What’s The Best Online Business To Start | From My Personal Experience

This is part 3 of 3 of the online business series:
1. The Ultimate Guide: How to Start an Online Business
2. 10 Proven Online Business Ideas That Anyone Can Use
3. What’s The Best Online Business To Start | From My Personal Experience

So you want to start an online business.

But you don’t know what’s the best online business to start.

In the previous part of this series, I went through some of the most common online business ideas that one can use to start a successful business.

Today I’ll be talking about the best online business you can start.

So, what defines best?

My experience

Before we dive into the details, I thought I would share about my experience on how I decided what was the best online business for me to start.

What kind of online business do I own? By blogging and building a credible brand that stands out online, I get the majority of my traffic from search engines and social media. I monetize by coaching, online courses, and affiliate marketing.

Why?

• It suits my passions
• It gives me an unlimited income ceiling
• No physical inventory – scaleable
• I build a credible brand that grows with time
• I diversify my risk with multiple streams of income
• Search engines, social media and blogging are proven and sustainable ways of building authority online
• I have control over most parts of my business
• Low start-up costs

I’ll elaborate more below.

By the way — If you haven’t already started your website/ blog, do check out my tutorial on how to start a blog + biz here. It’s been shared over 50k times and is a great starting point for any entrepreneur.

I highly recommend using SiteGround (go visit it and see how amazing its support is!) as your website host for your online business. You can’t go wrong with it, and its support is the best. I have lost count of the number of times that SiteGround has saved this blog from being in trouble when something screwed up.

Click here to host your blog with SiteGround, or if you need more guidance, click here to learn how to start your blog with my step-by-step instructions!

That will get you on the right track, especially if you don’t have a website yet.

The best online business for you to start:

1. Something that aligns with your passion

Ideally, you want to build a business that you’re passionate about.

That being said, your business doesn’t really have to be revolved your life passion. I don’t believe that every business has to be started “because of passion”.

I feel passion is overrated and people’s passions change with time. It is amazing if you start a passion-based business, of course. But it is also perfectly okay to start a business because you are tired of working for someone else or simply because it aligns with your current goals.

Call it passion, interest, or whatever – it just has to be something that you can face every day for the next few years at least.

Example: My passion for writing and marketing

For me, I wanted my online business to align with my passion for writing, social media, and digital marketing, things that I was already good at.

My blog is a core part of my traffic strategy (I reveal exactly how I generate >40k page views/ month in my signature List Building Incubator course) as I love writing and I believe that blogs are a great way to establish one’s credibility. Search engines will always be here and will likely stay for a long time.

2. Aligns with your long-term vision

Ask yourself, what are you hoping your business can get you? If you want something that brings you passive income, you can’t be a freelancer forever. That takes time and it’s not scalable.

If you don’t see yourself serving 1-1 clients in the long-run, you can’t run a coaching business forever.

Example: I want a scalable business

For me, I love the idea of having an unlimited income ceiling. i.e, I don’t want to be paid per hour, I want to be paid for the results I bring.

I have limited hours per day, and I want to maximize the impact I bring to the world with the time I have. I write posts that will be here for years to come. I focus the majority of my time on scalable methods of monetization such as affiliate marketing and selling my online courses – no time needed for each additional unit sold.

I do blog + biz coaching (time-consuming and non-scaleable) to cater to the readers who require additional support and are willing to pay for it. These clients get my personalized attention and get action steps that are 100% customized to their business. Unsurprisingly, my coaching clients get the best results. (Update 2021: I no longer do any 1:1 coaching as I’m focusing on selling my online courses now)

However, should I choose to stop doing coaching, I am not stuck with doing coaching only.

3. Control

This is a major factor for me. Don’t build your business on soft sand, build it on solid rock!

It is one thing to build a business that will only bring you income for the next 6 months, versus building a sustainable business that will grow with time.

It is extremely important to ensure that you’re building a legit business that’s sustainable. Sure, you can sell things on Etsy and get a pretty decent income, but what if Etsy closes or decides to kick you out? Some people love to buy and sell websites. Do you see yourself doing that in 10 years time?

Example: I own the most important parts of my biz

For me, I want full control of my business. I write quality content with my own 2 hands because I believe that quality always rises to the top.

I stay away from online business models that take control away from me.

For instance, I don’t rely on sponsored posts or ads, and when doing affiliate marketing, I diversify and recommend a wide variety of products (here are the top affiliate marketing programs to join). Why? Because my income will be very reliant on one or two external companies if I am not careful.

Also, sponsored posts and banner ads require huge amounts of traffic and pay you peanuts. With that same huge traffic, you can easily create a product of your own and double or triple your income.

For this reason, I own my website (self-host your website, yo), products and email list.

Reduce the risk in your business and ensure that you control your business.

Just starting out as a new entrepreneur and want to start your blog right? In my free blog starter workshop, you’ll learn how to launch a website (tech worries begone!), install a reliable website theme, make money blogging, and more. Sign up here:

3. Working with a team?

Do you intend to work with a team? Or with virtual assistants? Or would you want to remain a solopreneur because you don’t want to have a big team?

Get clear about this from the start. It will influence the kind of business you have. For instance, if you want to run an online software company, you probably cannot work alone.

4. What kind of influence do you want to have?

Do you want to influence? This will affect whether you choose to put your name and face at the forefront of your brand. Consequently, this affects what will be the best online business for you to start.

Example: I want a personal brand

One of the biggest reasons why I started my business was because I wanted to spread the message of Christ out into the world. I believe that even online, having the right values and influencing others to do good and care for others is key.

For this reason, you’ll see that I am not afraid of putting my face and name out there into the world – in fact, I want this to become a personal brand!

If you have been in my community long enough you would know that I pray for the community every Friday in our Facebook group. I’m not perfect definitely, but I try…

5. Your skills and expertise

The best online business to start is affected by your skills and expertise.

As someone without much coding experience, I wanted something easy to start with relatively low start-up costs (compared to business models like building apps and such), which explains why I chose to build a blog and monetize it with online courses and consulting.

6. Multiple streams of income

I always recommend for people to have multiple streams of income. This diversifies your risk and gives you more stability in your online business in the long-run.

For me, I make sure to monetize with affiliate marketing, online courses, and coaching.

Personally…

Personally, I love and recommend starting a blog and branching out from there. A blog acts as a means to get you traffic and allows you to monetize via many different methods – coaching, selling courses, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and more.

As you gain traction with your website, you can branch away from blogging to look at different ways to monetize your business very easily. For example, you may decide to launch an online course or a coaching program. The sky is the limit.

Summary

I hope that this has been helpful.

The best online business to start:

• Aligns with your passion and interests
• Aligns with your vision of an online business (scaleable? desired income?)
• Some businesses require you to have a team – decide beforehand if you’re comfortable with this
• Gives you control over your own business
• Aligns with the amount of influence you want
• Aligns with your skills and expertise
• Diversifies your risk by having multiple streams of income

This is part 3 of 3 of the online business series:
1. The Ultimate Guide: How to Start an Online Business
2. 10 Proven Online Business Ideas That Anyone Can Use
3. What’s The Best Online Business To Start | From My Personal Experience

Ready to get started with your website? Start your website with my tutorial on how to start a blog, which has been shared over 50,000 times.