Building a business online is by far one of the easiest ways to start working for yourself and quit your full-time job. It costs very little money to get started. You just need a computer, a good internet connection, and an idea of what you’d like to focus on as your path to success.
The opportunity right now to take almost any product, service or brand message, and start-up an online business around it is huge. There are only 3 steps that need to be followed to make this happen.
Step 1 – Choose your Niche / Target Market
The first step is to choose what you want to promote online. It could be your product or service, or somebody else’s product or service which is called affiliate sales. This is where you need to be clear about who your target market or who you are marketing to.
There are thousands of niches to choose from online but if you’re after a guideline as to what the top 3 profit-making niches are, here’s what I recommend:
1. Health, Wealth, & Romance
These are HUGE markets to target as they are pretty much evergreen, which means they are going to be around for a long time as an opportunity to build a profitable business around. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of sub-segments of these categories that you can drill down to.
For example, within romance; dating, or ‘get your ex back’, or ‘stop your divorce’, or write romance books for kindle, or weddings; just as a few to think of. The health and wealth niche are also two incredibly massive opportunities to grow a profitable online business.
A really great place to see what other people are already doing well with in terms of products or services is Clickbank and then go and check out the ‘Marketplace’ tab.
This is where you’ll be able to review what the top sellers are in Health & Fitness and a bunch of areas that relate to health, wealth & romance.
2. Hobbies and Leisure Activities
These can be extremely profitable as people can be VERY passionate about their hobbies and leisure activities. They also don’t mind spending money on them because their hobbies makes them feel good about themsleves while they are doing them. In other words they are pleasure driven and so it can lead to good pay-days.
There’s so many sub-niches that fit into this category but the ones you might want to consider targeting include those leisure activities that people tend to spend good money on. Think along the lines of golf, hunting, travel, photography, fishing, sailing, yoga, personal care, weight loss, video games, pet supplies, just to name a few.
These niches are also an affiliates dream as there is no end to the digital and physical products that are available to be promoted as an affiliate. This means you don’t even need a website, you can sell from a Blog post, video or any social media platform that has an interest in what you are promoting.
A really great place to see what people are already spending their money on is Amazon and do some research on what is selling well already in an area that is of interest to you.
3. Affiliate Offers
There are companies in the marketplace that will pay you to send leads to them and they will pay you very well. I’m talking about high-end offers such as you might see on TV or online that includes areas like personal loans, beauty products, weight loss products, get rid of acne products, luxury goods, fitness products, travel and holidays, and thousands more.
These are not everyone’s cup of tea because it usually involves promoting squeeze page, or an opt-in page that people have to give their details in exchange for an amazing offer such as ‘first month free’ deal, or a ‘buy one get one free’ type of offer. And all you need to do is get the right kind of eyeballs on the offer and you get paid commission for everyone who sign’s up.
I have friends that make 5, 6 and even 7-figures a month just promoting these offers. Make no mistake, this is big business and the people that are really good at it really know how to drive qualified leads and they are masters of paid traffic and conversions as the test and measure all their campaigns to ensure they get the best ROI (Return On Investment) for their advertising dollars.
Step 2 – Build a Site
The next step then is to build a website to help feature what you are promoting. This can be a sales page, landing page, or a full blown website depending on your target market. I have built 5 to 10 page websites and had them up online in just over an hour. This doesn’t have to take long and if you don’t have a clue how to do it, then outsource it on Upwork for a few bucks an hour.
You’ll be able to tap into a huge pool of qualified web builders who are super fast at what they do and who can help you to get your landing page or website up in no time flat and for very little cost. They’ll also be able to help out with setting it up on whatever host provider you decide to go with. If you brand new to online marketing then Hostgator is a low cost hosting provider that has a good reputation.
Step 3 – Drive Traffic To It
Once you have setup your landing pages, then you need to drive traffic to your offering be it a Blog, product, service or affiliate offer.
There are 2 types of traffic to focus on. The first is ‘free’ traffic which comes from getting your site found on search engines such as Google or Bing. This also includes Social media sites that you build a community of people who get to know, like and trust you, who end up at your site from your posts or content.
The other type of traffic is ‘paid’ traffic. The beauty of paid traffic is that you can turn it on and off whenever you like and set your own budget. Once again, you can get someone to do this for you but it probably won’t be cheap, or you can bite the bullet and learn how to do it yourself.
I learned very early on in online marketing that you need to have some knowledge in all areas of marketing so as to not get ripped off by those who lack integrity in the services they provide. As it turned out this was the best decision I could have made as it enabled me to source awesome virtual assistants who have now been working loyally for me for years.
Bonus Step – Know Your Conversions
The last piece of the puzzle is to test and measure everything. It’s one thing setting up landing pages and driving traffic to them and it’s another knowing whether you are firing blanks or not.
I know from first-hand experience how frustrating it can be to think you have an awesome offer and sales page or website only to have no-one do anything from your page. That’s why these days with dirt-cheap advertising like Facebook Ads, or even Twitter ads or Linked In ads you can quickly test out your pages in just a few hours and tweak them fast to get a better return or opt-in rate.
As a rule of thumb I set a limit of $20 worth of traffic for any new project and just keep tweaking the page until I get it to work. It almost always comes down to who your target market is and what incentive you can offer them that makes your offer stand out from the crowd.
Of course, building yourself as an authority online in your targeted niche is also a good idea but I’ll leave that for another post as there’s a lot to cover in it.
