I was looking for easy startup businesses that make money. I began with the auction site eBay. I started by selling items from my house and then looked at buying and selling for a profit. I bought from pound shops, charity shops and car boot sales. Despite having some limited success, I turned eventually to a clever system of finding bargain items from eBay itself. Using a website known as bargainchecker.com, I found badly listed items and re-listed them for a profit. You can see the full strategy here: how to start a profitable ebay businesss.
Disclaimer: Startup businesses aren’t necessarily easy, nor should you expect to make something for nothing. Even with a business model which has proved itself for many people, not everyone will have success.
Easy Startup Businesses That Make Money
It’s a clever idea. Simply find items listed on the auction site with a misspelling. You can also find items listed without their proper title. Badly listed items don’t get the audience they perhaps deserve because nobody can see them. Because of this they don’t get many bids. If the item is listed at a low starting price the seller must accept the highest bid and sell the item.
By finding these little ‘gems’, buying them at rock bottom price and then re-listing them, you can make a nice profit, depending on the item of course. I started out with small items and then progressed on to larger, more valuable items.
How you list an item can also affect the end bid. List something at a high starting price and you can lose potential bidders. List it at an attractively low starting price and you can draw in many bidders and create a bidding war. This drives up the price. Check out the full article on this strategy here.
I found this strategy by purchasing an ebook over eBay. The eBook taught this as a business model. It works and is a good, simple idea. If you’re looking for easy startup businesses that make money, it’s a great formula. However, there’s a couple of drawbacks to it, as I found out.
An Internet Business Should Be Scalable
I found a few ‘easy startup businesses that make money’ much like this one. Another strategy suggested buying antique books on auction websites, and re-selling them on other sites where they will get more bidders.
After a while of doing the misspell search idea though, I decided there wasn’t much future in it. For one thing I was constantly looking for bargains and this took time. Then I had to individually list each item and take pictures. I had to reply to multiple questions I was being asked from potential buyers and sellers. It was a ‘time heavy’ business model. But most importantly, it wasn’t scalable.
Any business on the internet has the potential to reach a global audience. That idea in itself is beyond most people’s thinking. It definitely was beyond mine. It’s hard to fathom. When I bought the ebook which taught the misspell search business model, I had a lightbulb moment! I had just bought a digital product and the whole process was automated. I bought the eBook over the internet and downloaded it straight away. There was no shipping or customer service and there was a guarantee too, should I have decided that it was of no value.
What struck me about this business model was the automation and the global reach. It led me to look for another business model, one which I didn’t know about back then.
Easy Startup Businesses That Make Money – Affiliate Marketing
I wanted a business model which I could pick up and drop at a moment’s notice. The automation of a digital product struck me as a business model which could run 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. It could sell the same product over and over again through a single website.
I later learned of a business model known as affiliate marketing. Initially, I had tried to create my own products but I had no success selling any of them. Affiliate marketing was a model which allows anyone to sell other people’s products over the internet. I bought a couple of ‘how to’ affiliate business ideas and started learning.
There were many courses which claimed to teach affiliate marketing. I tried most of them!
Affiliate marketing lets you sell almost anything over the internet. Find a product and if the business has an affiliate program, you can sell their product and earn a commission. Your sale is tracked online via your own unique affiliate link.
Does affiliate marketing fall into the category of easy startup businesses that make money? Yes and no.
Affiliate Marketing – How To Make It Pay
So how can you make affiliate marketing pay? By selling products of course! But how does this work and how do the most successful affiliate websites work?
All affiliate websites need quality, targeted website traffic. Even with the best offers possible, you’ll never sell anything without it. Some websites build traffic by creating content (like this article) and others use only paid advertising to send target traffic to their products and services.
Most affiliates who make a business out of their efforts online use list building as their main focus. By building a responsive and targeted list of subscribers, you have access to a growing database of potential customers. List building works, no doubt about it. But you must have a list which is well targeted to your specific offers.
Affiliate Marketing – What Products?
Generating traffic is a major key to building a sustainable online business. The other one is choosing the right products. If you already have a passion or interest, it’s worth pursuing it online and building a following. Find products related to your interest which you genuinely want to recommend and offer to your visitors. If you can’t find suitable products it’s worth considering creating your own products, too – although this can take some time.
The fastest route is to use other people’s products and build a list of subscribers with paid advertising. Then build a relationship with your list by offering value and promoting useful products.
Digital Products
There’s thousands of affiliate products you can promote online as an affiliate. Digital products offer larger commissions on the whole. Usually, digital products pay out 40% commissions. Whereas physical products pay out much less.
High Ticket Items
‘High Ticket’ items sell for a much higher price than most affiliate products. This is a major key to building a sustainable income from the internet. I started out promoting products for $100. As an affiliate marketer, I would earn 40% commissions on a digital product worth $100. That’s $40! You will need a lot of sales in order to make your online business pay out enough to replace your existing income. To earn just $400 a day, you would need to sell 10 products.
If you choose to sell high ticket items, you can sell a product worth $1000 and make $400 with one sale.
Subscription Products
What I didn’t know when I started learning affiliate marketing was that the top affiliates were choosing to promote subscription products. That’s because subscriptions or membership products paid out over and over for a single sale! By referring a sale just once, you can earn a monthly residual income providing your referral maintains their membership. This means you also should choose membership products which offer huge value.
An Online Community And Ready Made Business System
Access an online community and business system which has:
- Online community and support
- A business system with high ticket items, subscriptions and multi-tier sales
- A ‘plug and play’ ready made business system and quick start website
- A ready made sales funnel
- Pre-made email series
- Plus much more..
Start your own online business with a sales funnel, sales materials and training and support.