Home Business Ideas

Given the title of this blog, I suppose some folks will arrive here looking for a specific home business idea. Well, here’s one I guarantee you haven’t seen before (unless you are reading this years after I first introduced it, so it has become commonplace).

What would you say to a product that can:

• Help reclaim unproductive soils to make them fertile.
• Improve production of garden or farm crops by 50% to 100%
• Reduce the use of irrigation water on those crops.
• Reduce the use of fertilizers on those crops.
• Improve the texture of the soil.
• Reduce pollution to rivers and lakes from fertilizer run-off.
• Reduce carbon in the atmosphere that is a major contributor to global warming.

That’s right, this product will help feed more people with less land, less fertilizer, and less water, all while reducing global warming. And if you have a normal sized yard, you can make it at home. Nobody is selling it yet, but it will soon be commonplace.

This product is called biochar. Basically, it is just charcoal — but ground very fine. It constitutes a major ingredient in Terra Preta, rich black soils of the Amazon basin that continue to be incredibly rich hundreds of years after the farmers that created them abandoned them. And that in a rain-forest environment, where nearby natural soils are leached-out and infertile.

Biochar seems to work by providing a favorable environment for soil micro-organisms. Each ounce of biochar provides a surface area equivalent to a football field for the growth of these microscopic creatures. The biochar also absorbs and holds moisture, and has a chemical property that facilitates something called cation that makes minerals in the soil more available to plant roots. The biochar is NOT a fertilizer, it remains in the soil for centuries unchanged — but acts like a catalyst to benefit plants without itself being consumed.

Because biochar is not a fertilizer, it needs to be used on soils that either have sufficient nutriments already, or used in combination with fertilizer — ideally organic fertilizer such as compost. In fact, adding biochar to compost will help it ‘work’ faster, turning the organics into rich soil. The biochar increases the efficiency of the fertilizer, and reduces the leaching-out of nutriments provided, so further fertilization is needed less often. Plus, the biochar retains moisture, so the plants require less watering.

Biochar is ideal for home lawns and gardens, as well as farmland. A home production unit will probably not produce enough to meet the needs of farmers, but there will not be any demand from farmers until they first try it out on their gardens and see how it works. Everyone with land on this planet needs to begin using this if we are to stop global warming! Think globally, act locally — introduce your neighbors to biochar, and get the ball rolling.

In tomorrow’s post I’ll give links to Internet sites that provide more information on biochar, and that show you how you can make it at home, with only a little investment. Make it, mulch it, use it. Then be ready to sell it when your neighbors beginning asking about that beautiful garden…

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There are an incredibly large number of possible home businesses you can choose from, so start by narrowing the field. First, choose one of these two types:

1. Service
2. Product

The main focus of your business can be either service oriented (providing a service in return for a fee) or product oriented (selling something). Note that I said ‘main focus’ — real world examples abound of these two categories overlapping — if you have a pool cleaning service, for example, you will probably also sell chlorine and other pool maintenance products. If you choose to sell tropical fish, you might also offer wet-pet sitting services to your customers. Your business needs to be focussed primarily on products or services, however, to create a clear image in the minds of potential customers. Once you have their attention, you can ‘cross-sell’ or ‘up-sell’ related products or services.

Services — Advantages and Disadvantages

The main advantage of a service business, assuming you already know how to provide the service, is that there is usually very little start-up cost. You may need equipment or tools, or you may have them already if it is an area that interests you. Depending on the specific service you choose, you may be able to work hours of your own choosing — though there are limits based on practicality and customer expectation. Pool cleaners, for example, are rarely expected to work after dark! Many service oriented businesses, such as consulting or music instruction, take advantage of your particular skills or education, and can be more profitable than many product based businesses.

The largest disadvantage of service oriented self-employment is that there is only one of you — it does not readily leave room for expansion. If you get ill, your income usually stops (when you need it most). Partnerships can be difficult to manage in service based situations, since the work-load is never evenly divided, so perceptions of unfairness can lead to hard feelings. Expanding beyond partnerships is even more fraught with management difficulties. The more skill required to provide the service, the more difficult it is to expand.

Products — Advantages and Disadvantages

A product based business usually requires maintaining inventory — though not always. If your business requires inventory you may need extra storage space. If the product is perishable, you have the further concern of spoilage. Product based businesses that do not require you to keep an inventory, such as catalog sales, drop shipping, or sales of intangible products like software or ebooks, often suffer from too much competition. With any product you do not personally produce, you also have the cost of purchasing the product to factor in — your profit potential is only a fraction of the total sales.

On the other hand, it is usually much easier to sell actual products than to get people to pay for services. Tangible products, in particular, provide an immediate gratification, and the perception of worth. Some services can be gratifying, such as when you see how clean your pool is, but others take time to bear fruit, such as music lessons or consulting advice, so dissatisfaction is almost inevitable among some percentage of customers. With products, satisfaction levels are likely to be higher, so long as the product was accurately represented.

These are just some of the factors to consider when deciding if it is better for you to sell a product or service. Other factors tend to apply depending on the specific products or services. In future posts we will look more closely at particular businesses, and weigh their advantages and disadvantages.

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It may be hard to believe, but some people make a good living just by publishing a blog. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs, however, only a small minority are at all profitable. Never mind that. Blogs can provide other benefits — in addition to direct profits — that make it a no-brainer to start your own.

If you are among the small minority of people who love to write, write well, and have something interesting to say about a subject of interest to many other people, then you may be able to make a blog your primary business. But even if you hate to write, must struggle to put a literate sentence together, and feel you have nothing of particular interest to say — start a blog. It won’t take much of your time, and the benefits are tremendous.

The first and easiest benefit you can derive from having a blog is the power to link to other sites. Now, that may seem fairly basic (and it is) — but links are valuable. Blame Google for that. Google has a system for ranking web pages based in part on how many links they have pointing at them. The strength of the links is also important — and that is related to the same rating system — better ranked links are more valuable than poorly rated links — but any link has some value. So if you start a blog today, and six months from now put up a wonderful website to promote your business — you will be able to link to that new site from your blog and give it instant credence in the Google ranking system.

Having Google or any of the other search engines find your site in the first place requires links. It is much easier to put a link in your own blog, and have the search engines find your new website through that link, than it is to go out and find other sites that will link to you. As I’ve said, links have value, and most sites are reluctant to give away links to those sites that need them most — new upstarts — it is safer and easier to link to old established sites. The exception is blogs. Blogs have a tradition of linking to one another. There are also sites, called blog aggregators, that will link to your new blog, even if it only has one post in it. We will be discussing getting links more in a future post, but for now — just start your blog!

If you are completely new to Internet marketing and having your own website, I’d suggest you begin by placing a blog on wordpress.com — it is free. More importantly, WordPress provides the best blogging software in existence, so learning to use it will be a benefit to your future endeavors. They provide two ways for you to use their software — you can go to the site and click the sign-up button, and start a blog on their site. Or, you can download their software, enter a few variables into the configuration file, and upload it to server space you have rented (with your own URL/web address). When you are ready, you will want to do the latter, but just to start out — use their free service. It comes with support forums that will walk you through the process step-by-step, and help if you get flummoxed.

Lots of people never start a blog because they think it just too much commitment. You have to post every day, you have to write long articles, you have to be entertaining. While those factors are one formula for crating a successful blog, they are not the only options available. Blogs are websites — there is no ‘rule’ that you must post every day (follow this blog and you will see that we don’t always post messages — that doesn’t diminish the value of messages previously posted). Articles can be as long or as short as you like. If you can’t be entertaining, be informative — it is much easier and just as welcomed by the Internet community.

If you can’t write, all is not lost. Take my WordPress blog Musician Biographies for example. Currently it has a respectable PR4 rank with Google, and it is in both Google and Yahoo indexes. It has only a little over 40 posts so far, and I add a new one about once per month. And I hardly wrote a word of it. The site content comes from an old (expired copyright) book on musician biographies. I expand some of the acronyms, reword some of the text to make it flow smoother than the abbreviated style of the original, and put it on the site. Many of these musicians are so obscure that this is the only site that mentions them. There are plenty of sites with biographies of famous musicians, but this is the first with little-known artists. The fact that it is a blog, rather than a static website, is of no relevance one way or the other — except that it helped me get the site into Google faster at the beginning. The right column has the usual ‘blogroll’ and other links — all totally under my control. I can’t advertise on a free WordPress blog, but I can place valuable links. In a future post we will discuss affiliate links — those can be highly profitable, and may be used on free blogs.

So start your blog today. Don’t think of it as your main website, or your only website, just your first website. It will be a valuable tool for you in the future.

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Hi Folks! Let’s talk business. In these times of difficult economics, worrisome environment and uncertain future, everyone should have a home business. Depending on where you live, there may be tax advantages, but the main allure is the comfort of a second source of income — some protection against downsizing, business failure or health problems.

I’m Andrew J Morris, and I quit my last ‘job’ over 25 years ago, opting for self-employment instead. I’ve learned a bit out businesses and the options and opportunities facing us when we decide to undertake a particular venture — so I’ve started this blog to help those of you who are struggling with the idea of a home business to get started.

Nowadays, all businesses — even micro-sized home businesses, need a website. Your website can provide a means of contact and support for your customers, or it can be your main means of promotion. If you can educate people about your business or service through a web site, it will prove to be a major benefit. Many home business entrepreneurs choose an Internet based business, which has several advantages over trying to sell products or services within your local area.

In fact, there are so many options and decisions to be made that most people just never get started. My first word of advice is: START SOMETHING. Even if it does not work out to be your main business, you will learn as you go. Choose anything you have a strong interest in, and begin building a website and business around that topic. You might decide to do something entirely different when you know more about the market, but the act of starting a business will help you learn enough of the basics to allow you to make better decisions later. In tomorrow’s post we will talk about the easiest business to start: A Blog!

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