Are you a little artistic? Great at coming up with short quips that make people laugh? Designing your own t-shirts might be a fun home business for you.

There are a few sites that allow you to create your own designs and then sell them printed on t-shirts through their sites. The cost varies depending on the site, as do the products you can offer.

Skills Required

Creativity, artistic skills, something to make your designs catch people’s attention. You will probably want to be comfortable with Photoshop or similar software to create your designs.

Common Expenses

You will need a computer and internet access, of course. There may be a cost to have a premium versus basic store.

Possible Income Streams

CafePress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt all allow you to create designs and sell them on various products. All offer free stores, although CafePress does have a monthly charge if you want a premium store.

You can coordinate your stores with any other of your home business efforts that will allow you to do so.

How you earn varies a bit with each site. You may get to set your own prices or be paid a percentage of sales of the shirts you made. You can also use associate programs to earn from referring people to other people’s products.

You will want to market your shop through a separate website, Squidoo lens, etc. in order to make sales.

It generally takes a LOT of designs to make much money at this. It’s not a quick business.

Do you Squidoo?

If you haven’t heard of Squidoo, it’s a site that lets you set up individual pages, called lenses, on a particular topic. You can add your own affiliate links and also earn money from the ads they place on the site.

This is not something I’ve earned a lot from, but I only have a few lenses. I’ve been experimenting with increasing them lately, just to see if I can earn more. Some people report doing very well. My challenge may be that many of my lenses are not much focused on selling.

Squidoo lenses can also be good for backlinks to your own sites.

They do of course have restrictions on spam, and you can’t write on certain topics, but otherwise you have a pretty free hand.

Skills Required

Writing skills, of course! Also the ability to point out interesting and relevant products can really help your earnings.

It helps to know a bit of HTML so that you can make the most of what you’re allowed to do. There are a lot of limitations on the HTML you can use, but if you know how to style it you can make things look pretty interesting. Using the various modules well also helps.

Common Expenses

Expenses? Squidoo is free to use!

Possible Income Streams

Squidoo has various income-sharing modules you can add to your lenses, such as Amazon and Cafe Press. You can choose individual products or allow them to be selected automatically.

You can also add your own affiliate links. Squidoo doesn’t mind.

Recommended Reading

The Secret Cash Machine on Squidoo – Also has a free subscription with a free lens idea daily.
Squidoo Queen

Working as a mobile notary may sound pretty easy, but it has its challenges. One of my cousins did it for a time and gave the business up. Even though the pay per notarization can be quite good, it’s a lot of driving at the last minute, and sometimes it’s hard to collect the money you’re due.

Most states will limit what you can charge to notarize something, and it will probably be a very, very small amount. States may or may not limit what you charge for travel.

However, if you add in the duties of a signing agent, you can earn a better living.

Skills Required

A notary must be commissioned by their state. You can learn how to do this in your state by going to the National Notary Association website or by checking your state’s website. Instructions may be in the Secretary of State section, Attorney General section or elsewhere on your state’s site.

The requirements may vary from state to state, but the basics will probably be along the lines of:

• You are at least 18 years old.
• You are a legal resident of that state.
• You have never been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors.
• You complete the training for your state, which may be online.

Common Expenses

You will need some basic supplies: notary seal, notary journal, fingerprint ink, notary bond, errors and omissions insurance, business cards and marketing expenses.

You will need a reliable vehicle and have travel expenses as you go to customer sites.

Possible Income Streams

Your income as a mobile notary is often determined by limits set by the state. Plain notary services are often very limited as to what may be charged. If you work as a loan signing agent you can generally earn significantly more money.

Related Scams

According to my cousin, the biggest problem was simply getting paid once she started working. You may have to be very strict with your clients about when you expect payment and keep excellent records so that you know what you have coming to you.

You should also be aware of the possibility of training scams. Check with your state so that you know what is required. In many states it’s a pretty simple process to get started.

Also make sure your insurance is from a reputable company. You will want errors and omissions insurance to protect yourself in case you make a mistake.

Recommended Reading

Tid-Bits For New Signing Agents

How does your resume look? Do family and friends as you to help them get their resume in order when they’re job hunting? Why not make a business out of resume writing?

Skills Required

The ability to write a great resume is the most obvious skill required. This includes being able to slant a particular resume so that it emphasizes the skills for a particular job, not just writing a generic resume.

You should also be able to write a good cover letter and maybe even help people learn how to hunt for a job. The more range you can offer job seekers, the more you can earn.

You will need to be able to draw out from people what their skills really are. Not everyone will be thorough enough in listing their skills in whatever baseline resume they give you. A good resume writer can ask questions to learn about more skills and maybe even experiences that should be listed.

Common Expenses

You’ll need your computer and internet connection, of course, plus Microsoft Word or other word processing software. These days a domain name and hosting are pretty much a given, as these will allow you to get clients from all over, rather than just locally.

You should also get business cards and flyers that describe your services so that you can target locals. The internet is a wonderful thing for home businesses, but that does not mean you should neglect the potential that local business brings.

Possible Income Streams

Your primary income will of course be your resume writing services. You can add in fees as relevant to writing cover letters and job hunt assistance.

You should also be aware that some job boards offer small commissions for people to post their resumes on them. While these affiliate programs won’t generate much, it’s a little something.

Recommended Reading

Resume Magic: Trade Secrets of a Professional Resume Writer
Cover Letter Magic: Trade Secrets of Professional Resume Writers
Start Your Resume Writing Business

Do you love jewelry? Spend too much at the craft store making up designs of your own? This is something you could turn into a business.

Skills Required

If you already make jewelry as a hobby, you have the basic skills required to create jewelry for a business. You may have to learn how to do your work more quickly.

You will also need to learn how to run your business. You’ll need to figure out details such as pricing, marketing and where to sell your finished jewelry.

Common Expenses

Any business where you have a physical inventory is going to have expenses related to that inventory. That’s supplies, tools and packaging.

You may choose to sell at craft fairs, and have the expenses associated with renting a table and displaying your merchandise. You may choose to set up your own site to sell your jewelry, which means hosting, domain name and credit card processing fees, and possibly shopping cart software. You may choose to sell on Etsy or eBay and pay the associated fees for those sites.

Possible Income Streams

The main way you will earn money is from creating and selling your jewelry. However, you could also earn by teaching other people how to make jewelry, either as in-person classes or by writing an ebook.

Recommended Reading

Ultimate Guide to Your Profitable Jewelry Booth
Jewelry Selling Secrets
Sell Your Jewelry: How to Start a Jewelry Business and Make Money Selling Jewelry at Boutiques, Fairs, Trunk Shows, and Etsy.

Voiceovers are the kind of work I keep telling my husband he needs to try to get into. He always gets people commenting on what a great voice he has. He did radio in college. Maybe one of these days he really will check it out and give it a try. It strikes me as a nice potential side income.

Skills Required

The big thing you need is a great voice. Something that people want to listen to. You also need to speak clearly.

You can come from a variety of backgrounds and do well in voiceover work. Your best way to get started may well be to simply try. However, there may also be classes or coaching available in your area to help you get started right. How you get things going can depend on how professional you want to start out. If you’re aiming at television, movie or radio voiceovers, you can expect to be dealing with people who require a higher degree of professionalism than if you do voiceovers for people who are working from their own homes. That doesn’t mean you can sound bad, of course.

You will need to create sample voiceovers for potential employers so that they know if yours is the voice for their project.

Depending on the kind of work you want to do, you may want to consider joining a union. This is not at all a requirement, and many voiceover actors are not members of any union. This type of work is primarily freelance.

Voiceover actors may work on commercials, read for audio books, television, movies, podcasts, video games – anything that requires just your voice. You may have to sound like a particular person, sound cheerful, talk quickly yet clearly, and so forth.

Common Expenses

To get started you may just get some basic equipment to record with at home, such as a voiceover microphone, then improve your home voiceover studio as you go. You may need software to edit the MP3 files you produce or the client may prefer to do that themselves.

Possible Income Streams

Voiceover work at home may be found through sites such as:

Voices.com
Voice123

You will need to consider how you charge for your work. Flat rate or by how widely your work will be used? Would you charge the same to do a television commercial as you would for a multimedia presentation? Will you be doing post production work?

Related Scams

The basic voiceover scam is rather like the standard modeling scam. You find an ad saying that you can get voiceover work without experience. You respond, only to find that you need to buy the equipment they recommend and pay for the production and distribution of demo tapes. They won’t really work with you on practicing before you record a demo, or anything like that.

A good rule of thumb is to not pay up front for anything. A legitimate agent won’t charge you upfront.

Recommended Reading

Voice for Hire: Launch and Maintain a Lucrative Career in Voice-Overs
Step Up to the Mic: A Positive Approach to Succeeding in Voice-Overs
The Art of Voice Acting, Third Edition: The Craft and Business of Performing for Voice-Over

Some home business ideas are made much simpler if you use software to pull in offerings for your customers. That doesn’t mean you should just slap up dozens of sites with no effort to make your sites unique, but it can be a faster way to build a site that can pull in some affiliate income.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is a solution that I’ve had some good luck with. It’s a tool to build sites that feature eBay auctions. The program costs $97 and is fairly easy to use. Customizing your template can take some work, as can researching good niches to build a site around.

The biggest challenge with BANS is making a decent quality site. Yes, you can just throw up a site and not add anything of your own to it. I do not recommend that. They don’t last.

The disadvantage to a BANS site is that they can be deindexed by the search engines for poor quality even if you have put some effort into them. I haven’t had that happen, but others have. To me that makes it not necessarily an ideal home business, but not the worst one either. The few BANS sites I run have paid for the software at least 10 times over. That’s not much really, but considering what I do with the sites after I set it up, not too bad either.

Skills Required

Your first step with a BANS site is to research the niche you want to use. You want to find things that sell well through eBay. Tight niches are a good thing. “Jewelry” is too broad. Antique jewelry of a particular era or Middle Eastern jewelry would be better. eBay has a Popular Products section that can make for some interesting reading.

You will also need to know how to customize the templates. The BANS software separates things out and offers you a few extremely basic templates to start things out. If you have the skills to do more than change the header, it’s a good idea to really work with your template. Change the colors, work with the layout, keep the site from looking like an out of the box BANS site.

You should also have some skills at writing copy. Even for the pages BANS generates automatically for the categories you choose you should be adding a good amount of your own copy. This is a big part of how you keep your site from being thrown out of the search engines.

You’ll probably also want to do article writing. The software makes it easy for you to post your articles to your site.

Common Expenses

The BANS software is the big upfront expense, of course. But you will also need a domain name for each site and hosting. Fortunately a good hosting account will let you host quite a number of BANS sites, so that cost should not increase too much with each site built.

Note that it may take you several tries to come up with a niche that will pay well. I have a couple BANS sites that hardly do anything at all. Two make up the bulk of what I have earned. I mentioned that this isn’t a completely easy home business solution, right?

Possible Income Streams

eBay commissions are not your only source of income on a BANS site. You can add in AdSense and other affiliate links. The templates make it very easy to put banner ads in.

Recommended Reading

Read in the BANS forums after purchase. You’ll get a link and be allowed to join once you’ve bought it. Lots of great tips from active users.

Do you have the skills to create and maintain technical documentation? A technical writer can write online help for programs, write scripts for instructional videos and prepare technical information for the end user.

Skills Required

A tech writer not only has to be an excellent writer, but must be capable of understanding the topics they write about. You may have to get technical information across to a non-technical audience. The information must be precise and complete.

Common Expenses

To start out a technical writing business, your main need may be a computer. A machine dedicated to your business has advantages, especially if other family members will be wanting to use a computer while you work.

You may need specialized software, depending on the requirements of the job. Some will require fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office. You may also need Project, Visio, RoboHelp, Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat and familiarity with some scripting languages.

A domain name and hosting can be useful for your online portfolio.

There may be expenses associated with finding clients. You will want to print business cards. You might look for work on boards that will have either an upfront cost or take a percentage of your earnings from projects found there. You might try pay per click advertising.

Possible Income Streams

Hopefully you can attract clients over time through your site. However, sites such as Shelancers, Elance or Guru are also good places to search for work.

Related Scams

When you’re running your own business dealing with clients, your main concern may well be getting paid by your clients. Sometimes this will be really difficult. But there are fewer flat out scams out there when you have your own business. They do exist, however.

Fake job boards, for example. Any time you pay for membership you should first research to be sure that you will be getting something for your money, or at least have the chance to. Sometimes a legitimate source just won’t have a match for you. Other times there may be deliberate deception about the possibilities present on a site.

Recommended Reading

Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Documentation, Second Edition
Technical Writing Basics: A Guide to Style and Form (3rd Edition)
Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications