Starting an online small business from home is one of the best ways to make money. Offering your customers great products and services can turn your small business into a big thing and you can start an online small business from home.
Online Business Ideas: You’ve probably heard this before; it’s no secret that starting an online business is the best idea around. It allows for working from home, flexible hours and most importantly, you can work full time or part time as your schedule permits. Today, with the help of today’s technology, anyone can start an online business. I’m going to list a few of the most common online business ideas below.
Don’t Start Building Yet
When looking to set up a company online, it can be tempting to jump into action.
So, if you’re feeling the urge to build a website, choose a business name, or create a logo, hold off for now.
If you want to start a successful online business, first, you need a strategy. And steps two, three and four of this article will show you how to create your online business strategy.
Choose a Business Model
When learning how to build an online business from scratch, it helps to know about some tried-and-tested online business models.
Here are six types of online businesses to consider:
- Affiliate Marketing: Promote other business’s products and services online, and receive a commission for each sale you make with this passive income idea.
- Freelancing: Provide a service to other individuals and businesses using a skill that you have, such as advertising, writing, designing, or programming.
- Coaching and Consulting: Become a coach or a consultant and sell your expertise, advice, and guidance.
- Information Products: Package and sell your expertise in ebooks, worksheets, templates, and online courses.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Create a piece of software or application, and charge users a recurring subscription fee.
- Ecommerce: Use a service like Shopify to set up a website and sell physical products online.
Identify Your Target Market
Next, you need to get clear on your target market. In other words, who are you going to serve?
This step is absolutely vital.
As the marketer Philip Kotler once said, “There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.”
Here’s the trick: Make sure you are part of your target audience.
Think about it. If you’ve been camping your entire life, you’ll understand the problems, desires, and language of other campers. As a result, it’d be much easier to sell camping products online.
Plus, your marketing will be more successful because you’ll have a better understanding of how to communicate with other campers.
On the other hand, if you’ve never been camping in your life, you’d probably struggle – a lot – to sell camping products online.
So, when choosing a target audience, ask yourself:
- What are my hobbies and interests?
- Is there anything that I know a lot about?
- What do I spend most of my time thinking, talking, and reading about?
Business Ideas:
Blogging
While not a new concept, monetized blogging is always a popular option for an essentially no-cost business.
There are tons of options when it comes to making money from your blog, such as affiliate partnerships, producing ebooks, offering online courses and webinars. Some of these work better than others, as and certain blog niches will be more popular and easy to monetize than others. For instance, beauty, food, and parenting blogs are some of the most popular niches, and will, therefore, be easier to monetize (though you’ll also face stiffer competition).
It’s worth mentioning, however, that monetizing your blog will work best when you choose a subject that you are actually passionate about and personally invested in to blog about. So, this route works best if you’re thinking, “Yeah! I’ve always really wanted to start a blog about my love of handcrafted artisan chocolates!” (or whatever else gets you going). Merely wanting to make money isn’t enough.
Start your own clothing line
If you have some designs in mind and a little bit of time on your hands, you can get your clothing company off the ground.
If you already own a Shopify store, you can set up your own clothing line using Oberlo, Printify, Printful, or a similar product-sourcing app. Each automatically links your store to apparel printers and clothing manufacturers. They also handle every step of the retail fulfillment process for you, giving you the freedom to design and ship a wide range of pieces right out of the gate.
Why start a clothing line?
- There’s nothing more satisfying than creating products that people will use every day.
- As soon as you build your Shopify store, you’ll be able to start selling instantly. Thanks to print-on-demand apps, the process of designing and delivering your own custom-made clothing has been streamlined and simplified.
- You’ll love the feeling of seeing your designs come to life by transforming your creativity into something real and profitable.
Freelance writing
Are you a strong writer? This one is a no-brainer. If you have solid writing skills, consider starting a business as a freelance writer.
To build up your portfolio and client base, you may want to start with a site like Upwork (and check out my article on using Upwork to find great freelancers—it’ll give you insight into what to do, and what not to do!).
Launch a dropshipping store
Think you need a warehouse full of inventory to run your own business? Think again! Dropshipping is one of the best online startup ideas for entrepreneurs on a budget. You can hit the ground running by sourcing a pre-existing product from a supplier and having them take care of things like packaging and fulfillment.
This process lets you skip over a lot of obstacles that might be standing in the way of you starting your own business. More importantly, it eliminates the risk of finding out there’s no market for your product after placing a huge order with a manufacturer or supplier.
Why choose dropshipping?
- You don’t need to stock products in a physical location, meaning that your cash flow won’t get tied up in inventory. There’s less of an upfront cash risk.
- Whenever a purchase is made, you place an order with a third party and they handle the rest of the process for you. Since you don’t have to deal with things like tracking inventory or mailing packages, dropshipping eliminates a lot of potential headaches for budding entrepreneurs.
- No warehouse means you can run your business from anywhere. Whether it’s your living room or the café down the street, you decide where you want to work from.
If you’re interested in dropshipping, read our Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping to help you get started.
If you don’t have any online store ideas, here are some strategies for narrowing down the perfect product:
- Find products to sell on Oberlo.
- Read our guide Find a Product to Sell: 12 Strategies for Finding Your First Profitable Product.
- Check out these 17 places ecommerce entrepreneurs go to find product ideas.
- Find out how we made more than $2,000 in five weeks with imported gaming glasses.
Conclusion:
If you’ve ever thought about starting an online business, here is your best options. It’s no question that starting an online small business from home takes a lot of courage and perseverance. But I know you can start this if you put your heart into it.