Starting an online business isn't difficult if you have spare time.

Starting an online business isn't difficult if you have spare time.

Many people start their digital journey because they either need to make money right now, or they have hopes of making a lot of it later on.  Either way, you will need to have plenty of spare time if you want to have an online business become successful.  You can't pay a programmer or designer to build you a website, and then you instantly make millions of dollars a year because your site is so cutting edge.  You need to invest your time in building the content, doing SEO, branding your business, and various other things that can all be done in your spare time.  The more spare time you have, the more you can invest in your digital empire, and the more likely you'll become successful online in a short amount of time.


Start when you don't need to make money
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of newbies will come into the digital marketing realm because they need to make money today or tomorrow in order to pay a bill or simply make money to live.  The internet doesn't work like that for 99.99% of people, and you shouldn't be swayed by the "Success Stories" you see floating around online.

Sure, there are people posting "Ads" on Facebook and making $10,000+ a month, but they've dedicated themselves to that method over the years, and they have built up their passive income in that time.  It wasn't like they posted a few ads in a week, and now they're making $120,000+ per year.

Know what you want to sell or offer before starting
If you don't know what you want to sell or offer, then you shouldn't think about setting up your website.  Instead, you should sit down and write out a lot of ideas that you think would make you money.  After that, do your keyword research and figure out what can bring in some money within a short amount of time and what would need months or years of work before it was profitable.  Start with the easier ones, the low hanging fruit methods, and bootstrap your profits until you can come back here and say, "Tommy, I'm successful now!"

Don't have a product?  Start with Dropshipping!
A lot of people want to break into eCommerce, but they don't have anything to sell.  They think that purchasing a truckload of products from a wholesaler is the way to go because they can now add those products to Amazon and eBay to turn a profit.  Well, it doesn't work out for nearly 100% of people that do something like that, even the top tier digital marketers don't succeed in this, and that's why you should look into something like dropshipping.

Dropshipping is when you run a big eCommerce type store, and none of the products listed are your own.  You work as a sort of middle man, but your customers see you as the person with all the inventory. 

What I like using is the AliDropship plugin and running niche-specific sites, then running small Adwords or BingAds campaigns to pull in people.  These sites tend to be slightly profitable, which is why you'll need 5+ to make a decent income, but that takes time and should never be rushed

There's no need to outsource content generation, write your own
Save money on your content by writing it yourself and talking with potential writers for later when you want to outsource these tasks.  You can write your own content for free and invest your money elsewhere, like into SEO, Branding, PPC, etc.

The more money you save in one area of your website means you can invest it in others to help excel your business as much as possible.  Think about it, if you were paying $100 a day to a writer and they were submitting 2 articles a day, all of that money could go into Adwords and pull in 10,000-50,000+ people a month depending on your keywords and targeting.  You can write your own content, save money, and pull in vast amounts of traffic if you do it right

Offer your writing services to other website owners
One thing you can do is offer your writing services to other website owners in exchange for a backlink to your own website.  You can do this to boost your own website, or you can charge them a fee to get content that isn't linked back to your pages.  Either way, you'll be making money, and that's always a good thing lol.


Final thoughts,
Making money online isn't the most difficult thing to do if you're not chasing it.  You need to work online in your spare time before you need to make a profit and build up a website over time.  When you think your site is ready to launch, you can start running various PPC campaigns, and that should bring in your first wave of customers.  Work on your SEO, branding, and marketing over time and watch your sales increase gradually.


Thanks for reading


- Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey