5 Best Small Business Ideas to Make Money Online

Coming up with great small business ideas to make money online is not easy. Millions of people have tried millions of things, and this serves to make the Web a very cluttered graveyard of failed small businesses.

The secret to starting a profitable and successful small business online is to get customers and clients as quickly as possible.

Like seedlings in a forest have to grow quickly to compete for limited sunlight, so online small business startups have to aggressively find new customers and clients to compete for sales and revenue.

This article will share 5 great small business ideas that can make money online and, hopefully, become profitable as quickly as possible.

Top 5 small business ideas to make money online

While all businesses need a flow of income to sustain them, initially, your small business idea will need to make money online quickly – just to survive.

Once you have picked a startup idea, it is important that you:

·         create a high quality Website
·         get up and running quickly
·         create focused, high converting content and landing pages
·         advertise and market aggressively

For each of the small business ideas presented below, I’ll also provide you with some background reading, advice and links to the products, tools and services you will need in order to get started.

You might want to learn a bit more about starting an online business by reading:

·         How to start a business

·         Solving the most common small business startup problems

·         The five stages of launching a successful Internet startup

1. Hyper niche eCommerce store

Setting up and running an online store is easier than you think. If you know a lot about a focused niche (it could be anything from nail clippers to fighter jets), then you stand a good chance of being able to dominate the search engines, and market intelligently to your audience.

Not only are there great online store builders available, but there are also drop-shipping companies that can manage logistics and delivery on your behalf. All you have to do is sell.

Get started

To learn more about how drop-shipping works, read How to start a small business with drop shipping eCommerce.

Next:

1.     Choose your niche market and products

2.     Choose a quality drop-shipper like WorldWideBrands, or

3.     Quickly build an eCommerce store using a well known, high quality shopping cart builder

2. Mobile payment collector

Almost any business owner will regale you of stories of how difficult it is to collect payments from customers, clients and other businesses. A lot of the time, payments aren’t forthcoming simply because it is inconvenient for people to get it done – it’s not a priority.

There’s now technology that allows you to accept mobile payments on your iPhone, or other mobile device. Why not start a payment collection agency in your town?

Alternatively, offer businesses the facility to handle mobile payments if, as and when they have occasion to do so.

To make money, take a cut of each transaction, or charge a membership fee.

Get started

There’s not much to this small business in terms of setup. Your main obstacle will be meeting business owners and establishing your service. A blog, and online marketing should form an integral part of your overall marketing (i.e. door to door, flyers, etc):

1.     Get mobile eCommerce facilities using Intuit’s Gopayment

2.     Build a website to market your business online

3. Free software trials and promotions

There are a lot of software companies that need to generate new business. They are often happy to offer promotions and discounts in order to generate buzz for their products and services.

In addition, many software companies are moving their software to the cloud and offering it as SaaS (Software as a Service). Why not start a blog or website that tracks and promotes great deals, free trials and free software?

Get started

1.     Pick a niche (i.e. games, accounting software, small business software, etc)

2.     Create a professional blog and write plenty of great content

What’s nice about this business is that often there are free trials for the software you are about to review – this makes life a lot easier than having to buy it first.

Check out Top free trials, software & services for business for ideas on how to get started.

4. Local listings directory & service

Many businesses do not make an effort to ensure that their local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and local data are properly implemented.

But, rather than trying to compete directly with Google Places for business, why not offer a directory service that also provides a local SEO boost by completing business listings in all applicable directories, as well as your own.

Charge businesses for a listing in your directory and the SEO service of updating and managing their local listing and SEO. This is a great way to earn a sustained income as you can charge an annual amount for maintaining clients’ listings.

Get started

1.     Build a directory website

2.     Research all local listing options such as Google places, yellow pages, local directories

3.     Market your business offering online and offline

5. Guest blog & convert

There are a lot of guest bloggers looking to place their content on other websites. By offering guest bloggers a link back to their website, and possibly some other social backlinks (Hint: check out the author bio at the bottom of this page), you can encourage people to write original content for your blog.

Creating content is one of the hardest parts about building an online business, so using guest bloggers is a great way to build it up. Your job then becomes editing for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and working out the best way to generate revenue from that content (i.e. Google AdWords, direct advertising, affiliate links, etc).

While, it’s not hard to set up your blog, it is a bit harder to learn SEO and how to make money from online content.

Get started

1.     Create a professional blog

2.     Advertise for guest posts on your blog, and on sites like Craigslist

3.     Learn about SEO and Internet marketing

There are my top 5 small business ideas to make money online. Are you going to try one? If so, tell us how it goes. Alternatively, add your own ideas and suggestions for small business startups with an online focus in the comments.

By David Mercer.   Article source: http://www.business2community.com/small-business/5-best-small-business-ideas-to-make-money-online-0397227

What Can I Do To Make Money?

There are four ways to make money online (MMOs).


The first way to make money online is to remember, your website is just like a traditional business. Your shop front is simply a website, that’s it. 

So the first thing you can sell is physical products. And so they don’t have to be anything special, just cameras, books,you name it, anything that people want. Physical products can all be sold from a website. They can be your products or somebody else’s.

Secondly, you can sell digital products. They are products you can download, 
like software, e-books, audio files, and videos. Digital product is just another way for you to get information or solution. It can be your own digital products as you create them yourself, or you can buy somebody else’s digital products and sell those from your site. Either way, you have options. And people often said, “How can I possibly sell products online, I don’t have and I don’t have any product idea?” That’s okay, you can find other products which have licenses that are allowable and you can buy the licenses and you can sell the product at your site, it’s a great way to start.

The good thing about digital products is the margins can be great, as you have got very low costs. It can be a great way of getting ahead. There are so many tools nowadays to enjoy digital product; we have iPads, iPhones etc. Therefore it’s a fabulous area to get into.

The third way to get yourself online is to sell your services. Solicitors, dentists, hair dressers, all wonder, “How can I do it online? Do I really need a website?” 48% businesses in Australia still don’t have a website. It’s crazy, they need a website. How do you do that? Simply educate your market. Give away your best secrets. Create a website and that allows you then to contact people if they join your database and give you their name and email. You can contact them with special offers or about coming in to your store. If you don’t want to sell things from yourself, you can sell other people’s stuff. You can  recommend other people’s stuff and take a commission. So selling your services is totally doable online and very very cool.

The last way is simply to recommend other people’s products. You simply  make a business by recommending other people’s products. You don’t have a  business; you don’t really have anything other than good recommendation. You can recommend someone else’s software, like I have software and if you recommend someone to buy that software, you get 50 cents for every dollar I make. There’s no reason you can’t set up a deal where you send people along to their site and if they turn to a customer they give you 10-25% of the sale which can be a grand at least. It’s called Affiliate Marketing; you may have heard of it, it’s really awesome :)