11 Creative Home-Based Business Ideas (That Actually Work In 2023)

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Are you thinking about starting a home-based business? There are literally hundreds of different home business ideas that you can choose from, but which one is the most suitable one for you?

And if you are looking for home-based business ideas that are easy to start and require zero to little startup capital, you are in the right place. 

A few years ago, I started my own service-based business from home providing graphic design services to small business owners. 

I started my business with no money and managed to get my first paying client in 3 days. 

So, I know for a fact that selling services is one of the quickest ways to earn an income from home. 

1. Service-Based Home Business

If you have a marketable skill, you can start a service-based home business by turning your skills into services that other businesses already want and are willing to pay for.

Starting a service-based business is not only one of the quickest ways to make money working from home, but it’s also one of the easiest businesses that you can start with little investment.

You see, your service business is actually all about solving problems and providing value for business owners.

So, what skills do you have that can be turned into a service that is already in demand?

What I want you to do now is to take out a piece of paper to write down what skills or knowledge you have.

If you could, please write down at least 10 things that you are good at.

If you are struggling to come up with ideas, it helps to take a look at the following:

• Books you usually read
• Activities you do in your free time
• Websites you frequently visit 
• Tools you often use
• Results you’ve gotten for yourself or others
• Subjects you have studied in college
• Certification you have obtained
• What advice do your friends always seek you for

Also, you can ask your friends and family what they think you are good at. 

Once you have identified your skills, I would like you to think about what problems you can help business owners solve with each one. 

Here are a few real-life examples of how you can turn your skills into a business-to-business service.

Let’s say if you are good at graphic design, you can help business owners design their marketing collaterals such as posters and brochures. 

Or if you know how to do content writing for websites, you can help companies write articles that generate a lot of organic traffic to their website. 

Or if you have accounting and bookkeeping knowledge, you can help businesses take care of their accounting and bookkeeping. 

or if you are good with administrative tasks, you can offer admin support or virtual assistant service to business owners to help them save time and be more productive.

Below is a screenshot of all the services that are already in demand.

Generally, it is easier to sell to businesses because they are always looking for help to solve their business problems.

And they also have the willingness and the ability to pay for solutions.

Now, what if you don’t think you have any skills that you can turn into a service?

The good news is that you can always learn a NEW marketable skill.

Here are a few marketable skills that are easy to pick up and also in high demand:

• Write to 1K (Recommended)
• Jump Start Your Virtual Assistant Business (Recommended)

For example, below are the most recent writing jobs posted on one of the many freelance writing job boards.

Once you get a paying client, you can expect to get consistent writing assignments from them. (you can check out this Freelance Writing Course which shows you how to earn your first $1,000 from writing)

So, as soon as you know what service you can offer, you can start setting up your business from home and getting paying clients.

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Further Reading:
A Beginner’s Guide: How You Can Make A Full-Time Income Online (2023)

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2. Service Arbitrage

If you don’t think you have a marketable skill or you don’t have the time to deliver the service yourself, your next best alternative is to start a service arbitrage business. 

A few years ago, I started my own home-based service business offering graphic design services to businesses.

The interesting part is that I didn’t have any graphic design skills.

What I did was that I found a group of talented freelancers online from platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork and asked them to work with me because I always have projects that I want to outsource.

Freelancers need work.

And I need talented people to deliver the work for my clients. 

It is a win-win situation.

So, if you don’t want to sell your own skills or don’t have the time to deliver the services yourself, you can consider Service Arbitrage.

Basically, you are reselling other talented people’s skills and services.

Here’s the link to sign up for my FREE Service Arbitrage email course.

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Further Reading:
Service Arbitrage Case Study: How I Made $1,000/Month With No Experience

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3. Earn Passive Commissions As An Online Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest and most proven ways to earn a full-time passive income online. 

So, what is affiliate marketing?

It’s the process of promoting other companies’ products and services online and making money as their affiliate.

As an affiliate, you earn a commission when people buy something at no extra cost to them using your affiliate link.

I have been doing affiliate marketing myself for quite some time, promoting a wide range of products and services such as web hosting, Amazon products, and email marketing software on this website.

My revenue from affiliate marketing contributes to at least 50% of my total revenue. 

This is the BEST type of revenue in my business because it’s totally passive and some are even recurring!

So, I highly recommend affiliate marketing to anyone who wants to start an online business for the first time because it’s cheap and simple to get started.

Most importantly, it’s one of the fastest ways to get results, compared to other online passive income ideas such as selling online courses or blogging.

But, to do it right, you must learn how from successful affiliate marketers who have gotten massive results themselves.

Here’s a FREE affiliate training that you can sign up to get yourself started in the right direction.

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4. Blogging

Starting a blog is a proven business model to earn a full-time income from home. 

It’s very easy and simple to set it up.

I did it even though I am not a tech-savvy person or a professional writer.

The cost to get your blog up is very very low – less than $30 a year. 

For my own blog,  I used Bluehost ($2.95/Month with a FREE domain and SSL) to set it up.

To make money from blogging, everyone thinks that you need to have a lot of traffic.

But, that is NOT really true.

If you are ONLY planning to monetize your blog with advertising and sponsorship, then you definitely need to get a lot of traffic to see some decent revenue coming in. 

But, there are other ways for new blogs with very little traffic to earn a decent income.

A few years ago, I started my personal finance blog, Earn More Live Freely.

Within a few months, I was able to earn more than $1,000 from this blog even though I didn’t have a lot of traffic yet. 

So, what is my secret?

The secret is to create and sell your own products and services through your blog.

You see, if you have a product that is priced at $197, you only need to get 5 paying clients in a month to make $1,000/month. 

If you have a product that is priced at $497, you only need to get 2 paying clients a month to make $1,000/month.

If you have a product that is priced at $997, all you need is just ONE paying client a month to make $1,000/month. 

Let say, you have 1000 people visiting your blog every month, all you need to do is to convert just ONE out of the 1000 people into a paying client.

Now, let’s put the blog traffic numbers in some perspective for you.

To be eligible to sign up with an advertising network to make money with ads, you need at least 25,000 monthly pageviews (or visitors).

And many bloggers struggle with getting that amount of traffic.  

With just 25,000 monthly blog visitors, you can expect to make about $25 to $40 A MONTH by putting ads on your blog.

That’s why I don’t EVER encourage bloggers to make money with display ads because you can make so much more selling your own products with this kind of traffic. 

Now, to have at least 1000 people to visit your blog every month, you need about 33 blog visitors a day.

In fact, many of my blog posts on EarnMoreLiveFreely.com can bring more than 50 visitors a day to my blog. 

That’s how easy it is to achieve.

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Further Reading:
A Beginner’s Guide: How To Make Money Blogging in 2020

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5. E-commerce Business

E-commerce is set to grow with more and more people buying almost everything online and having them delivered to their doorstep. 

So, starting an online store is one of the best home business ideas right now and also in the future. 

It’s easy and cheap to set it up even if you don’t have any technical skills. 

For example, with Shopify, you can have your online store set up and running in minutes. (Right now, Shopify offers a free 90-day trial. No credit card is required)

There are two types of products that you can sell online:

• Physical products (e.g. food, clothes, shoes, etc)
• Information products (e.g. online courses, coaching programs, membership site)

It’s much simpler to sell physical products than information products because it takes more persuasion to convince people to buy intangible things such as online courses.

For example, to sell online courses, you must know how to create a good online course, how to design a high-converting lead capture page to get leads, and how to create a high-converting sales page to sell your courses.

That’s a lot of hard work.

But, with digital products, the profit margin is much higher because your cost is very low and you can keep selling the same online course over and over again without incurring additional costs.

Having said that, it takes much longer to get your online course business started because it takes at least weeks to create your course.

On the other hand, you can start selling almost immediately if you already have the physical products with you. 

Or better still,  you can just drop-ship the products or you can do pre-orders and buy inventory only after you’ve gotten the sale.

Regardless of what products you choose to sell online, it’s a great business to go in right now.

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Further Reading:
How You Can Start A Profitable Online Store (In 12 Weeks Or Less) 

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6. Coaching Business

Do you love to help people and transform people’s lives?

If that is what you are passionate about, then you might want to explore home-based coaching practice. 

Coaching is one of the fastest-growing industries, and people are spending billions of dollars every year on coaching.

Here are some common examples of coaching:

• Life Coaching
• Health Coaching
• Relationship Coaching
• Public speaking coaching
• Mindset coaching

Do you really need to get certified before you can start getting coaching clients?

That really depends. 

You see, if you can help your coaching clients get results and have proof that you’ve helped other people get results before, I think that’s all that really matters.

Tony Robbins never went to a traditional coach certification school, and he is probably the most well-known life coach in the world. 

So, certification is not really a MUST for you to start helping and coaching people.

But, getting certified can definitely boost your credibility and win over clients who only want to work with certified coaches. 

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Further Reading:
Why Selling Your Advice Is Probably The Best Online Business To Start With

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7. Tutoring Business

If you love teaching, a home-based tutoring business could be a good fit for you. 

It’s very easy and simple to get started. 

Also, there is almost no cost to set up this small and flexible business because you either tutor your students in your own house or at your student’s homes. 

There are many things that you can choose from:

• Language (i.e French, Spanish, Japanese, etc)
• Music (i.e. violin, guitar, piano, etc)
• Arts (i.e painting, drawing, etc)
• Singing
• School Subjects (i.e Maths, Science, English, etc)
• Standardized Tests (i.e. SATs, GMAT)

To get tutoring clients, there are quite a few effective ways to do it. 

• Give out fliers in your local area
• Post on social media about your tutoring services
• Word of mouth & friends’ referrals
• Form partnerships with companies that have your target clients but are not direct competitors of yours
• Paid advertising (i.e. Google ads or FB ads)

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Further Reading:
[Case Studies]: How To Make Money Online With Your Hobby In 2020

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8. Photography & Videography Business

If you are good at photography and videography, you can turn your talent into a thriving home business by offering photography and videography services. 

Here are some common in-demand photography and videography services:

• Wedding event
• Corporate event
• Birthday party
• Baby photography
• Product photography

You can either niche down or go broad when it comes to creating your service offering. 

But, generally, you can charge much higher if you specialize. 

To start this business, the equipment can be expensive. 

If you want to keep your startup cost low, you might want to consider renting equipment from the peer-to-peer platform Sharegrid.

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Further Reading:
Start a Photography Business: The 2023 ‘How To’ Guide for Startup Photographers

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 9. Dog walking business

If you love dogs, this is a perfect home business that you can start with almost no investment needed.

Similar to the childcare home business, you can expect recurring revenue from this business if you can turn your clients into repeat clients by offering monthly packages.

As the barrier of entry to this business is very low, the key is to stand out from your competitors by offering better services and more value to your clients. 

For example, you can take photos of your adventures and share them with your clients. Also, you care to know the dog’s birthday and also their favorite treats.  

10. Children’s Party Planner

If you have a knack for planning birthday parties, then this is a good home business idea for you. 

Every year, parents spend a lot of money throwing birthday parties for their kids. 

You can definitely build yourself a profitable party-planning business if you can help parents save time and also create an amazing experience for their kids on their birthday.

To help you market your service better, you should put together a portfolio of birthday parties that you have planned. 

The key to getting hired by parents is to know exactly what they are looking for and give it to them. 

And you do that by asking good questions. 

Here are some questions:

• What’s your child’s favorite color?
• What’s your child’s favorite outfit?
• Which cartoon character does your child like the best?
• What does your child like to do with his/her friends?
• What song does your child like?
• What hobbies does your child have?
• Who does your child want to be when he/she grows up?

Once you have found out more about the birthday boy or girl, you are able to come up with a personalized birthday party idea. 

Everyone loves to get personalized service because it makes them feel special and understood. 

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Further Reading:
Patricia May Gonzalez: Success in the Party Planning Business

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11. Home-Based Bakery

Are you good at baking? 

If the answer is yes, then starting a home-based bakery can be a great business opportunity for you. 

It’s easy to set it up. 

All you need is an oven and baking supplies. 

Now, how do you get clients for your home bakery?

Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Facebook…

Yes, the best way to get the word out is through social media. 

You need to take amazing photos of your products and share them on social media consistently to grow your fan base. 

Don’t hesitate to ask your friends and family to help share it on their social media because that’s how your photos or videos reach more audiences and possibly go viral. 

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Further Reading:
HOW TO START A HOME BAKERY

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12. Senior Service Business 

With an aging population in US and most of the other developed countries, there is not a better time than today to start a senior care business from your home.

And you don’t even need to have a medical degree. 

There is an ever-growing demand for nonmedical senior services such as companionship, meal preparation, house cleaning and transportation.

To succeed in this business, you really need to have a passion for helping the elderly and take pride in what you do. 

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Further Reading:
Examples of Elder Care Business Ideas

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Conclusion

starting a home-based business is very simple. Any of the business ideas mentioned above can be profitable and maybe even lucrative if you learn how to market your business well and turn a one-time client into repeat clients and even brand ambassador for your business. 

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