spent two hours researching and writing a few simple ads.

I had been one of those people who checks stats daily. Realizing that this was mostly a waste of time, I had just made a decision to only check weekly and spend my time more productively.

What happened?

I learnt a great lesson.

Nothing Beats Checking

After a week, I went into my Google Account and saw that over 10,000 people had clicked on my ads. Already calculating my profit, I went to the affiliate network and saw:

Income: $72.

12 people had actually gone ahead and signed up (for a free service - mind you!)

The Google costs were somewhere around $1,000, producing a loss of 92.8%.

And I had been so certain!

So whenever I start a new project now, I check every step of the way. No adequate return? I tweak something until it works.

And I see an affordable home based business opportunity, I check even more thoroughly.