Many people are making thousands per month from the comfort of their homes through starting and growing a from-home online business. Here are three online business ideas that will perfect for you if you need a side hustle for some extra cash on the side, or seek to reach financial freedom by owning a full-time business that eventually grows to generate passive income.
Building an Email Newsletter
You need very little money to start this online business idea, as you won’t have to pay for physical products, which can be a very big issue for people who want to start businesses.
There’s also a lot of money in it. Let’s take a look at Morning Brew, for example. It’s a finance and business email newsletter that was created by two students at the University of Michigan called Austin Rief and Alex Lieberman. The two started in 2015, and grew their newsletter until it was bought by Business Insider in 2020 for a staggering $75 million, which is an insane amount of money for a business that literally anyone can start.
The first thing you need to do if you want to start a newsletter business is come up with a good idea for your newsletter. This depends on who you are, your passions and the type of niche you want to focus on, the type of content you want to create, as well as the whole purpose of your newsletter. For example, your newsletter’s purpose can be creating content as a business itself, or promoting other businesses and helping them get clients by offering benefits like a discount code for subscribers.
Once you’ve identified what your newsletter is for and why you’re creating it, you need to pick the right email newsletter platform. There are a lot of platforms that you can use to create a newsletter, like beehiiv and Brevo, both of which have free plans for people who are just getting started, as well as paid plans that unlock more features like custom domains and increasing the number of emails you can send each month.
Now that you’ve created your newsletter, here are some tips you can follow to grow it. First of all, you need to take some time crafting your subject lines. In an email newsletter, a subject line is the title of the email, so it’s extremely important because it’s what grabs the attention of your viewers, so you need to make sure to choose the best subject lines. If you write your own content for the newsletter, you need to do really good research, good writing, and create content that delivers value to your viewers. Many people online will tell you to use an AI tool like ChatGPT to write content, and while this might be okay in the short-term, it’s not going to be good enough to entice your viewers to always open up your emails.
You also need to make sure you have a strong call to action, as a lot of newsletters have a lot of really good text but they don’t have any actual actions they want the reader to do. These actions can be anything from clicking on a link and sharing the newsletter with a friend, to actually responding to the email. If you have affiliate links on your newsletter, then you definitely need to entice your readers to click on them, and you can do this by highlighting the links or writing exciting words that will urge people to click.
Another good tip for growing your newsletter is using social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok to promote it, but you need to keep in mind that it takes a really long time to build a successful email newsletter and if you don’t stick to it for a long time, it’s not going to do well and won’t grow large enough for you to monetize it, either by running ads on it or by offering a premium subscription service. In fact, you need to be consistent with your emails for at least 6 to 12 months to start seeing some success. But, once you grow your newsletter, you can turn it into passive income by hiring writers to do the work for you, which is why newsletters have become so popular as a passive income business lately.
Print on Demand
Print on demand is one of the most popular online business ideas because it is essentially you creating designs and uploading them to print on demand websites, which will create a photoshopped picture of what that design would look like on a t-shirt or a mug or anything that the company could print the design on. Then, it gets listed on that print on demand’s website’s marketplace, and when people buy anything with the design you’ve created, you get a split of the profit. What’s even better is that you won’t have to worry about dealing with customer service or shipping, because the website will do all of this for you.
There are several websites that do print on demand, and you can use Teespring.com or even Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), which refers to print on demand as Amazon merch on demand, to get started. If you want to get into this business, but think that creating designs might be too hard for you, you should know that there are actually tools you can use to create the designs. One tool that you can use is a website called Placeit.net, which can help you create designs for print on demand, or even a logo for your business. It’s extremely easy to use and helps you because it has existing templates, so you don’t need to be a professional graphic designer to make this business work.
Additionally, you can upload the same design to multiple print on demand websites that get different traffic, and this will increase your chance of making really good money, and could become a source of passive income over time as you upload more and more designs. To scale your print on demand business, you need to pick the right topic or niche for your designs to cover, and you can do any design you want, as long as it’s not copyrighted, and this can include things like song lyrics, movie quotes, or logos of businesses. Therefore, you might want to stay away from these designs.
You can even find design ideas by sorting products on Etsy (NASDAQ: ETSY) or Amazon based on the best-selling ones, just to see what people are buying. Additionally, you can check for copyrights using a tool called Merch Informer, which will check if a slogan or a phrase you want to include in your design is copyrighted. Keep in mind that it isn’t free and you need to pay $10 per month for it, but it’s better than getting sued over copyright.
Social Media Management
Businesses, both big and small, are always looking for ways to use social media to reach their target audience. But, they often don’t know how to use social media to promote themselves, especially if they’re a small business, or simply don’t have the time to manage their profiles effectively. Therefore, if you’re into social media, you can find these businesses and offer them freelance social media management services.
You can start by managing the Instagram or TikTok account for a local business, and if you can’t find a local business that needs your services, you can use websites like Upwork, which might help link you up with a client. Over time, you can do other parts of the business and even reach out to other businesses that need their social media accounts managed. Some social media managers can make up to $5,000 per month, but that’s if you do it full-time. If you just want a side hustle next to your daily job, you can take in from $500 to $1,000 per month.
The services you can offer as a social media manager can range from just posting daily and responding to comments and DMs, to actually creating content for that company and running ads to make that content go viral. All of this depends on your social media skills, what the business is looking for, and the amount of time you can actually offer. The initial investment needed to start doing this is minimal, as you’d only need a good internet connection, and your time to create content, analyze metrics, and engage with followers.
Additionally, if you want to scale this and make it a full-time business and grow your client base, you can eventually hire people to do the work for you, and this can turn the income you get into passive income, where you won’t have to do a lot of work.
The Bottom Line
There are a lot of online business ideas that you can start at home for a very low cost, and we tried to cover three that are low-cost, in-demand, and easy to get started at. Remember, none of these businesses will be a success and earn a lot of money if you don’t stick to them for a long time, meaning that it’s important to be patient and work hard to grow your business, so you can enjoy the fruits of your hard work.
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