When you're at your desk at work, do you find yourself daydreaming about quitting you job because you don't need the money anymore?
A lot of us do. Tons of people don't exactly love their job.
Entrepreneurship offers a way out.
And thanks to the internet, it's easier than ever before for just about anyone to start a profitable small business that can support themselves and their families — freeing themselves forever from the many problems of working for “the man.”
There are a lot of options, too.
And they're things that you can basically do from home, often with little more than a laptop, a little free time, and a tiny bit of capital to get started.
(And I mean tiny. You can set up web hosting and get a URL for less than $30 to start a blog, a niche affiliate site, or an online store.)
In a recent blog post, Nichehacks offers a ton of different ideas you can consider.
You could sell products, become a consultant, become a blogger or an author, or something completely different from any of that.
It depends on your needs, your skill set, and what you want out of your professional life.
Here are four great ideas for profitable online businesses.
1. Start a Dropshipping Business With Shopify and AliExpress
You’re completely broke and don’t have the resources to invest in an eCommerce business.
Can you still sell online?
Definitely yes!
Dropshipping is an ideal business model for anyone who’s low on budget or just wants to test new products without investing too much time and money.
The business model is simple.
Instead of manufacturing the products yourself, handling storage, warehousing, shipping etc. you simply promote other people’s products as your own at a higher rate.
When you get orders, you route them to the original product owner and get it shipped directly to the buyer.
You make money by selling the product at a higher rate than the original supplier.
Source: Oberlo Blog
You can use Ali Express to find cheap products to sell at a higher rate on your Shopify store.
I prefer Shopify since it helps you automate the whole dropshipping process with plugins and apps like Oberlo.
When you automate the whole system, your only job is to market your products using Facebook Ads and Google Adwords.
This step by step dropshipping guide by Shopify will teach you everything you need to know
2. Sell Your Own Digital Products
If you can identify the biggest pain points of your target audience and create a product that solves them step by step, people would willingly buy from you.
Creating a product is a one-time investment that keeps earning you money for years.
You can keep updating your product with new modules to stay relevant to the current problems of your audience.
Here’s a quick look at the type of digital products you can sell.
An Online Course
Target one major problem that's bothering your audience and create an online course that solves it.
Your course could contain a series of video lectures, worksheets, PDF guidelines and additional reading material.
Online courses are high ticket products that can be easily sold in high-four figures as long as you can provide value.
For example, Ramit Sethi opens up registration for his premium course Zero to Launch only once a year and sells it for as much as $10,000 per course.
An eBook
eBooks won’t immediately fill your bank account.
But they’re easy to create, provide quick value to the readers and sell like hot cakes.
Plus, they help you turn your email subscribers into buyers that can be upsold to higher priced products.
For example, Stuart’s 101 Digital Affiliate Hacks and 101 Traffic Hacks are eBooks by definition, but they provide more actionable information on their respective topics than many full-fledged courses.
And that too at a fraction of a video course.
So when Stuart does eventually launch his own video course, his buyers would happily buy from him because they know he over-delivers on value
Not bad for a few hours of work.
Because of these advantages, some of the biggest blogs on the web still actively sell eBooks on different topics.
An Email Course
Instead of publishing everything in an eBook, you can break it down in a series of emails and offer it as a premium course.
This 30 day course by Brennan Dunn is an example.
[image source: Nichehacks]
Many bloggers and marketers use this strategy to make it easier for their buyers to digest all the information on offer.
3. Sell Online Courses on Third-Party Platforms
Selling online courses directly from your blog is a great way to create a passive income stream.
But even if you don’t have a blog or an email list, you can still sell courses on third party platforms.
There are dozens of websites where you can create and upload video courses on all sorts of topics ranging from Business, Marketing and SEO to Music, Arts and Science.
These platforms attract millions of visitors every month.
If your course is good enough and makes it to the top of your category, there’s potential to bank big bucks.
[image source: Nichehacks]
For example, I recently came across this astonishing case study of Abdul Wali, a broke street seller from Pakistan, who never went to school but turned his life upside down by making more than $100,000 in 1 year just selling courses on online learning platforms like Udemy.
His story was so inspirational that Udemy flew him all the way to San Francisco to attend their annual conference.
[image source: Nichehacks]
The downside of selling courses on a marketplace is that you don’t get to keep all the money since you need to pay the platform fee as well as its share in every sale you make.
You can sell courses on Udemy, Skillshare, Eliademy, YouTube, and several other platforms.
4. Monetize Your Social Media Audience
There’s more to social media than cat videos and the Kardashians.
If you have a large and engaged following, brands would be happy to pay you to promote their products and content.
Sponsored social media posts pay so well that many marketers have made it a full-time career.
[image source: Nichehacks]
The amount of money you can earn grows with the growth of your audience. Here’s a quick cheat sheet to give you an idea of the earning potential.
Source: Economist
When your network grows, brands usually reach out and make an offer themselves. But if they don’t, you can sign up on different networks that connect social media influencers with relevant brands.
You can find tons of other online business ideas — 41 of them, in fact! — in the full blog post over at Nichehacks.
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