That the Internet is overflowing with different sorts of opportunities to make money online is no longer in question. What is indeed a question now is whether there exists, beyond the floating wishy-washy ideas, online business ideas that can make you a full-time income.
If you are looking for online business ideas that can fetch you some extra income or even full-time income, chances are you have checked on Google for ideas.
From my experience, it can be very confusing and unrewarding. Not because there aren’t useful articles that take care of that topic, but because of two major problems.
First, there is so much information out there you may end up suffering from analysis paralysis -- a situation where you are no longer sure of which one you should implement or which one is truly beneficial.
Second, quite a number of them offer very little value or may not be easy to implement.
So, how do you get the right online business ideas? Or what are the tested and proven online business ideas that you can apply irrespective of your position?
1. Sell your skills online
In as much that sounds generic, I’m writing this blog post bearing in mind that the problem you have isn’t that you don’t know that selling your skills online is among online business ideas you could implement.
But that no one is telling you exactly how you could go about it.
So, this won’t be the sort of dry “sell your skills online” you’ve heard or read elsewhere, but one which teaches you what steps need to be taken to achieve success selling skills in the online world.
These are the three things you will need to be able to sell your skills online.
Open a profile on online job boards
Open an account on some of the following online job boards: Upworks, Fiverr, Flexjobs, Solidgigs, etc.
Thousands of business owners, if not hundreds of thousands, are always on these job boards looking for your service.
Having a profile on most of them will not cost you anything more than your signing up and setting up a professional business profile well optimized for searchers.
Take Fiverr, for example. It allows you to create up to three gigs. In Fiverr’s parlance, gig refers to the basic price of any other service you offer.
Read further here on how to optimize your Fiverr gig to rank on top.
Open a website for your business and optimize for search engine
If you have the budget, or you are willing to even appear bigger and smarter, create a website or a blog and optimize it for search engines so that you can appear first whenever your prospects are searching for your services online.
This isn’t expensive either, with just a few dollars you could buy a domain name and hosting and start using your website to attract clients.
Furthermore, research shows that freelancers who have websites command higher rates than those who do not.
Although this might be a little bit of upfront investment, in the beginning, it pays, in my experience and according to research, the best returns.
Market your service properly on social media
Every day, countless numbers of business owners search LinkedIn profiles as well as Twitter to look for some specialists in a particular service.
While this happens on every other social media, too, I can bet on the oftenness of LinkedIn and Twitter.
Just personalize your profile and optimize for service seekers to find you. And there, you have it.
Also, don’t forget that content is king everywhere, but even more so on the Internet.
By sharing contents that are relevant to your industry every time on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Quora and several others, you not only give yourself an aura of authority in that area but also boost your chances of being discovered through search engines that rank these sites or even their own search engines.
But one important rule, don’t make foray into people’s inbox unless you are going to create a relationship with them or they asked you for it.
2. Become an affiliate marketer
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting products or services online.
A publisher receives a reward for every customer who takes a specified action. The action could be purchasing or visiting the advertiser’s website.
In recent days, affiliate marketing is fast becoming one of the commonest ways for people who want to make some passive income in the online business.
On becoming an affiliate marketer, most people confuse bloggers who use affiliate marketing as an income-generating source for an affiliate marketer who started a blog solely for affiliate marketing.
Whereas, a blogger may sell all sorts of services on his blog to make money: online courses, ads space, freelance services, consultancy, affiliate marketing, etc.
An affiliate marketer does not start a blog to teach people anything more than how to make the best choice when purchasing a product and where to buy it from.
Both of them, though, overlap on the basis that both need content in order to make money.
So, how do you start a successful affiliate marketing business online?
Here is a step by step guide on how to become a successful affiliate marketer
- Choose a niche you have knowledge in or are passionate about enough to never get tired of learning about and talking about
- Research different affiliate products and programs to see what to build your affiliate site over
- Built a site tailored to that purpose
- Start producing excellent content
- Use your website to build a sizeable audience
- Promote affiliate product on your site directly, or through your email list or through social media ads
- Be persistent with it
Done! You are good to go.
Do not forget, affiliate marketing is not an overnight success (None of these tips is anyway). So many competitors are out there, but if you are ready to do the hard work, the rewards are limitless.
3. Become a freelance writer
Among my topmost online business ideas is freelance writing. If my friends were sitting here when I said this, they’d all burst into a laughing frenzy.
Of course, that’s because my first attempt to make money online was about freelance writing, so I’m profoundly versed in this and it is so natural that I mentioned it.
The path to that is the simplest. Not necessarily easy, but simple.
The first and the most important thing that you will need to become a successful online writer is some world-class level of writing skills. This also involves some intimate mastery of language, since rich language is the lifeblood of good writing.
And how do you achieve this? In three words: Read. Write. Everyday.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not even asking you to become J. K. Rowling or Stephen King before you can sell your writing skills. Just acquire some level of mastery and you are good to go.
Now let’s deal with how to get a job online as a freelance writer.
There are many ways to do this, so I’m just going to give you the ones that work, though some of them are hard and upheaval.
- Cold pitching: I used this shit a lot as a freelance writer. It is a very hard process where you will need to look for email addresses of key decision-makers, such as CEOs, of a company that may need your service, or media house or magazines that pay writers and send them an email letting them know of your services and asking them to hire you.
- Open a website to attract clients through organic search. Look at the process I described in selling your services online above.
- Optimize your profile for social media search like I described in the “sell your service online” section above.
- Guest post. A lot.
And before you do any of these, write some 3 to 5 masterpieces to show to your prospects as samples of your work.
If you want to charge higher rates and get them to pay it, establish some social proof by writing for big publications such as Entrepreneur, HuffPost and Forbes to show clients that you are one badass writer.
4. Become an expert blogger
The potential with blogging to make money is limitless and undisputable. At least, not anymore.
You can create an online course and sell it through your blog.
You can sell your writing services through your blog.
You can monetize your audience by selling space for an ad.
You can monetize through affiliate marketing.
You can set up a consultancy business online when you have established authority through your blog.
And so on.
I mean I can’t see any sort of income that you need with blogging these days that you can’t make.
Some bloggers, like Neil Patel, are making millions yearly.
Others, such as Jon Morrow, are making between hundreds of thousands and millions yearly.
And some, like Ryan Robinson, are making tens of thousands monthly. While some make less than that.
And until you start, you really can’t say how far you could go. But what’s most important is your level of thoroughness and hard work, as that’s what determines how much you earn as a blogger.
Read my masterpiece on how to start a blog and monetize it here.
You can go on and buy your domain name and hosting now.
5. Become a social media consultant
Among workable online business ideas, I see this one lucrative job as the most marginalized.
What most people forget is that anyone can handle social media, but not everyone knows how to grow a large number of followers on them or even engage those followers.
Funny enough, this is a skill that anybody can learn and sell to businesses and big men who need it.
If you have a knack for social media, why not trade the time you waste on it for learning and making money from it instead?
It’s definitely time to monetize it.
But how?
Read a full guide on Sprout Social here.
6. Start an eCommerce business
You say online business ideas that can fetch you real income, didn’t you?
This is among the best of them. While it’s not very easy due to the cutthroat competition environment, starting an eCommerce store is one of the surefire ways of making real income online.
To be frank with you, eCommerce is very challenging, but if you are like me, I always believe the harder the challenge the greater the reward.
An eCommerce business will take your time, money and energy, but once it gains momentum, you will profit so much you will wonder where this whole money has been the whole time.
Read this Shopify blog post to learn how you can set up your online eCommerce.
7. Sell photos online
Are you a good photographer? Can you afford a good camera with insane resolution and you have this artistry mind where you know how to use imagery to tell an irresistible story?
Then, you are in luck. Because boundless opportunities exist online for your trade.
Shutterstock alone has paid more than $1 billion dollars out to contributors.
Just be sure you are able to come up with what is best and you can get paid whenever your picture is downloaded online.
Here is where you can sign up with Shutterstock and start earning as a photographer.
Don’t forget to look up for other websites for the same purpose.
8. Teach online
As you and I know, the global landscape for education is fast changing. More and more people are learning online.
While it is outrageous to imagine that the entire human learning system will shift to remote learning any time soon, the number of people taking courses online is staggering.
If you have what it takes to teach people in any given subject, or you even love the challenge of stepping out of your comfort zone and do something you are not completely certain of, then online teaching is for you.
There are two ways to do this.
First, you can register with an already established online company that trades in such services and become one of their workers.
Second, you can create your own class and expand it to reach your target audience.
Some say the second one is easier and even more evergreen as well as profitable than the first.
In any case, if you are looking for brilliant online business ideas, teaching online could be just the right one for you.
Want to learn more about this? Go on and do so here.
9. Become a Vlogger/Youtuber
Video content is dominating the world. More people are consuming video content now than they are reading written content.
And Vloggers are simply in luck. If you have any idea how much an influencer makes on any platform, think of youtube influencers who are the mega example of influencer marketing will be making.
Not to mention, you don’t have to be an influencer before you can make money from Youtube.
All you need is an audience 10, 000+ and you will be qualified to apply for ad display on your Youtube channel.
With ad now displaying on your videos, the only effort you will ever need is to increase your number of viewers. Not more, not less.
Conclusion on online business ideas
We all have seen what disruption the Internet is causing in the way that we work.
Billionaires spring up every now and then from the oblivion just like a rainbow develop out of nowhere. All thanks to the Internet.
While world-class billionaires are considered outliers -- people who got the unfair advantage of sheer luck, as explained by the genius author of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell -- ordinary humans like you and I could make stupendous wealth from the Internet, too, just by having the right online business ideas.
Undoubtedly, more online business ideas exist online, but I only mentioned the ones I believe could hardly go beyond the capacity of anyone that wants to be honest and earn money online through legitimate means.
Don’t forget to share and leave your comment below.
