Sign up to social media, and people bombard you with thousands of business ideas, but not all of them are good, worth the investment, or just plain too much for you.
Fortunately, there are some ways you can make money, and we promise you that you’ve never even thought about these methods before. Dying to find out what they are?
Let’s dive in.
3 Profitable Business Ideas You Never Thought About
Looking for some profitable business ideas, check them out below:
Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is just the thing for you if you’re an internet fish because it’s less cash intensive than an actual business. Why?
Because when you open a drop shipping business, you only keep up the storefront while your supplier or manufacturer manages the actual order fulfillment. This cuts operational costs by a considerable margin. So, you can quickly start a drop shipping business with limited funds.
However, it’s not all funnies and rainbows in drop shipping land. You have to put in immense hard work (with a capital H) to get your drop shipping business up from the ground. Still here? Well, let’s look at how you can start a drop shipping business:
- Find a Niche – Selling twenty different products as a drop shipper isn’t going to work for you at the beginning. Always start with one product you want to sell. High-priced products are the way to go because when you add in the marketing and acquisition costs, a product that costs $10 to produce becomes worth at least $700.
- Perform a Competitive Analysis – Remember: you’ll have to compete with several other people in your industry. To get above them, you need to be the best, and you won’t know what to do if you never find out what your competitors are doing.
- Get a Supplier – Most drop shipping suppliers are overseas, so shop around Europe, China, or Asia for products you’d like to sell.
- Build Your E-commerce Website – Once you’ve secured your supplier, the fastest way to begin your business is to launch your website. You could use an e-commerce platform like Shopify.
- Create a Marketing Plan – Your marketing plan will determine how many customers actually buy your product, and you can’t get any customers unless they know about your business. So, hire a marketing or advertising expert and create a plan.
Online Course
The thinking behind online courses is simple: if you have a skill, you can teach other people how to have it too. For instance, if you’ve been embroidering for years and years and know all the tips and tricks, you should join a platform like Skillshare and share your skills online.
Similarly, if you’re a sales funnel expert, why not start a brand on LinkedIn and offer a course to your audience, helping them learn what you did in ten years? You could also begin a photography business if you’re a traveler and fund your trips by selling photos online.
Wondering how to make your course? Here’s a handy checklist:
- Determine Your Course Topic – You need to know what part of your expertise you’re going to show to people and even if people are going to pay you for it.
- Validate Your Topic – You could validate your course topic by looking at the most commonly asked questions. If your skill matches what people are asking for, it’ll sell.
- Launch a Social Media Channel – Once you’ve determined what you’ll talk about, create a social media channel to tell other people what you’ve learned. That’ll establish trust and help you get your first customers later.
- Create a Course Outline – Think about and note down every skill only you could teach to your audience.
- Position Yourself as an Expert – Post blogs, tweet on Twitter, and build a community on Facebook and LinkedIn by boiling down complex topics. For example, if you’re a paystub master, show your audience that you’re one through your posts.
- Launch Your Course – Once you have the audience, launch your course. Pay attention to the feedback. It’ll help you make your next course better.
Buy and Flip
The easiest way to start a profitable business is to buy and flip items and sell them for more than you bought. For example, you could buy stained vintage pots and pans, refurbish them and sell them for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
You could buy items from Goodwill, a yard sale, or Craigslist and flip on Facebook Marketplace. It’s that easy. You could even begin with your own things. For example, if you have older decorations, fix them up and sell them for double their worth.
Similarly, you could fix broken wooden chairs or reupholster a sofa (it’s not as hard as it seems) and get back twice what you paid for it. That doesn’t appeal to you? Here’s a list of items you can flip this year:
- Strollers
- Record player
- Rare or vintage clothing
- Websites
- Vehicles
- Computers.
The Takeaway
Business ideas are dime-a-dozen these days, but what makes a business idea great is that it’s actually reachable. There’s nothing like starting a business and finding out it costs three times as much investment as you have.
Alas, we’ve saved you from the trouble of finding out business ideas that’ll never give you the returns you seek. We hope they’re as profitable for you as they were for us!
