Mystic Toad Press Blog

How I Found My Home Based Business Niche.

By: Elaine Currie, BA (Hons) © The Hunting Venus Group

I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly unemployed after more
than twenty-five years in the same job. Prior to this I had no
ambition to own my own business. I had previously had vague
thoughts that it would be very nice to be able to work from
home, but I never had any idea of what I could actually work at.
I have a computer, I am literate and can type at a pretty fast
rate. Apart from these, I have no skills which I can see as the
basis for a home based business. I like reading and I grow all
manner of plants from beans to cacti, but I couldn’t see anybody
paying me to stay home and do any of these things.

If you had told me then where I would be today, and what I would
be doing, I would have thought you were crazy. I would not have
believed that I would own some websites (my own domain
actually), be working from home and have published articles
which I had written myself.

I searched for work, both on and off the internet and the more I
searched, the more downhearted I became. Sure, there were jobs
about but they all required things I lacked: some wanted
experience, some wanted much younger people, the worst ones
wanted people who were prepared to work long hours for peanuts.

I was regularly searching on the Internet for opportunities for
home work. I joined forums and read posts from women who were
desperate to work from home, most of them had children and were
unable to find suitable jobs to fit in with their schedules. It
began to seem as if there is a great army of people all wanting
to work but unable to find the right opportunity to suit them.

I signed up with a couple of companies to get paid for reading
emails, but reading a couple of emails each day is not the way
to make a fortune. I still read emails for these companies, but
only out of sentiment (you will understand what I mean by this
when you get to the end of this story).

I picked up a couple of ideas which seemed promising and I tried
them out. The first thing was mystery shopping, which sounded
simple enough, and potentially enjoyable - well, getting paid to
go shopping sounds good to me. I found many companies through
searching the internet and I applied to dozens of them; I wanted
a full time job, not just the odd shopping trip. Months went by
and I heard nothing from any of these companies.

Fortunately, I had not been just sitting back and waiting for
the mystery shopping jobs to come pouring in. I saw
advertisements for paid surveys, and it seemed that you could
make a full-time income filling in surveys on line. There were
many websites which advised that you should never pay a fee to
join a survey company, and these sites displayed the web
addresses of various survey companies. At the same time, I saw a
lot of advertising by a company which promised access to an
enormous database of the best paying survey companies for a fee
of only $35, which you would be bound to recover within a few
days. Against my better judgement, I paid over the $35 and was
disappointed to find that many of the companies in this database
would accept US and Canada residents only. Nothing wrong with
that, apart from the fact that I live in the UK. Of the
companies which would accept international residents, I had
already signed up to most of them. I got precisely nothing back
for my $35. The only money I earned came from two paid survey
companies which I did not join through that database. To date I
have received a total payment of £12. I have earned another £21
which is in an account which would only pay out if my total
reached £50.

My work search turned into a research project. I started looking
at home based businesses rather than jobs. No shortage of
possibilities here, but how to choose? I saw some attractive
websites aimed at selling all kinds of goods but I had no idea
where I would obtain stock, or even what I should try to sell,
let alone how to set up a website, and my budget was limited. I
tried searching for turnkey businesses. I looked at affiliate
programme opportunities, and they seemed a good idea, no stock
to buy or handle, but what should I sell? There were also
different grades of memberships. I hardly knew what most of it
meant to start with, but I was learning, and I was getting a
pretty good feel for what I didn’t want.

I would like to say that I found my niche as a result of my own
genius, hard work and perseverance. Actually, it was an
accident. I opened one of my paid to read emails, clicked on the
link and had my first view of a Plug-in Profit Site. I try to
avoid clichés but this truly was a sight for sore eyes, eyes
which felt as if they were ready to bulge out of my head after
hours of staring at a computer screen. If it is possible to fall
in love with a website, I did just that; I knew absolutely
without a doubt that I wanted a Plug-in Profit Site of my own,
it was everything I needed and more besides.

An attractive young man (young enough to be my son, I am afraid)
was offering to build for me free of charge a website, complete
with five free to join affiliate programmes selling a wide range
of items, to provide multiple ways of earning money. He was also
offering me, free of charge, my own pre-written newsletter, his
own guide to setting up and running my business and many other
free things which I came to appreciate even though I didn’t know
what they were at the time (remember, I did not know a mailing
list from a grocery list at this time, and I thought a lead was
just something you needed to walk your dog). I could take
delivery of all this within 24 hours, thank goodness; I don’t
think I could have waited a minute longer. I did not resist this
temptation for even a second and within 24 hours, I was a
website owner all ready to trade.

The learning curve started here but I’ll save that for another
story. I’ll just tell you one thing that I learned: I found out
that I had, once again, been extremely lucky. I joined a couple
of forums and read many posts from people who had struggled for
years to find a decent home based internet business. These
people told harrowing tales of failure, money lost, mounting
debts, years of hard work and worry. In a strange way, I feel
almost guilty that I found my niche by accident.