10 Creative Online Business Opportunities

Maintaining a steady flow of revenues as a web worker is a major challenge. Whether you’re freelancing for an ever-changing group of clients or selling products to consumers, it can be tough to know whether you’re going to make ends meet month to month. Business comes in waves, so anything you can do to make your earnings more dependable will help you sleep better at night.

We’ve already shared lists of ways you can grow your income with creative online business opportunity ideas (check our posts from April and last January), and we’re happy to present a new list of ideas to help you on your journey for scoring more online gigs.

So much of what’s touted around the web as opportunities to make money online ends up with the opposite effect. We’ve done the hard part for you and checked out the reputations of these sites and business models for you. (We still recommend keeping your guard up and watching out for scammers interacting with users on these platforms, though.) Whether you want to offer your services using a niche online marketplace or monetize your existing assets, there’s plenty you can try!

1. Sell Your Own Swag

Are you an artist, designer, illustrator or doodler? Are you working with a brand that has a strong visual identity? Got ideas for clever imagery or witty words?

All you need is an image file with decent resolution, and you can easily make it available for purchase on the internet as a tee shirt, tote bag, mug, iPhone case or whatever else you can think of. CafePress is the most famous of the sites that’ll handle the printing, processing and shipping on your behalf, but there are plenty of others that have good reputations too, including MySoti, Printfection and Zazzle.

You don’t need to pay any fees at all to the platform you choose, since they only print when there’s an order – and you’ll earn commissions on every sale. So you can get creative and promote your products on your website, with a dedicated microsite, with ads on other sites, on social media, or wherever else you think you can generate sales.

2. Menial Clicks During Spare Time

Do you enjoy mindlessly scrolling, finding images, clicking, evaluating data, dragging, writing five-word descriptions or copy-pasting in your spare time? Businesses often need help with these types of tasks, and sometimes it’s cheaper or easier to crowdsource than to write bits of code to do the work.

That’s where marketplaces like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and ShortTask come into play. Here you can take on nano-jobs that pay out a few cents each but are highly scalable and generally don’t require too much attention. Each marketplace has its own stipulations, culture and lingo, though, so be prepared for a bit of a learning curve.

3. Virtual Tutelage

Are you an expert in a niche area of knowledge? Can you teach someone to play baroque concertos on the ukulele? If someone has questions about how to store their power tools, can you give good advice on the fly?

There are dedicated web platforms where you can offer your services as an authoritative coach or tutor in exchange for money. Google’s relatively new Helpoutsis a full-on marketplace with video conferencing with customers, while Ether allows you to book paid appointments for phone consultations, with marketing handled by you offsite.

4. Drop Shipping for Risk-Free eCommerce

Drop shipping is a much-praised hybrid business model somewhere between eCommerce and affiliate marketing. Essentially, it allows you to sell other people’s products on websites that you manage, but with none of the risk. The vendor handles the billing, service and order fulfillment – all you need to do is drive the orders and you make commissions.

If you’ve built your website with Wix, you can easily add the 365 DropShip Product Catalog app to your website. There are zero costs involved, and you can earn commissions by hosting a full-on eCommerce-style shop on your site with products from several manufacturers and categories.

5. Leverage Your Social Influence

If you’ve got lots of Twitter followers who click on links you post, you can leverage this asset to make money by sending out sponsored tweets.

There are now several marketplaces where advertisers can post offers, includingTweetPeddler, ChurpChurp and SponsoredTweets. There’s a lot of volume in these directories, so you should be able to find offers to promote products that are relevant to your community of followers and won’t kill your social media credibility.

6. Niche Tourist Services

If you live somewhere that tourists flock to, you might be able to profit from the greater economic ecosystem that comes along with a robust tourism industry. While most travelers purchase solutions for lodging, transportation, eats and guided tours from mainstream, big companies, there are growing numbers of them who prefer to do business with independent locals – it’s often cheaper and more authentic.

If you don’t need your car every day you can rent it out with RelayRides. If you do regularly use your car, then you can offer people rides for money using Sidecar. You can also rent out your home, or part of it, using Airbnb, or offer quirky special interest tours of your locale on Vayable.

7. Cook and Host Dinners

Along similar lines, there are plenty of people who are interested in eating out but have grown tired with the anonymous, polished corporate flavors of restaurants. If you can cook up delicious and friendly dining experiences in your own home, it’s easier than ever to reach customers interested in joining you.

Marketplaces for home-hosted meals include EatWith, Cookening and HomeDine.

8. Sell Your Collectibles

Are your baseball cards from the 80′s collecting dust in your attic in a box next to your childhood Star Wars action figures? Are you unlikely to ever play that Santana album you have on vinyl ever again? You may have a hard time letting go of this stuff, but your life will feel lighter once you do. You can make decent money selling it, too.

Just take some photos, determine fair asking prices, post on Craigslist or eBay, and the inquiries from interested shoppers ought to come pouring in.

9. Offline Tasks via Online Marketplaces

People are posting one-off jobs in droves on platforms like Redbeacon andTaskRabbit, which means you can make extra money by running errands or performing handyman tasks for people in your spare time.

To pick up these gigs, you’ll need to pass a background check, so get started with building your profile with plenty of notice.

10. Review People’s Apps

If you’re a gadget junkie, gamer, tech tool lover or an early adopter, you’re likely to get a kick out of SoftwareJudge. Here you can get paid to try out recently launched apps and write what you think of them.

Social proof is a powerful force when it comes to app marketing, so publishers are willing to pay top dollar for your opinions – a quality review can earn you up to $50.

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How to Succeed on Internet Promotion the Easy Way

With a struggling economy and so many people out of work, there are thousands of people online right now looking up terms like "work from home" and "internet promotion." Internet promotion is a huge business, and one that can bring you a lot of money if done correctly. Check out some solid advice on the genre.

Admit your shortfalls. Don't attempt to deny that your website does not have its own pitfalls, because every website does. Take note when someone complains to you about an issue, acknowledge the problem and make steps to fix it. Allowing the customer to know you understand them, without getting defensive, is a good way to not only fix site issue, but also, to gain visitor trust.

Many small businesses can tremendously increase their revenue by taking their advertising campaigns online. Because more traditional venues of advertisements are slowly becoming less profitable, as newspapers see declining subscriptions, small businesses, which start advertising online are often able to reach a much more broad customer base and see an increase in profit.

Keep the background on your site very light and manageable. The darker the background on the site, the harder it will be for your visitors to view your products. Also, a dark background can create a morose and gloomy atmosphere, which could alter a customer's mood when they visit your site.

If you'd like to get involved with online marketing but don't have a product of your own to sell, you can still have an online presence by selling someone else's product. Buying the rights to an established product, will give you a way to capitalize on sales without spending the time to develop your own product.

Make sure you read a lot of informative resources online and work up a list of your top-10 tips and pieces of advice. After you figure out the top-10 things you want to try or follow, go down the list and do them all systematically. This is like receiving an assist to your overall business plan, and it can pay off in a big way.

Know your goal. Obviously, the overall goal of web marketing is to get more business, but there are many ways to do this. Without a strategy, you can easily become overwhelmed. Start with one small, but specific, goal - such as increasing your site's number of unique hits, and expand from there.

When writing web marketing copy, consider giving customers some kind of prize that proves they have read the entire piece. For example, you can hide a link somewhere in the text that nets them a free gift if they can find it. More people reading the entirety of your ad copy will translate into more buyers.

After you have set up your site and it has begun to make money, it would be wise to expand. Using your knowledge from your first site, go ahead and create another site. This way you can take your expertise and use it to become well known and make money from another site.

In important tip regarding Internet marketing is to try to be as original as possible. This is important because if you are able to focus your originality correctly, then you will create an extremely memorable marketing campaign. This is best utilized by taking something well known and molding it to appear as though it is something brand new and original.

If you have been sending newsletters to your customers and potential customers, it is a savvy internet promotion strategy to convert those newsletters into website content. Some visitors who would never think of subscribing to a newsletter may nevertheless eagerly devour the same material on your site. And since you are reusing preexisting content, the effort involved is minimal.

If you have any well-known people that have purchased your product it would be nice if you got permission from them to let everyone know that they did that. People are more likely to purchase things when they know that well-known people have bought them.

Now that you've read some expert advice on marketing, you can put this information to use and hopefully grow an effective business. Things are going to go slowly at first, but soon, with the help of these tips. You will begin to see some real results and begin making some serious money working online.

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