A home business can make you a little bit of income, or a lot. It depends on what you do, and what you sell. But in almost all cases, no matter what you are selling, you can make a home business generate a lot more profit. Here are some proven ways of taking home more of that money you are leaving on the table.

1. Make one-time offers on complementary products. If you have ever ordered from QVC or the home shopping network, you know about upsells and one-time offers. Sometimes, they keep offering you more stuff until you finally say no - which can be up to 20 times more money than the thing you called in to buy.

2. Sell more focused products - things that your target market really want. If you sell them exactly what they want, you'll not only make more money, but you will get happier customers. To do this, you will need to understand your customers, and there is no better way of understanding them, than to ask them what they want. Put a question on the thank you page, or send them a survey link after they order - it can double your profits.

3. Optimize your sales process. It is well known that printed material - both mailed and online formats, are salesmanship in print, and by optimizing your materials, you can generate more sales, and create more profits. This often involves hiring a professional copywriter, or learning how to write persuasively yourself (which can be a long, time consuming process). Ultimately, it is one of the most profitable things you can ever do, since changing your conversion rate (the percentage of viewers that make a purchase) from 2% to 3% means you just increased sales by 50% - which often means your profits double.

4. Increase rapport with prospects and customers. This means getting to know your prospects and customers better, so you can better serve their desires. By providing useful service, your prospects and customers will come to like you and respect you, which has been proven to increase their likelihood to buy from you again. The biggest companies in the world have mastered this, by giving their customers high quality stuff that they come back for time and again. And those companies that fail to learn this quickly discover that the cost of finding new customers is about 1000 times more expensive that keeping an existing customer.

If you do not yet have a consistent online income, then you should get some help to learn how to get a product that a focused group of people are looking to buy, and the way to reach that group of people, and the way to persuade them you have what they are looking for. If this is new territory for you, having someone that knows how to do this can shave 3 years off the time it takes to succeed.