Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2018. Google AdWords has since been renamed Google Ads, China Post’s ePacket service has changed or been withdrawn on many routes, and Amazon affiliate commission rates and SEO conditions differ today.
Many gurus claim that anyone can earn outrageous amounts of money online. That’s not quite right. While anyone with the right business ideas can create a steady income stream using their computer, the truth is that you can’t do it with little knowledge or the wrong mindset. And that limits the number of people who can earn 3,000 or 5,000 euros a month doing business online.
Below are some business ideas with proven profitability, probably the ones that have earned the most for a large number of entrepreneurs. But I’ll start by saying something.
Your business idea will fail if money is all that drives you
If you go into the online world with the sole aim of making money, you will most likely fail when faced with the many difficulties that will come your way. When you hit certain obstacles, you will probably lose motivation or get bored.
On top of that, a bubble is forming of people who copy the business models of entrepreneurs who succeeded with their projects, forgetting one small difference: that entrepreneur enjoyed what they were doing, and the purpose that kept them working 10 or 12 hours a day was surely very different from simply making money. With that said, let’s move on to these ways of building an online business.
These are the business ideas entrepreneurs use most today
One of the fastest ways to earn money every month (if you know what you’re doing and aren’t going in blind) is the business idea we have talked about so much lately. Although, as we will see, there are two ways to carry it out.
1. Dropshipping with AliExpress
I won’t go into detail about this business idea again. If you want to learn, step by step, how to earn thousands of euros a month dropshipping with AliExpress, follow that link. In short, it would be:
- Set up a website, or build it directly on Shopify.
- Find several products in high demand on Amazon.
- Look for a similar product on AliExpress that offers ePacket shipping to Spain (or your country).
- Fill your online shop with these products, with good-quality images and descriptions.
- Drive traffic with Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, using offers and eye-catching copy.
- Once an order comes in and has been paid, place the order on AliExpress and have it shipped directly to the customer’s home.
- Use AfterShip, an app that gives your customers a tracking number for their shipment.
The advantage of this business idea is that the risk is practically zero and the investment minimal, while the profits can be striking.
Beyond that, it is a matter of testing which products are most in demand and trying them with a small advertising budget to see the results. If it works, increase your ad spend; if it doesn’t, look for another product until you find the one that is most profitable.
2. The same business idea, but with Amazon affiliates
I won’t say this business idea is easy, but I will say that if you acquire the necessary SEO knowledge, it can generate that much-desired passive income.
The idea is to create a website or blog on a specific topic, such as photography, fishing or hunting, and start writing about it. You can include Amazon affiliate links when you talk about products, or create an online shop section with descriptions and images as if you were actually selling those products, but the customer is sent to Amazon. They make the purchase directly on Amazon through your link, so you receive a commission through the affiliate programme.
The advantage of this business idea is that the customer at least knows they are buying from Amazon, so trust in the place they are buying from has already been won. Today you could say that nobody distrusts the Amazon shopping experience.
3. Small-niche SEO
Today, being good at SEO guarantees you a good, steady income. And SEO specialists prefer small niches. Searches with less competition won’t bring in as much money as the most powerful keywords, but they are quicker and easier to win.
In other words, you would earn more money working on keywords with millions of monthly searches, but those face more competition, so they would take more time and effort and raise the chances of failure. With less-searched keywords (10,000 or 20,000 searches a month) you can make 80 or 120 euros a month, as some people do. But niche SEO is about having several blogs on different topics. And here’s the trick.
Why is niche SEO so profitable?
Because although it brings in little monthly income from advertising, we can add one of the previous business ideas to it, especially affiliate programmes.
If you are good at the topic and have built a site architecture that sends users smoothly to the purchase page, those few visits can generate more money than another niche with 10 times more traffic that hasn’t been worked on in this way.
As I said, though, this idea isn’t that easy for an inexperienced user, but it is ideal for a young person who wants to learn what they need about SEO. Some people take only 30 days to reach a steady income of 100 euros a month. That may not seem like much money, but if you repeat the process five more times and add an affiliate programme, you could say you have a good business from home. In fact, some niche SEO specialists manage to earn more than 100 euros a day online.
4. Selling a course (your own or someone else’s)
Selling someone else’s course would again be an affiliate scheme, so we will focus on creating your own course. It is undoubtedly one of the most profitable business ideas today.
There are a lot of frauds and fake experts making courses these days. And granted, one thing is clear: everything you will find in a course is available for free online today, but a well-made course makes it easy for the user to have all the information they need in an orderly way. And if the person manages to explain it well, the course will have been worth paying for.
The process for selling a course is no different from what we described above. First we need to create a market by making ourselves known: showing our skills and professionalism, because otherwise, why would anyone buy a course from us?
So we need a good website or blog to introduce ourselves, interesting articles that show what we know, and a way to attract traffic and send it to the course’s sales page. You could call this passive income.
What can you sell a course on?
Today you could sell a course on practically any topic people search for online. The Google Trends tool (search trends) can make this easier.
Topics that sell easily today on sites such as Udemy and Thinkific include:
- Marketing
- Sales
- SEO
- Poker
- Beer brewing
- Cooking
- Photography
- Video editing
- Learning to fly drones
5. An online T-shirt shop on autopilot
We have already explained how to start your own business selling T-shirts on Amazon, but here we will simplify the idea.
Making money selling T-shirts is as easy as creating your T-shirt design in Canva and uploading your artwork to Spreadshirt.
See also: Other ways to make money online: unusual businesses
On Spreadshirt you don’t have to worry about stock, invoices or delivery. Upload your design, and every time it sells, you earn. And since we are connecting the dots, if you have a niche blog and create T-shirts related to that niche, it would be like selling an affiliate product, except that the product is yours.
There are many ways to make money online, and the truth is that even when we suggest ideas for earning some extra income, many of them can be turned into a highly profitable business if we add the basics.
What are the basics when building an online business?
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Attracting traffic. We can do this organically, by ranking for our keywords in search engines, or by attracting traffic through paid advertising.
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Making the site where the traffic lands as attractive and trustworthy for the user as possible.
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A good site structure for converting users into customers.
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The more ways you have to make money on that site, the better. In other words, you can have CPM and CPC advertising, affiliate programmes, your own course for sale and so on.
This way, if you can turn a small amount of traffic into customers, you won’t need much traffic to earn large sums every month.
We have also chosen not to go into the usual business ideas today, such as writing an ebook and selling it on Amazon, or creating a YouTube channel.
That said, since advertising income on a YouTube channel tends to be very low, if we add affiliate links to it as well, we would have more or less the same thing.
As for writing an ebook, always ask yourself why anyone would buy it. If the answer you give yourself is convincing, go ahead, because it is another excellent way to generate passive income.
But remember what we said at the beginning
Don’t do this just for the money. The process of generating income online should be fun. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, it might be better to look for a traditional job, because you won’t be the first or the last to abandon your business idea when the difficulties arrive and you face that feeling of frustration. And believe me, you almost always face it when you are starting an online business.
Featured image: Wonderlane, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
