by Brenna Mae

Created on: July 19, 2008

Everyone wants to become financially independent from home, and your laptop is usually the place to start. However, statistics show that over 90% of home-based or online businesses fail within the first year. However, the idea of a financial empire is to grow big, and fully support yourself from your online business. Hopefully this article can give you a good idea on how to do just that, and avoid failure.

1) GET A BUDGET
Add up the expected starting costs, and do your research so you have an accurate view of what kind of cash you'll be needing. Include the costs of web hosting and design, wholesale products, services, and any needed software. Find as many free things as possible! There are a lot of free web building tools out there, along with free e-commerce scripts. Google has many free business tools like spreadsheets and Google docs to keep your business paperwork organized. PayPal is a good way to securely accept money, and they also have a wide range of office tools. Write down what you'll absolutely need to spend money on, and determine at what cost you'll need to sell your products or services to make a good profit.

2) START SMALL
First things first: Decide what you want to sell or do. Make sure it's something people will be interested in, and that it's unique. Next, create a professional, functional, and user friendly website. If you need to hire some help, do so. The last thing you want is an ugly website your visitors can't trust. Upload products or make service detail pages on your website. Find out how your users will pay you, and how you will ship a product or complete a service.

Once everything is completely functional and you know exactly how your website will run, advertise a small bit. Go for targeted users on web forums (try not to spam though!), around your community, or on free advertising sites. Keep your advertising costs to a minimum for right now.

3) GROW
Now that you've sold a few things and started to make a small profit, invest in more inventory, better software, a more professional web design or script, or whatever you need to do! Then make a profit off of that. Keep finding cheap advertising solutions to sell your expanding business.

4) ADVERTISE BIG
Now that you can make a decent profit, and you have a fully functional site, it's time to go big. Advertise on Google, and other large websites. You can also think about advertising with an internet marketing company that specializes in SEO and can put you at the top of search engines.

Continue making much higher profits. If you get bigger, you may want to invest in a warehouse and other employees. Different legal requirements would be needed to do this, but it's all pretty straightforward. Good luck, keep growing!

The Final Step: control your empire. Once you can, quit your day job, and enjoy the happiness of owning your own business. Online business are easy and cheap to maintain, but it's important to stay focuses and be professional in order to go big.

Learn more about this author, Brenna Mae.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.