I started looking for low cost online business ideas several years ago. My search eventually led me to learn affiliate marketing, which I still consider to be the best online business model available. See why affiliate marketing is the best business model. But before I found success as an affiliate, I also fell for the many pitfalls of the business model. See 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. But affiliate marketing is not necessarily the right business for you. So in this article I’m going to share the many low cost online business ideas I’ve found on-route!
Low Cost Online Business Ideas – eBay
eBay was a site I used to make money long before I found the affiliate marketing business model. It’s a great low cost business model in which you can use several different ideas. The main one I used was that of buying and selling on the site itself using a misspell search tool which showed the lesser found listings which were going for a bargain.
Then, I would re-sell the items with a better listing, (correct spelling), and better pictures. I always made a profit except once when I broke even. But this was because the item arrived in not so good condition, which wasn’t described in the listing. (I was being honest).
The full explanation of this strategy can be found in my article “how to start a profitable eBay business“.
There’s other ways to earn from eBay too of course:
Wholesale purchasing and selling individually. You can find wholesale prices on Alibaba.com and import the stock. Create a single listing on eBay and sell multiple items through your one listing.
You can buy and sell from other auction sites and make a profit on the difference. Buy also from charity shops and car boot sales, live auctions etc. and sell on eBay.
Low Cost Online Business Ideas – Blogging
Yes blogging is a great way to make money from the internet. I’m a big fan of blogging and have been doing it for some time now. Depending on the niche you decide to build a blog in, this can take months or even years before you start to see regular traffic and of course profits. There’s a couple of main ways to monetise a blog if you have nothing to sell of your own:
- Affiliate products – use affiliate products which you can find without any investment whatsoever. Link to those products on your blog and earn from their sales.
- Advertising – Google Adsense is one of the most popular advertising platforms which content creators can earn from by placing targeted adverts on their content.
Low Cost Online Business Ideas – YouTube
YouTube is another platform used by online businesses to build followers and traffic. It can be used in conjunction with your own website to gain traffic or even on its own. YouTuber’s typically use affiliate marketing to monetise their channels but there’s also a YouTube program which can be joined after you gain a certain number of followers. See the YouTube partner program for details of monetisation.
YouTube is a good platform to use if you’re a fan of creating videos and uploading them regularly to the platform. Much like with blogging, over time you can build quite a following and this means traffic. When you have many people looking at your videos you can start to earn from your hard work. YouTube can also be used as a paid marketing platform, but you’ll need a high ticket product range if you choose this route. Learn about high ticket affiliate marketing here.
Low Cost Online Business Ideas – eBooks
I first thought of selling my own ebooks shortly after finding an ebook about the eBay strategy mentioned above. To me, the automated downloadable product seemed the best way to automate sales online and generate a passive income. So I wrote a couple of ebooks and tried to sell them on my websites. This was a struggle at the time, but now there is Amazon self publishing which has made the process much easier.
With self publishing you can write an ebook and upload it directly to Amazon’s self publishing section, selling it directly on their site. Here’s the link to Amazon’s self publishing section.
See also sell digital downloads on my website.
Email Marketing – Low Cost Online Business Ideas
Email marketing is probably one of the best low cost online business tools you can get if you want to make money over the internet. Anyone can get an email autoresponder and learn how to build their email list to multiple subscribers. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Most affiliate marketers build an email list of subscribers and automate messages which connect customers to products online. It’s a good way to build an online business without products of your own. See also the power of email marketing. Top affiliates grow email lists into the tens of thousands of subscribers. A single email sent out to such a list can mean you can sell multiple products through a single email message.
Learn more about online business through email marketing through this free video series.
Freelancing – Using Online Skills You Can Sell
Freelancers are effectively self employed business people who offer certain skills or services. If you have a skill set which can be leveraged online, you can more than certainly make an income by selling your services on a site such as Upwork.com or Fiverr.com.
Freelancers offers services such as website design, logo design, SEO services (Search engine optimisation), link building, digital imagery, copywriting, personal assistance and so on.
Although freelancing is pretty competitive, you can build up your reviews over time and showcase your work online to a number of online business people who use these services.
Using Google My Business – For A Physical Service
Google My Business offers a means of advertising which is completely free. All you need is a service you can provide and a physical address to prove you are where you say!
I used this service to offer a handyman service in my local neighbourhood for several months and got work quite easily. So if you have a skill such as tutoring, music tuition, handyman, painter and decorator, computer skills or language tuition, you can use Google My Business to set up a completely free listing in your neighbourhood and get free customers! It takes about half an hour to set up and you’ll need to verify your address when they send out your code.
