Having a successful home based business is really made of several hundred steps. These are a few that can help you as a guide line. There is no simple repeat system out there. Every home based business is different. What will you for you may not work for the next guy. What worked for you this month may not be the same as what is needed for next month. In order to have a successful online business you will need to keep up with the changing of the internet times. New technology improves monthly and if you are not up on it you can be left behind. What works for someone who is the first to sell a product may not work in a few months when there a few thousand marketers, marketing the same product.Take traffic generation, It is completely different now than it was a year ago and is not a hugely profitable strategy as it was a few years ago. These are only a guide line and a few simple steps that you need to do to run a successful home based business. They are truly to be used as a foundation only.1. Develop or find a product.Find a product that people are going to want. An old product that you can buy the resell rights to for free or cheap is more than likely not going to meet today’s customer needs. You really have 2 choices. Either pay for the rights to sell a product or find an affiliate marketer and make a percentage off that product.2. How can your costumers view your presentation and product.If you develop or buy the rights to a product, you are going to have to develop a website as well. A few tips here: Purchase you own domain name and pay to have your domain name and site hosted by a professional hosting company with a good reputation. If you use a free company and they go bankrupt you will be back to square one without a website.3. Once your site is running, you need to develop a sales page and a web copy.Besides on who to use for hosting, developing a sales page is the next important thing you can do. You might want to invest in a copy writing course unless you have experience in writing sales pages. You will need to spend some money to learn this skill. You will not make any money like the rest of them out there if you try to wing it. Getting knowledge will help you in the long run that will help you getting sales or names. People will buy because the site they are visiting does the best job of convincing them to buy that product they are looking for.4. Traffic source.When starting out in a home based business, you might be on a shoe string budget, and that’s alright. Assuming you have been willing to spend some money on copy writing skills and a hosting company. This might be an area you can skimp out on. If you have no money to advertise or the time to find low cost advertising, a home based business may not be the right thing for you. Low cost traffic generation is a time consuming thing. After you start to make some money, do not pocket it. Use it for paid traffic generation. With out reinvestment into paid traffic generation you will surely fail. Article writing for all the article directories is a good way of free advertising.5. After getting traffic to your home based business, you will want to try and keep track of where that traffic comes from. You also want to track costs. If you are paying more for advertising than what they are purchasing, you may want to change something.6. By following this pattern and rinse and repeating. By keeping diligent on cost and records as well as where your traffic is coming from. You will develop a profitable home based business.This is not a get rich quick type business. It will take time and hard work. However by starting with a solid foundation you are well on your way.Cheers to your success.