If you’re entrepreneurially minded, you may be considering, or already have, one of the best home-based businesses for women, an online business. If you have a clear plan and are willing to take consistent action, you can make your online business a success.

While running an online business may seem daunting, home-based businesses for women can take many forms and function in many different ways. Let’s explore some of the options for an online or virtual business:

1. fiverr. Start small and offer $5 gigs on Fiverr. Services range from the mundane (like writing articles and blog posts, creating cartoons or small logos) to the sublime (singing mascots with logos on the sides, funny phone messages, posting love messages from your town). Anything is possible and each job or concert costs $5. The secret is to find a popular gig that you can offer for $5 that you can deliver quickly and easily.
2. Offer freelance services through sites like ehow, elance, or peopleperhour. Whether your skills are in writing, marketing, social media, site review, logo or website design, you can find freelance work here.
3. Blogging. Follow your passions and blog about something you love or have experience in. Write regularly and provide great content and value. Once you’ve built a small list of regular readers, you can sell them relevant products. Make sure you offer products that help your readers solve their biggest problem. And write blog posts on that very topic. Make it easy for your readers to find information that solves their problems or fills a specific need.
4. Become an infoentrepreneur. Find a niche that is hungry for potential customers using sites like ClickBank and Amazon. Determine your biggest problem or need and create products that solve that problem or fill that need. For example, if you love to ski, you could create a “Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Skiing” eBook or a video series on “How to Carve a Turn.” This is the most fun way to earn money while writing about the topics you love.
5. Create small niche websites. By choosing a specific niche, identifying 5 keywords for that niche, and writing and publishing articles for each of those keywords, you can create a very simple 3-5 page website, which will drive traffic. Instead of trying to sell your visitors right away, make one of your pages an attractive “opt-in” page that encourages visitors to sign up for your ezine or mini-course. Then use email marketing to automatically provide content to your readers every day and promote affiliate products or your own products to your potential customers. Niche websites will not make as much money as authority sites, but they can generate a steady income. Once you have the formula, you can rinse and repeat until you have the desired input.
6. Get paid to write. Sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, Triond, and Ehow pay you to write by placing ads on their pages. The key is to write good quality content and write regularly. All of these sites have a very different format and feel, so it’s probably best to try them all out and then focus on one site that you write for consistently. Another tip is to find content in a niche similar to yours and leave comments. That will increase awareness of your content and build all those important relationships with others in the same niche.
7. Microworkers – Earn money for small tasks. Outsourcing is big business these days and you can get paid for any number of small tasks. Microworkers is great if you need small amounts of money quickly. You will get paid to do random little tasks online like tweeting, blogging, reviewing, signing up for social networking sites. Any routine task that someone can outsource can earn you some quick cash.
8. Earn money for tweeting, sharing and commenting. Create a Facebook fan page that offers your services to tweet or share with your Facebook friends, post content on various social networking sites, or comment on forums and blogs. Online marketing depends on regular and consistent communication, and there is a great opportunity to earn money by offering these services to others. You can charge a fee per task or per hour.
9. Affiliate Marketing. Use email marketing (if you have a list) or Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Digg, etc. to find people in a particular market and share affiliate links with them. You will then collect a commission for each sale made through your affiliate link. The secret here is to find a hungry buyer’s market by finding the best sellers on ClickBank, Commission Junction or Amazon and then promoting products relevant to that market. You can join an affiliate network, like ClickBank or Amazon Associates, and get paid every time you promote a product through your affiliate link.
10. Offer a virtual PA or management service. Formalize your business by offering administration, organization or other office skills. With the popular use of Google docs, Dropbox, and other online tools, you can easily create spreadsheets, track listings, review products, write articles, or help others with their management. And make good money doing it.

So as home-based businesses for women go, there are plenty of opportunities to make money if you’re willing to get out there and start taking action today.