Business Ideas USA

Sam Jenkins asked:




Going green can net you some green: for the aspiring or seasoned businessperson, what’s good for the environment may also be good for your wallet.
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Natural ingredients, no trans-fats, locally grown, organic: these phrases plastered on?today’s food packages represent a response to growing consumer concern about what goes into what we eat. Forget that favorite packaged snack cake-even carrot sticks may contain chemical residue from pesticides.
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The smart businessperson knows that today’s consumers are more than willing to shell out additional cash for the peace of mind and body that comes from buying organic.
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From manufacturing food products and ingredients certified organic (grown without use of pesticides or other chemicals), to setting up a natural foods store or vendor company, the opportunities for going organic go beyond a mom-and-pop fruit stand.
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If we are what we eat, we’re also what we wash with, so don’t underestimate the demand for natural and organic personal care products.
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Shampoos, toothpastes, soaps and deodorants made with natural ingredients and without unnecessary chemicals are no longer health-food-store specialty items: get going with a product line, and it could get on the shelves of big box stores around the country.
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How are green consumers getting to the big box store to grab these items? In a hybrid car, or another green-friendly ride that runs off alternative fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.
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Right now, the demand for green cars exceeds their availability-tax incentives for owning a hybrid or AFV (Alternative Fuel Vehicle) are adding to their appeal. Hop on the supply train for green cars by selling or distributing this environmentally-sound trend (hint: moderately-priced green rental services can be a hit in cities that house a normally car-less crowd).
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If your start-up funds are less than savory, consider manufacturing or marketing reusable shopping bags. Talk to local grocery stores, drugstores, even clothing boutiques, and get in on a deal that promotes the store’s logo and benefits the earth by cutting down on plastic waste and paper resources.
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The go-green trend has touched consumers of a variety of ages and socioeconomic brackets. Teens love earth-friendly logo tees and bags, new parents are running (or driving hybrid cars) to the store for organic baby food and natural shampoo, and the adult with financial knowledge and significant investment capital or investor connections can serve the needs of all green consumers by becoming a green financier.
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As specialized lender, the green finance business gets money to others wishing to get in the business of green. Branding your lending as environmentally-friendly will get you standing out from the start.
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Before you get your feet wet, make sure you’ve got a solid business plan. Consider joining SCORE, where you can get small business advice from seasoned counselors and mentors.
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Identify the need in your community, and figure out where you can grow the green. From small-scale items such as reusable shopping bags to the larger network of green financing, there’s money to be made in addressing today’s environmentally-conscious consumers.

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Donny Lowy asked:




Flea markets are great retail marketplaces. Flea market vendors are in a marketplace where the customers have a made a predetermined decision to buy.

Unlike people in malls and people walking in the streets, flea market customers are more than just browsers. They are serious customers who have a trip to the flea market to buy products.

But just because flea market shoppers want to buy, does not mean that they will buy from you.

To make sure that they do buy from you, I have compiled some great flea market insider business ideas. Use these strategies and your flea market sales will go through the roof.

Flea Market Business Idea #1

Make your booth stand out. Flea market shoppers are surrounded by hundreds of flea market vendors. They start developing tunnel vision as they walk through the isles. You need to make your booth stand out so that shoppers will focus on your booth. One way is to use bright table cloths and a bright tent. Yellow and white are great colors since the sun will reflect on them and catch the attention of people.

Flea Market Business Idea #2

Flea market vendors need variety. Even if you have the world’s lowest price on socks, your customers can only buy so many socks from you. If you want to increase your flea market sales you need to diversify your products. There is definitely a correlation between flea market sales and product variety.

Flea Market Business Idea #3

Professionalism is key. Just because you are selling at a flea market doesn’t meant that you can drop your professionalism. Flea market shoppers want to be treated right. They will give their business to the most organized and polite flea market vendors. After all, who doesn’t want to be treated well.

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Nazir Daud asked:




A couple of friends of mine needed to generate a little extra income on top of their wages. They were both into keep fit and enjoyed working out. They decided to supplement their income by becoming part time fitness instructors.

They had to do a course which lasted less then six months and taught them the basics of keep fit. They both enjoyed doing the course and made some great friends along the way.

The money is good and they keep fit at the same time! One teaches spinning on the stationary bikes whilst the other does aerobics classes. They both benefit from free membership in the gym they teach in…

If you are good with your hands and into D.I.Y. then why not become a part time handy man? Busy people now a days just never get round to fixing that faulty cupboard… and the money that they are willing to pay for odd jobs is not that bad either for a couple of hours work.

Start up costs are very low as long as you have the full range of basic tools. Most people who start out working part time find that this can easily turn into a full time occupation!

Do you enjoy gardening? This is a great little earner if you do not mind getting your hands dirty… especially enjoyable if you find someone rich with a beautiful garden! The only problem with this business is that work dies away in the winter months.

A mobile car wash can be a nice earner and if you buy all the equipment it can be very easy to clean a large number of cars in a short time. Pick one or two street and whiz around a couple of times a week.

You will need to buy a van with some specialist tools and carry your own water on board. Starts up costs are higher than other part time businesses and therefore this business demands a lot more careful planning.

A photography business can be run from home and it is easy to make a decent income. Digital cameras are so good now that you do not even need a dark room to process your pictures. Start of with the usual weddings and birthday parties. Take pictures of all the landmarks in your city.

More websites are being created every day and all of them need some images. Speak to web designers and take pictures to their specifications. Online networks are expanding rapidly and people need portrait pictures. Demand for head and shoulders shots is massive.

The great thing about the photography business is that you can take pictures all the time. You do not have to be in work mode to snap away! It is easy to build a huge collection of images and showcase your work on a website. Start up costs are now very low and this business can become extremely lucrative once you have built up a collection of images.

Do you have any ideas for a part time business that can help to provide additional cash flow for people struggling to pay the bills?

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Lee Lister asked:




So you want to start your own business – you are a new entrepreneur so to speak. Maybe you have just become unemployed and are trying to start a business from scratch or you’ve just got the yen to start a new business. In these recessionary times starting capital is going to be tight. So how do you start a new business without spending too much of your hard earned money?

Well first of all you need to realise that what you don’t spend in money you are going to have to spend in time and what is cheerily called “sweat equity”. Secondly a business that is started with little capital is not one that usually grows very quickly – so you initial income or profit (if any) will be low. So with these thoughts in mind what are the low cost business models open to you?

Web Based: The most obvious one is setting up an internet based business. Traffic and buying customers are hard to attract now that the internet is so crowded so you should always look for a really good niche, a great descriptive domain name and an easy to use, well SEO’d web site. Internet millionaires are very rare, internet marketers selling poorly written “get rich” schemes are not – so be careful out there. Treat your web based business like a business that will take time and care to expand and you should be ok. Your costs will be for web design, hosting and domain and marketing which can be from low to expensive!

Party Planning Sales: One of the quickest ways to get your products out into the market is to sell them via parties – just like Avon, Tupperware and Anne Summers. The use of commission only sales staff coupled with demand only fulfilment and no need to have a retail store will ensure that your start up costs are at a very low level. Your only cost will be for your demo kits and presents for your hosts. Advertising can be via notice boards and classified ads. It is important that you ensure that you keep your kit levels and stock under control as you expand.

Market Stalls and Karts: Both are cheap to rent or lease and if you choose your positioning well they are an ideal way to test out your retail business. Your stock will by necessity be low and you can hire minimum wage staff if you need assistance. The hours can be long and heavy on your feet, but you are ideally placed to get customer feedback on your products! Marketing can be kept to a minimum, although you should budget for samples.

Public Speaking and Seminars: If your new business is going to be more service based then holding free or low cost seminars is an ideal way to introduce people to your company and get some cheap advertising. Be wary of giving it all away though – give them a taster only and then leave brochures out with your available services. Giving talks on an interesting subject is always popular with clubs, hotels, restaurants etc. and is a great way to position yourself as an expert. Your costs here will mostly be transport and marketing costs. Although you will be giving some of your services away. Ensure that those that come to your talks or seminars are interested in your services and potential customers.

Internet Selling: On sites such as eBay and Craigs List is an ideal low cost way of testing the marketing and selling without the need for a retail area or large stock. Of course your goods must be easily and cheaply transportable to make it profitable. Some people make money by buying at auctions, garage sales, boot sales and markets and then reselling on the internet. Your costs will be listing fees, payment processing and mailing costs.

Home Services: There are numerous home services you can offer, that have very low start up costs, mostly being initial kit, marketing and advertising. These services can be such things as gardening, lawn cutting, cleaning, carpet cleaning, courier, dog walking, ironing etc.

Which ever business you plan to start – make sure that there is a demand for it in your area and good luck.

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Suzanne E Morrison asked:




Do you want to start making money online in 2009? January is a popular time to start an internet business, as many people make new year’s resolutions and want to create a better life for themselves and their families. Thanks to the internet you can now start your own business online much more quickly and easily than ever before.

Here are 6 online business ideas for 2009:

1. Start your own affiliate marketing business. Affiliate Marketing allows you to receive a commission every time you sell someone else’s product. Often you can receive commissions as large as 50% and it is easy to get started. There are millions of affiliate programs on the internet and it is easy to find affiliate products in almost any market.

2. Join a network marketing company and work at building a residual income. This has matured into a profitable business model and is a great way to make money online if you enjoy working with people. Building a downline distributorship is one way to create a residual income for a lifetime.

3. Niche marketing is a term that has really taken on a life of its own in the past year and will be an extremely good online business idea in 2009.

Narrowing down a broad theme into a smaller niche is a great way to make money and have fun too. This is especially true if you can find something to sell in an area that you have an interest in or a passion for.

4. Blogging is a good choice if you are good at or enjoying writing. You can also monetize your blog and make money selling advertising on it as your traffic increases.

One easy way to get started with blogging is to create your blog using Blogger.com.com for free. Blogger is a free blogging platform owned by Google and it is very easy to monetize your blog with Google AdSense and get paid every time a visitor clicks on an ad.

5. Selling private label rights products is a fast way to jumpstart an Internet business. One of the main benefits is that the product idea has already been thought through and created for you.

It helps if you can make some of your own customizations to the product. Another great thing about selling PLR products is that all the profits are yours to keep.

6. Email marketing is a fantastic way to build security for yourself and should be a part of your online business efforts in 2009. Co-registration leads are one way to jumpstart a list and as you develop relationships with your subscribers you can begin to sell products to them.

As we mentioned earlier there are many great ideas for earning money on the internet. You can use one or more of these ideas to make as much money as you want in the coming year!

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Harvey Ramer asked:




So you have a business idea that you believe will solve pressing issues for your business clients. Maybe it will even end world hunger and rid the world of AIDS? Congratulations are in order! Now what?

How can you find out if the idea you dreamed up will make it in the real world? You can follow the conventional route of hiring consultants to do market research if you have enough money to bankroll a project and are confident the risk is worth the possible payoff. But are there other options? Thankfully, the path to exploratory market research has been shortened by the advent of pay-per-click advertising tools like Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords.

You can get started with exploratory market research online in 5 easy steps!

1. Digest your business idea and the benefits it will offer your target market for a few days. Do conventional research in your area of specialty by reading industry periodicals and blogs from industry leaders. Then write a short article or white paper that offers some key tidbits of information about the benefits of your new business idea or product without compromising any of your intellectual property.

2. Either learn enough HTML to create a basic HTML landing page with your selling points picking up the thread from your pay-per-click ads, or hire a designer to set up a simple landing page for you.

3. Learn the editorial rules for Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords and write your first Ads using the keywords you discovered during step 2. These ads should accurately reflect the content your article or white paper will provide.

4. Use keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool along with search engines like Google and Ask. The latter has a useful “Narrow Your Search” prompt in the right hand sidebar that will speed up your task considerably. If you want to get serious, subscribe to Wordtracker and do some research based on the past behavior of search engine users – this is an effective way to find key phrases that will work.

The landing page should require a minimum of customer information, such as name and email address. Remember, you can start a dialog and learn more from your site visitors once they decide to trust you with their email address. Include a brief privacy policy that states your intention to protect the security of your site visitors’ information.

When submitted, the form should send you an email notifying you of the name and email address of the site visitor who wants to read your valuable article or white paper. If the site takes off, you’ll want to automate this step, but this simple form will be enough to get you started.

5. Set up accounts and campaigns with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords keeping your cost-per-click as low as possible. If your keyword research was effective, you should be able to get traffic for a free product like your article for between.15 and.25/click. Once you have traffic coming to your site, you will want to learn about conversion rates – (the number of visitors who sign up for your article)/(the number of total visitors to your site or page) – and tweak your landing page to improve your conversion rate as much as possible.

Conclusion There you have it, my 5 easy steps to testing your business idea. Of course, this is only the beginning. Once you have your campaign set up, you will probably want to develop surveys and have conversations with your subscribers regarding your idea. However, you will have qualified potential clients with whom to examine the effect of your ideas in the real world.

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Sean R Mize asked:




Are you leaning towards starting your very own small business? Then, consider these business ideas:

1. Online jobs. If you want to make money at the comforts of your own home, I recommend that you find business that you can operate online. Depending on your skills and expertise, you can offer SEO, ghostwriting, link building, and website creation services. You really don’t need much to get started in this endeavor. All you need aside from the required know-how is a reliable computer and internet connection.

2. Specialty store. You may also opt to set up your own specialty store. When deciding on the items to sell, I recommend that you consider the things that you do best or your hobbies. If you are into water sports, you can sell snorkeling gears, scuba diving tools and equipments, and swimming lessons. It’s important that your business is aligned to your areas of interest so you will wake up each morning excited to go to work.

3. Franchising opportunities. If you don’t want to spend time and energy on thinking about products that will sell like hotcakes and if you don’t want to struggle building customer base, franchising is perfect for you.

4. Massage parlor and spa. More and more people are now rewarding themselves with spa and massage after a long day at work. You can take advantage of this demand by setting up your own massage parlor and spa. Just make sure that you offer something different to easily get ahead of your competitors like home service or week day promos.

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Nazir Daud asked:




Every time I have a business idea or come across a new opportunity I analyse it using these criteria:

Is it really any different from what is currently on the marketplace? What wants and needs am I fulfilling? Who will be buying my products or service offering? How strong are my competitors? Is the market for my idea growing or shrinking? Do I have the time and energy to follow through? Who is going to handle what? How much initial capital is required? How am I going to raise extra funding? What is my maximum total loss including money, time and effort? What is the potential for return on my investment? How long is the time frame between initial investment, break even point and getting a return? What is my exit strategy?

I believe that one should be very careful about how they invest their money. Very often I see people that invest a huge sum of money when the potential for return is low and the risks are high. In this scenario it is better to leave your money earning interest in the bank.

The ideal business idea or opportunity for me, offers a potential for high return, with low initial investment. It focuses on a fast growing marketplace and there is something unique about the proposition.

Alternatively another great form of investment is when the potential for return might not be high but the risks are low, little effort is required and the profits are almost guaranteed. I will only usually consider this type of investment if the payback is rapid and the amount of work required is low.

Let me give you an example based on personal experience on how not to do it. One of the first businesses I started was a packaging company. The market was served by established players and it was being eroded by cheaper imports. Britain’s manufacturing base (my customers) was declining as the UK was slowly turning into a service economy. Margins were tight and my customers were willing to change suppliers at the drop of the hat.

Although we did end being successful, the amount of effort and sheer stubbornness required was out of all proportion to the money making potential. This is a classic business idea that should be avoided at all costs! I vowed when I sold this business that next time I was going to get into a fast growing market place where exactly the opposite was true.

Your evaluation for investing in an opportunity might be different from mine, based on your propensity to risk. If you have a family to support than this reduces the amount of risk that you can take on. Your age, your sex and business background all greatly influence the types of opportunities that you can examine.

Before starting a new business, bear in mind that working as an employee has many advantages to being self employed. Your hours are fixed, the return of investment of time might be less but it is certainly guaranteed, at least for the short to medium term. Starting any new business especially for the first time is risky and demands extraordinary effort before any returns are forth coming.

How do you evaluate any new business ideas or opportunities?

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Cynthia Minnaar asked:




The tried and true ideas are some of the best online business ideas to start an internet business with. Even if you are new to trying to earn money on the internet with you have probably heard about selling things on Craigslist or eBay. But you may not be familiar with affiliate marketing or making money with blogging. Those that master either of these two avenues for making money can make a great living and can even become rich doing so.

As with any business venture you will need to determine what you have the ambition, desire, and passion to do everyday. You’ll also want to set goals that are realistic. You will need to consider the nuts and bolts of businesses such as eBay or Craigslist if you want to sell using them. You probably have some “stuff” around your house right now that will sell but what will you do after those are gone?

With research you can determine what the hot items are and buy those cheaply yourself to then resell. But do you have the storage? What about shipping and handling? There are some great training materials available online to assist you in getting started.

Affiliate marketing is for those who would rather just promote products of other companies without the hassle of dealing directly with customers. This again will take some research to determine the best products to promote.

There are a lot of things to consider when coming up with products to promote. What niche are you most interested in? Will you get your own website to direct customers to first or will you strictly supply a link to the company who’s offering the product?

There are pros and cons of both but long term you’ll benefit the most by having your own website. This way you’ve captured the information (names and email address) of those showing interest in the product. You can then contact them in the future with other promotions.

In considering the products to promote it will be important that you find quality items that do what they say they will do. For example there are a lot of affiliate eBooks for sale that really only give basic information that someone could find easily on their own. And many do not offer true solutions to problems.

On the other hand there are thousands of great products that give you a chance to earn 50% to 80% commissions. Part of your research will be determining what products have the best chance to sell and finding out what your commissions will be. Blogging has become another way to promote products and any other business you have. Blogs are very easy to set up and enable you to find a target audience to drive to your site.

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Kimberly Kelly asked:




Profitable small business ideas are the cornerstone for start up business success!? Are you searching for the best business to start without BIG bank loans??Perhaps you have less than perfect credit, and a bank loan is just not a financing option for you. ?To find the right business opportunity to start without incurring major debt requires that you consider small business ideas that are profitable — and can be started on a shoestring.?So, which business ideas should you consider??

Let’s take a look at the What, Where and How for finding the best small business to start.? ?

The What…
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If you have very limited resources, you should consider a service orientated business.?Service businesses can be started up quickly and easily – and usually don’t require bank loan financing.?Here are a few sources to help get you started in your research.

“The Internet Idea Book: 101 Internet Business Ideas for the Everyday Ordinary Person”, by Michelle McGarry ? “101 Small Business Ideas for Under $5,000″, by Corey Sandler and Janice Keefe

Check out these books for free at your local public library, or do an online search for free information on the best business to start.
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The Where…
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Consider a home based business start up.?Operating a home based business immediately cuts down about 32% of your small business start up costs.?
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The How…
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Find free sources of start up money!?Save on your initial start up costs and ongoing operating expenses by searching out free sources of business start up funding.?Many budding entrepreneurs don’t realize that these valuable, free resources exist.?Don’t borrow, bootstrap!
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Let’s Recap…
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So, the first step to finding the best business to start without BIG bank loans is to research small business ideas that you can start up on a shoestring.?The second step is to consider a home based business start up. The third step is to find free sources of business start up funding.
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That’s a Wrap!
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Now you have all the information and advice you need to find profitable, shoestring small business ideas for your home based business start up.?Share your shoestring start up success story with me.?Post your best start up success story right here.
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?2009 Kimberly Kelly – All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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Permission is granted to reprint this article on the condition that it may only be?reprinted in its entirety with all live links and author bio in tact.

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