What kind of online business are there

Take Phil Knight for example. He continued to work his day time accounting job while he started Nike on the side. Ralph Lauren started his namesake business by personally selling his first few neckties to department stores in Manhattan. My friend Rudy Glocker switched from a career in finance to begin his own clothing brand, Burgeon Outdoor. Just as you would with any business, carefully plan out your clothing brand before launching it. I suggest you start with a very few, truly outstanding items.

And find a dependable manufacturer that will consistently deliver good quality. Selling online is competitive. Build up a regular following through social media and email. Publicity can also help promote this business. To learn how to get going with your own clothing brand — or any other business — start streaming the courses on BusinessTown. This business is a terrific way to earn money in a product business without taking on all the work of creating the products yourself.

Historically in this business you would need to travel all over the world to source your products. But today you can also do that on the Internet. You can also sell your products online through your own website, through your own store on a website like Amazon, or by putting up listings on websites like eBay and Etsy. Another possibility is reaching out to storefront retailers to carry your products. You could try sourcing your products on large online marketplaces like Alibaba. Or why not have a little fun and travel overseas to find some cool products?

I have a friend Suzanne Watzman who loves to travel and has a passion for traditional textiles and related goods. She sells her products on her website Tamaryn Design, as well as through a few select retailers, and at art and craft fairs.

A classmate of mine from business school began an import business after college. He purchased goods from local artisans in South America. His business grew to the point where he was filling up the entire cargo holds on several international airline routes.

To get going in this business get a feel for the products you could import or export, then come up with a cohesive plan. To learn more about starting this business, creating a business plan, and marketing online, start streaming the courses on BusinessTown.

Can you really make good money writing resumes or profiles? Richard Lambert was teaching English full time when he started writing resumes on the side. He landed his first clients on Fiverr offering a resume and cover package for one low rate. As his business picked up he increased his prices and also added other services including writing LinkedIn profiles.

Within 2 years he went full time. The demand for resume writing and LinkedIn profile writing is huge! Many otherwise talented professionals are not great at writing their own resume or profile. I know because my book publishing company became one of the leading publishers of resume books. The key is that most resumes and profiles sound like attendance records. In other words they primarily emphasize the positions that were held and the job responsibilities.

Instead a good resume or profile should highlight what the individual accomplished, what they changed and how they distinguished themselves. They also need to include plenty of search engine friendly keywords.

I arranged to rent bicycles through a motel, a gas station and a sporting goods shop in a tourist area on Cape Cod. And all I could afford was used bicycles whereas the competition had brand new ones. Then I changed my business model to be different from the existing competitors. I did this by offering free delivery of bicycles directly to customers at their campsites, and motels.

My business immediately took off and became a big success. To do this you need to evaluate your market, your target customers and your competition and seek out opportunities. Then you design your business around a true competitive advantage. Another good solid related business is bicycle repair. The demand is huge and steady.

You could start just by doing simple repairs yourself — you can teach yourself how to do them. You can send out the more complex repairs to other repair shops and take a percentage of the repair cost for yourself. By the way, I did try to sell brand new bicycles out of my house and it proved very difficult.

Instead, as still another alternative, you may want to consider buying and selling used bicycles. In my bike rental business I found that I could often sell my used bicycles for more than I paid for them.

But with a little time you can quickly master the business aspects of the jewelry business. A great place to start selling your jewelry is online with websites like Etsy and eBay. You can also sell your jewelry at flea markets and craft fairs. You can also set up your own website and do your own online marketing including building an email list, social media following and more. The big advantage of doing this is that you can develop a loyal audience, add more customers by word of mouth, and build repeat customer business.

Holly Christensen left her real estate job and started her jewelry business making items on her kitchen table and selling them through art and craft shows. Her idea was to make jewelry using sand from beaches. People thought it was a crazy concept. But she has been highly successful and now has loyal customers, over 20 employees and sells jewelry in stores throughout the world. Holly explains how she started her jewelry business in the course How to Succeed as a Woman Entrepreneur.

This course is one of the many included with BusinessTown , which you can try for free. So if your educational skills are a little rusty, you may want to stick to tutoring first and second graders. If your skills are more advanced you can tutor at higher levels. You can help out students by tutoring in your own home , at their home, at a local library or at a coffee shop. You can also tutor online via a video service such as Zoom. As you are getting started you may want to test marketing different tutoring specialties to see what gets the best response.

Home tutoring is another example of a very simple business that you can start. But like any simple business you are going to be much more successful if you start and plan it carefully. You should write up a business plan including what you will specialize in, who is your target market, what will be your marketing message and how you will reach your audience.

You may want to take a look at the courses Start-a-Business , Developing Your Marketing Message, and How to Create a Business Plan which includes a sample one page business plan for a tutoring business.

You can try all these courses for free on BusinessTown. Dropshipping is a very simple business. In this business model you feature a product usually on your own website or an online marketplace. You accept an order and payment for the product. Then you forward the order to a third party who fills the order and ships it to the customer.

The third party that fills the order may be the product manufacturer, a wholesaler, or another retailer. And you can start part time. After a couple years he focused on his business full time, testing a variety of products. So it certainly is possible to make a lot of money in dropshipping.

But while it is a simple business, it is not necessarily an easy business. Like any business you first need to do your homework including learning the basics of running a business. You need to choose your products carefully and come up with a business plan.

Furthermore any product business, including dropshipping is going to be riskier and take more work to succeed at than many of the simple service businesses on this list. But at the same time the upside can be huge. So how do you succeed at dropshipping? Beyond learning and planning you need to test. Test everything! Test different products, different prices, and different ad copy.

Finally when your dropshipping business begins to gain some traction I suggest you consider shifting your model to stocking and shipping the goods yourself. And you also may want to consider creating your own products.

To increase your chances of success in this business learn all that you can by streaming the courses on BusinessTown. To find out more about launching a business, start streaming the courses on BusinessTown including Start-a-Business This is perhaps the cheapest business to start in terms of overhead.

Expertise is another matter, but remember that writing can take many forms — from resumes to news articles to marketing materials and even thank you notes. One friend made good money editing posts on a popular travel site.

The key to freelance writing is to never stop selling yourself. Network like crazy online and in person. Ask for press passes to events in the field of your choice. Attend writing workshops and writer meet-ups; they happen everywhere.

There are loads of job listings for freelancers on major job boards, and you can always advertise your services and look for work on craigslist or LinkedIn. Steady work is the best work for freelancers. If all else fails at first, just write. Start a blog. Build clips. Get writing!

Content marketing is writing designed to help businesses market themselves online such as through websites, blogs, emails and social media.

The more you know about content marketing, the more marketable your writing services will be. And learn what makes for good blog posts, email messages and social media posts. To learn more, start streaming the courses on BusinessTown including the courses on freelancing, content marketing, SEO, email marketing and social media.

I have a wealthy friend who is crazy about his cars. He had a six car garage built onto his house. On Saturdays he loves to wash, wax and then take one of his fancy cars for a ride. His older son also loves cars and worked at an auto dealership while in high school.

He started washing cars, then later learned how to detail them. This is a great niche business. Some people pamper their pets. Other people pamper their cars. Owners of high end cars are willing to pay good money to have their cars detailed. But they are a meticulous bunch. They are going to want the work done just so. But if they like you, they will have you detail their car regularly.

And they will recommend you to their friends. Give them a discount and keep their expectations realistic when you are getting started. To find out more about how to start this business — or any other business — see my course Start-a-Business An enterprising friend of mine, Jeff Jacober, started a custom T-shirt business after college.

Then as he turned 40 years old he sold the business and bought an airplane, and a yacht to cruise around the Caribbean. Custom T-shirts is a great online business. People email you their logo or artwork and you print up the shirts. In college I made T-shirts for my softball team. I would also do email outreach to youth groups, sports teams and local business owners. The flip side of this business is that instead of doing custom T-shirts you sell your own designs.

They tried to sell their T-shirts on college campuses but initially made little progress. To learn more about how to begin your business, start streaming the courses on BusinessTown including Start-a-Business One of the more obvious ideas for starting a new business is still one of the best.

Cleaning houses is hard work, but people who do it well can pick up desperate new clients at a rapid pace. Cleaning can be very lucrative. Most house cleaners charge a flat rate to clean a house. I notice that some house cleaners however spend less and less time at each job after they think that the customer is comfortable with their work.

Another option is cleaning offices. One friend in Boston built a highly successful cleaning business focusing on small businesses. They trusted him with access to their businesses at night and were willing to pay him a hefty premium. He worked just 4 or 5 hours a night and made a very healthy living. You can make lots of money in this business if you know the basics of how to run a business and how to attract new customers.

To learn more see my course Start-a-Business You can try this course and all of our other courses for free on BusinessTown. Most school kids enter a music program at some point, whether it involves singing or playing an instrument. There is a big market for teaching music and your instrument is your specialty. The key is to develop reasonable but firm policies on pricing and cancellations and, if possible, make your home the venue for providing lessons, rather than traveling to visit students.

Another great home teaching gig is art lessons. When I was growing up there was a woman not too far from me who gave art lessons in her home to young kids after school. Not just kids but adults too are interested in art lessons. Almost anyone for example can teach young elementary age students. Plan out the course so that the students will have some exciting finished art projects to take home and show off to their friends.

Both music and art lessons lend themselves well for digital marketing. For music lessons you can show off videos of students playing their instruments on your website and on social media. For both music and art you can feature interviews with your students talking about what they are working on.

To find out more about starting this business — or any other business — see my course Start-a-Business You can try it for free on BusinessTown, along with all of our other courses. When my son was at Stanford University one of his fraternity brothers, Evan Spiegel, came up with an idea for his kid sister to send digital messages in her high school classes that would instantly disappear. He called it SnapChat. He became the youngest billionaire in the world in Almost any business that sells anything wants to be on social media, so the market is huge!

They need your help. How can you break into this field? Learn and practice. Build an audience for yourself before offering your services to others. Keep cranking out content and get comfortable with it. And like any business, come up with a solid plan. Evaluate the competition and potential target markets, then come up with your business plan. You can learn more about how to use social media to promote a business — including your own business — on BusinessTown.

We also offer 5 other courses on social media marketing. People trade away perfectly good or certainly good enough cars all the time for all sorts of trivial issues. Especially if you like cars and can make one shine for a Craigslist ad, you could take advantage of massive opportunities to buy used cars and resell them for major profit. That way you could buy a few decent used cars without using any financing. But it could be possible to start this business with just about nothing by getting financing for your inventory.

The key to success in this business is being very disciplined in buying. Limit your car buying to popular models that you can turn over quickly. Focus on models that you have a strong understanding of current local pricing on.

Only buy cars that you can buy at a significant discount to the price you believe you can fairly sell them for. And avoid cars that are likely to need major work. A friend in Georgia has been doing this successfully for more than 20 years. I never traded cars, but I did trade used boats from my house one summer and quickly made good money at it.

I discovered the key was to focus on the most popular, fastest selling products such as brand name outboard powerboats and avoid the slowest selling products such as sailboats. It was a really fun business! I even sold a boat to the famous novelist Norman Mailer. Today even if you are trading cars or boats part time, you want to have at least a simple website.

It will not only help attract customers, but it will make your business seem more credible. To learn how to create a website for your business, see my course, The Complete Guide to Digital Marketing. Help businesses build their social media presence by offering your social media services. This option lets you use and improve your knowledge base. Here are some typical ways that bloggers earn money:.

You can sell ads by yourself or use advertising networks to put ads on your site that pay you every time someone clicks an ad link. Promote Products : You can use your blog to sell products, whether those are physical goods or information products such as e-books. All businesses must follow specific rules where applicable, including laws about collecting and paying taxes , regulating marketing and protecting intellectual property.

You may be dealing with sensitive details like addresses and credit card numbers, and consumers have the right to keep this information protected. Be aware of certain steps, like building an SSL-encrypted site, to safeguard this information against identity theft, and consider cyber insurance to protect against data breaches and other cyber crimes.

Before you get started selling, familiarize yourself with applicable business laws. The U. Launching an online business can be a great career move. It can give you the opportunity to earn extra money and assume greater control over your professional life. But starting any venture presents challenges that you need to be ready for. Small business insurance can give you peace of mind to protect your company and help you concentrate on building a successful company.

How to start an online business Starting an online business is more practical than ever. Podcast Monetization After your podcast becomes a worldwide sensation, it's time to think about monetizing it: 1 Create Courses or Sell a Product You may be skilled in a particular subject.

Producing high-quality content requires effort and sometimes even money—ask for support. Pro Tip: Choose a Great Media Host Just like when you start a blog you need a web host, starting a podcast requires you to have a media host. Recommended Service: BuzzSprout Therefore, choose a top-tier podcast hosting platform designed to make podcasting easy, but not limited.

So on. There is little more to it than this: Sign up Create a profile Provide your opinion on products, services, ads, etc. Step-by-Step Survey Money-Making 1 Find a Company First of all, you need to sign up with a reliable company to take surveys more details below. Pro Tip: Register without Commitment There are tons of survey companies out there.

Freelancers are those who offer their services for money. Little to No Startup Costs If you are already skilled and have the required equipment for the job, freelancing can be extremely affordable. Speed You can begin right away. Pay Infrastructure Once you find a client, do the given task and submit before the deadline, and get paid instantly, minus the processing time. Freedom You are your own boss.

Self-Reliance You can make your own decisions. Mobility Since there is no 9 to 5, you can do your project pretty much whenever you feel the most productive. Unless you choose the wrong platform. Recommended Service: Upwork We recommend using Upwork. If the latter seems challenging, for now, consider the following tips: Branding Yourself Before Branding Others How to Get Web Design Clients Build your skills enough to create an eye-catching, professional portfolio.

Include in it only your best projects to increase your chances. Send out cold emails to those you think might need a new website. If you are a great web designer, design and code templates and consider selling them online.

Create a blog, post articles, publish open-source projects, and make a name for yourself. Finally, as you start getting contracts, make sure to pick your clients wisely. Feel free to let go of those you have a bad feeling about. Pro Tip: Use the Right Tools To create appealing websites, use a powerful tool web design tool and have a list of helpful resources that you're planning to utilize Related Read: Top Online Logo Generators.

Here are 5 reasons why everyone is turning to eCommerce in Shoppers Start Online People love shopping online. Content Marketing A solid online presence lets you provide detailed information about your product or service to your audience via key product content. Pro Tip: Choose a Suitable Platform If you want something more advanced that comes with extra customization and virtually no limitations — look no further than WordPress.

Look out for Uptime in the above list. Recommended Product: Shopify While we also reviewed Shopify in depth , there are some great eCom alternatives to consider. Our article will help you to choose between Shopify vs Wix , but have in mind these things about Big Cartel : Big Cartel is the only E-commerce platform that lets you sell online for free , and is suitable for those selling individual products.

The Drone Future Dropshipping lets you sell and ship products you do not own or stock. The main process is pretty straightforward: You get an order You forward it to your supplier The supplier fulfils the order Dropshipping solves a number of decades-old problems for wholesalers and retailers. Increase Consumers Wholesale consumers can showcase your product in their online or physical stores, and market it directly to their line of consumers. Low Starting Cost Because you no longer have to purchase wholesale or pay for product manufacturing, you can start selling with little to no early investment.

Come to Market Faster Dropshipping reduces wait times when items are shipped from the manufacturer to the merchant, allowing you to sell the goods the second they are published on your eCommerce website. Pro Tip: Automate Your Shipping When starting a dropshipping business, the biggest challenge is deciding how to automate. The best thing? Start up in less than a month — more into this later. You will also probably never be jobless. Start with their Python 2 course. Learn the foundations of Python, one of the fastest -growing programming languages.

Start with their JavaScript Basics course. The duties of a social media manager include: Planning, scheduling, and posting content across media channels. Get Hootsuite! Hosting Types. Best Web Hosting. Best Cheap Hosting. Best Free Web Hosting. Best WordPress Hosting. Best VPS Hosting. Best Dedicated Hosting. Best Reseller Hosting. Best Ecommerce Platform. Best Blogging Platform. Best Podcast Hosting. Best Email Hosting. Best Domain Registrars.

Hosting Reviews. Hostinger Review. HostGator Review. SiteGround Review. Bluehost Review. Kinsta Review. GreenGeeks Review. A2 Hosting Review. GoDaddy Review. Website Builders. Cheapest Website Builders. Best Free Website Builders. Wix Review. Weebly Review.

Zyro Review. Squarespace Review. Site Review. Shopify Review. Cloud Storage.