Looking for low maintenance business ideas? A low maintenance business requires the minimum of input to generate income. While some of these ideas require investment, not all do. Some can be run from home from a laptop, which makes them really good for anyone. In general, the more you can invest in a business, the less you need to do. If you’re on a tight budget you can expect to need to put in more work to generate traction.
Some businesses ideas here will take some work just to get them earning. Blogging for example is a great low maintenance business idea once it is working. But initially you’ll need to put in the work upfront to reap the rewards later.
Once you have an established blog, you can earn passively from it. Conversely, property management is a good low maintenance business but requires upfront investment of at least a deposit for a buy to let property. An alternative is a REIT – Real Estate Investment Trust which allows you to invest in property in smaller amounts without the hassle of owning a property and renting it out yourself.
So here’s a few low maintenance business ideas for your portfolio!
Low Maintenance Business Ideas: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a good low cost business which can allow anyone to earn online from the sale of other people’s products and services. Like with most low maintenance businesses, there’s some upfront cost and work to be done. Depending on your budget and available time, you can take the faster route of using a high ticket sales funnel (and paid marketing) or going a longer cheaper route of doing content creation.
Blogging is an example of content creation and it can take months or years of work to build up enough content to start earning passively. The quicker route is to use paid marketing and build an email list; them promote a high ticket product range through your email marketing list. Since this can all be automated, it can produce a nice little earner once you put the work in upfront.
Affiliates are basically “middlemen” for products and services online. You can learn more about affiliate marketing with this free video series.
Low Maintenance Business Ideas: eBay
eBay is another great place for business ideas. One low maintenance idea using eBay is to buy a popular product wholesale and create a single listing to sell it in your country.
Once you’ve done the legwork you only need post a few items each day as you sell your items. You can buy wholesale goods from a site called Alibaba.com and make a profit on the difference according to the price you sell at. This does require some upfront costs. You’re taking a risk on what you buy so it’s worth doing your homework before you choose a product to sell.
Low Maintenance Business Ideas: Content Marketing/Blogging
While blogging has already had a mention in the affiliate marketing category, you can also use a blog to make money in other ways too. One such tactic is to use Google’s Adsense program to place adverts on your content.
With a lot of content on a blog, or video platform, you can generate income from advertising clicks from your visitors. This does take some time and dedication in the first instance, but it’s a low cost way of building a digital asset from which you can make a passive income over time.
YouTube is another place where you can build such an asset. Expect to upload regularly for several months to achieve a regular income from this strategy.
Low Maintenance Business Ideas: Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer website where contributors can earn a passive income from their content generation. While the amounts are typically very low, as you build content over time you can generate a passive income from what you have done previously. Quora.com has a couple of ways you can make money:
- Through answering questions and monetising your content
- By posting questions yourself and earning from advertising clicks on the answers
- Using Quora in combination with an affiliate website – using Quora to drive traffic
There’s a lot of competition on Quora though. So you’ll need to own a lot of content to make this work and produce a passive income. But you can spend a small amount of time on it daily and over time it will add up.
Vending Machines
I’ve always fancied a vending machine business because it always seemed like the perfect “hands off” business. Then I discovered affiliate marketing, which I think is much better! But still a vending machine business is pretty hands off. All you need to do is find somewhere for your vending machine to go in order to attract customers.
You also need to buy the vending machine in the first place, so there’s some investment in this business. Servicing your machine, maintenance and re-stocking the machine are all costs to consider. But ultimately you’ve got a business which requires a small amount of work and a large potential gain, particularly if you invest in many machines.
You can find vending machines on eBay.
Buy To Let Property
Buy to let property is of course a great business to get into if you can stump up the deposit for a property. Owning a property is great because you can earn from the increasing value of the property and from renting it out. Even if you don’t buy for long term investment, you can pay a interest only mortgage and make money on the difference by renting it out. As your portfolio increases so does your income.
There’s the risk of tenants not paying and moving out and all the hassle of buying and doing up a house though. An alternative is the REIT – Real Estate Investment Trust. This is where you invest in a company which owns property without owning the property yourself. If you don’t like the thought of moaning tenants and constant upkeep of a property, checkout REITS instead.