Successful Online Business Examples?

[Hankaroundtheworld]

Hi,
I was wondering what frequent *successful* online Business types there are (that somebody alone could set up). So far it seems mainly:
* Blogs with Adsense, etc... --> requires some super topics to generate traffic and combining with selling eBooks
* Sites that sell "how to create a business" tools and books
* Application design for Smartphones --> requires a lot of coding skills and imagination
* Financial advice --> subscription to advice for x USD per Month

BUT, what other types of online business have you seen that are successful and could be set up by an individual. I am just looking for inspiration!

thanks!

[skinnyninja]

I can speak to some of this. I built one successful online business and have been unable to duplicate it, so have moved on to other things. Here are my thoughts:

* Blogs with Adsense - This was essentially what I created successfully and later sold out at a healthy sum. I got in at just the right time and picked a lucrative topic and I pushed really hard. For example, I was writing as much as 20,000 words per day, 25 articles per day, creating custom infographics, added a user forum, gave away free eBooks, and so on. I worked really hard and I got lucky in terms of SEO. Did very well. Since then, Google has cracked down on this sort of business model and they don't need you any more. That's right.....Google doesn't need your great new blog about whatever topic. They don't care to send you free traffic any more. Google is shifting towards a "pay to play" environment on the web. Buy traffic from them (PPC) or be a big brand that has other traffic sources. But the days of starting a website from scratch and getting free search traffic via SEO and then turning that into a revenue stream are clearly dead.

* Sites that sell "how to create a business" tools and books - This has become a "me too" sort of thing. Everyone telling everyone else how to make money online, how to build a micro business, etc. Yet very few of them have successful experience at this themselves. Google is clearly done rewarding this sort of circle jerk. And if you want to create eBooks along this topic to sell via Amazon, I am afraid it is the same thing. Amazon is going the way of Google....too much junk content, too many people all writing a million different books about how to create a side business, etc. In the beginning you could write passable material on Amazon and make money, just rinse and repeat. That is long gone. Today you can write a killer book and without brand building and additional marketing (via your own site, your own following, etc.) you will not even turn a part time income. It is not that the book has to be great, it is that you need a great book PLUS your own platform to launch the thing, a way to market it other than just upload to Amazon, etc.

* Application design for Smartphones --> I have no direct experience in this but I have online marketing friends who say that the ship has sailed. About one out of 20 apps will be a decent money maker and each app will probably run you about $5,000 or so in development, depending on how much of it you have to outsource versus coding it yourself. 3 years ago would have been ideal. Now, not so much. Hyper competitive.

* Financial advice --> subscription to advice for x USD per Month - This is similar to selling eBooks on Amazon or trying to build a personal website that generates income. You can certainly build it, but that no longer means much. It is all about driving traffic and marketing. Where are you going to get your signups? New subscribers? Sure you can create a sizzling newsletter, get yourself a nice landing page to capture new leads, but then you have to somehow drive traffic to get these new signups. That means getting out there and guest posting on big blogs, engaging in social media every single day (milking FB, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) and so on. This is a full time job and you are risking all of this time and effort in the hopes for what we are insane enough to describe as "passive income."

I am sure there are still opportunities to make money in an online business, but the game has changed significantly and it is so much harder now than it was even a few short years ago. If I were starting out from scratch today I would go to job boards like Guru and Elance and I would start doing freelance work (I am a writer by trade) and then I would keep doing different jobs until I found something that seemed to click, do a deal, start working direct with someone who values my skills. In other words I would freelance first and then turn it into a real job. The kind where I trade hours for dollars. I do this now as a writer and because I am so fast (compose new content and publish at roughly 65 wpm) I can make a strong hourly rate. I also found a steady "job" this way and so I do not have to work that many hours each week.

Passive income is dead. Or maybe it is just a false idol online these days.

[theanimal]

Passive income is dead. Or maybe it is just a false idol online these days.

Well you can certainly nitpick and find negatives with every category, but I'm sorry that statement is complete bs. Take a look around the forums. There are a few folks (riparian for example) who are able to generate multiple successful passive income streams that are able to fully fund their living expenses.

[almostthere]

Check out The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau.

http://www.amazon.com/The-100-Startup-R ... 0307951529

[jacob]

I came across a website that had cornered the market for expensive ($100+) push mowers. He bought them in bulk, stored them in his garage, and sold them online.

[Hankaroundtheworld]

Wow @skinnyninja : that was quite a summary of the changing landscapes in online Business. I guess, certain topics and type of online business models have been copied over and over, and that killed or reduced some markets, so it is now about getting very creative to find a new spot.

I have the 100$ start-up book, but still have to start reading, but may be the examples are very much related to what skinnyninja is saying is "gone days", but I will read it.

Personally, I am just exploring existing ideas and then somehow link it to my own skills and ideas (kind of trying to learn of what has been done before). I have set my target on generating "only" 1000 Euro per Month, let's see It is more for fun than anything else, I like to create business (at least in those big companies I worked for, but I never created a business myself, so that is a nice challenge)

[riparian]

I think I've typed this out elsewhere, but here's a brief overview:

Self publishing on Amazon. I published two very short books over a year ago and continue to make $700/m (closer to $1k for the first 8 months or so).

Niche porn. I've built a small following and it seems that I can make about $200 (as an average, with huge variability) from each video I release. They're 10-20m long and clothes or topless. I can also send out an email and log in and get phone sex money.

Blog. I had a very popular blog for a couple years and totally failed at monetizing it.

Subscription blog. I had a secret blog and made people pay $5/m to read for a few years. I could have done more to market it, but I didn't. I'm not really sure anymore but I think it made around $300/m.

Telling people how to make money. I started sexypassiveincome.com and then didn't do much with it. I think I made $50 from it once, but I've gotten a lot of emails from people who found it helpful, so I'm happy.

[Hankaroundtheworld]

Hi Riparian, interesting reaction, it will not be something for me, but for sure an eye-opener !!

[sky]

Home manufacturing and sales over the internet.

I made a simple product using hand tools, bought packaging materials, built a website, opened a paypal account and started taking orders. Startup cost was about $1,000 which was mainly material to make the product and packaging.

I priced the product so I would make $25 per hour. Sales were slow, but I eventually sold all my product after 2 years. Once you make the product, you check your email for a message from paypal that someone has paid you, that message has the order information (item, quantity, shipping address). I then would package the order and mail it at the post office.

The business was seasonal and not a regular source of income. My niche was black plastic signs cut out in the shape of a coyote to frighten away canada geese.

It could have become a bigger business, if I had done more marketing and if I had gotten someone to cut the parts out using cnc to lower the price. But making the parts by hand was a low risk way to start. I stopped doing the business for a number of reasons, but may restart it or try out another idea.

[workathome]

It's like the best fishing spots. Great passive businesses exist, but the smart guys don't want to tell everyone and ruin it for themselves.

Companies are always throwing "free parties" with open bars at the conferences, but part of that is to hang out with successful drunk guys and hope to find out useful information or make new partnerships.

[Ego]

Back in 2006 this girl was a dumpster diving, freegan, anarchist who was selling vintage thrift-shop clothing on ebay. Last year her website that grew out of the original ebay store did $100 million in sales. Neither are passive income.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAVq-sW6LCA

[7Wannabe5]

I think it is actually kind of hard for people who are naturally thrifty and self-reliant to come up with business ideas because the core of a good business idea is thinking about what you would want enough to spend money on it yourself.

For instance, I was thinking recently that a problem I needed to solve was sun protection while wearing a biking helmet. Somebody else already encountered this problem and created a solution they are willing to sell me for $35. Since I estimate I can make it myself out of recycled materials for less than $5, I won't buy it and I likely wouldn't choose to manufacture and market a product like this even if it wasn't already available.

OTOH, there are probably a bajillion ways to generate a stream of passive (auto-pilot as opposed to tax basis) income. Basically, all you have to do is think of a business then put in some capital or brain/sweat equity yourself and then arrange to automate and/or outsource as much as possible of the work left to be done. IMO, there are two main reasons why the internet is frequently used for this kind of thing these days. The first is the exposure to the world-as-market. The second is the easy ability to integrate this with the automating power of computing. For simple instance, I automate/outsource the re-pricing of my rare book inventory on Amazon to a third party. When I first started selling books on the internet, this service was not available and I had to hack it myself with a spreadsheet. Totally worth the $15/month I spend to avoid this tedious process. OTOH, when I used to store my books in a local barn, I hired my then-teenaged son to go there in the winter and lift heavy boxes and dig out the books that had sold that week. Since I had also taught him how to do the shipping, I was (in theory) free to leave the country and simply collect my profits on my previously acquired inventory. This is basically the same process as hiring a property management company to take care of your rental real estate. Some "businesses" more readily lend themselves to passive income (obvious example being writing a book or patenting an invention and then collecting royalties) but just about any enterprise can be rendered passive.

[JeffD]

Web design and development. Designs that did not satisfy clients will go to template marketplaces where they will bring in passive income. Or make them into a free wordpress theme but sell a link sponsorship before submitting to theme sites. Same goes for scripts and plugins. Or design and develop a site for a hobby you like and put on ads in there for passive income.

I used to earn passive money from a website I made about food carts, all because I have no active design/development clients then. Until a lot of people copied and made it saturated. Still earn money to this day but not so much all passive and never made an update for it for 4 years now. But still..

[jacob]

I think it is actually kind of hard for people who are naturally thrifty and self-reliant to come up with business ideas because the core of a good business idea is thinking about what you would want enough to spend money on it yourself.

Yes, I find that really hard myself. Both the pricing---How I can charge 4X for something I can make myself for $X?---and the demand---Who would pay 4X when they can easily make it themselves for X?

[workathome]

I couldn't sell grass to a cow in real life... but the internet makes that quite different.

Anyway, in past projects I never thought "how can I charge X for X?", (especially when a lot of products are free information compiled into eBook format!) instead it was merely a statistical exercise. No use of human psychology or other considerations, just simple split-testing for how people react to various variables. Find optimization points, see what the competitors are doing, test new changes, rinse and repeat. For everything: minor color changes, button shape, word order, font-size, etc. It may sound terrible, but I never actually considered the customers as... people, more like simple AI units from a strategy game that in aggregate act in a predictable way.

[JamesR]

If you spend any time with sales or marketing, you quickly come to realize that the customer is not you, and thinks nothing like you.

For example, you might not be a person that ever clicks any banner ads on the internet and could never understand why people would ever click on ads. However people *do* click on it, and advertising through paid ads is a totally valid and pretty great way of getting quality traffic to your website and products.

Also, you get used to pricing for what people will pay, not how much it cost you to create the product.

[dot_com_vet]

Resell stuff on Amazon/Ebay.

Okay, it's only 10% online. The 90% is hitting the ground picking items.

[7Wannabe5]

Jacob said: Yes, I find that really hard myself. Both the pricing---How I can charge 4X for something I can make myself for $X?---and the demand---Who would pay 4X when they can easily make it themselves for X?

Right. Actually, it's not so much that I can't imagine the customer for the some of the things I have dealt in or have difficulty determining a fair price, it's more that I am happier selling-what-I-am-selling to the extent that I can respect or empathize with my imagined customer. Otherwise, I am "just pimping" or not-feeling-pride-in-work-that-is-in-alignment-with-my-purpose.

Bigato said: Hey 7w5, I enjoy your posts. Maybe it's my intj narcissism, but you seem to think in a clear way about subjects I'm interested in. Thanks for the insights above.

Thanks. As an ENTP, I sometimes feel like I have wandered into an exclusive gathering for people-who-are-highly-intelligent-but-not-crazy! on this forum. Also, please regard anything I post as conversation rather than advice unless you wish to find yourself a kept woman at age 49 rather than a financially independent man at 29.

[dot_com_vet]

Back in 2006 this girl was a dumpster diving, freegan, anarchist who was selling vintage thrift-shop clothing on ebay. Last year her website that grew out of the original ebay store did $100 million in sales. Neither are passive income.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAVq-sW6LCA

There's not a better business story! A thrift store picking CEO on their way to being a billionaire. She bought her own office chair on Craigslist.

[workathome]

I think what might be hard for a INTJ to "get" is most products are selling emotion/experience, not what product X actually is, and the majority of the population makes decisions based on emotional reaction - not logic. Therefore X is worth whatever someone values the emotion/status at, or you can convince them it will be valued at, etc. which has no real or intrinsic link to the tools actual functionality. ERE philosophy breaks that conditioning and reestablishes the practical link.

Maybe most humans were not built to be quite so illogical and our advertising-based culture can be blamed for the extent of the nonsense.