The reason why online video courses are so popular is, they are more engaging and consumable easily.
Online courses give people the freedom to learn from anywhere at any time, and that’s the reason it becomes so popular.
If you keep keen knowledge of any subject, you can create and sell your online course.
You can set your price and market your course at various digital marketing channels such as blogs, YouTube channels, social media, and direct emails.
Selling your course is better than other online earning options. Unlike the affiliate commission, where you only get a certain amount of revenue as an affiliate commission, you can keep your entire profit.
As a beginner, it might seem a daunting task for you to create and sell your course; you might get confused to put everything together and get started; luckily, there are platforms out there that can help you to create, store and sell your course such as Kajabi
It provides hosting, landing pages, course creation tools, payment gateways, etc.
It’s not a marketplace like Amazon, where you can register to sell your products, and you will have to market your course at digital marketing channels.
If you don’t have a presence on digital marketing channels and want to get started selling your course right away, you can use platforms like Udemy; it’s a multi-vendor platform where you can sell your online course to a vast audience.
It’s the best platform to start as a beginner, and after getting some experience, you can move to skillshare, which is an expert level platform, it pays you higher than Udemy.
A platform like Udemy and Skillshare are suitable for beginners. But I would suggest you create your platform instead of using a third-party platform; you have to share a certain amount of your revenue per sale with the platform.
You are also limited to the platform’s rules and regulations, and you are limited to upload the course in preferred formats.
These platforms never want you to link your resources such as your site, social media page, or YouTube channel, restricting you from making your identity and brand.
You can only sell a course under the platform’s brand name, and you are nothing more than an educator like others; you can’t build your identity.
If you choose to sell it through your platform, you don’t have any limitations and regulations, and you can build your brand and get famous without sharing your profit.
4 – Social Influencer
Social influencing is also called Influencer marketing in this business, brands and business approach to industry-relevant social media profile for their brand and product promotion.
In TV advertising, brands feature celebrities and famous personalities in their advertising. In influencer marketing, those celebrities and famous personalities feature brands and products on their personal social media profile.
It’s an effective way to drive results because the audience is more likely to buy and engage than another marketing platform because of the influencer’s high level of trust.
Example of influencer marketing.
Before, only celebrities and famous individuals used to get in influencer marketing. The more people started using social media as a business; anyone can become an influencer.
To market products in front of a vast audience, businesses reach industry influencers. It can cost them more than advertising, but the ROI on influencer marketing is always high as compared to ads.
You can also become an influential marketer and promote products from various companies related to your field.
Influencer marketing can make you a millionaire, but it isn’t short term success; you need to work hard for a long time with a well-planned strategy and execution to become a good influencer marketer.
Once you establish your audience and your profile started standing out, the prospect business and companies will start approaching you. You can also found offers on networking platforms like Maxbounty.
5 – Digital marketing agency (SEO Consultant)
There are many genuine ways to make you some side income, but if you want to escape your 9-5 job, spend time with your family, work without pressure, and want to work remotely while staying in any part of the world. Digital marketing is one of the best career choices.
Usage of the internet has increased by 5% between adults in the last three years, and they spend most of their online time on social media, watching videos on YouTube, and reading blogs.
People shop has also changed; they can buy almost everything online, either physical, service, or digital.
Online purchase reached 4.2 trillion dollars in 2020, and it will continue to grow, according to a report by STATISTA.
The digital market is the virtual marketplace on the internet, where customers hang out. Marketers use it for marketing a business, product, and service through digital devices and the internet.
The digital market concept is the same as the traditional market, where you set up your digital marketing channels like your offline store, and you look for the right customers.
The only difference is the digital mediums you use to promote and sell products.
Digital channels such as social media, blogs, YouTube, public communities, etc., provide a digital market for business.
These digital channels on the internet, where customers hang out, are called a digital market.
Digital marketing is a way to use the internet and digital devices to promote a business on digital channels such as social media, blog, email, website, display ads, SEO, etc.
Digital marketing is a combination of various niches such as email, social media, SEO, content marketing, copywriting, advertising, analytics, SEM, etc.
Traditional marketing use phone calls, newspaper, print ad, banner ads, and other physical advertising to promote products and digital marketing use online mediums to connect with customers in real-time.
In traditional marketing, Businesses can’t effectively target their potential customers.
Digital marketing is best compared to traditional marketing because it helps you reach a vast audience base. It allows to target the users interested in business and are more likely to become customers.
Digital marketing provides much better chances to connect online with existing and potential customers; it opens the unlimited potential to expand a business in a new market.
Digital marketing is cost-effective and sustainable in comparison to traditional marketing.
Businesses spend their marketing budget maximizing their reach, but they can’t track ROI, audience insights and can’t see analytics to know how their marketing campaigns are performing.
For example, if you advertise a product A in a newspaper, it will reach a vast population, but you have no idea whether the person is reading the ad is interested in buying or not?
Let’s assume if you want to promote a new electric shaver for man, you will need to maximize your print ads reach without knowing who your audience is? Teenagers, Women, and elders will all see the ads, but they are not likely to buy the product no matter how great the product and ad is.
But in digital marketing, you have options to only show your ads to your ideal customers based on various targeting options such as age, gender, demographics, interest, income, geographic location, etc.
It allows you to save the money you might spend on an untargeted audience.
Digital marketing allows you to see your marketing campaigns’ insight, and it tells you how many people are visiting your advisements, how many of them clicking on your ads? Or how many of them converting into customers? Where are they located? Which devices do they use?
These help you to improve marketing campaigns and allow you to market more effectively.
Nowadays, almost every business has a website or social media presence, and customers started relying on the digital medium to learn about brands and products.
In this era, a business needs to have a digital marketing strategy to be competitive and sustainable.
As I told you, digital marketing is a combination of various online technical strategies. If you are expert in any one skill, you can collaborate with other experts and start your digital marketing agency to provide a complete solution.
6 – YouTube channel
YouTube is the world’s biggest video publisher platform; it has 2 billion active users worldwide.
A long time ago, people used to read the great wall of text by spending hours, but in 2022 the era of digitization changed everything.
Textual content is everywhere, and consumers are getting bored with it. Consumers prefer to watch video content over textual content; it’s more attractive and engaging.
You don’t need to produce videos similar to the studio, but you can create a product review video or video tutorials.
Remember, your YouTube channel is not to advertise your products, but it’s a platform to win the loyal audience as subscribers.
By helping them with quarries and educating them about your niche, you establish your channel’s authority.
Ranking your website in search engines might be tricky because almost all niches are competitive, and you have to make a lot of SEO efforts to position your site.
But YouTube video ranking work relatively little differently; you don’t have to worry about your channel’s authority because it doesn’t affect your video ranking, unlike the SEO. You can also include YouTube videos in your blog for better SEO ranking.
YouTube helps you grow as a brand because the audience remembers you by your face and channel name, meanwhile they are less likely to remember your site.f
Check this article for more detail: Blogging vs YouTube – Which one to start in 2022
We know that users are spending a lot of time on their smartphones, and lots of time is spent on social networking platforms. Social networking users frequently interact with businesses they’re interested in or do business with.
Small companies focused on individual and community customers, making social websites a robust platform for linking directly with a user to create brand awareness and brand loyalty. It’s a better platform for lead generation for businesses.
Social networking is a free and effortless tool for businesses to connect directly with customers interested in their brand. It doesn’t mean they could log in and begin posting random content; business needs a solid social media marketing strategy.
Social media marketing is a business which provides complete marketing solution for companies or individuals. From creating content, designing graphics to publish consistent content and engage with an audience. It also involves creating and running ads
Everyone knows how important is it for a business to be present on social media. Unfortunately, they don’t have time to handle their social media accounts and must be experts on maintaining their accounts.
If you can run and maintain social media accounts, you can offer your services to businesses.
8 – Freelancer
Since this pandemic has emerged, it affected every sector’s of businesses, and it gives new directions to freelancing. It has emerged as the most popular business.
After this pandemic, lifestyles have changed, people are being thrown out of jobs and there is massive unemployment in every sector.
Freelancing is the best choice for an individual who has talent in any field.
The business also started moving toward freelancers to get their work done instead of hiring permanent employees. Because just like the freelancers, businesses also get the benefits. They don’t have to go through the complicated hiring process and invest their resources to train them for the kind of Work the Company wants.
They don’t have to provide other resources and equipment to get the work done such as electricity, computer, office environment, and free to choose tons of freelancers who offer quality work.
Some small organizations can’t afford to hire permanent employees because most of their work is not ongoing, so they go to the other freelancers and get their work done whenever they need it.
In freelancing, you can work from your home, at any location of the world, avoid office politics, and maintain healthy relationships with your managers, etc.
You can choose the clients based on your interest, and you can charge them according to your skills.
But always remember this business is not for everyone. While everyone wants to earn money, but not all have skills.
The benefit of freelancing is you don’t have to invest money to get started.
If you don’t have any skills to offer other businesses and individuals that add value to their business or work-life, then you can’t start freelancing.
In that case, you can go to other work, invest your money and start working in it, such as blogging, affiliate marketing, drop shipping, etc. In this business, you can outsource most of the work and keep learning everything slowly.
While freelancing is your own business, you don’t directly serve the customers; you serve the clients. It is B2B model, not B2C so you can’t step in it without being an expert and expecting to learn while working.
Why will someone pay you if you are not able to provide them with quality services?
Remember, people will pay in directly proportional to the problems you can solve for them and the percentage of results you can provide them.
Some profitable freelancing niches
- Graphics designing
- Video editing
- Content writing
- Copy-writing
- Logo design
- Virtual assistance
- Website designing
- App development
But it’s never too late to learn anything. If you want to get into freelancing, you can start with other businesses and become an expert in it while working for yourself. Then, you can provide your service to other businesses and become a full-time freelancer.
9 – Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a little similar to the affiliate marketing business model.
In dropshipping, you directly buy the products from the manufacturer and sell them directly to your customers.
When a customer buys from your online store, you place an order for a product to the manufacturer, and then they ship the product to the customer.
Benefits of dropshipping
- You don’t need to involve in the physical process.
- The profit in dropshipping is higher than the affiliate marketing.
- There is significantly less risk in starting a dropshipping business because the startup cost is meager. (website development)
Dropshipping is a profitable business model for entrepreneur and wealth minded people.
When you get started in any business, you perform market research, but you can only see the accurate analytics after getting your hands into business and testing your ideas. Dropshipping allows you to learn how a particular market works and the demand for a product?
Why choose a dropshipping business?
You can start your dropshipping store without investing thousands of dollars in inventory, production, warehouse, shipping, etc.
You need to develop your store and tie up with your retail suppliers.
You will only need to purchase a product when you already sell it to the customer.
Having a laptop and a good internet connection is enough to start with dropshipping.
The expenses might increase when your business grows. However, it will still be the lowest compared to purchasing all the products in bulk and storing them in your warehouse then worrying about safety and shipping.
- Can run the store remotely.
You are not limited to any specific geographical location. As long as you can communicate with your buyers and customers, you can run this business from any part of the world.
- Can use it to taste the business idea
If you are an entrepreneur and want to start your own business, it’s always good to create your dropshipping store first. It will allow you to test how a particular product performs in the marketplace before ordering a big product unit for your own business.
10 – Amazon FBA
In the amazon FBA business, you can sell your products through amazon worldwide without worrying about your involvement in delivery or another process.
When you purchase an Amazon product, you don’t directly publish it from amazon except for few digital services. Amazon doesn’t have its warehouse.
Amazon provides a marketplace for the seller worldwide, where they showcase their products and sell them to an international audience.
Selling on Amazon FBA is much better than running your e-commerce store because you don’t have to be involved in the selling process and worry about the delivery. You have to sign up for the program and send your products to the Amazon fulfillment center.
Whenever your customer places an order for your products, amazon process and delivers the delivery, you have to pay small fees to Amazon for using its services.
11 – Start a podcast
Similar to the concept of your online course and e-book, you can start your podcast to educate, entertain and engage your audience.
People love to listen to a podcast during workout sessions, traveling, and working on other physical tasks because they can’t read and watch the content. Still, the podcast allows them to multitask, which is why it’s getting so popular.
Platforms like Amazon music and iTunes are a great place to start and get into the marketplace. Still, to get considerable subscribers to your podcast, you need to build your audience base on your platform and make your identity in the industry by gaining a loyal audience.
You don’t need millions of audience; only having a few loyal audiences who are interested in your subject and love to listen to you is enough to earn a considerable amount of income
12- App Development
The usage of smartphones is evolving day by day. Consumers rely on mobile apps to shop and interact with brands and businesses because it’s much better than sitting in front of your pc.
Apps provide better access to services at accessible modes, and you can use them while traveling and workout, etc.
Many companies still don’t have mobile apps, and they are willing to pay the price to get an app that services their audience best.
There is two business model in the app development industry; firstly, you can create apps for other companies, and in the second option, you make the apps yourself and sell them to individuals.
Working for companies and organizations is the best option. If you choose to go this way, you will have to find the business continually looking for your services. It is best to plan strategies to get an ongoing payout to maintain your business.
If you create apps for public usage, it will have high demand and lower payout, but if you develop apps for other businesses and companies, it will have low demand, but you will earn high profit.
13 – Buy and sell the domain name
As the internet and technology usage is evolving, more and more businesses are coming online.
The first thing a business needs to build its online presence is domain name and Webhosting. Hosting can be purchase from any provider and can be changed.
But a domain name is the business identity that you can only choose one time, and there is no way to change your domain name the second time. When an entrepreneur starts a business, they also look for a domain similar to a company.
Once a domain is booked, it can’t be duplicated, so if someone already possesses the domain name, no one can use it. They will have to alter the domain name. In case the only option is left to them is to contact the domain owner and ask them to sell the domain in exchange for a good amount of money.
You can be that domain seller and earn a considerable profit.
The best way to do that is to perform your research and purchase the domain in bulk from any domain provider. It doesn’t mean you can purchase any random domain name; otherwise, no business will contact you to buy that domain and end up losing.
You need to brainstorm carefully and search for the top unbooked domains from a specific industry that any business would want to use.
For example – food.com, health.com these domains are very high end and targeted domain because they have the exact matching niche words. Of course, these domains are already booked, and I have mentioned them to give you an idea of what type of domain you need to purchase to earn a considerable profit.
14 – Personal brand
Lots of people see branding as connected to business and companies, but branding is for everyone. The brand is about telling the story of what you stand for. Any individual and professional can have their own story to tell.
Building your brand is essential in today’s world because this is what makes trust in your audience.
If you are going to start your online business, you will have to establish your brand and build trust in your audience and make them purchase the things you offer.
A strong brand stands out in the crowd and get more sales, leads, and conversion
You can’t just build your brand overnight. It is an evolutionary process of understanding your industry, market and provide better value to your audience.
I hope this list of the 14 most profitable online businesses has helped you find the right one for you.
Tell me in the comment section which business you are going to start?