9 Most Popular Online Businesses (And My Honest Thoughts About Them)

I’ve been building businesses online since 2016.

That is a very long time in this space. I’ve come across many different business models while looking for ways to escape the 9-5. While I haven’t tried them all, I have tried many.

Today, I wanted to provide my thoughts on some of the most business models so you can know where to start your entrepreneurial journey.

Keep in mind these are in no particular order, and that every business model has pros and cons.

SURVEYS

When people start trying to make money online, almost everyone gives survey companies a try.

Why? Because there is no initial investment required, and you don’t have to develop any skills.

This might seem like a good thing, but because anyone can do it, the rates paid out are low. According to Nerdwallet, between $.40-$2 an hour on average.

I’ll always be grateful for survey companies because they gave me my first taste of making money online.

I recognize that there is a place for them and that many, many do them to make some extra money on the side. I think you can make an extra ~$100 or so a month.

NICHE SITES

Niche sites are where I started to first make some real money online way back in 2016. In case you aren’t familiar with the niche site model, it’s pretty straightforward – you are reading one right now!

You create a WordPress website in a specific niche (outdoors, recipes, home decor, etc), drive users to the site using free traffic from Google (and other sources such as Pinterest, Youtube, etc if you wish), and monetize your content using referral marketing (also known as affiliate marketing), display ads, sponsored content, and more.

I love niche sites. They changed my life – surveys showed me I could make a few bucks online, and niche sites showed me I could make life-changing money.

Here is a screenshot from a random niche site I have. You might be thinking – $8 a day in display ad revenue isn’t exactly life-changing, but here is the thing.

I haven’t touched this site in years. I’m still benefiting from the content my team created in 2017 and it’s completely passive – you don’t have to interface with any consumers if you don’t want to.

Plus, this is one income stream from one site. And honestly, I just kind of did the bare minimum with this particular site.

I could make way more by doing email marketing, creating my own info products and selling them on the site, brand partnerships, or even private labeling my own product.

To this day, I make about $500-1000 a month in pure profit from niche sites working passively in the background. I plan to reinvest heavily into them going forward.

The sky is the limit with these sites – if you want to create something small that makes $100 a month, that is possible. $1,000 a month. There are even people making $10,000+ a month profit doing pure affiliate marketing.

The only real downside is that it takes time – you can’t just throw up a website today and expect to make thousands of dollars tomorrow.

This is a real business, and because you are relying on free traffic, it takes time to warm up your site to these platforms and get them to trust you enough to give you traffic. This is commonly referred to as the “sandbox period”.

The flip side of that is when you do get out of the sandbox, you can see exponential jumps in your traffic, and thus your revenue.

I think niche sites are great for complete newbies and seasoned entrepreneurs alike – the startup costs are small and the returns can be tremendous.

DROPSHIPPING

Dropshipping means many different things to many different people. At its core, it is just a fulfillment method – you take an order, and your supplier ships the item directly to the consumer.

When people throw the term “dropshipping” around, oftentimes they are referring to what I call “low ticket dropshipping”, which I define as using Facebook/Instagram ads to drive traffic to your store to make an impulse purchase.

When a customer purchases an item at retail price, you then pay for it from your supplier at a wholesale price, normally in China, and they ship it to the customer. I call it low ticket dropshipping because the items usually cost less than $100.

You profit by making the difference between the retail price, minus the cost of the goods and shipping, and your marketing costs.

Low-ticket dropshipping was my first experience using paid traffic, and it changed my life. It is certainly not easy, but once you develop the skills to sell a product to cold traffic, you can scale quickly.

Winning products can normally only be run for a few months, so you need to always be testing new products.

High-ticket dropshipping, using my definition, utilizes US-based suppliers selling known brands in a specific niche. Products are generally at least $200 and can go up to $30,000.

You function as a retailer, trying to capture branded searches – think “ABC Product Type” – and then convert them on your store. You aren’t creating the demand, so there are generally limits to how high you can scale it, but demand tends to last longer and can be spread out over hundreds of different products.

What’s interesting is that many retailers utilize high-ticket dropshipping, simply because it’s cost-prohibitive, and silly, to hold say 100 safes in your warehouse.

Anyways, I’m a big fan of dropshipping for several reasons. Both forms changed my life.

Low-ticket dropshipping allows for quick scaling once you know what you are doing and find a winning product.

You can then pivot into private labeling (adding your own label to a product) and holding inventory if you wish. This allows you to move into additional traffic channels such as organic social media, influencer marketing, content marketing, and more.

GymShark and BlendJet both started as low-ticket dropshipping stores, and they’re now multi-million dollar brands.

High-ticket dropshipping allows you to sell a wide variety of products which spreads out your risk. I’m a big fan of spreading out risk.

Let’s say you say you have an electric fireplace store. You might have ten brands that create indoor electric fireplaces, and each brand has ten products. That’s one hundred products you are driving traffic to, meaning if one product dies out or gets discontinued, you still have ninety-nine products that can potentially drive profit.

You can then go out and get ten new suppliers who make, let’s say, outdoor electric fireplaces. You then discover that some of your suppliers also sell patio heaters, so you move into that market as well. You can see how all of a sudden you are offering customers hundreds of products.

With so many products, you have tons of ways to drive traffic as well. Most people use Google Ads, but you can also use social media ads, content marketing (SEO), organic social media, YouTube, influencers, email marketing, and more. You can scale into holding inventory for higher margins or even create your own products if you want.

Wayfair started as a high-ticket dropshipping store, although they now have some of their own products and inventory I believe.

What are the downsides of dropshipping? They’re the same as the upsides – you don’t hold the product. This means that you have less control over the fulfillment process.

Profit margins tend to be thinner than if you were to hold the product, but in my opinion, it’s worth it to be able to sell a huge variety of items and pivot quickly.

Dropshipping, in my opinion, is one of the best online business models. It has changed my life.

PRINT ON DEMAND

Print on demand is another form of dropshipping. It just means “made to order.” Someone places an order on your website, Amazon account, Etsy page, etc, and you send the order to your supplier.

They then create, package, and ship the product directly to the customer for you.

When many people think of print on demand, they think of t-shirts, mugs, and lowe priced goods with tight margins. These are incredibly popular items, but print on demand has grown a lot over the past few years.

You can now get everything from car seats to high-end shoes printed on, which is amazing. These expensive items generally have bigger margins, and you have an awesome opportunity to create a dedicated following for your store.

AMAZON KDP

Kindle Direct Publishing is a business model where you publish low-cost novellas directly to Amazon, usually anywhere from $.99-$2.99.

These are normally ghostwritten and are oftentimes in the “Romance” category – think small versions of Fifty Shades of Grey. Normally, they are multi-series affairs, so you hook your reader in and they stay in the series.

If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many books on Amazon that feature covers of shirtless guys with six-pack abs, this is why.

I don’t have any direct experience doing Amazon KDP, but I have friends who do. At its peak, they were making around $8,000 a month profit before they sold it for $300k+. Some people make a lot more than that every month.

What’s great about this business model is what is also not-so-great about it – you’re completely reliant on Amazon. It’s their traffic, and it’s their platform.

You can mitigate this a bit by building your email list, brand, and website. All-in-all, I think this is an interesting business model for sure and one I might invest in in the future.

AMAZON FBA

Fulfilled by Amazon is another popular online business that leverages the e-commerce juggernaut.

You find a product that is selling well on Amazon by using a tool like Jungle Scout, import a branded/improved version from China to an Amazon warehouse in the US, and then sell it on Amazon.

The interesting this about this is that Amazon handles all the fulfillment – the shipping, the returns, etc.

Much like with KDP, you are reliant on Amazon – it’s their turf. You get to use their platform and their free traffic, but you are reliant on their systems.

Additionally, you need to bulk-order units in advance and get them shipped overseas. This can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. The flip side is you generally have higher margins than if you were to dropship.

I don’t recommend FBA for complete beginners because of this, simply because of the initial investment. There is a ton of potential upside here – people making tens of thousands of dollars a month in profit.

AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH PAID TRAFFIC

There are really two sides to affiliate marketing – we’ve already discussed leveraging free traffic and driving it to your niche site.

This is great because it works passively once the content is up. The trade-off is that it takes time to get Google to trust you enough to give you traffic.

What if you were looking for something faster, and more hands-on? Paid affiliate marketing is one way to go.

You set up a pay-per-click campaign, drive traffic to your campaign site, and then over to the offer. You’ll have to test multiple offers, but you’re looking for the one that allows you to put in one dollar and get two back. Then you scale it as high as you can.

There are many different ways to do this – but one of the most popular is native ads, pictured above.

You are probably used to seeing these at the bottom of news articles, but there are various traffic sources you can use. Push. Mobile.

What’s great about it is you don’t have to interface with customers, deal with customer support, etc. However, the flip side is that you don’t have control over the end offer, and while some campaigns may last a long time, you need to always be testing new ones to try.

LEAD GEN

Lead generation is another form of referral marketing. You capture a lead and then refer it to either a lead broker or the end customer, and you make a commission or charge a flat-rate monthly fee.

It depends on the niche, but the payout could be anywhere from a few bucks to hundreds of dollars.

Does this sound familiar to you? It sounds a lot like affiliate marketing – because basically, it is. Just with services instead of products.

There are two ways to do this – paid traffic or free traffic. With paid traffic, people set up Google Ads and social media ads for services such as tree removal, foundations, locksmiths, carpentry, (really anything without a storefront), and pay per click. The goal is to make a spread between the cost per acquisition and the lead payout.

With free traffic, people generally make simple websites using a service like Wix or Squarespace. They then try to get a Google My Business account set up to drive leads to their site. When someone calls the number or fills out the form on their site, the lead gets sent to the business on the other end.

There’s a lot to like about this business. On one hand, a simple site can bring in a thousand dollars or more per month in profit. You can also build multiple sites, in multiple states, with multiple GMBs to try and spread out the risk.

There are certainly some negatives to this model as well. Fundamentally, you are building a business on Google’s ground – and GMBs get taken down all the time.

There is also no way to remarket the leads you capture – your tree service leads go to the end service provider, and they are the ones profiting from them indefinitely. Compare this to something like building a niche site or an e-commerce store where you can build out an email list, remarket on the backend, and utilize additional traffic sources to spread the risk out.

Don’t get me wrong, lead generation certainly works. It’s an interesting business model, and I might decide to try it out one day!

YOUTUBE CASH COW CHANNELS

Cash cow channels are YouTube channels that are not based on a personal brand. Normally, they have names such as “Top 5 Interesting Facts”, and things like that.

Scriptwriting is outsourced to a writer, video production is outsourced to an editor, and voiceover work. Generally, you pay somewhere between $70-100 per completed video and then you see a return on your investment via Adsense and affiliate deals.

Cash Cow channels are interesting – I like the idea of monetizing YouTube as a traffic source. This is something I may look into in the future.

I especially like the idea of leveraging YouTube traffic and views and then funneling that traffic into additional businesses – like niche sites.

IS IT TOO LATE TO START AN ONLINE BUSINESS?

“Dropshipping is dead!”

“Content marketing peaked in 2011, it’s over for us.”

“Amazon is too saturated to make a profit on.”

“It’s over for YouTubers. Too much competition.”

I’ve heard all the complaints since I started making money online back in 2016.

I bet people in the early 2000s were saying the golden age of the internet was over, and to pack it all in. It’s silly.

I ask you to do this: Just look around you.

Are businesses still around? Are they still making money? Online businesses are just businesses. As long people are buying things, there will be an opportunity to make money with an online business.

Don’t get me wrong, things change. Running any business is all about adapting and overcoming. But it’s a silly argument to make that it’s “over”.

IT’S WIDE OPEN OUT THERE

Keep in mind, that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

Everyone starts as a beginner when they’re first learning, but what you will quickly see is that there are so many opportunities out there to make money.

Let me give you some examples.

I bought a piece of furniture from an online store a few months ago. When I went to checkout, they offered an upsell of a customized canvas with my family name on it. We were already buying furniture for the house, so why not get a custom piece of art with our names on it for $79.99?

I had a friend build out a niche site over the years using affiliate marketing. Eventually, he found a product that was constantly selling, and he was making good money by referring to it. He realized he could sell it himself, so he got custom packaging made for it for dirt cheap, and now he refers thousands of visitors to a store he created. He still makes great money using affiliate marketing, and he can easily drive free sales to his product.

Once when I was researching Amazon KDP, I found a best-selling book that linked to the author’s website. On the website, they had a section teaching readers how to create their own Amazon KDP books, and they monetized it via consulting and affiliate links.

It may seem daunting now, but as you grow as a businessperson and entrepreneur, you will see that the opportunities to make money are truly endless.

IN CONCLUSION

This list isn’t exhaustive – there are hundreds of different businesses out there that leverage the power of the internet. Service-based. Selling info products. Consulting. The list goes on and on, and hopefully, that is inspiring to you.

These are just some that I’ve looked into over the years, and my thoughts on them. Thank you for reading!