An Idea for a Small Business You Can Start

Start-up costs range $50 to $500,000+, earnings $5,000 to $2,000,000++, skills from knowing nothing to running an airline. Bon appetit!

COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARD

Start-up cost: $300 - 600

Potential earnings: $10,000 - $100,000+ per year, depending on the subject(s) of your board and the number of customers you can develop.

Advertising: Run small classified ads in newspapers and magazines devoted to the subject you're covering. Run similar ads on the Internet. People will call or e-mail you to learn how to access your bulletin board.

Equipment needed: Desk, phone, typewriter, fax, modem, PC.

WHAT YOU DO
Put up, on a computer bulletin board, information useful to people interested in a specific subject area. Thus, your bulletin board might cover business opportunities, export-import leads, items for sale in a specific industrial category, real estate opportunities, etc. People with a computer access your bulletin board for a fee and pull down the information they seek. Give them a free trial run and then charge them for any additional accessing of your bulletin board.

You can get much of the same bulletin board results with you own web site on the Internet. The difference? On the Internet you "open" your business to millions of prospects. Thus, a recently opened computer game sales web site is getting 8,000 "hits" (visits) a day! And these inquiries come from all over the world. You can get started free of charge on the Internet if you have your offer put up on a mall (an Internet grouping of pages which offers a number of products, much like a shopping mall offers a number of different stores with different products in each). Once you see what kind of response you get to your home business offers on a mall, you can decide if you should invest in your own home page.

Excerpted with permission from "199 Great Home Businesses You Can Start (and Succeed In) for Under $1,000" by Tyler G. Hicks. Published by Prima Publishing. For more on this and 198 other great businesses you can start, Buy the book now or ask for it at your favorite bookstore. You can also call (800) 632-8676 www.primapublishing.com

Ideas for a Small Business You Can Start Classics