I'm a little late to the party, but I would suggest that you look into starting a gold buying business. It doesn't cost much to start, can be very profitable, and is in demand. Meanwhile, I would be careful about spending money or effort on anything that sounds too good to be true. This post was edited to remove a link. Please review our Community Best Practices for more information about how best to participate in our online discussions. Thank you.

Like the other poster mentioned there are a lot of home business scams. As far as how to start one, you can just file a fictitious name with county clerk as a sole proprietor and you are now in officially a business. Apply for a tax id (form ss4 - IRS.gov) instead of using your social security number. Or if you are just going to make money off of affiliate products and adsense then you can skip those steps. You will get a 1099 from the businesses and you would just file it under a schedule C of your income taxes.

Mike,   I am working on some ebusiness affiliate marketing stuff and have found the link to this site helpful. Maybe you can find some of what you are looking for here as well...   http://www.free-ebusinesshelp.com/website-development/free-web-development-tools.html

Let's get one think clear, 99.8% of all 'Work at Home' claims and businesses are either scams or do not work; the only person making money is the one selling you the idea, concept, list, etc. A true at home job would be something along the lines of running your own website(s) selling items or providing informational content with advertisements via 3rd party sites or programs like Google AdSense. It's not to hard to start an ecommerce site if you have a concept of web development, you'll just need to find a product manfacturer that will sell you products at whole sale so you can resell them at retail online. I've seen and heard of peope being successful in doing all sorts of things, however I'm mostly in the internet field and can't go really beyond that. Just remember, if a deal or concept is too good to be true than it most likely is just that.... NOT TRUE.