Do you want to build a drop shipping business that brings in thousands of extra dollars each month?
Right after following a few simple steps, he made over one hundred thousand dollars.
What's up, entrepreneurs.
So if you've been wanting to start an online business for a while, I think now is the best time to jump headfirst into it.
Especially with everything that's been going on in the world lately, more and more people are moving online to make money.
So in this article, I'm going to share with you what I think are the best online businesses you can start this year, even if you don't have that much experience.
Hey, by the way, if you're new to my blog, I just want to say a big welcome.
I make easy-to-follow articles on things like starting online businesses, making money online, affiliate marketing, personal finance, and more.
My goal on this blog is to help you build multiple streams of passive income, which is something that I've been fortunate enough to do myself.
So if you're into any of these topics, please subscribe now, and I'd also love it if you could hit that like button on this article as it really helps out this blog.
So let's jump into it now and talk about some of the best online businesses you should start this year.
Starting off with number 10, which is to become a micro-influencer. So what is a micro-influencer?
Well, you've probably heard of the term being an influencer, essentially someone with a large social media following who gets paid $100,000 to promote a skincare product or something like that.
Well, the term micro-influencer is a little bit newer.
Essentially, it's when you're operating at a much smaller level.
So you've got a thousand followers or 500 followers, but you have a community that's really invested in what you're saying and the kind of topics you're talking about.
So rather than going for a big general niche like just being a popular vlogger, a micro-influencer might be talking about a specific niche, which might be like fly fishing or cooking vegan cookies.
The people who follow them, even though it might not be a really large audience—like I said before, it could be 500, could be a thousand people—are really invested in what you've got to say and the content that you're making.
So as a micro-influencer, essentially what you would be doing is posting content, may be on Blog, maybe on YouTube, maybe on Instagram, maybe even TikTok these days, which really seems to be taking off.
You'll be making this content just about this topic.
The great thing is, even though you don't have a million followers on Instagram or a million subscribers on YouTube, you do have a thousand really dedicated followers who are actual mega fans compared to someone with a million followers who don't really care about them that much.
The thing is, these mega fans are much more likely to buy your merchandise if you put out some t-shirts or hoodies, or if you have a course like a micro course or a mini course that you put out for $50.
They're much more likely and much more invested to buy that from you because they're so invested in what you're talking about.
By the way, guys, if you are enjoying this article, I'd love it if you could smash the share button because it means a lot and helps this article get found by other people.
The good thing is, it really doesn't take that long to build up this micro-influencer kind of community of 500 or a thousand people.
So say you start in January, by the end of the year, I can absolutely assure you that you'll have that many followers who are really dedicated and invested in what you're talking about.
All you need to think of now is what kind of niche you want to be an influencer in.
That brings me nicely into our question of the day: If you were to choose a micro-influencer or blog topic, what would it be?
Now coming in at number nine kind of builds on this micro-influencer topic, and that is to start a blog.
You might be saying, "Jose, blogs are so 20 years ago. Ten years ago maybe was the last time I checked out a blog."
Well, you'd actually be wrong because blogs are still incredibly popular and they're still a great way to make money online.
It's so much easier these days to create a blog with services like WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix.
You can get your blog up and running pretty much within a day or two.
Again, what I would recommend is not doing your blog on a very large topic; it would be much better to do it on kind of a smaller niche and really target that micro-influencer community that we were talking about before.
That way you're going to get people who are very targeted and the traffic is going to be really good for you, just in case you want to sell them something.
One of the best things about websites is that it's really easy to launch different products and have these different income streams that you can have directly from the website itself.
So whether you're going to be selling merchandise directly from your blog or using Google AdSense to run ads similar to how you would on YouTube, you could also do affiliate marketing, which is one of my favorite ways to make money online.
So while we're at it, let's talk about affiliate marketing, which is going to come in at number eight.
If you don't know what affiliate marketing is, it's essentially a way in which you refer people to a product or a service, and you get a commission if they end up buying that service.
A really good example is Amazon.com.
So you've all heard of Amazon.com, it's the biggest online retailer in the world, and they have one of the largest affiliate programs in the world.
So if I was to recommend a product to you and link you to Amazon, and you go there following my link, whatever you purchase in the next 24 hours, I'm going to get a commission of.
How much commission do you make?
Well, around 4 to 8 percent per item on Amazon.
So say if you were to buy a camera for $1,000, I might make 4 percent on that, which is $40.
That's not that bad, and you can imagine if you have a hundred different blog posts where you're talking about different products and people end up buying multiple things in that same day, you can make a decent amount of money.
I've been fortunate enough through the Amazon Associates program to make enough money over the last few years, and it's been really successful, mainly through camera reviews which I've been doing.
Like I said before, if you were to do those kinds of camera reviews, you can make a decent amount of money because they're quite expensive items, but people also buy not just cameras but lenses, tripods, and SD cards, and it all adds up.
So again, if you are that kind of micro-influencer that we've been talking about in this article, and you're going to be selling fishing rods, you can do a review on that either on your Instagram or on your blog and then link to it.
If they end up buying that within the next 24 hours, you'll make a good commission on that.
Now I get it, you might not want to be a micro-influencer, and that's totally fine.
I've got some other ideas for you as well.
Coming in at number seven, which is to become a virtual assistant or a personal assistant.
I talk about this one quite often because I think it's a really good job that you can do if you don't have that many practical skills, but you're able to help people and you know how to maneuver your way online.
Essentially, what a virtual assistant is, is being a personal assistant but doing it all online.
You generally use something like Zoom or Skype to call up the person you're going to be working with, and then you will use different programs like Google Docs, which is what I generally use with my virtual assistant, and you'll just help them out with different projects.
Maybe you help them out with their emails, making sure they are sorted, and making sure that the emails they need get to them correctly.
You'll also help them out with calendars and bookings and all those kinds of things.
This business here is really good if you want to work from home, say that you're a stay-at-home mother or father, or if you just want to have that freedom of not having to go into a job 9 to 5 and actually go into a workplace.
Another really cool business that you can set up is doing some freelance writing.
This one comes in nicely with what we were talking about with the ninth online business, which is starting a blog because people actually need content for their blogs, and they don't always want to write it themselves.
If you have the skills to be able to write blog content, this can actually be a really valuable thing that you can offer.
The best place, I'd say, to find work for freelance writing is over on Upwork.com, but you can also take a look at Fiverr.com.
You probably get paid a little bit more on Upwork.com, but check them both out if you want to do freelance writing.
Freelance writing is kind of working for someone else, but if you want to do a little bit more for yourself and keep the profits for yourself, I would recommend writing an e-book.
This is one of my favorite all-time passive income ideas because essentially what it's going to be is you write an e-book about something—again, we're talking about that micro niche, that micro-influencer thing.
You might write a book about fly fishing or something like that and you can sell this book for $20.
People can just download it, and the great thing is that once you've written that book, every sale you get is going to be a passive income recurring source.
Let's say that you wrote a book two years ago, and you're getting two sales a day coming in at $20.
That's $40 a day every day for the next few years.
Of course, it's never that easy, but I think you get the idea—you do a little bit of the work upfront and then the passive income comes in as the days go on.
Alright, so coming in at number four is to actually start a podcast.
This one here is kind of the hot new thing at the moment because everyone is starting a podcast.
One of the things that I really like about a podcast is that you have the attention of the listener so much more than you would on, say, a YouTube video
Marcha Contra El Cáncer (youtube.com).
With YouTube, I might have your attention for three minutes and then you'll click off and go watch another video.
You might have done that already, but if you haven't, thanks for sticking around.
With a podcast, people generally listen to the whole podcast and just have it on in the background.
So say that a YouTube video goes for 10 minutes, a podcast might go for an hour and people will be listening to it while they're doing something else, maybe in a car.
They're not going to have different distractions and different videos that they might want to click on.
A podcast is great because you can monetize it in so many ways.
You can have different ad sponsors, you can promote different affiliates and talk about them in the link description, and you can also have a Patreon campaign where people can pay $5 a month to support your podcast.
If you can, I'd recommend doing a video podcast as well because I think they are a little bit more engaging.
That's great because you can have your podcast in audio form, which is on, say, Spotify or Google Podcasts, and you can also show your podcast on a video streaming service like YouTube.
Alright, coming in at number three is to do print-on-demand.
Essentially, what print-on-demand is, is you come up with a design for, say, a t-shirt or a hoodie and then use a service like Printful or Teespring or Spreadshirt.
They will print the t-shirt for you, package it for you, and send it off.
Essentially, you get to keep the profit after all that's done. So back in the days, if you were to print your own t-shirts, you would have to get different blanks, get the t-shirts, order the ink, and then print the t-shirts yourself and send them off by yourself as well.
That was obviously a lot of work and it cost quite a lot of money.
These print-on-demand services will do all of that distribution and fulfillment for you, and essentially you just keep the profits.
All you need to do is come up with some cool designs. You can use a service like Fiverr.com to come up with these designs and that's a great way to do it as well.
Alright, number two is to do YouTube.
I'm really passionate about YouTube because I've been doing it myself for about ten years.
It's similar to being an influencer and micro-influencer.
Of course, there are lots of big YouTube channels which might have one million, two million, five million subscribers, but there are also a lot of really profitable channels with just 5,000 subscribers or even 1,000 subscribers, and they're making a full-time living off this.
What I would recommend is starting a YouTube channel about some sort of niche.
Again, this is going to come back to that micro-influencer thing, which is something I really recommend.
If you can start it on a niche, for example, fly fishing, you could make reviews about different fishing rods, fishing equipment, and also do different tips and instructional videos.
It's just a great way to build that kind of community and then make money from the revenue that you're going to be generating.
Again, it's kind of the same as on a blog—you can make money through affiliate marketing, print-on-demand, or selling fly-fishing t-shirts. The opportunities are absolutely endless.
My favorite way that you should make money this year is actually doing online coaching.
There's a huge online education boom happening at the moment, especially with everything that's been going on in the world over the last few years, and it's a really profitable niche to get into.
Teachable is fantastic and allows you to create a video course or a text course, which you can sell to people for $20, $50, or even up to $1,000.
This is a great business model because it's relatively passive.
Those were some of my favorite business ideas for beginners.
Hopefully, you enjoyed this article.
If you did, make sure to smash the share button because I really appreciate that.
Good luck with your online business this year!
---
Posts
