2010 had seen the slowing down of the world economy followed by recession, retrenchment and the rising cost of living. You can’t run away from this, doesn’t matter where in the world you live because it is a world wide phenomena. To make thing worse, your income does not rise in proportion to your expenses. What should you do when faced with this situation? Don’t you think a second source of income by doing home business online could help?

When choosing the type of business to run, a home based business is the best option, especially if you have children at home. Starting with this form of business does not require you to quit your current job. You can start doing it part time from the comfort of your home and at the same time keeping an eye on your children.

By doing it right and following the correct procedures you could start seeing results within months if not weeks. Running a home business online does not require a lot of capital. You don’t have to rent an office and staff to help you. What you need is just a computer with an internet connection and a small space in your house for your work station.

Affiliate marketing is the best option for you to start your home business.In this business, you are not required to keep an inventory and you don’t need to have your own products. What you do is just promote other peoples products that are available at ClickBank, Amazon.com and many others. Whenever a transaction is made, you will be paid a commission.

Once you have made your decision to start a home business online, you have to look for the necessary online tools to help you get your business up and running. First of all you need to have a web presence. You can do it the free way such as using the services of Squidoo.com, Blogger.com or WordPress.com. However as this is going to be a business, I recommend that you go for paid services for your website. You need to have your own domain name and open a hosting account. You can get some free instructions on creating your website but if you don’t have the time or insufficient skills to do it yourself, you can either get someone to do it for you or purchase a ready made website with your chosen niche.

Promoting your website is the most important step of your home business online. You need as much traffic as possible to visit your website.If you want a fast result and you have extra money to spend, you can advertise your products or services at Google or Yahoo. You can also get free traffic through article marketing, forum marketing, social bookmarking and many more. For free traffic generation, you really need sometime before you can see results.

Next on the agenda is to subscribe to an autoresponder service. This software helps you maintain an e-mail list of your visitors who have agreed to give you their name and e-mail address in exchange for a gift e-book or reports you offer on your website. With this list you will be able to sent newsletters and sale offers to them at regular intervals. All this will be done automatically based on the preprogrammed letters that you created earlier. Based on past experienced, it takes about 5 to 6 visits before a prospect purchases a product.

Monitoring traffic movement on your website is an important criteria for a successful home business online. If you know where most of your traffic comes from, how long do they stay on your website, which keywords they used to get to your site and so on, you will be able to structure your business approach to produce the best result. You can get this service for free at Statcounter.com.

The decision is in your hands. It is you who will determine your future.