Think long and hard about yourself. Can you sell things face to face or do you want to leave your website to do the selling for you? Will you want to be out and about meeting people and or would you rather be at home running your business from a website? You need to decide what kind of business you want to run before you set anything up or pay any joining fees.

Secondly, are you a thinker or a doer? I always believe that both are important to running a business, but once you know which you are, it makes your planning much easier. If you are a thinker, then planning should be much easier for you, but make sure being organised is not at the expense of actually 'doing' the business. Having a thorough and detailed business plan will not earn you money if you stop there. On the other hand, if you are a doer and don't take the time to plan, then you might find yourself 'doing' lots of things in a haphazard way and not actually getting anything done properly. While 'doing' is the only real way to earn money, if you don't take the time to plan and stick to the plan, all your 'doing' could be in vein.

Website. Anyone these days who is in business and does not have a website is loosing out a huge amount of business, so you DO need a website. Your website will need to take online orders and be easy to use. Using friends to evaluate your finished website can tell you if it's easy to use. When your friends evaluate the site, take notice of what they say and make any changes needed. Make sure you include all your contact details on the website and make full use of all sales material you have for your product. Make the headlines snappy and appealing as you only have a few seconds to make an impression.

Business model. MLM has had some bad press over the years, but in principle, it's a great model especially if are starting out. There are great benefits to selling someone else's products. You might only get a percentage of the total sale, but you don't have to create, and ship a product or provide customer support. Some MLM companies are better than others, so do your research first. If you want to go it alone, design, produce and sell your own product, then you need to get some kind of additional training and support from somewhere else as this is really the only way you will succeed if you are new (or even experienced) to internet marketing.

Marketing Ideas: To get traffic to your website you can write articles (like this one) to put onto your site and submit these to article directories, you can give away free ebooks, reports and newsletters for people to subscribe to. You can buy traffic packages from internet marketing companies. This is not free but can be highly targeted and successful if you need an initial boost of traffic. Pay Per Click advertising can be highly targeted but only if you use it properly. Building links with other quality sites helps to build your business reputation and boost sales. These are just some of the ideas you can use to build website traffic and therefore sales.

I hope this helps to guide you through some of the pitfalls of setting up your own business, working from home.