Have you ever wanted to own your business but never got around to it? What has been holding you back? Was it a lack of ideas? Or did you think that you needed a significant amount of start-up capital before you can even think of getting started? Since the advent of the internet, you can start your own business at minimal costs. Following are some ideas to get the wheels turning:
Online Retailer
The beauty of being an online retailer is that there is no inventory to maintain. The wholesale market is pretty cut-throat and after doing a few keyword searches, you can easily find whole-sellers who would be willing to drop ship merchandise to your customers with your company’s name printed on the invoice. You can create your own website or be an affiliate on a site such as Amazon or EBay. These days you do not even need any specialized knowledge if you want to create your own website because there are several online solutions that you can easily customize on your own such as Zen Cart, OSCommerce, etc.
Domain Name Broker
It is estimated that a whopping ninety three percent of all words in the English language appears in some domain name or the other. People want the catchiest or the most effective domain names for their business, as a result of which the re-sale values can at times be pretty high. Coming up with catchy names and registering them would be a fool’s errand. Instead, it would be ideal for you to approach people that own these catchy domains (just do a DNS look-up) and offer your services to help find a buyer. You can typically take a significant cut from every transaction!
Search Engine and Web Presence Optimization Services
Despite the Hummingbird update released by Google, the field of SEO is alive and well. White hat SEO strategies like submitting sitemaps to Webmaster tools or implementing long-tailed keywords are easy to learn for enterprising individuals but not something most online businesses are particularly aware of. Teach yourself these tricks and then start seeking out businesses that are not doing particularly well in the search engine rankings. Do not be too price sensitive at the outset, but once you start building a reputation, your business has the potential of scaling really fast!
Business Planning Services
A lot of entrepreneurs have great ideas, but they are unable to generate adequate interest from potential investors because they either lack the inclination, or at times even the ability to hash out a thorough and appealing business plan. The process of business planning has several moving parts, such as doing market research, creating a cash-flow model and so on. Do some research to find out what part of business planning that the entrepreneurs in your area are struggling with and specialize in that. Offer everything else under the sun as add-on services. Obviously you need samples, so the ideal way to start would be to create a realistic version of your own business plan and sharing that with potential clients!
You can be spoiled for options when you are looking to start your online business. Although the aforementioned ideas would be some excellent places to start, if you spend a few days doing some thorough research, you can probably find or even create your ideal niche!