What Is The Easiest Business To Start? And What’s Not!

After having tried many online businesses I have found that after many failures and being led astray by people who only wanted to make a quick buck from me, that there is really only one way to make money online.

So what is the easiest business to start from scratch? Starting a crafting blog is by far the easiest business you could begin. After you have chosen what to write about and have bought a domain and hosting you are set up and are running. It’s one of the few businesses that can be set up in less than 3 hours.

So a blog sounds nice and easy, right? Yes, that’s because it is. Yes, it takes dedication and commitment to make it work but then so does any other business.

Before we dig into why having a blog is a great idea, let’s look at some things I believe you should avoid and why

What NOT to try and start (Let’s get this out of the way so you can avoid all of these pitfall ideas)

I have compiled this list as touted by some other sites as great ideas to start an online business easily. Some of them are hard, some are misleading and some are just ludicrous.

Set Up an E-commerce Site – This is highly competitive and the margins are really small. You will be trying to compete with the likes of Alibaba, Amazon and Ebay. Unless you have something amazing and unique that only you can sell you will work hard for a small return.

Self-Publish a Book on Amazon – If you are going to write 100,000 words (the average amount for a decent novel) then you will probably be better off writing a blog and get not risk a possible zero return as an unknown author.

Start App Development – Just simply start writing apps for Apple and Android – Easy huh? Wrong! Bad idea as you will need to spend over a year full time studying to get even remotely good at this. Flappy birds was a flash in the pan. Chances are you will never make any money this way unless you are already an app developer.

Learn Facebook Advertising – Selling what? To who? Sure you can find affiliate products to sell and make commission but how do you start a business when the first word is learn? How good will you be, how much will you spend before it works/fails?

Learn and Master SEO – Again with learning, what if you don’t want to spend time and money learning something. Maybe learning as you go but SEO is hard and always changing plus you need to have a good track record before you can get lucrative jobs so you will need to spend a large amount of time working for free or for a very small fee.

Become a Copywriter – If you have never written in a professional capacity I don’t recommend you try and start now. You will need to join a company like Odesk and will need to establish yourself first as a writer and then after a lengthy period of earning a few dollars here and there you may start to get higher paying gigs. It’s not a business either, you will be a contractor and the moment you stop writing is the moment you stop earning.

Skype Coaching – What are your skills for coaching/teaching? Are your skills transferable? Without a decent existing customer base you will need to join another company and essentially be a contractor. This is not an online business either.

Buy and Flip Domains – This can work well if you know a lot about websites, SEO, marketing possibilities and design. You may, in some cases need quite a lot of cash to buy and existing website. If you are just buying domains to sell then you will either be spending a lot at auctions for high price domains or you will buy cheaper low priced ones with no guarantee of a sale. If you end up being unable to sell them you can either let them expire of keep paying for renewals. If you have many domains then this can be quite a large outlay with no guarantee of reward.

Start a Podcast – Usually these are hosted on your own successful website. If you don’t have one then you will need to pay to put it somewhere and hope you can grow an audience. You can advertise stuff online and build up a library of material but unless your material is timeless then your audience can disappear quickly if you stop podcasting for any reason

Drop shipping – Selling things on Amazon and Ebay and other large sites and then getting the supplier to ship directly to the customer. For every success story you will see in drop shipping then know there are 500 unsuccessful ones Also competition is fierce.

Freelance Pay Per Click Consulting – Essentially learning how to successfully create paid ads on search engines to drive sales to a website. If you are learning how to do this then it can be very expensive if you are trying to get customers to a site to buy a product and you are paying for each click. This cost can easily run into thousands with no guarantee of reward if you are not amazingly good at it, which if you are learning, you won’t be.

Sell Products on eBay – If you are a specialized collector then it could be possible to make decent money here. If you are not then I hear of some people who buy stuff in bulk and then sell smaller or single items. Do you really want to spend hours and hours at the post office trying to chase a few dollars as well as tie up hundreds if not thousands of dollars and risk ending up with a bunch of stuff you can’t sell?

Become a Web Developer – Another crazy one, the article writer was actually serious too. Simply study for at least a year and get amazingly good at something it can take at least 5 years to become proficient at and then just get a high paying contractor job online, easy eh? No!

Invest Your Time in Graphic Design – Why not just become a graphic design expert instead? You can’t draw? Rubbish at design? This may not be for you then.

Start a Consulting Business – If you have a good marketable skill this may work. You also need customers, a track record and a decent level of awareness of your product. If you are new then you will need to spend a lot of money on promotion before you even make your first dollar.

Start a Paid Private Facebook Group – If you have a massive following and people hang on your every word for advice then this could be quite lucrative. I would expect a take up of about 1 or 2% of your Facebook following may subscribe to your group if you are really onto something, If you are looking to make $1,000 per month then you need around 15,000 die hard fans some of which would be willing to part with $5 per month.

Instagram Sponsorships – Getting people to pay to to sponsor their items, give a shout out or other promotional means can be quite lucrative. You need a substantial following though and to be your own brand leader here, simply getting a bunch of random people to follow you is not enough, you need to spend time promoting yourself or your message.

Technical Writing – If you are very nerdy, have a love of writing and can understand how to guide someone through a process with no ambiguity (multiple possible meanings) then this may be for you. It’s not going to be a thick and fast process and you may spend a lot of time waiting for new work, which would also be on a contractual basis.

Tech Support – Logging onto your laptop and working as tech support comes with freedom as you can do it anywhere but, what if you are not technical or haven’t worked in this industry before? The only real way you can get experience in tech support to do it in a meaningful way is take up training and then get a job in tech support to learn the processes and how to troubleshoot. While this is a great way to make money it’s essentially a job or contractor role, It;s not a business.

SaaS (Software as a Service) – I saved this one for last as it make me laugh out loud. The author of one of the articles I read about said you could setup SaaS and cited Google Docs as an example. Really??? I know they were looking to pad their article with things to make it look like you have many options but to simply create a software suite run on server clusters globally??

So if you have been unimpressed with this list then I don’t blame you. For people to try and recommend things like this as a viable and easy option for you is downright dishonest. They know these things are not easy to start and in many cases can take you years to learn at a cost of many thousands of your hard-earned dollars.

I know this as I started my technical career as a Cisco Network Engineer and I took six months off work to study and qualify for various certifications and spent roughly $12,000 to do so. Only to get a junior entry-level role as I had no experience, I seriously want you to avoid that.

This is why I recommend blogging as the easiest way to start a business and make money.

Why choose a crafting blog? Why is it the easiest to start?

A crafting blog is by far the easiest business you can start as you can have a website up and running and be ready to write your first article in less than 2 hours. With sign-up discounts from a domain name provider and web hosting site, you could spend less than $20.

I really cannot think of any other business model that allows you to do that. Admittedly you will not be making money at this time but it is the easiest to start.

It’s also the most flexible too. You can work on your blog for 1 hour a week or 10 hours a day if you so choose. You can write about whatever you want and design your site to look exactly how you want it to. You have 100% control over everything.

The only other thing you really need to have done at this stage is to have a plan or rough idea of how you want your blog to look when it’s complete. What kind of site do you want?

Do you want a site with lots of interaction and user commenting? Do you want a message board for your users? Will it be a paid membership site with regular training/updates? Do you want it to be completely passive and hands-off?

Once you have this idea/ plan in place you can then form a plan of attack with how you will build and monetize your website. It’s important to do this early on with your site and trying to rearrange things later will cause you many problems and headaches.

What domain name should I pick?

It would be nice to get a short easily remembered name like abc.com but sadly these days buying a website name/domain name has in itself turned into a lucrative business model.

Not to worry though, you can still buy a memorable name for your website by making it interesting and memorable.

If, for example, you had a website promoting sports clothes for kids then having a website name like bestsportsclothesforkids2019.com would be an awful choice. How are you supposed to remember that?

If, on the other hand, you went with a name like kidsgearplanet.com then it’s more catchy and much easier to remember. This will be key when you start becoming more popular and your name beings to spread by word of mouth. The second website name will be easily remembered if told to someone during a conversation.

Try to avoid using anything to personal too. Don’t go for something like johnsmithsgarden.com. If you do it may be difficult to sell it if you decide to do so later on. Try something like johnsgarden.com, this will be fine but avidgardener.com will be even better.

Try also to keep your name linked to the main theme of your site. If you are just focusing on lawn maintenance then theflowergarden.com will be misleading but freshlymown.com would be perfect. Try to give your potential readers an idea of your website topic and an authoritative feel (even if you don’t have any authority yet).

What hosting should I use?

I personally use Bluehost. I have found that for all my domains they have given me by far the most reliable service I could ask for. Even for domains on a real budget who do not have the support service attached you can get support from them at any time by opening a chat window.

To begin with, you can select a low-priced, budget, shared hosting option but as your site grows (and it will) then you will need to look at a dedicated server plan with an increased traffic option. That’s in the future though so keep your costs down until the money starts rolling in.

There are many other hosting services you can try but one thing you should avoid at all costs is using a completely free WordPress, Joomla, or another service which offers a free platform and domain.

You are not getting a free domain you are getting a free subdomain that looks bad and spammy and will not give you the authority you need. A subdomain will look like freshlymown.wordpress.com it looks bad, doesn’t it? That’s the cost of free and believe me it’s a bigger cost than you think.

The free subdomains are extremely limited in what you can do with them. For example, the free Worpress option does not allow you to add your own plugins, just a limited subset they believe you should use, also the other customizations are very limited too.

Pay the few dollars it takes and knows you have a much wider scope and a real chance to shine.

What are the best topics to write about?

Firstly there are so many topics you could write about it would be almost impossible to list them all. There are some main topics that generally do well, though I do recommend crafting as a preference:

Crafting
Beauty and Fashion
Food
Lifestyle
Personal Development
Health and Fitness
Personal Finance
Making Money

These are very broad topics so you would need to pick a smaller subset of one of these but really you need to pick something you enjoy or are passionate about.

Writing about something you love will turn it from a job to a hobby. It will give you the motivation to keep writing and keep going. If you have ever had to study for something or do something you absolutely hated you can imagine how hard it was to get it done.

Now think about something you love doing and imagine doing it all the time, a much better prospect wouldn’t you agree?

What you need to do is think of something you love and what we call ‘niche it down. That is to find a smaller less competitive area of your chosen topic. For example, rather than choosing gardening as a topic that is really competitive, you could focus on a smaller subset of gardening such as growing your own food or lawn care.

Ok, great. So now you know how to find a topic take a few hours and have a think about what you like about your topic, and what your site could look like when it’s finished. Is there enough wiggle room to write about 20 or so big elements of your topic? If so then great, you can easily find a hundred more.

How do I find the right things to write about?

Finding the actual topics to write about is easy, you can do this in a number of ways. Before you begin I just want to point out there are many tools that boast that they can help you find the best keywords and phrases to use but don’t bother with them.

What is a keyword? It’s a search term that you type into Google to get a list of web pages that you are interested in. It can be something simple like ‘todays weather’ or something longer like ‘what is the best bike for a 3-year-old?’

Generally the longer the keyword the less competition there will be for that search and the easier it is to rank for that term. This is important so keep this in mind.

Most tools use in some form or other Google Adwords data to show how competitive a keyword can be but this is for advertising purposes and does not reflect user intent accurately. You can get a rough idea but the numbers don’t stack up reliably enough to make it viable so steer clear.

Google does have a tool you can use to get an idea of user intent and it’s completely free and quite reliable, it’s called autocomplete and with this, you can find out if people are searching for your keyword by seeing it in the autocomplete drop-down box when you are typing.

By using autocomplete you can ask Google questions that you think people want to know the answer to and then if you find the answer in autocomplete then you know that Google has a user that has searched for that term.

When you hit enter for that keyword you can see a set of results that you can check. If the articles are small and have less than 1,000 words you can be sure you can write something that can beat it easily. If there are forum entries like Reddit in the search results then it means there are not enough good matching articles in your search to even less competition.

Then you write an article of 1,500 words around this question, answering it simply at the beginning and then in more detail later in the article. After a few months if you have written the article well you can see it slowly climb the rankings.

In this way, I have had articles rank at around spot 35 in a few weeks and after about 2 months hit the number one spot and spot 0 (the snippet at the top of the Google search)

When you have written enough of these articles Google will see you as an authority and will begin to rank you higher which will increase your traffic.

How do I earn money from my blog?

There are a few ways to make money from your blog. In this article I will just focus on 3 main areas, 2 of which are passive meaning that once you have set it up you don’t need to do anything other than watch the money flow in. The third way, launched later, will require a bit more effort.

Advertising – When you have your blog set up you can begin to place ads on your site. You can either do this right away or wait until you have built up a good level of traffic beforehand. Either way will be fine. Whenever someone visits your blog you will earn money from each ad they view and if they click on the ad.

You will earn money for every 1,000 page views. At the lower end, it can be as little as $1-2 per 1,000 if you have only 2-3,000 visitors per month but will jump up to $15-20 if you have 80,000 or more.

Clicks can be more profitable ranging from $0.25 to $5.00 depending on the advertisement.

Usually, though the bulk of your ad revenue is from ad impressions.

Affiliate products – Joining a company’s affiliate program is another good way to make money passively. What you do is write about a company’s goods or services and provide a link to them and if one of your readers likes what you have written clicks that link and buys something then the company will reward you with a commission for referring that customer to them.

For some big companies like Amazon, the commission can be small, on average 4-6% but can quickly add up if you are promoting items for a good price and you have a reasonable traffic level.

Other companies may offer better percentages but you may make fewer sales. Clickbank’s digital products for example can net you 50% commissions for some items

Your own product – After you have established yourself and your blog and have built up some decent traffic and authority it will be time to launch your own product.

You can sell your own arts and crafts without worrying about paying high commissions and charges, there will be more admin but you can easily allow for this when you start to see patterns in orders and sales.

It could also be something small like a helpful spreadsheet, a small e-guide for buyers or something more substantial like a video training course.

This can be one of your largest money-making sources if you do this well. If you had a video course for sale for $50 and you made 500 sales per month then you could be looking at $25,000 per month.

As previously mentioned there will be more work needed for this. You may encounter issues with billing errors, refund requests, login issues (if you have a members area), and so on but, and it’s a big positive but, you can hire people to take care of this so now you can begin doing some good and create jobs.

Finding a good advertiser

This can be much easier than you think, there are a few companies that will reward you right away with advertising revenue from your blog but in the early stages you will not get much and there may be a minimum amount you need to earn before payment can be made, which can be from $50-$100 depending on who you choose.

Companies like Google Adsense and Ezoic offer immediate revenue from your site but Google has a minimum payment threshold of $100 and Ezoic is only $20.

Some other companies will pay you at a higher rate but you need to have a higher traffic level before you can consider applying.

Companies like Thrive, Adthrive, Access to media, all have high traffic entry levels, so it’s not worth considering these yet until your traffic exceeds about 30,000 page views per month. These companies though will give you a higher level of service with regards to assisting you with your site ad optimization and will pay slightly more per 1,000 ad impressions too.

If your blog was more niche and more local you could also ask local businesses or approach specialized companies to ask them if they wanted to place ads on your site. This can be quite a good regular income source for you.

Imagine you were blogging about tourism in your area. I’m sure there will be more than a few companies who would be interested in working with you if it meant a substantial increase in their business.

Finding a good affiliate program

There are many different companies you could work with. Some of the best ones are:

Amazon – Very famous and reliable. When you promote something from here people feel safe knowing it’s a big brand. A lot of competition in many areas and a small commission. It’s possible to earn thousands from here though
Ebay – Same as Amazon, reliable brand, similar for competition and earnings potential.
Clickbank – More for digital products and subscriptions. Very high commission in some cases with great earning potential.
CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction) – Many companies across a wide range of topics to choose from with some excellent earnings potential.

It’s important to do your homework on these companies and for you to decide which, if any, you want to work with. Remember it’s your own brand you are building so you need to make sure you are working with people you feel are a good fit with your brand and goals.

Don’t just look for large dollar values when looking for commissions. You may find you can get more income from many $3 dollar commissions than you could from a $75 one.

If you are in a niche that does not need to spend a lot of money will it make sense to try and ask someone to spend $500? If you are in a luxury niche will people think a $7 product is high quality? Try to get the affiliate company you want to work with who is in the same price range, style as yourself. This will work out better for you in the long run.

How to create your own product

Creating your own product for sale is going to be the hardest thing you can do on your blog but now you have some money coming in from advertising and affiliate income then your confidence will be much higher and so will your desire to earn more.

There are many ways you can create a product for your readers. Try to think a little outside the box and you will be surprised at just how many options you have. Some ideas include:

Creating your own crafts can be easy if you have a flair for it, or a little tricky if you don’t but far from impossible these days (I can’t draw to save my life, so I don’t!)
Video training – This can be quite lucrative depending on what you are teaching. If it’s not too expensive and in high demand then you could earn a lot from this.
Ebook – If you are offering an in-depth training manual, a travel guide, or other how-to books this can be a great way to get income.
Consulting – If you are an expert in your niche and you now have a decent following you could begin to charge people for your services. You could do this via the internet using Skype of other means to connect with your audience globally.
Buyers guide – If you have a particular product focus that is expensive such as a boat or other big ticket item then a buyers guide will be popular. If someone is willing to pay $15,000 for a boat then $20 for a guide will be money well spent in their eyes.
Software – Small items such as spreadsheets or templates can be quite good money makers and are often free to make. Selling an excel spreadsheet for a few dollars could make you literally thousands.
Membership – This is always a great one as you will be able to get a recurring income from this. The downside is that you will need to keep things current but the upside is popularity and regular income.

There are many other ways you could potentially create and sell your product or service. What you need to do is think creatively and not just try to sell another 2.0 product that just follows the mainstream. All that does is creates competition where you are a/the competitor.

If you can’t avoid that then so be it but if you can try to think of a new way to pitch what you have. You may be pleasantly surprised.

How do I get traffic to my blog?

There are a number of products out there but in my opinion, they are very much like snake oil salesmen. They promise you that you will have a successful website in a few months with their tool but in reality the tools, while helpful, will not do it for you. They will do it with you.

This is an important distinction as it essentially means they can enhance what you are already doing to make you a little more successful but what they won’t do is guarantee you success.

You will see many disclaimers after their ‘you can make $10,000 a month’ sales pitch stating these are not typical results. So what are the typical results? Usually between $0 and $200 per month if you are lucky.

So how do you get traffic to your blog? By performing good keyword and competition analysis before you write to show that you have a good chance at getting to the first page at the top.

Then you write an article that helps the reader more than the other articles do, provides better answers, more information, and extra ideas to help them that they may not have thought of.

This is the fundamental foundation for your blog. If you do this then you will rank in Google and build authority. This does take time though so you can speed things up.

YouTube – Youtube is a great medium to promote your blog if you have a lot of content that is easily spoken about in a video. Such topics as cookery, DIY, self-help, etc. are great topics to vlog (video blog) about.

By creating a small, short video about the topic you have just written about will send some good social signals to Google, who owns YouTube by the way, that your content is good.

If people like the video and link through to your site to read more then both your video and your web page will benefit.

Make the video a few minutes long, say around 4 – 6 minutes long, and cover about 30-40% of the article in the video and tell them there is more information available if they click the link to your web page.

Pinterest – If you have a blog that has a strong focus on still images like travel, fashion and food then Pinterest is another great way to encourage visitors to your site. A great photo is a great way to get those captivated by your pictures to visit your blog.

Pinterest has a large following and has many people who make a living just from there. If you have a similar interest to one of these larger followers you can even get them to do a special post or shout out to your blog, it can really help drive potential fans to your blog but it can be quite costly so be careful with this.

Setting up your own board and connecting with people is a great way to build up a brand name here and it will not be long before your pins are being shared and promoted with a bit of effort.

Instagram – Instagram works in a similar way to Pinterest but it’s worth pointing out that Instagram does better in some countries more than others as does Pinterest. both are equally good but before you dive into your niche look at your target demographic and what apps are most popular in the countries where your target audience lives

How NOT to get traffic to your blog and why

Trying to game the search engines will not help you and in many ways can penalize your blog or in some extreme situations get your blog de-indexed, which could result in you losing 90% of your revenue.

Imagine that you spent a couple of years to build up your site to the $5,000 a month level and you got greedy and did some spammy link building (even if you think it’s not, it will be seen that way) your site tanks and you now have an income of $230 a month. How will you feel?

Google’s algorithm checks over 300 attributes of your website to ensure the Google users get the best experience. Making sure they get exactly what they need is Google’s driving focus. Your site if it’s not ranking organically will be seen as not real and will be investigated.

If you get a manual inspection and you have an artificial link profile (not naturally gained) then you will get penalized pure and simple.

Avoid anything called black hat or grey hat link building, these are ways you will alert Google to your tricks. Tricks such as:

Link swapping – Reaching out to another website and each linking back to the others site. Google will perform a search and if it finds too many of these ‘link pairs’ then it will know you have created fake links

PBN’s – Personal blog networks. These are getting easier for Google to spot and take an incredible amount of effort to create. Imagine a pyramid of free websites, created on various platforms like WordPress, Weebly, and Blogger for example. 1 at the top then 5 linked to that one and 5 linked to each of those 5.

Now imagine you have to now write or pay someone to write 10-15 articles for each site. Then you get your site at the very top to link to you with what is seen as an authoritative link. Do this 5 or 10 times to create 10 PBN links.

It can work to get your site ranked but look at the time and money invested. For the same amount of time, effort, and money you could spend it writing, taking videos, and adding images to your social platforms with no chance of Google de-indexing you and stamping on your hard work.

Guest posting – Guest posting while fairly inoffensive can also give Google a sniff of your intentions. Less risky than PBN’s and link swapping but what you are really doing is trading your authority for a link.

Think about one of the main things Google is looking for to rank your site. Authority. This is one thing you should never trade. If you are going to write a well-written, informative and helpful article, put it on your own site where it will get you the most recognition.

Paid link sites – Again these are risky as Google is fully aware of them. Appear on more than a couple and you will set off alarm bells at Google so avoid these at all costs.

Typical sites like business directories should be avoided especially if you are trying to use fake addresses on many directories and then have them all link to your site. Google will know, trust me.

Conclusion

There are many ways you can build a very successful blog and thousands of different ways you can make a great income from it but there are a few rules that you have to follow to ensure your continued success.

No short cuts, work hard. Write as often as you can and make sure you write well, doing the best research about every topic. Be more helpful than the other guy.
Be patient and don’t give up. It can take in some cases more than a year before you begin to see and appreciable results. Remember the main reason 90% of blogs fail is that people give up before their site has a chance to do well.
Content is king. If you write well and you are persistent then the links, rankings and authority will come. If your site has 100 great articles on it, writing about 20 articles per month after 12 months you will begin to see some results.
Don’t cheat. Google spends more each month than any of us will see in a lifetime. It spends money on thousands of people trying to find the cheaters. Don’t be one.
Enjoy it. Don’t pressure yourself into thinking it’s a dud if you haven’t made $1,000 after 3 months. Just write for the pleasure of writing and helping and then when the money comes, smile.

Thank you for reading

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