How to Make Money Online for Beginners
Making Money Online with Limited Time and a Tiny Budget
If you’re like most beginners looking for a way to make money online, chances are you already either have a job, are a full-time student, or have other business or personal obligations that keep you from being able to work 40+ hours on this new venture.
You probably also don’t have a whole heap of cash lying around to invest upfront either.
The good news is with the right business model, you can absolutely build a scalable online business working part-time and with a very modest budget!
This is exactly what I’m going to share with you and this post is pulled directly from my free “Passive Income Shortcuts” expert guide.
Choosing the Right Business Model
Many “smart people” fail despite their best efforts because they pick a model that is not suited for their limited-resource situation.
That’s why as a solo entrepreneur with limited time and money, you need a business model that:
1. Allows you to focus on PRIMARILY marketing and sales
You have limited time and money so if you have to work on sales, marketing, product development, logistics, operations, customer service, etc., and you only have maybe 5–15 hours a week to work on this, you’re not going to get very far.
You’re much better off finding a business model where you can dedicate most, if not all your time to the direct revenue drivers i.e. marketing and sales.
2. Does not require a huge upfront investment
All business ideas are experiments when they start and success is never guaranteed. So what you don’t want is to spend several hundred or thousands of dollars on inventory, technology, licenses, or infrastructure just to get started.
To use a poker analogy, winning players don’t “go all-in” right away blindly and rather increase their bets (investments in our case) incrementally as the odds turn in their favor.
So even if you have a little money to invest, you’re much better off focusing those resources on scaling your sales and marketing with the support of some automation tools and maybe even some paid advertising.
3. Is infinitely scalable
Another problem with a lot of models is that they are not infinitely scalable and are constrained by your time or operational and production capacity.
For example, if you’re selling physical products on an e-commerce store and tomorrow you end up on the front page of Reddit (by some miracle), and a few hundred thousand people want to buy your product, you could probably only serve a fraction of them due to inventory and logistical constraints.
Yup, that would be a 7-figure loss in potential revenue. Ouch!
The good news is this is a really easy pitfall to avoid with the right business model.
The Winning Business Models
This isn’t a test so I’m just going to give you the answers!
Here are the only 3 business models you should use to create the online income lifestyle you want that works within your constraints:
1. Sell Digital Products
How do you make e-commerce infinitely scalable with practically zero investment upfront and no logistical issues? Sell digital products, that’s how!
Specifics will vary by industry and niche (we’ll discuss niches more in the next section) but examples of digital products include workout plans, design templates, software tools, music files, and so much more.
One type of digital product that’s applicable to practically any niche is a digital book or expert guide. If you’re fairly knowledgeable in a subject, you should be able to bang a book out in a weekend or two.
Yup, I’m not kidding! Here’s a free video on how to create and sell thousands of books without writing a single word.
The beauty here is that once you create a digital product, you can sell it to an unlimited number of people without having to worry about inventory, shipping, returns, or any of those kinds of issues!
The Global E-Book market alone is expected to reach $28.73 billion by 2026 growing at a rate of 6.8% per year!
2. Offer Online Courses, Subscriptions, and Memberships
People want what’s in your head! No, seriously.
Again, if you know your way around a certain field, you can sell access to this information in the form of an online course. Much like the e-book example, you can shoot a few videos with your phone, add a few write ups, and create an online course in a matter of days.
An online course could be anything from a structured workout program to teaching people how to use Photoshop. Literally, there is an online course and market for practically any subject.
And like a digital product, you can sell this course as a one time payment OR you can create a subscription service or member portal where your registrants pay every month to get and maintain their access!
This latter approach is good if you periodically keep adding value and new resources to keep your audience invested. Heck, this is what Netflix does and you can clearly see how successful they are.
The Digital Education market is expected to reach $48.4 billion by 2026, rising at a growth rate of 33.2%
3. Affiliate Marketing
Saved this one for last as this is one of the most popular online business models right now!
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business pays you a commission for bringing in customers (or another qualified action).
Basically, you sign-up with a company as an affiliate partner and they give you a special link that you can use to promote their products. Then when someone clicks on your link and buys (or does the defined qualified action), you get a commission.
In fact, some of the best affiliate programs pay a recurring commission for the lifetime of the customer or give you a commission for everything that customer buys forever!
Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful passive income streams because there is zero initial investment in creating products, delivering them, or even supporting customers with their purchase — all of these parts are handled by the company!
Affiliate marketing is estimated to be worth at least $15 billion by the end of 2020. 16% of all online orders can be attributed to affiliate marketing.
Most importantly, this means that all of your efforts can be concentrated on generating sales.
Now you might be thinking that Affiliate marketing is clearly the best option but I want to highlight a few things to be mindful of.
With affiliate marketing, you run the risk of building something for years only to have it disappear overnight as you don’t own the product.
This is why choosing a reputable partner is extremely important. You want to do your due diligence before choosing a partner. There are numerous fly-by-night, shady affiliate companies that pop-up and disappear at a moment’s notice.
Also, some of these shady companies may not pay you fairly and skim off the top as you ultimately don’t have direct access to the sales figures. Yes, you will usually have a dashboard but it’s provided by them and could easily be manipulated.
Another thing to note is that the customers you fought hard to acquire belong to the company and you may not have a relationship with them.
That’s why smart affiliate marketers know how to bridge the gap between them and the product or service they’re promoting. They know how to build and maintain a list of customers that they can market to within their niche regardless of what happens with any single affiliate product.
The last thing you want is to lose access and influence on a massive audience you painstakingly built — trust me.
(…here’s the story about the booming Amazon Affiliate business I had with 100k subscribers on Reddit and what happened to it the very next day after I had just bought a Mercedes cash!)
Going beyond any one of these business models, the real secret to the online income game is to build multiple income sources. In fact, all of these 3 models work together and can create insanely powerful, diversified, yet complementary income streams.
Read the Complete Guide
This post is one of the chapters in my free “Passive Income Shortcuts” expert guide. The guide provides a complete system for making money online and covers many more topics including choosing a niche, attracting customers, tools, scaling your business and more.
