Finding the number 1 home based business is not easy. In fact, it is different for everyone. Everyone has different goals, strengths, and timelines. Do you want a business that you can use to generate additional income, or are you looking to replace your current job at some point? Do you mind putting in the hours, or are you already overworked and trying to spend more time with family and friends? What kind of exit strategy are you looking for? Do you want to sell your business in the future, or will you pass it on to family members when you decide to retire? Maybe you have bigger plans and want your business to move beyond the home-based arena and go public at some point.

All of these questions have an impact on how you find the number 1 home-based business. What may be the perfect business for you, may not work as well for someone else. You may simply be looking to supplement your income with a few hundred or thousands of dollars a month by working overtime here and there. If that’s the case, you’ll have very different needs than someone who plans to have a full-time business and income to replace their current job.

There are many good candidates for a home based business. Your number 1 will be the one that best suits your individual needs and strengths. Here are some great ones that have been well-tested over the years, in no particular order.

1 – Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is a favorite of marketers all over the world. The affiliate marketer sells the products and/or services of another company and is paid a commission or finder fee for doing so. The advantages are that you have no inventory or customer support requirements. There’s nothing to store, no tech support, no customer service phone calls, and no shipping to worry about. It’s perfect for the person who wants to operate from home and have very little overhead.

Of course, there are downsides to affiliate marketing. Depending on what you’re selling, you may not make as much money in sales as if you were selling your own products (however, for some information products, the affiliate often makes more than the content owner). right to sell the products when operating as an affiliate.

Any individual affiliate, affiliate program or product can be canceled at any time. This can be a real pain, not to mention expensive, if you’ve spent a lot of resources developing a website and marketing campaign around the product or program in question. It’s also frustrating to watch a good income stream evaporate and you can’t do anything to stop it except another product or program and make it work as well or better than the old one.

Another disadvantage of an affiliate business is that you can lose large sums of money through your advertising and marketing efforts if you are not careful. It is the same with many other businesses as well. There are many free or inexpensive ways to advertise, but some marketers find that they get the best and fastest results using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The best known example of PPC is Google’s AdWords program.

2 – eBay or other online auction business – here again is a way to make quite large amounts of money if you want to. eBay and other auction sites have large amounts of traffic that you take advantage of for good revenue and brand recognition. The advantage is that there is virtually unlimited income potential. The downside is that there are few barriers to entry. Anyone with a pulse can start an eBay business from home, and it costs little to nothing to do so.

While those attributes could be seen as advantages, just know that you have over 240 million potential competitors who are registered eBay users. Of those, 83 million are active users, so starting an eBay business gives you access to a huge potential market. More than 600 million items were sold on eBay in 2007. Part of that could have been your merchandise. In fact, there were 532,000 eBay stores in 2007, and more than 120,000 people make their full-time income from the online auction pioneer, so you could be next.

Those are two of the most popular types and it could be argued that simply by virtue of their sheer number, eBay stores rank as the #1 home-based business. However, there are many others, from consulting companies to landscaping companies, that can be run out of the house. In reality, businesses like consulting lend themselves easily to being run from home.

With the advent of the Internet and other modern communication systems, there is little reason to have a traditional office. In fact, keeping overhead costs low is one of the keys to success in your business, and a traditional office is one of the largest sources of overhead costs in many businesses. Eliminating the office adds directly to your bottom line, which is the whole point of having your business in the first place.