If you’re looking for online business ideas 2018, I’ll share a simple strategy here for you. Before I do, I want to mention the journey I took which led me to this online business. If you want you can skip to the end of this article for the nitty gritty.
Online Business Ideas 2018 – An Ebay Strategy
I started looking to the internet as a means to earn a living several years ago when I was out of work. After signing up for an ebay account I learned how to sell on the site by listing some household items. For there I began to find items from car boot sales and charity shops to sell for a profit. I even bought from pound shops at one time and made a profit on each item. One particular item which I bought for £1 sold multiple times for around £8! A pretty good mark up. Alas though it was a short lived success. Ebay can be pretty competitive and just when you think you’re on to a good thing, a load of other sellers catch on and do the same, plummeting the price.
The Clever Little ‘Hack’
I moved on to buying and selling from ebay itself using a clever little hack known as bargainchecker.com. This is a website which finds misspelled items listed on ebay which are not getting many views. As such, they often sell for far less than they’re worth. So I went about purchasing these kinds of items and then relisting them for a profit. It was fun at first and over time it wore a little thin. The main problem was that it wasn’t scalable. As you will see later on in this article, if you’re looking for online business ideas 2018, you need scalability. That’s one of the biggest ‘gifts’ the internet has.
You can read about the ebay strategy I used in my article how to start a profitable ebay business. By all means use this strategy. It did make a profit several times for me but I was looking for something bigger and bettter which I share later in this article. Scroll down to skip to the end.
Online Business Ideas 2018 – Downloadable Items
It was during my time on ebay that I found the above ‘system’ for making a profit on misspelled items. During this time I had searched for ebay businesses on the site itself and there were many people selling downloadable ‘ebooks’ with various business ideas on there. After a policy change here in the UK, it became so that you couldn’t sell downloadable items. You had to sell something physical in order to keep within ebay’s ‘rules’.
Before this happened though, I had found the above mentioned ebay business idea from an ebook. I bought it for around £10 and downloaded it instantly. What struck about this transaction was that it was completely automated. No-one was there having to deal with me or personally post out an item. I bought it from the sales page on ebay and received the item instantly via download link from the internet. This struck me as the perfect sales model and a far better way to do business than anything I had previously been attempting.
My Own Downloadable Ebook
I set about creating my own “ebooks” and attempted to sell them on ebay to replicate the model I had discovered. After a lot of time doing this and ultimately it came to nothing. I don’t think I even made a single sale! It was a strategy which was flawed by my ignorance! However, I didn’t give up on the idea and after putting it on the ‘backburner’ for a while, I picked it back up later on.
I discovered a business model which used this same strategy of being able to sell downloadable products over the internet. What struck me about this model was that it was probably the best use of the internet. Downloadable products had no geographical boundaries and as such they could be sold globally. Of course you can sell physical products globally too, but the storage and delivery of the products adds other costs. Digital products have zero storage or delivery costs and you can access them from a laptop from anywhere.
Affiliate Marketing – Sell Other People’s Products
The business model I eventually found is known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need to create your own products because you can sell someone else’s. Why would you want this? Simply because you can find products which are already selling and which offer more value than you could create yourself. Plus it can save you a heap of time. Of course if you can create an amazing product yourself, and know how to sell it online, this is something you can do. However, one of the main problems I found with my own ebooks was that I didn’t know how to sell online. I listed them on ebay and hoped for the best. Little did I know how much time I going to waste.
You can promote and sell almost anything over the internet with affilaite marketing. Amazon is one of the largest affiliate marketing networks on the internet. You can join their affiliates program here. Joining an affiliate network doesn’t automatically make you any money of course. Affiliate marketing is performance based marketing. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t get paid. So the biggest part of making a success from an affiliate marketing business comes down to your understanding and training.
I went the long route round of trying and failing with affiliate marketing. I learned a bunch of skills which are now pretty obsolete thanks to new software and ‘push and click’ websites! Even the skill of building a website is no longer needed and anyone can get an affiliate website up and running in a few minutes! See this video.
The Nitty Gritty
I tried and failed many times with various digital products I attempted to sell. It wasn’t the products themselves which were a problem. It was my lack of knowledge about marketing online. If you’re looking for online business ideas 2018, here’s the nitty gritty of this article.
Anyone can learn the skills needed to promote products online. It takes a little determination and staying power but it’s worth it because an online business takes advantage of a couple of important strategies:
- Selling digital products means you can sell globally and you are not limited by location, postage, manufacturing or storage costs.
- With the internet you have access to a global population and this makes your business very scalable
With the right business model and the right training, anyone can build an online business and sell digital products from anywhere too. Providing you have an internet connection and a laptop, you can work from anywhere. Access a training and education platform with a business system which you can use to sell a range of products over the internet. You can also access an online business community which is a must for anyone serious about building a sustainable business on the internet.