5 Online Businesses Ideas You Can Start With Almost No Money

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15-20 years ago, no one had ever imagined that you could start making money and operate your business online through the internet. Things have changed, and the online marketplace had become a battlefield for most companies. If you’re new to this business and want to start your new online business with no money, then you are at the right place.

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Every young entrepreneur thinks about starting their business with minimum investment. But the question is, is it possible? Definitely, it is possible to start an online business from scratch with minimum cost. But how and what businesses should you start?

Hello, welcome to Unboxing Startups. Today, in this article, we are going to find the solution for you. Kindly read till the end to understand the opportunities and what all options are there to start when planning to launch your online business.

We know online business companies like Amazon, Walmart, homedepot, and many other online companies dominate the online marketplace with their products and services. But in this article, we will talk about how one can start an online business at minimum cost. Our primary target is not to cover biggies, we will mainly target the newbies who want to start their online businesses, but they don’t have enough funds to spend.

The great thing about starting a business online is — it is one of the affordable business options that can be started from home. Anyone can start an online business and earn money—anyone with a computer, laptop, or a tab. Here, virtually no technical experience is required. Today, you can use plenty of tools to build an online business that makes technical work a lot easier than it was in the past.

You can start your online business from any corner of the world, set your own working schedule (you’re the boss), and work as little or as much as you want, depending on how quickly you want your business to grow. No additional business or marketing experience is needed. It’s a truly democratic medium for entrepreneurship.

Nowadays, many new online businesses are doing great and operating with minimum funds because many free services facilitate the possibility. For example, you can leverage a third-party website like Amazon or eBay to sell goods with no inventory costs. You use their selling platform in exchange for giving them some portion of your sales.

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Now the question is, why owning an online business is such a great idea. Now it’s time to look at exactly which are the five best online businesses to start in 2021 and beyond.

1. Drop Shipping

2. Blogging

3. Online Video

4. Make Money by Affiliate Marketing

5. Information Products

 

Let’s Begin:

1. Drop Shipping

The primary idea behind an online drop shipping business is that you don’t have to maintain a large list of products or handle any delivery to your customers as a small business owner. That removes the financial cost and risk of having a warehouse full of products you might not sell and the problem of arranging to send orders all across the country. In fact, you don’t have to manufacture or store any products at all. 

The only thing you have to focus on is your marketing and advertising to search the customers and make sales. 

Once you hit on the bull’s eye (sales), others can handle the rest. You have to only pay for marketing and advertising to attract new customers.

Once that is done, you will work with a company that specializes in drop shipping. Here’s how it works:

• You list products for sale on your website or a platform like eBay, Amazon, and many others.
• When your customers make an online purchase, you buy the product from a third-party company (the drop shipper, usually a manufacturer or wholesaler) at a lower price. The process is as simple as forwarding the order from your customer, which can be completely automated. 
• Your drop shipper then delivers the product to the customer.

Simple isn’t it? With drop shipping, you can offer a wide range of products, so your business’s operating expenses are minimum.

One way to stand out from the competition with a drop shipping business is to label your products privately. This means you put your own brand label on the products that the manufacturer is creating and selling at a very competitive price. We will just give you an example for better understanding so; for example, when you look at medicine at the pharmacy store, the reputed brand names sell for higher prices. People think they are different from the generic brands and are more effective even though the ingredients and the formula are the same. Consider these few important factors when looking for a good dropshipping product.

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Also Read: 6 Things You Need To Know Before Starting Your Business Online

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2. Blogging

When it comes to blogging, you can’t get better than this. If you have good writing skills and passionate about writing, you can start making money with a blog. With a service like Blogger (www.blogger.com), you can start your blogging without any cost. Not only this, you can even create your own personal site and secure your hosting for a low price, which is generally the path we recommend, as many free blogging sites have some restrictions on what you can say or do, including making money or advertising.

Blogging is not only about writing. You can also publish photos, videos, and links to other sites; you can even repost news and other articles—anything will work till it relates to the work you’re doing.

The critical point is always to post the original and uniquely valuable content to your target audience. And make sure you post every two-three days to keep your readers engage. That is the ideal way to get ranked in the search engines and get your audience to take action.

What sort of content should you provide? The answer is anything engaging and appealing to your prospect. How-to topics, top-5 lists, commentary on trends in your niche, tips and tricks articles, pros and cons—basically, you need to provide useful and effective content. There’s no shortage of ideas for your blog. In short, do some research before you write and always keep a purpose why you are writing this blog and who will read it.

Thus, in this way, you can make money in various ways with an online business blog without spending a penny. 

3. Online Video

Have you watched any YouTube videos? Of course, you have! It is one of the world’s most popular platforms, with more than two billion+ users watching hundreds of millions of hours of video every day. 

You can leverage YouTube’s reach to earn money online. We are not talking about creating great videos that might go viral. We simply mean that if you make a well informative video and millions see people’s video, that’s a good thing to start with.

It would be best if you focus on some proven strategy for maximizing views of multiple videos regularly. Make sure you create some helpful content—something engaging that people want to watch. Don’t impose your thoughts on your subscribers; create content that your audience likes to watch.

When you start to get respectable numbers of views and subscribers, you make ad revenue. Your first step is to create a YouTube account (mail id required) and start upload videos. Then you enable monetization on your YouTube account settings. This allows Google the go-ahead to include short AdSense ads with your videos, which you have already seen if you’ve watched a YouTube video before. When viewers click on those ads, you get paid. As simple as that isn’t it?

Another way to make money with a YouTube channel is through paid sponsorships. With your good content, getting more subscribers and viewers-companies will be happy to pay you to promote or mention their products and services in your videos.

Some tips for creating professional-looking videos (no costly pro equipment needed):

1. You can use your smartphone camera. But make sure you record the video in good lighting conditions so that everything in your video is clear and easy to see.
2. Make sure the audio is clear. You don’t want an air conditioning room, and avoid any kind of unusual noise or distractions.
3. Use simple editing software like iMovie to put titles at the beginning of the video and edit out any flubs.

Above all, remember it doesn’t matter how long duration you make the video; it depends on how much value and useful content you are putting into your video. Sometimes try to be funny in the video because people love a good sense of humor.

To extend your videos’ reach, be sure to post them on your Facebook business page, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. Let people know you’re in the official video business now.

Besides ad revenue from YouTube videos, you can also use your YouTube channel to drive more traffic back to your website. Visitors can read your genuine product reviews and click on the ads on your website—where you can make multiple sales with your email list.

4. Make Money by Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers work with brands and help to increase their sales. You can do this work at home by generating traffic to a merchant’s website through an affiliate link. You will then earn a commission on all the sales generated through your link. The commission generally sits between 5% and 20%, to be negotiated per client.

It might be a risky trade for some as payment depends entirely on your marketing performance: how many sales you generated and how much resulting commission you make. On the positive side, however, the startup costs are next to none – you can post your affiliate link anywhere to generate sales. If you have some budget, you can reach more people by using paid advertising.

You can use Amway and Amazon Associates networks to generate traffic to your merchants as an affiliate. Amazon, in particular, has an enormous audience. One of the most popular affiliate network sites is Clickbank, which specializes in digital products. These items offer much higher commission rates, sometimes up to approximately 80%.

5. Information Products

When you have an online business, it doesn’t have to be about only selling products. In fact, digital information products are one of the effective and quickest ways to make money.

There are ample ways to create information products, but the most popular formats are:

• Audio: a recorded teleconference, interview, course, or some other spoken-meaningful product.
• Video: a recorded webinar, a how-to, an interview. Or some motivational speech.
• Text: an ebook, an instruction booklet of some sort, a travel guide.

In each of these categories, you can get creative and appealing; as a result, you can make any type and format of content, as long as it’s engaging and meaningful. People love information; when you have the capability to deliver appealing details in any format, people will buy your products. 

No matter which way you do it, it’s passive income—you can earn money while you sleep because everything is on your website for sale. And interested customers can automatically buy and download them at any time. All you need to do is check the sales sporadically to see what topics or types of products have the highest demand and are selling so you can make more of those.

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Final Wrap-Up

With the above comprehensive guide, we hope you have understood 5 online businesses you can start with no money.

But which of these online business ideas should you choose?

Whatever you select, we think that an online niche business could be used to promote, start or fund every one of the ideas we highlighted above. If you have a good work ethic, are willing to learn something new, and have an internet connection, then there is no reason you can’t start your own internet business and build it into a mini-empire!