BEST SMALL BUSINESS IDEAS TO BECOME A ENTREPRENEUR (LOW COST & ONLINE)
by Mark.
The best small business ideas are born at the intersection of passion, skills, strategic thinking – and timing.
Last year, it might have looked like a great time to open that fancy Crossfit microbrewery.
But good thing you didn’t, as you’d have been shut for most of 2021.
The landscape is changing rapidly as businesses move online. In fact, social distancing and COVID-19 accelerated the growth of online shopping by 4-6
That’s why many of the small business ideas in this article are low-cost online businesses that you can start from home.
What Are the Best Small Business Ideas?
Here is a list of the best small business ideas for potential business owners to get started with.
Best Online Small Business Ideas
1. Best Online Small Business Idea: Start a Profitable Blog.
When you start a low cost online business, you’re most likely selling one of three things:
Your time (coaching or consulting).
Your own products (ecommerce or SaaS).
Someone else’s products (affiliate marketing or ads).
With a blog, you can sell all of these from one website and make the most money from any low-cost online business idea out there. For example, when I first started my blog in 2019, I sold high-end SEO consulting services. Once I got more traffic, I added a few digital resources and sold them to my email list. Today, I’m in over 200 affiliate programs and make over $100,000/month from this blog promoting SaaS software with a profit margin of 88%. So how do you get started? First, you need to reject common blogging advice and learn how to blog like a business from day one. A lot of common advice from successful bloggers (who all started 5-10 years ago mind you) is to “write about your passions” so that you can make a decent side income within a few years. I never liked this generic advice. I always felt that it was written to appeal to the widest possible audience and it never gave tactical step-by-step guidance on how to grow from zero. The entire reason I started this blog in 2019 was to prove that most blogging advice is outdated and you absolutely can make life-changing money in months, not years. You just need to scale and treat it like a business. If you’re interested in learning how to start a blog and follow the exact formula that made me a million dollars in under two years, check out my ultimate guide to learn how to start a blog. Some of the steps I cover in my 15,000+ word blogging guide include:
Choosing your blog’s niche based on four primary business factors, not your passions.
How to choose your domain name and set up web hosting for as low as $2.95/month with a company like Bluehost.
How to install a simple WordPress theme along with all of the relevant plugins bloggers need.
Getting to know SEO tools and performing keyword research to generate traffic to your site.
Becoming well-versed in search engine optimization (SEO) writing to help your content rank.
Scaling your guest blogging and link-building strategies to build Domain Authority.
Monetizing your blog with the right tactics at the right stage of your blog’s growth.
If you’re ready to get started now, I recommend you sign-up with Bluehost for $2.95/month, which is 63% off their regular price. Blogging is the ultimate low-risk, high-reward business idea, and my top pick. With a low barrier to entry and high profits, it’s a great idea, even while working full-time from home. 2. Online Courses and Coaching. It has become easier to share your knowledge or expertise via online course platforms. If you are a subject matter expert or passionate about something, then you can convert it into a substantial income. Small business owners can offer online coaching classes to students, build a community to help while building an online coaching business. You can set up a Facebook page or even a podcast where you can reach out to people looking for online coaching classes. All of these coaching and training-based business models can be done at a low cost and at home. There are also several online platforms, including Thinkific and Teachable, to help you get started quickly. You can register on these platforms and start coaching right away. 3. Start an Ecommerce Business. With COVID accelerating ecommerce by 4-6 years, retailers are moving online faster than ever before. With ecommerce, there are multiple routes you can go – Amazon FBA, dropshipping, or full-fledged manufacturing your own products and selling them on your own website. Dropshipping is a good option for beginners since you don’t have to fulfill orders or ship them yourself or have an actual store. Dropshipping is one of the most profitable business ideas. It is a process where online retailers post products from wholesalers, but the dropshipping suppliers manage all of the shipping. The retailer just has to generate online orders and send the shipping information to the wholesaler. Here’s a breakdown of how dropshipping works: For a list of business ideas in dropshipping, you first need to do some market research and identify products in high demand. You can also check top-selling products on sites like Amazon and Google Shopping to get ideas. You can learn more about dropshipping in my ultimate guide to dropshipping. If you want to build a website to do this, there are a few routes you can take. If you’re starting from scratch, I recommend you get started by creating a Wix website. They are the easiest-to-use ecommerce platform and come with all the marketing tools you need. Selling products online is a simple process:
Choose your ecommerce platform.
Upload or add product information to your store.
Choose a theme and design your web pages.
Set up settings for taxes and shipping.
Test your shopping cart functionality and do final QA checks.
Launch your ecommerce site.
Start a business (It’s really that simple)
While it’s easy to launch an ecommerce site, the challenge becomes how to get website traffic. I wrote a full guide to ecommerce marketing which includes the top eight strategies to drive traffic and sales. Overall, you can start a Wix ecommerce site today for just $13-22/month. Try Wix
If you’re a physical retail business (or plan to have a storefront), your best option is to go with Square Online. They are the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses looking to move online. Square Online syncs with its popular Square POS system and offers a lot of unique features for small businesses, like the ability to book online appointments, online food ordering for restaurant websites, and tools for in-person retail. You can get started with Square Online for free, and only pay transaction fees. Upgrading to a paid plan will give you your own custom domain. Try Square Online 4. Start a Podcast. Podcasting is one of those great business ideas that is witnessing a meteoric rise. Back in 2006, only 22% of adults in the U.S. listened to podcasts. Now that number is over 75%. You can make big money too. Just take Joe Rogan for example, who was paid $100 million to move his podcast exclusively to Spotify. So how do you get start your business? The first step is to plan your podcast episodes and get your software and equipment. Next, you need to sign up for podcast hosting. A podcast host is a service that stores your audio files and distributes them to the major podcast networks like iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, etc. You can read about all of the equipment you need to get started and the best podcast hosts in my guide to podcast hosting. To get started, you can sign up with Buzzsprout and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Try Buzzsprout 5. Sell Custom Printed Products. Another option for ecommerce is to create a brand and sell custom products like T-shirts, mugs, stickers, bags, and more. There are a lot of websites that take care of the logistics for you. For example, here’s how the process goes with a company like Printify:
Pick one of over 200 products you’d like to sell.
Use a mockup generator to apply designs to your products based on images and graphics.
Order samples to make sure your products have the quality and feel that you’re looking for.
Publish your products and sync them automatically with an ecommerce platform like Shopify.
When you make a sale, your product is put into production and you don’t have to manage any manufacturing or shipping.
To succeed with a custom printed product business, you need excellent designs, a strong brand, and good marketing skills to generate sales. 6. Graphic Design. Companies are always on the lookout for graphic designers to help them with their brand image. From designing marketing collateral like banners, posters, and logos to designing landing pages and websites, the opportunities are vast. You can pitch your design skills to small businesses owned by individuals who aren’t giving the right attention to how things look. Graphic designers can also join freelance websites like Flexjobs to find relevant work. If you have prior knowledge in this field, getting new clients should be relatively easy. However, learning the basics of graphic design from scratch is also simple, with a lot of online courses and tutorials available. First, you leverage graphic design software like Adobe InDesign or Photoshop to learn the foundation of graphic design. Alternatively, you can use other user-friendly online tools like Visme to hone your graphic design skills further. Here are some amazing graphic design courses that will give you a great head start in this career:
Fundamentals of Graphic Design (Coursera)
Graphic Design Fundamentals: Getting Started (Creative Live)
I recommend you get started with Adobe Photoshop as part of Creative Cloud. Try Adobe Photoshop 7. Web Development. There are over 4 billion internet users in the world and 6 out of 10 small businesses have a website. Front-end web development is a valuable skill to cater to the surging demand for launching new websites. You can start by developing websites for your friends and family to polish your skills. While there are a lot of website builders that can help small businesses create their own websites, developers are needed for more custom jobs (and new businesses are always looking for efficient coders at cost-effective prices). You can kickstart your career by offering competitive prices for your services and then slowly transform it into a more lucrative business plan by solidifying your portfolio. Every web developer must have basic coding skills in computer languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are several free or cheap online courses including Treehouse, the Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy, and Codecademy that can help you learn to code and get started with web development. 8. Instagram Influencer. With the rise of social media channels like Instagram, consumers are increasingly turning to niche influencers to get product advice. The truth is, most influencers have trouble actually influencing purchase decisions. Sure, we like to look at their photos, but will we actually buy a product that they’re recommending? Most often, no. First, you have to choose your niche. It can be anything from tech gadgets and marketing to beauty or fitness. Make sure to select a niche you’re passionate about and can create a lot of content for. Next, you have to build a solid Instagram following by posting interesting content and discuss helpful things that are relevant to your target audience. There are a lot of social media marketing tools to help you schedule posts in advance so that you’re not always struggling to come up with new posts. Once you build a strong following, you can get paid to promote products via sponsored content. It requires a lot of hustle and not everyone can make it as an influencer. But people with the right marketing skills, know-how, (and thousands of Instagram followers) can earn anything from $500 to $6,000 per post. And if it can publish a few sponsored posts a week, it can be a profitable business. 9. Phone Case Business. There are more than 2.5 billion smartphone users in the world, and the number is increasing every day. Since pretty much everyone has a smartphone, smartphone cases are one of the top-selling mobile phone accessories. As a result, some mobile case sellers can rake in 6 or 7-figure incomes by selling a high volume of cases. The competition is pretty fierce, but you can get started by testing out your phone case ideas with Amazon FBA before creating a full-fledged website. When designing your cases, go for unique designs that cater to a specific audience. You need to be creative and innovative to create a collection of smartphone cases that your audience would purchase. One popular Etsy store managed to sell handmade cases worth $60,000 in its first year. The idea is to find your own unique niche. You can easily list your collection of new products on ecommerce giants like Amazon and eBay. Once you start making some money, you should then look into launching your own ecommerce website on a platform like Shopify to improve your profit margins. 10. Affiliate Marketing. It’s been a buzzword in the marketing arena for quite some time. When someone asks how to make passive money online, a lot of people automatically envision affiliate marketing. Brands that want to sell products online create new affiliate programs and allow affiliates (publishers and bloggers) to promote their products and earn commissions. According to one blog income report study, bloggers making between $7,500 — $25k per month make 38% of their income from affiliate marketing. In simple terms, it’s a proven business model where bloggers and influencers recommend services or products they like or find useful and earn a percentage of profit for each sale that follows. It is a great form of passive income and the perfect business model for bloggers. Here’s a rundown of how affiliate marketing works: To get started, register with networks like ShareASale, Awin, Rakuten, Clickbank, or Skimlinks to start making money from the type of content being published on the website. The income will gradually grow along with the growth of your website – Sky’s the limit here. To get more pertinent insights, check out this blog post of mine about the 105+ best affiliate programs to join this year. 11. Virtual Assistant. You can use your excellent organizational skills to start your business and create an extra stream of income as a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants (VAs) are in high demand by corporations, freelancers, and every kind of business. It is also an excellent opportunity to know successful and influential people from different fields of work to build your professional network and learn from experts. At the same time, it also provides you the opportunity to work from anywhere in the world while developing your professional skills. While it’s typically a lower-paying home business, it can hone your digital skills and be the first step in starting a more lucrative freelance career. People are always looking for virtual assistants on freelance job websites like Flexjobs. 12. Social Media Manager. Billions of people are on social media – it’s natural that there are jobs and businesses to be sprung from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you have experience with social media marketing and know-how the ad network operates, you can start a consulting business on social media. Everyone from small businesses to large corporations needs help getting their message out there on social media. There are a ton of different responsibilities and services a social media manager can provide: Create content for brands. Create custom ad campaigns and track ROI. Integrate content with other email marketing and PPC strategies. Analyze results, A/B test, and tweak campaigns. You have to stay ahead of trends in this constantly-changing landscape too. For example, TikTok is currently a huge opportunity for major brands, and many don’t even have an account or post regularly. LinkedIn is also a growing platform for digital marketing to businesses and connecting with new clients. If you’re looking for a job to gain social media experience, Flexjobs, CareerBuilder, and Fiverr offer a lot of opportunities related to social media management. Now it’s your turn. All of the small business ideas mentioned above can help you earn a decent income even with a low startup cost. Ultimately, I recommend you start something online like a blog, ecommerce business, or consulting firm, as these are less susceptible to market shifters like Covid-19. Did you miss any of your picks of the best business ideas? Let me know in the comment section below. Further Reading on AdamEnfroy.com: To dive deeper into some of the best small business ideas, check out my free guides on how to start a blog and how to start a podcast.
