Starting a new online business requires far less risk than investing your dollars in a brick-and-mortar store or downtown office. Because your business is internet-based, you can reach more potential customers, work from almost anywhere, and make money online at no great cost. With some basic internet and communication skills along with little maintenance knowledge, almost anyone can start an online business and get it up and running in just a day. Do you think you are ready to become the next big internet entrepreneur?
Here are some great online business ideas to get you thinking in the right direction. While some of these ventures can bring in pleasant passive income, some of these online money making ideas can actually create small fortunes.
Online business ideas that makes money
Start a Blog Listicle
A really simple idea that would only last 1 hour of your time per week and about $20 in cost. Over time this can make you quite a bit of money.
Create compelling content by finding funny, exciting and inspiring stories on Reddit, Facebook and Imgur, rewriting content, adding some more detail and posting content on your site.
With a small promotion on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon and eventually organic traffic, within two months you should be able to pull in 30K to 50K unique visits per month. Earn money from AdSense to get some revenue to cover the cost of hosting and domain name.
You will make peanuts to start with ($10 to $50 per month), but as traffic increases, this figure can increase to $1000 + per month. Then potentially you can turn the page for 30x monthly income. I know people who do this all the time and flip sites after 8 months for $10,000+!
Just go to BlueHost and get your blog live and making money!
You can get the basic BlueHost retention package for an insane $2.95 a month (36 months)
If you want a plan that allows you to scale your blog/website in the future, then I would suggest you go for their Choice Plus Package for only $5.45 per month. (Normally $14.99 per month) – With this plan you get more unlimited features such as bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited websites on your account.
Become an Affiliate Trader
One of the easiest ways to make some money online is through affiliate marketing. An affiliate is actually someone who gets a commission for selling products to other companies, whether it is on their site or through another channel like eBay. The best part is that you do not have to develop any products yourself, just sell other people’s products.
For example, Amazon affiliates can seize embarrassing amounts of commission dollars if they work on it. Simply register as an affiliate to sell a company’s products using your unique referral link, and you can get a commission for each product sold without raising a finger. The commission ranges from product to product and also goes into stages according to how many sales products your clicks produce. The high commission rate is 8%. This adds up to some serious amounts of cash each month if you advertise products with that high commission fee (Home & Garden is one such high commission product area).
Also, affiliate networks like ShareASale or ClickBank offer a wide range of products to promote as well. Some of the most controversial niches like health and gambling can make people millionaires. Being an online affiliate can be a great way to generate passive income for you and your family.
Sell Your Brand
If you have a knack for creating unique images, you do not need to worry about your inventory. If your creations can be easily printed on a product, then you can make money. Post your templates on a variety of websites like CafePress. If someone likes them, the company prints them out and ships the product. You can create unique patterns for calendars, books, t-shirts, bags, hats, postcards, or posters and get a commission for each one sold. Some of these sites include Zazzle, Teespring and Lulu.
Build Applications
Because Smart Phones are everywhere, the demand for new and creative applications is growing in popularity more than ever before. Between Google’s Android market and Apple’s Apple market, people use countless apps every day. And, most of them are selling right and left. Time to develop and sell a smartphone app can be worthwhile as it is a very lucrative way to make money online. Applications cost almost nothing to actually develop and do not include any shipping or storage costs, which works to expand your overall profit margin. Well-performing applications can generate thousands of ads per month for their creators, making them another great passive revenue strategy.
Buy and Sell Domain
Many people buy and sell domain names to make money online as it requires very little time or investment. You can buy a domain with its registration price or even much cheaper and then resell it for a profit. But, it always pays to do your homework first on websites like Afternic.com, domainlore.uk, Sedo.co.uk, Flippa or other domain auction sites, in order to get a good idea of what is known in terms of domain names. An ideal way to find really good names is to check out the completed lists that offer lots of expired names and have made their way back to the pool for people to buy. A good site for this is expireddomains.net where you can put your desired keyword you want in the domain name and a long list of domain options will appear.
Start Stock and Forex
Some people consider the merger of volatile stocks and the Forex trading market as a somewhat risky business idea. This is very true, but if you start small and do research until you gain knowledge and experience in this field, it can simply bring the rewards you have had.
The main thing with Forex Trading is to find someone to learn. Gathering knowledge from people who are current traders and have earned large sums of money from trading currency, are the people you want to associate with and learn from.
Create an E-commerce Store
With solutions such as Shopify and WooCommerce it has never been easier to start your online store for such a low investment and thanks to methods such as dropshipping you will not even need to worry about things like distribution or warehousing.
Become a Social Media Advisor
Large corporations and business firms can easily hire a full-time staff coordinator or relevant agency to run their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, but smaller businesses often have to manage their marketing for social media. But because they have a large number of other responsibilities, many times business owners are too overwhelmed or busy to spend a lot of time developing their social media access.
As a social media advisor, you can steer them in the right direction in terms of ideal tactics, schedule implementation and posting content relevant to their target audience. Therefore, as their business grows, so will yours.
Freelance Professional
Freelancing over the Internet is a great way for experts in their individual business to help a wide variety of clients in general. Some independent and project-based websites allow businesses that need extra help to list their projects. Small businesses and freelancers offer proposals, ideas, or offers, through which buyers can easily choose what they want and need. Sites like Elance or Upwork cover almost everything, including content writing, graphic design creation, programming, and data entry.
Become an Expert Blogger
If you are passionate about writing and feel strongly about certain subjects, write your way to enrichment by creating your own blog. Launching your blog does not require much technical or computer skills. However, it is important that you know what you are talking about in relation to the topic you are writing about. Over time, you will begin to develop an audience as people will trust your expertise and knowledge.
By building a wide following, this will allow you to make profits by attracting top advertisers or get commissions by promoting other brand products (think affiliates). Blogging is a big business. One of my favorite ways to make money from a blog is by setting up your own online course.
Create WordPress Themes
As more and more people want to establish their online presence regardless of their reason, the demand for WordPress themes and website templates continues to grow. Do you have a talent for web design and html coding? If so, you can make big money by creating attractive website themes. Create them and then sell them on online marketplace sites like ThemeForest and TemplateMonster to generate enjoyable passive income for yourself, depending on how talented you are.
Work with advertisers
If you are a website or blog owner, you can sell a portion of your site space to advertisers and make passive money every time you click on ads from your target audience or visitors to your website. While the actual placement of ads is completely free, the cost-per-click (CPC) advertising capability is based on the level of traffic to your site and the cost per click and click-through rate, or CTR. The most popular way to make money today through ad clicks is through Google AdSense or similar advertisers.
Other effective ways to advertise online include RSS feeds and direct banners.
Paid To Write
If managing a blog seems bit overkill but you still want to indulge your passion for writing, you can write for other pages or blogs like PayPerPost, Textbroker or Helium. Also, writing an interesting e-book can also be an opportunity for you as well. Ebooks have no printing or shipping fees, which makes them a viable investment. If you are someone who possesses strong language skills, you can potentially become an expert copy editor that webmasters will gladly pay to read and modify articles and also correct overlooked grammatical errors related to online copy.
Do Research
Can’t design, write or code websites? No problem, do not let this stop you from making money online. If you have a few extra hours a week, you can do a lot of research work on behalf of other people or companies which cannot afford to do it yourself. Many different organizations and businesses hire people to research certain issues or to assist them in online investigations every day. You can be one of them.
Internet Marketing
Once a site or blog is created and optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes, it starts search engine marketing (SEM). The earning potential in this area is literally through the roof if you know what you are doing. An expert in SEO management is responsible for the successful marketing of a website and may choose to promote it in various ways.
Some of these promotion techniques may include article marketing, social bookmarking, form posting, print writing, submitting your site to a number of search engines and directories, and blog posting; just to name a few. Most businesses do not pay their staff to perform these tasks and decide to outsource all their SEO and SEM tasks instead.
Sell Photos
Do you like to take pictures and have a general passion for photography? If so, you can make a very nice living for yourself online by selling your photos. There are countless people who are willing to pay you good money for your unique collection of images to offer. Today more than ever it is very easy to submit your photos to the masses, which can provide you with a very convenient approach to creating a strong source of extra income. Some stock photo sites like Shutterstock and Fotolia offer attractive incentives for individuals to passively make money from photos they casually photograph in their spare time.
Become a Virtual Assistant
Almost every small business needs help to carry out their day-to-day administrative tasks, but they may not particularly want to pay a regular in-house employee to do it. Virtual assistants perform a range of tasks that a traditional assistant or secretary would normally do, including making travel arrangements, paying bills, or managing expense reimbursements. It’s a really online job and what is growing in popularity with both employers and people who want to have a more flexible working life.
Virtual assistants usually work from home or wherever a Wi-Fi connection is available. They interact regularly with customers via phone, email or Skype on behalf of their boss. How much can a virtual assistant actually do? It usually depends on the level of expertise and overall experience.
Learn Online and Bring Webinars
Tutors are in high demand either online or offline. Therefore, if you have a brain and like to help others use their own, become an e-teacher to earn extra income in your spare time. The only thing you need is to be skilled in your area of expertise and be willing to give up a few hours each week to help someone else. Sites like Tutor.com and TutorVista are places where you can sign up and build a good reputation as a coach over time. If you are really good, you can develop lectures, seminars or websites that are broadcast online. University and college students are always willing to pay money to gain access to highly respected online webinars.
Become a Crypto Trader
Trading cryptocurrencies is the next big thing in finance. The value of crypto has increased in recent months with Bitcoin reaching over $18 just for one Bitcoin! You too can get some action by buying cryptocurrency from one of the bitcoin/crypto exchanges and waiting for the value to rise. I would recommend you do your research before diving, and remember to invest only what you can afford to lose.
Become a Web Developer
A website developer is someone who can build a website from scratch, from start to finish. To be able to do this, you will need to learn how to encode. Web developers can make good money, but to become good at it, you really need to know your stuff, and that can take time.
The great thing about being a website developer is that you can work from many anywhere in the world if you work for yourself that is. You are not connected to one site.
Become a Vlogger/YouTuber
People are changing the way they search and consume content online. It is no longer simply text rich articles that people read from finding them in a Google search. Internet users are now engaging more with rich media such as videos. Because they are more engaged, Vloggers are able to utilize this to their financial benefit. Vloggers can make millions of dollars a year from their audience.
Videos are becoming insanely popular, especially for users under 25 years old. There are just so many effective video content platforms on offer like Instagram and Snapchat Stories, Live Facebook videos and YouTube. With these releases you have the opportunity to push your content to hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
If you have always fantasized about yourself as an online celebrity and you like the idea of being in front of the camera, then this is the time for action.
There is so much money to be made from starting a vlog or a YouTube channel. You can earn thousands of dollars a month by reviewing and promoting products for companies and brands. The more traffic you build to your YouTube channel, the more advertising revenue you will get from YouTube and potentially, offers from third party brands.
Another great thing about starting a vlog is the relatively low set costs. You do not need to go and get an expensive camera. You can do it literally on iPhone or basic SLR camera.
Become a Podcaster & Start a Podcast
Podcast is a really simple way to create content that is easy for your audience to consume. It is mobile, cost effective and can better engage with your audience than saying text written content.
Once you have built trust with your audience through your podcasts, then you can potentially gain your content with sponsorships and offers. Gaining the trust of your listeners is essential, because if they do not believe what you are saying, then why would they buy the things you are promoting?
Conclusion
In general, the Internet itself is overwhelmed with one opportunity to make money after another. While making money online for most people is not their first source of income, it can create a very strong additional flow of dollars coming in each month. However, there are some online entrepreneurs who manage to reach my gold because of all the effort, perseverance and time they have invested in order to realize that dream. Can one of these online money making options works for you?
Put in time and see where it leads you to discover. There is something out there for everyone. Whether you want to get your hands dirty, or just make money passively, there is plenty on my list of online business ideas. Hope I gave you some inspiration to start something yourself!
All the best!
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate link which may provide a small commission to me at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through the link.You can read the affiliate disclosure.