Working at home provides a tremendous amount of freedom for moms and dads who want to stay home to raise their own kids while still earning a full-time income to support their families. In order to make money from home, you need to find a home business opportunity that meets your family's financial needs by providing the ability to earn a residual income for years to come.

Here are three potential home based businesses that anyone can start, run and earn a good income from with little or no experience or investment.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the equivalent of being an online salesperson by promoting someone else's products or services in order to earn a commission. Depending on the type affiliate program offered, commissions are earned based on either sales or leads--sometimes both. Most affiliate programs pay for sales, but leads programs are available.

Affiliate programs are typically free to join, require no special knowledge and can even be promoted through ezine advertising or classified ads so you don't even have to have a website (though one is recommended). Search online for "free affiliate program" to find hundreds of possibilities.

2. Epublishing

If you have even average writing skills, you can earn a good income working at home by writing your own ebooks, reports and ecourses and selling them to others. The easiest way to epublish and the one that offers the most profit potential is to write about what you know.

• If you know how to rebuild an engine, you can write a series of ebooks on rebuilding the engine in various vehicles.

• If you know how to bake the best bread in the county, you can write an ebook filled with tips and tricks for baking bread.

• If you've raised 10 kids and no what works in parenting and what doesn't, you can write an ebook on how to be an effective parent.

Whatever you write about, choose topics that you enjoy, and create informative products that readers will be glad they bought and will tell their friends about.

3. Private Label Rights (PLR) Products

If you like the idea of epublishing, but don't feel you're a competent writer, you have a couple of other options. One is to hire a ghostwriter to write ebooks and reports for you. This is a good option, but does require some monetary outlay. The other option is to find Private Label Rights (PLR) products that you can customize and sell as your own.

PLR is material that has been written, and sold or given away, with permission that allows the buyer to resell it as his own. While you can pay for PLR, and may decide you want to later on, you can find a lot of good PLR free for the download.

The profitable way to use PLR is to edit and customize it to make it your own. Before you do this, be sure the PLR you use comes with Master Resell Rights (MRR) and gives you permission to change it.

Never make the mistake of using PLR as is. A quick search for your PLR title online will reveal others who do that very thing. This is not a profitable way to use PLR. Why would someone pay for what they can download free?

However, customizing PLR, maybe by combining one or more articles into an ebook, changing the title, or adding more information will create a unique product that you can use to build a profitable business working at home.