Truth About Work From Home 2021

Work From Home Options in 2021

After the previous year left a lot of the world out of work and scrambling to find other sources of income, the popularity of working from home has increased. Those who have only recently entered into the world of home business and work from home options are likely lost in the vastness of all the options available. Which will work for you and which are a scam?

The number of available methods for working from home and earning online have grown at an amazing rate over the last few years, and increased with the state of the world. The three most talked about business ventures now are affiliate marketing, print on demand, and e-commerce. Of course, the best course of action is if you can manage to master all three of these avenues, but most will have enough trouble mastering even one. The most appealing on first glance is the print on demand market. People have been led to believe that all they have to do is upload a few designs to a free POD platform and they will have an instant business that will replace their income. Afraid not.

Print On Demand

Print on demand in a nut shell is when you upload a design to a platform that connects you with printing suppliers. You upload the design and those designs are placed on various products. The products are then made available for sale to the public and you earn a commission each time one of those products sells with your design. Two things that most people do not consider in this arena area are that you have to have great and professional designs, not just any idea will do. Also, it’s not as simple as just uploading and waiting for sales to come in. You will still need to market and promote your designs if you expect to have any reasonable number of sales.

Another factor that most entering into print on demand do not realize is that the commissions for these free platforms are not great. Most platforms allow you to set the markup for your items, which means that you can control how much you earn for each sale, but since the products’ original prices are rather high to start with, sellers are forced to keep markups around 30% at most. Even with these markup prices, you as the seller generally only make a very small amount per sale. This is one of the reasons you absolutely must market and promote your own items. Given the level of marketing required, you are better off creating a Shopify or BigCommerce store of your own and putting your efforts and budget toward that.

E-Commerce

This leads us to e-commerce. This business model is perhaps the oldest and most straight forward of them all. E-commerce is simply selling products online. Typically, the plan here is to either drop ship items from your own online store, or to connect an app that allows you to sell your own products. Your own products can include print on demand products that you have designed and connected something such as Printify or Printful to, allowing you to sell your designs and have them printed and shipped to customers. It is important to note that with this model of POD, you still have to pay the wholesale price of the item before it will be printed and shipped. You collect the money from your customer, pay the wholesale cost to the printer or supplier, and keep the difference.

Using the drop shipping model, you will still have to pay the wholesale price for the item before it will be shipped to the customer, though you will have not designed the product. Drop shipping allows you to sell products that are created and warehoused by another company. Fairly simple business model in theory. The trouble is it takes a lot of research to find the right product or products to sell. After that it will still take a great deal of marketing to start seeing sales.

Affiliate Marketing

Even if you haven’t spent much time looking into working from home or having an online business, there is a good chance that you’ve heard of affiliate marketing. Again, a simple concept, affiliate marketing is simply promoting products or services created and sold by other companies and then collecting a commission for each sale you bring. For example, if you promote a product that cost the customer $50, and the customer buys that product after clicking your link, if the affiliate program for that product is set to pay out 50%, then you would earn $25 in commission for bring that sale.

At first glance, this would seem to be the easiest method of making money from home. However; to be successful, you must not only be great at marketing, but you must be better than the thousands of other people who are promoting the same product or service you are. Most have far more experience and often time a larger budget for promoting, so it can take a while before seeing profit with this method as well. Aside from that, you also still must find the right products or service to promote that is of quality and appeals to the people you are marketing to.

Conclusion Summary

As you can see, all of these methods are great ways to earn money online, but only if you ware willing to learn and put forth the effort to make them work. Never give up. Also, you do not need a huge budget to get started in any of these methods, but you will need a budget. It is extremely unlikely that any of these will be successful if you are not willing to spend money on advertising and even on tools and other aids to help you do better. It is possible, but it is not as easy as most will think. The vast majority of people who enter into these types of efforts will end up frustrated and giving up. The trick is to stay with it. It will take time, but it will happen if you go about it with a smart and determined outlook. Good luck.