Online Business Ideas For Beginners

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The internet is the perfect place to start your online business. It’s fast. It’s easy. And it’s always available. You can run your business out of the comfort of your own home, in pajamas if you like, 24/7. When you’re ready to start an online business, think about what you would love to do. Consider interests you have developed or skills you’ve acquired over the years. Online business ideas are all around us! If you love to cook, you could become a private chef, cooking healthy recipes for people who want exciting dishes but don’t have the time to prepare them themselves

Whether you want to start your own business, supplement income from your current job, or even just learn the online business basics, then this guide will help.

Self-Publish a Book on Amazon

Have you ever thought of writing a book, but didn’t know where to get started? All the publishing nonsense, editing, and formatting, marketing, etc.?

With Amazon, you can self-publish a book fairly easily, and really make money from it. There are some simple and inexpensive guides to help you write your book AND have it generate consistent income.

Here’s the secret sauce: If you can launch your book and get a few hundred sales in the first week, Amazon will take over and start promoting it for you. This way you can make some real money from it. It’s actually easier than it sounds, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Here are a few tips for writing a book:

  • Validate the book by giving a survey to friends, an email list, and/or survey sites like PickFu. By validating your idea before you write the book, you’ll improve the odds of people willing to buy your book (and you’re not wasting your time by writing it.)
  • Create an outline and stick to it if possible.
  • Set aside at least 30 minutes to an hour each day to write.
  • Format the book according to Amazon’s standards.

Once the book is written and formatted, you can head over to KDP.amazon.com. Log in with your Amazon account, then under “Create a New Title”, select “Kindle eBook.”

Here’s a good strategy for your book’s launch week (to get 100+ sales):

  1. Set the price at 99 cents for the first week.
  2. Run a 99 cent promotion with sites like Buck Books and Robin Reads.
  3. Post a book excerpt on a relevant subreddit and link it to your book page at the end.
  4. Post 1-2 guest posts during the launch week that link back to your book page.
  5. Blast your email list multiple times.
  6. By the end of the week, hopefully, your book has eclipsed the top 5,000 or 10,000 overall paid ranking. From there, raise the price to $2.99, and continue raising the price $1 at a time every few days until it stops selling (then, lower it back by a dollar). This will tell you the optimal price for your book.

(Here’s a case study of a book that used this strategy to launch successfully and consistently bring in $3-$4K a month in profit.)

Create a Digital Product or Course

Creating a digital product or course is similar to writing an ebook. You’re monetizing your expertise by teaching it to the others.

That being said, you don’t have the benefit of Amazon promoting your course. You have to do the promoting yourself through your own website, your email lists, and possibly through affiliate partnerships. You also need to create a compelling sales page that will convince visitors to buy from you.

If you don’t already have an audience, it might be better to self-publish on Amazon first. That way, you can validate your course idea, grow your email list (just make sure to have an email opt-in at the front and back of the book), and more or less create a rough draft of the course (since it will probably be similar to the book).

Here are some additional resources to help you with an online course creation:

  • TheRiseToTheTop.com – David Siteman Garland’s website that’s helped thousands of entrepreneurs launch profitable online courses.
  • Monetize Your Expertise Podcast – Helpful episodes by online course expert Grant Weherley to help you start your fist online course.

Become a YouTuber

Videos are becoming more and more popular. From Instagram and Snapchat Stories to Facebook Live video, videos will only continue to grow. If you’ve always loved the thought of being behind the camera, now is the time you can take advantage.

Whether it be starting a vlog and getting ad revenue/selling products to your audience, or building a YouTube channel to drive more traffic to your website – 2021 is a great time to get started.

Not only will making YouTube videos help you tell better stories and provide more valuable content to your audience – it can also help you get profitable speaking opportunities.

The best part is, you don’t even need to go out and buy an expensive new camera – as long as you have a smartphone with a quality camera lens, you can start filming your first video right now!

Start App Development

Mobile apps are getting more and more popular by the year. If you have an idea for a cool, useful, and/or fun app for a phone or a tablet, this may be the way to go.

It helps to have some coding knowledge, but it’s not an absolute necessity. There are plenty of software developers looking to collaborate with people on app creation.

Word of caution: the app market is saturated right now, so make sure you validate your app and do your research before investing lots of money in your idea.

Here are some resources to help you in the app development process:

Learn Facebook Advertising

Facebook continues to expand and grow. Therefore businesses are spending more on Facebook ads. But here’s the problem: a lot of old school businesses don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to Facebook ads. Even newer companies don’t have the time it takes to learn the ins and outs so that they get the most return on their Facebook ads investment.

Consequently, they’re looking for Facebook ad specialists to step in and do it for them. Luckily, this is something you can learn fairly quickly. Once you do, you can reach out to businesses and offer to help create profitable Facebook ads.

Here are some Facebook Ad resources you can learn from:

Learn and Master SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to getting a website to rank higher for certain “search terms” in search engines like Google. When a website ranks higher, it gets more relevant traffic and in turn, can make more revenue.

This is another highly valued skill in the internet marketing world. That being said, it can be a bit difficult because Google is always changing its algorithms. With it, some of the rules of search change. You always have to be on the leading edge, learning, and testing new strategies.

If you can master SEO, companies will always be willing to pay you for your help.

Become a Copywriter

Copywriting is the art and science of strategically delivering words (whether written or spoken) that get people to take some form of action. It can range from anything to sales pages, to email marketing, to even quality blog content.

If you have a natural inclination and passion for writing, copywriting may be your ticket to earning online income.

It’s a great way to achieve freedom in your life. Not only does copywriting allow you to work remotely, but it also allows you to control your schedule. Plus, learning the skill itself will help you in many areas of online business (i.e. building a blog, affiliate marketing, etc. – when you can write in a compelling way, all of these become much easier!)

Skype Coaching

Do you have an expertise that you’d like to help people with? Then Skype coaching may be a potential option for you. Basically, you hop on Skype and provide assistance to your coaching clients. This can come in the form of daily, weekly, or monthly calls.

There are Skype coaches for just about everything – life coaches, health coaches, dating coaches, etc.

Note: It’s much easier to market your coaching services when you also have a blog on your coaching topic.

e-Book writing

If company blog posts aren’t your style, then you might consider writing and publishing e-books instead. With Amazon and other websites around, self-publishing has never been easier than it is today. If you think you’ve got something interesting or useful to say — and you believe other people will think so, too — then writing e-books could become a lucrative business.

With e-books, you don’t have to design, print or ship your work. Just write, market, publish and sell — to anyone in the world. Plus, since you’re publishing the book yourself, you receive a larger cut of the profits when the e-book takes off. Of course, you will have to learn how to format an ebook correctly, pay for editing and cover design services and figure out an effective marketing strategy — but luckily, there’s plenty of examples to learn from.

Translation

If you’re a great writer but aren’t so interested in publishing original material, we’ve still got some easy online business ideas for you. If you’re fluent in multiple languages, for example, then translating could be the ideal job. You can do it wherever you’d like, so long as you’ve got the text you’re working on and you understand the goal of the translation.

Editing

Editing comes in many shapes and sizes, from copyediting a company’s marketing materials to proofreading novels to indexing academic manuscripts. As long as you’ve got a sharp eye for detail, a strong grasp of grammar and a willingness to get in the weeds, then editing could be a great business idea if you’re interested in working when and how you want.

Writing a blog

While a blog isn’t exactly a business, it can definitely support any of these online business ideas you’re choosing from.

Freelance writer or designer? Show off your skills in each post. Interested in coding, photography and video, fitness, food or anything else? Prove your knowledge by writing great articles on those topics.

The more people trust your authority, the more they’ll read, and the wider your audience, the easier it is to grow your business by blogging. Even if you’re still deciding which of these online business ideas to pursue, starting a blog is never a bad idea, as you’ll be establishing an online presence to build from.

Freelance researching

Freelance researching is another smart online business idea that lets you work from wherever, on your own terms. You don’t need to be a talented writer or a born designer, just hard-working and conscious of how to find what you need.

Whether you’re putting together research documents for competitor or market research, answering tough technical questions on forums, or analyzing statistics to point out trends, you’ll be doing invaluable work for your clients — and doing it for a good price, with the freedom to work how you want.

Freelance coding and web design

Notice a trend yet? Lots of jobs you could be doing in an office for one company, you could also be doing for a bunch of different clients whenever and however you want.

If you’re a software engineer, the perks of working at a startup or tech giant are pretty sizable, but if you’re more invested in flexibility, diversity of projects, taking on work at your own pace and the freedom of being your own boss, then freelance coding is one of the best online business ideas from home. Whether you’re into web design — an especially popular freelance coding category — or another kind of software development, it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge to find clients you’re interested in helping out.

Plus, you can double down as a software consultant as well, offering your critical eye and expertise without necessarily coding.

Conclusion

Starting an online business is not exactly easy, but it can be super rewarding. You get to work from home on your business and on your own schedule.

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