Would you like the freedom to work from home? …or anywhere you like for that matter. If so, an online business is a great option. Ideally speaking, you should select a business sector (niche) that you are wildly passionate about.
Some people are calling it the “laptop lifestyle” others their “digital career” – no matter what you call it – working online is one of the most flexible ways to work in 2019 and beyond. You can choose who you work with, where you work and how much you make.

The more lives you enhance, the more money you’ll make.

3 Key Areas of An Online Business

1. Money making/ working

2. Administration

3. Marketing

Starting a Blog is easier than ever, there are many ways you can start for free as well as some amazing platforms that you can build your website on for cheap. It’s most certainly not too late to start your blog – if that is something you want to do – I’d urge you to get started TODAY.

WordPress is the best platform for blogging/ bloggers. Sure, other suppliers like Wix offer similar deals, but WordPress was specifically created as a blogging website platform and it’s really nice to use as a blogger.

When I say “Wordpress” I’m not talking about WordPress.com, I am referring to the actual open-source blogging software. Normally what I do is set up a WordPress website on my own hosting platform. That way I am in full control of what happens to my blog.

My ALL-TIME FAVOURITE theme for WordPress blogs is Divi. Divi is more than a theme for WordPress. Divi allows you to easily create your WordPress website exactly the way you want it. You can edit the text on the page and then go ahead and add in all of your blogs.

Cons

✖ Time-consuming

✖ Longer-term commitment

✖ Need to enjoy writing blogs (alternatively you can hire someone that is)

PRO TIP: It may take you a few days to learn the in’s and outs of Divi, but once you have – it’s a dream to work with.

Like I said above, the most important thing about running a blog is consistency. You’ll want to create a content calendar for your blog so that you can post blogs once a day, week, fortnight or month – depending on your schedule.

As an all-or-nothing type of person,  I love sitting down and getting tonnes of content written at once. Then I can jump in and schedule them to be posted at the right time, to fit my content calendar.

PRO TIP: You can repurpose blog posts and create content for social media.

It’s a great idea to create your blogs and graphics in one go, with a specific purpose in mind. The main purpose should be providing value, and this should tie in with your core business goals.

How long should your blog posts be?

What Will You Write About?

Monetizing your blog

8 Ways to Make Money Blogging

• Affiliate products
• Advertising
• Digital Products
• Donations
• eCommerce – Sell Physical Products
• Membership
• Sell Your Website
• Consult or teach

eCommerce stores are becoming increasingly easy to set up. This is great news, but you also need to create a store that fulfills a customer’s needs. You’ll also want to make sure that you create a store in a niche that you are passionate about.

Online stores are generally more difficult to set up and run than a blog. There is a lot more to think about for example your products, shipping costs, packaging, inventory, storage, customer support and so much more. People that want to go into the eCommerce space need to be aware that creating your own store isn’t much different than setting up a “brick and mortar” style business.

The only difference between an online store and an offline store is that people don’t normally come to your warehouse in person. And you need to ship the products. As always there are exceptions to that rule because some types of goods must be collected in person and some online stores are an extension of a physical store.

PRO TIP: Take all of the product costs, packaging, tax and transport into consideration when pricing your products. Also, take a look over on Amazon or eBay and see how much people are paying for similar goods.

You can choose to set up your store on Amazon, eBay or Etsy to start with to test the waters. That way you don’t need to go to the hassle of setting up a website until you are 100% certain about your chosen market.  The benefit of these sites is that they already have an existing following that you can tap into.

If you decide to sell your products on one of the bigger sites, you can offer a discount voucher for future purchases (via your online store). That way you can take advantage of the traffic from the larger site, and gain a loyal customer.

How do I get traffic to my eCommerce Store?

This is a question I wish more people asked when starting out. So many people think that they can set up a store and the orders will start to flow in – sadly that’s just not the case.

You’ll need to market your eCommerce store and also direct traffic towards your URL for buyers to come over to your site. Setting up a newsletter, blog, social media campaigns and adverts are all great ways to get traffic over to your website.

How Much Does it Cost To Start An Ecommerce Store?

My three favorite eCommerce platforms are Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce. WooCommerce is great if you already have a WordPress website, as it’s a FREE extension for WordPress. Both Wix and Shopify are website builders that now offer eCommerce as a feature for premium subscribers.

There are four tools that you need to successfully set up an eCommerce store:

• Hosting
• Domain name
• eCommerce Software
• Payment processor 
  One benefit of going with Wix is that you get all of the above features in one place. You can then create your store in minutes. You also get the website hosted FREE of charge and your own professional domain name. For example yourwebsite.com.

Wix is ideal for the complete beginner who wants to set up a professional eCommerce website. They offer an all-in-one solution that allows you to set up promotional coupons, get paid and manage orders.

There are a variety of pricing plans offered by Wix. Business Basic comes with eCommerce features and is just £16/ month or £13 /month if you pay annually.

Cons

✖ Warehouse required.

✖ Products can get lost in the post

✖ Good customer service is required

✖ Suppliers can run out of stock

✖ You’ll need a good secure, dry space to keep your products in

Side Note: If you want to set up an online store and don’t want to have to deal with products, then you can dropship goods. This means that you don’t need to hold any stock, the wholesaler sends the products direct to your customer.

Dropshipping means that you don’t have the financial outlay of buying and storing products. This gives you more flexibility on what you can offer. On the other hand – if you choose to dropship, the process is out with your control and you can find yourself stuck in the middle of the dropshipping company and your customer.

Affiliate marketing has developed over the years. It used to be something that was only used by black-hatters who used sleazy tricks. But now there is a tonne of respectable marketers making a lot of money out of affiliate marketing, and helping people in the process.

As an affiliate marketer you bridge the gap between the supplier and buyer – and take your cut, a bit like drop shipping. Again, as with any of the online business ideas on this list, it’s a good idea to select a niche that speaks to you.  

It’s easy to get started with Affiliate Marketing and it can be incorporated in a blog. For instance, if you are in the health niche, then you can promote other people’s detox programs, supplements, or weight-loss products and take your cut. 

The customer gets the product at the same (or lower cost) and you get to take some money home.  Affiliate marketers can take home 50%-100% of a digital product (quite a bit less if you are promoting a physical product).

The best sorts of affiliate products to offer are those that offer a recurring payment model. That way you can build up your income, and have a tidy residual income that builds over time.

For example, if you wanted to be a Clickfunnels affiliate, they pay out $40 per month for each person that signs up for a paid account. If you sign up one person a week, that would be $160 per month. The following month, if you did the same, you’d get $160 from month one and $160 from month two, when you signed up four more people. 

Residual affiliate income compounds and can result in a nice passive income stream for you.

How Do I Advertise An Affiliate Product?

PRO TIP: If you’re advertising an affiliate product, then it’s best that you have tried and tested the offering before you recommend it to people. That way you’ll be acting with integrity.

There are a lot of different ways that you can get traffic over to your affiliate product such as email marketing, sales funnels, blogs, Facebook adverts or Google ads.

Strange as it may seem, you’re best not to sell the product directly. Instead, sell the solution to their pain point in an innovative way.

Where do I find Affiliate products to market?

Check if your favorite online suppliers have an affiliate program. You normally find them in the footer of their website. Or you can search their company name with the word “affiliate” at the end in Google and their affiliate program will normally popup.

Clickbank is a great place to start looking for affiliate products in a wide range of niches.

PRO TIP: You’ll need to understand online marketing principles like – SEO, Sales Funnels and copywriting to be able to succeed in this niche.

Cons

✖ Physical products offer low commission

✖ Advertising can be expensive

Self-publishing is easier than ever to do. If you set time aside every day to write, then you can begin to write your book, safe in the knowledge that you can self-publish your book when it’s complete.

Don’t have enough time to write a book? Just 30 minutes per day for one year is more than enough time to write a book. 30 mins per day adds up to around 150 hours in a year, if you write just 500 words per hour then you have the basis for a good-sized ebook of about 75,000 words.  

How to Self-publish a book

Today you don’t need to go and beg a publisher to print your book. You can easily self-publish on Amazon inside a day.

Make sure to validate your book idea and discuss it with your community prior to writing the book. You can also check out courses that are performing well in your niche on Udemy and books that have a high best seller rank on Amazon. If both of these boxes are checked, then you have a great book idea, with a buying audience. 

 [81% of Americans Want To Publish A Book #self-publish #author #book #publish]

Amazon also has a print on demand feature, where they’ll create a physical copy of your book and post it to people. This is a fun way to get physical copies of your book printed up. If you want to go down this route then proofing can take a while as Amazon print and send proofs within four weeks.

Once written, you’ll need to create a marketing strategy for your book/s. That can look like paid advertising on Amazon, Inner circles to discuss your book progress, free book funnels, sample pages of your book or book signings.

PRO TIP: You can also sell digital (PDF) copies of your book directly from your website – that means that you can take 100% of the money made, rather than giving Amazon a cut of your money.

Cons

✖ Physical products offer low commission

✖ Advertising can be expensive

Authors who have already written a book are in the ideal position to repurpose the content and create a workshop or course. You can also use a live workshop as the foundation of an online course.

There are three key moving parts to creating an online course:

1. Advertising
2. Website
3. Course Material & Delivery

Online courses can be a great way to share your knowledge and make money in any area of life. This can be extremely rewarding and relatively straight forward.

Why create a course when people can read books or blogs?

An online course should be a concise end-to-end guide that holds the student’s hand and takes them step by step through a process to ensure their success. An online course is similar to attending a course in a physical location, where you get trained up to be able to perform a particular task.

There are a few great tools that you can use to create your online course. I like to use Clickfunnels and Teachable. Clickfunnels do have their own membership tools, but they are not as easy to use as Teachable.

Clickfunnels is great for the sales funnel/ advertising piece, while Teachable is ideal for the course delivery. You can share your course materials easily on teachable, such as checklists, workbooks, and video tutorials. They also have a nice layout that makes courses easy to follow.

My ideal setup is:

• Blog/Youtube/Socials to provide value for free 80% of the time
• Funnels to gather leads and provide further value – building to your offering
• Teachable & Facebook Groups – to deliver your course

Teachable have course creator kits that make it super easy to go from overwhelmed to rewarded. Instead of teaching just one person, you can reach more people and get paid accordingly with an online course.

If you want to do some live teaching with your course you can easily do this with Skype or Zoom. Zoom also allows you to share your screen, meaning you can then teach the whole lesson and record your screen then upload the material to Teachable or Udemy.

PRO TIP: Creating a Facebook Group to compliment your online course can unite your online community and enhance the user experience.

Cons

✖ Can be overwhelming with all of the moving parts

✖ Time-consuming

Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular as people are so busy – as such Podcasts are ideal for people on the go. Downloading and listening to a podcast on your smartphone is great for people who want to multitask.

Podcasting is similar to blogging, or Youtubing because you really need to be consistent. Fans will grow to expect your content on a specific day. So creating a publishing schedule for your podcast is important.

Some people like to block out a whole month and get all of their podcasts done and dusted. This is an awesome approach for marketing and outreach too! 

Recording your podcast can be done easily over Zoom – you can then share your podcast on Youtube and edit it in free software like Audacity. Alternatively, you can record your podcast on your smartphone.

In short, podcasts are great for people who like to multi-task. Consistency is key with a Podcast,

[According to Ofcom 6 Million UK Adults Listen To Podcasts #podcast #voice]

Your podcast can be added to your blog and transcribed.

Define Your Podcast Show Format

Alright, you know what your niche is and your podcast name – awesome! Now you need to define your podcast show format.

Once you know your niche and name, you’ll need to decide on your podcast show format.  This is a great example of a podcast show format – with everything you need to set up your podcast. A podcast is a great way to speak to others that are an authority in your niche and quickly grow your online presence.

You’ll also need a podcast website. This can be as simple as a Clickfunnels sales page, a simple website or a more complex Divi blog depending on what you envisage. Your podcast page should outline your planned show schedule.

You could even start with a free website from Wix and then upgrade later.

How Much Money Can You Make from a Podcast?

According to Dave Jackson at School of Podcasting you can make over $1500 per month just from podcasting – you can see a breakdown of his income over on his site. Many people make more than this, but Dave’s breakdown gives a nice insight into how you can make money directly from your podcast.

Cons

✖ Takes time, consistency and patience

✖ You’ll need a decent microphone (unless you have a great phone)

Lots of people dream of being a Youtuber.

What people fail to acknowledge is that it’s a job like any other.

Being a great Youtuber takes time to master. It takes time to get your channel off the ground and you need to be fully committed to making it succeed. If you’re the type of person who loves to be on camera – then videos are the best way to connect with larger audiences.

Youtubing is a free and relatively straightforward business model. You need to share content that you’re passionate about and build an audience of like-minded people. YouTubers often go on to create a  blog, create merchandise and eCommerce stores.

Creating videos for youtube can open a lot of doors for you. People can virtually meet you and get to know you before they buy your goods or services. As such, it’s a great way to build up trust. When I spoke with a journalist from the BBC I found out that they often use an iPhone to create their videos.

You can create professional content directly from your phone and build your youtube channel.

Again, you’ll need to market your Youtube content and get good at catchy titles and thumbnails that people will click on.

Cons

✖ Not for the camera shy

✖ Consistent content is imperative

✖ Video editing is time-consuming

Becoming a freelancer is now a competitive marketplace. But if you’re aware of your unique skills and talents then it’s still very possible. For example, we used to make websites for small businesses back in the 2000s but that market got saturated (especially with the expansion of platforms like Wix). We had to explore other niches like systems development, sales funnels and copywriting.

You’ll need to keep on your toes if you want to be a freelancer. The market is always changing, new opportunities are opening up and old ones are closing.

Freelancing opens you up to the possibility of working with anyone in the world, which can be both exciting and overwhelming. For this reason, you need to be clear on your niche and also your ideal client profile.

You can earn a lot of money as a freelancer. Our best months freelancing brought us in tens of thousands of pounds. On the flip-side, there can be times where you are patiently waiting on your next installment of money as freelancing is way less reliable than a regular job.

The Top 9 Freelancer Jobs in 2019 are:

• App Developer/ Programmer
• Copywriter
• Marketer
• Journalist
• Chef
• Graphic Design
• Social Media Manager
• Accountant
• SEO Expert

This list is by no means exhaustive – you can learn new skills and delve into new areas as a freelancer. 

It all depends on how much money you want to make and how much time you have to devote to your freelancing career.

The best thing about being a freelancer is that you can get money as soon as you complete a job. A lot of the other ideas on this list require time to gain momentum and make money.

Sites like Peopleperhour and Upwork make it easy to connect with people who want to hire freelancers. You can make a profile TODAY for free and get started straight away. There is a wide range of clients on these sites, and they can often be stingy. So be aware!

Freelancer sites are a great place to start and find your feet, however, they don’t offer the best pricing as it’s often a fight to the bottom. The person who says they can do the job cheap often wins. But you do get the occasional client who wants quality.

Payment is normally taken via Paypal or bank transfer and a cut will be given to the platform after you have successfully completed the job. The money gets held in Escrow until the client signs off the project. For some clients, this can be a power struggle (so be warned).

If you want higher-paying clients, then set up your own freelancer website. Then target clients with more money, for example, luxury establishments or companies on the Inc. 500 lists.

PROTIP: Set up a business account and keep your business money separate from your personal money. Solutions like Cashplus and Anna make setting up your business account a breeze, no matter what kind of history you have had. 

As a freelancer, you are in control of your business. You’ll need to make sure that marketing, lead generation, pipeline, customer support, and billing are done. All this is on top of completing your regular work.

Cons

✖ No job security

✖ No holiday pay

✖ No company pension

✖ Income can fluctuate

✖ Lots to manage

Good coaches and consultants can be handsomely rewarded. The job also lends itself to other areas in this post, such as blogging, podcasts, videos, and ebooks. Most suited to a people-person who loves to interact and help people.

The most popular areas for coaches to work in are: relationships, wealth and health. However, you get coaches in just about every area of life. 

Did you know that Opera Winfrey has a coach for every area of her life? 

A coach is a guide by your side that is always there for accountability and guidance when you need it most. A coach can make money from online courses, group or 1-to-1 coaching – you even get coaches that can help you win at computer games!

How Do I Get Traffic To My Coaching/ Consultancy Website?

Cons

✖ No job security

✖ No holiday pay

✖ No company pension

✖ Income can fluctuate

✖ Lots to manage

Good coaches and consultants can be handsomely rewarded. The job also lends itself to other areas in this post, such as blogging, podcasts, videos, and ebooks. Most suited to a people-person who loves to interact and help people.

The most popular areas for coaches to work in are: relationships, wealth and health. However, you get coaches in just about every area of life. 

Did you know that Opera Winfrey has a coach for every area of her life? 

A coach is a guide by your side that is always there for accountability and guidance when you need it most. A coach can make money from online courses, group or 1-to-1 coaching – you even get coaches that can help you win at computer games!

Cons

✖ Not for people who don’t like to hear their voice

Become an authority in your niche and you can then sell influencer marketing. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, you’ll need to select a niche to work in.

Your job is then to create content to build your brand. All you need to do is leave your contact details in your bio – on your website and social media channels.

Some people make between $1500 and $5000 and more for one post on social media. It just depends on whether your followers fit the demographic of advertisers.

The idea is to build your following and then monetize it later.

Cons

✖ Very exposing

The creation of an app can be time-consuming. However, if you outsource the app development then you can focus on your business goals. 

The best thing about creating an app or membership site is that once you have created your asset then it’s just a case of monetizing it. 

This is sometimes easier said than done. That’s why we always insist that people create an MVP (minimum viable product) rather than diving into the full app build straight away. 

A membership site can be similar. It’s tempting to create all of the dream features that you can imagine. But the truth is, you don’t know what people want until you have been running the app/site for a while.

The best approach is to make a watered-down version of your app and then test it in the marketplace. If your app is amazing then you might be able to get funding from crowdsourcing, angel investors or venture capitalists. 

The main thing about creating a digital asset is that you should keep it simple at first. 

Once your app is up and running then your main goal is to look after your online community. This can be done in live streams, via email, in comments or at live events. 

Make sure you are always creating tools and membership sites that answer the needs of your user base. 

Cons

✖ Takes time to develop

✖ Can be costly

A business mastermind can offer your business some serious leverage. Firstly you need to choose people who you’d like to work with. These must be people you respect and share an interest with.

Put your mastermind team together and set some ground rules. This can be done inside Facebook groups easily.  You could also set up a website for your Mastermind Group. 

Finally, you’ll need to establish your meeting schedule. 

One this is all set up, then you’ll need to decide the format of your meetings, who will be holding the space and what format you want to use. It’s a good idea to have a few people run the meetings so that you can support each other and develop the Mastermind. 

You can also have live mastermind meetings, but as we are focusing on the online space – the meetings will be done over Skype, Google Hangouts or Zoom. 

PRO TIP: Ask your group when they would like to meet, also take into consideration other commitments and holidays. Finally, the meetings should work for worldwide participants, so you’ll want to check out the time zones of the bulk of your participants. 

Masterminds are a great way of sharing ideas and growing your business. They can form accountability and also bolster confidence when you find out what works for other people in the group. 

Cons

✖ You’ll need to show up for meetings, even if you don’t want to

6 Online Business Requirements

1. Pick a Niche
2. Pick Your Platform/s
3. Create a Content Calendar
4. Consistently Publish Content
5. Play to your Strengths
6. Publicly Share your Wisdom Daily

Downsides to Working Online

In Conclusion