AFFILIATE MARKETING
24 Business Ideas That Could Be Worth Millions
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The advance of the internet has democratized admission to the world of entrepreneurship. From virtually anywhere in the world (provided internet access), makers can launch real, viable businesses capable of generating millions of dollars a year.
While technology has lowered the barrier to entry to starting a business, there’s still an infinite supply of problems just waiting to be solved. With tons of ideas out there, the primary ingredient for building a startup — besides time and a bit of luck — is execution. You just have to get started. To get you started, here are 24 viable business ideas.
Gmail Extension Creator
Modern businesses rely on email to get their work done. There are dozens of opportunities to build Gmail extensions that automate parts of a professional’s workflow to save time and money.
Related: 20 Gmail Hacks Only Savvy Users Know
Drone Videographer
Improvement in aviation technology has made it easier than ever to get a drone up and flying over a beautiful landscape or building. The commercial and residential real estate industries are practically begging for more drone videographers to serve their agents and home developers.
Related: Revolutionizing the Film Industry With Remote-Controlled Drones
Drop Shipping Business Owner
You can start an e-commerce business without holding any inventory. This practice, known as drop shipping, offers a lot of opportunity if you can dominate the right niche.
Related: 6 Steps to Building a Successful Online Drop Shipping Business
Online Course Creator
If you know an industry or task really well, you can easily create and sell an online course that teaches people a new skill. You’ll just have to invest the resources upfront that are necessary to develop the class.
Related: 8 Steps to Creating a Profitable Digital Course
Social Media Manager
You can run social media accounts for a number of different companies if you market yourself well. Advertise your ability to drive sales and increase ROI by leveraging the reach of multiple social channels.
Related: Tips for Running Your Best Social Media Campaign Ever
Online Influencer
It’s a common dream nowadays to become an internet celebrity, and there’s a reason: Building a wide audience on the internet can give you immense influence that can be monetized at scale.
Related: What I’ve Learned From Spending $10 Million on Influencer Marketing
Affiliate Marketing Partner
Affiliate marketing is a partnership that bloggers, content creators or marketers can have with an online retailer. The retailer pays a commission for every referral sale the partner sends their way.
Related: Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Tracking Software Platforms
Event Planner and Promoter
Restaurants, clubs and other physical venues often struggle to get customers in the door. Using your ability as a marketer, you can be compensated for directing traffic to these locations.
Related: The Price Is Right: Turning a Profit in the Event Planning Business
Real Estate Investor
In any market, there are opportunities for buying and selling real estate to make a profit. With a bit of capital, you can begin taking more risks on your assets and making long term investments in residential and commercial real estate. Just be sure to do your research before you get started.
Related: 8 Ways Real Estate Is Your Smartest Investment
Ghostwriter
You can turn your ability to write well and quickly into a serious business if you find the right clients. Try freelancer platforms like Upwork and Freelancer.com. As long as you provide consistent and quality content, over time, your business is bound to grow.
Related: The Entrepreneur’s Complete Guide to Ghostwriting
Content Translator
Being fluent in another language can be extremely valuable to people who need their websites translated. Put up a simple website, and you can start charging for “translation as a service” for websites, documents and presentations.
Related: Going Global? 3 Strategies to Ensure Nothing’s ‘Lost in Translation’
FAQs Chatbot Builder
Companies waste dozens and dozens of hours a week answering support questions from their customers. Help them automate this process by using a simple chatbot.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
Website Flipper
Using Flippa or any other online business marketplace, you can buy and sell projects, domains and websites. With the right eye, you can find great deals on promising ideas and turn them for a profit with just a small investment in the right areas.
Related: 7 Lucrative Online Jobs That Can Skyrocket Your Income
Newsletter Writer
Building a newsletter with an active following is an extremely lucrative business opportunity because advertisers will pay serious dollars to get their names in front of the right audience. Start with a small niche that you can really provide value to, and you’ll likely see your subscriber list grow over time.
Related: 4 Steps to Building A Profitable Digital Newsletter
Freelance Designer
Learn how to use Photoshop or sketch, and you can start charging clients for your design work. As a freelancer, you’ll be able to make your own hours and dictate your own progression as your business grows.
Related: The Non-Designer’s Guide to Hiring a Great Freelance Web Designer
Personal Trainer
If you enjoy fitness and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, then personal training could be a prime business for you. There’s always a market for it through people who are looking to get in shape — and looking for someone to push them in the right direction.
Related: How To Add Wellness Coaching to Your Personal Training Business
Craigslist Flipper
Craigslist can be a goldmine finding deals that you can flip for a profit. There are plenty of resources available online that can help you identify the good deals from the rest of the pack.
Related: How to Make a Fortune With $100
Farmers’ Market Seller
If you know any farmers in your area, you can reach out to them and offer to sell their products at farmers’ markets. Rather than paying upfront, you can mitigate your risk by partnering with the farmers in exchange for commission.
Related: College Entrepreneurs Find a Green Niche in an Online Farmers Market
Paid Advertising Consultant
Most businesses rely on some sort of paid advertising to drive leads for their business. Become an expert at Google AdWords or Facebook ads, and you can start charging clients for managing their spend.
Related: Need Clients? The 5 Best Ways to Market Your Consulting Business
Tutor
Whether it is for the ACT, SAT or just general schoolwork, many students could use support to do their best in different subjects. Become a resource that helps students succeed in the classroom, and many parents will likely be willing to pay you for the help.
Related: To Rapidly Enhance Your Business, Stop Selling and Start Teaching
Outsourced Assistant
Well-paid CEOs do not have the time or energy to worry about many of the administrative tasks that can come with the job. If you can give wealthy people their time back by acting as an outsourcd assistant, many will be more than happy to compensate you appropriately.
Related: What Successful Entrepreneurs Outsource to a Virtual Assistant
Reviewer
Believe it or not, you can turn a profit off of beinga “professional reviewer,” or someone who reviews products by publishing thoughts about them online. It will take some time to gain some domain authority, but after a while, you could become a thougth leader in your space.
Related: A Top TripAdvisor Reviewer Talks About How Reviews Work, for Good and Bad
Life Coach
Becoming a life coach is as simple as determining which of your past experiences you can use to provide value to others. Whether it is providing actionable strategies or general advice, you can likely find a niche as a life coach or mentor.
Related: The 10 Best Cities For Starting a Life-Coaching Practice
Website Designer
There are plenty of companies and professionals out there who want a website to represent them online but don’t have the skills to create it. Many are more than willing to pay for a quality website that will better display their brand image.
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AFFILIATE MARKETING
How to Get Beat Out Your Competition by Making a Lasting Impression
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
I’m in the public relations space, and as of last count, there are more than 48,000 other PR firms in the United States. A large fraction of these compete with my agency in the five hub cities where I operate. Yet mine consistently ranks among the highest in those cities — Nashville, for example.
Is it because I know my industry better than my competitors? Because I land more placements for my clients? Because my team is more talented or my network of connections more expansive? As much as I’d like to think that I’m running with the front of the pack based solely on the quality of my services and the effectiveness of my methodologies, it’s far more likely that I earn rave reviews and generate referrals from my clients due to two words: personalized attention.
More specifically, my team and I go well above and beyond to create an exceptional customer experience at my firm because I’ve learned over the years of running my own business that it’s the client’s impression of you that matters most — that’s what informs all other aspects of customer relations, drives all other client decisions and determines if they’ll stay with you or not (even more so than short-term results).
Even in the digital age we all inhabit, with so many automated tasks and productivity tools that populate our workplaces, personalizing the professional is a surefire means to client retention and satisfaction. Here are five practices I regularly follow to make the most positive impression on my clients I possibly can.
1. Get a copy of your client’s org chart
When you understand the structure of your client’s business, you understand who does what, who reports to whom, and, in turn, you know who to go to for what. Not only is this an immense time-saver — as in not filling people’s inboxes unnecessarily with work that doesn’t pertain to them — but your clients will also appreciate that you did your homework on their staffing.
It’s so much more impressive to send a note that says, “Would your team like to see this before we send it up to Jeremy?” or “I believe Bettina has the final sign-off here” than “Are you the right person to contact about this?” And note the use of actual names here — learning the first names of everyone you’ll be working with moves you into first place faster than you’d think!
Related: 4 Ways to Make the Best First Impression With Your Customers
2. Use proper grammar and punctuation
Make sure that all your communications to your client — and, far more importantly, all the communications you prepare on their behalf — are written properly. Yes, it takes some extra work to eliminate errors. Still, it’s absolutely worth the effort when you consider how much just one typo can mar an entire project (ever seen “pubic” instead of “public”?) and how poorly faulty grammar can reflect on quality output, education level and attracting the intended audience.
Though it may be true that language standards are slipping in America, that doesn’t mean nobody’s noticing the shoddy quality of copy. Some people still notice and care. If your client is one of them, you’ll earn bonus points by knowing the difference between “compliment” and “complement” by not allowing both “San Antonio Riverwalk” and “San Antonio River Walk” in the same publication. Use your grammar checker. Always do a spell-check. Re-read everything you produce. And if you don’t have a language maven on staff to serve as your in-house proofreader, hire an affordable freelancer who can provide quick turnaround times.
3. Choose video over audio
Whenever possible, schedule video calls and videoconference meetings over phone calls and phone meetings. The day and age of in-person meetings is quickly becoming obsolete. Still, there will never be a replacement for face-to-face interaction, eye contact, observing facial expressions and showing your client with every head nod and eyebrow raise that you’re following what they’re saying and closely attending to your conversation.
During the pandemic, cultivating one-on-one relationships over Zoom and Teams became the new norm, and most people are entirely fine leaving it that way! Interacting over a screen instead of a conference table is just more convenient, time-effective and environmentally friendly. Nevertheless, we can’t afford to lose the “one-on-one interaction” part of business relationships. Remember the old Bell advertising slogan? Well, video is the modern-day equivalent of “the next best thing to being there,” so leverage your camera as often as possible to “see” your clients, not just talk to them.
4. Mark your calendar!
Notate birthdays, business anniversaries, baby due dates. Keep a record of your client’s big meetings and conference attendance. On those days, send a person-to-person text or email. And the more specific, the better, such as “Hope your coffee product presentation in Jersey went well and the traffic wasn’t too bad on the Parkway!” Or “Congrats on baby Elliot. That was my grandfather’s name, and I hope it serves your brand-new son as well as it did him.”
By incorporating the personal into the professional, which is a pillar of my own approach at my company, clients value your role more because you’ve actively endeavored to become part of their lives, not just an appendage of their business. In other words, when you add personal touches to your communications and conversations, your clients can’t help but think of you on a more human level rather than just a professional contact with whom they can easily cut ties.
Related: 6 Strategies for Making a Good First Impression During Business Meetings
5. Observe the line between personal and professional, but use both — often
On a related but separate note: As much as I’m saying to weave personal connections into your daily dealings with your clients, you never, ever want to go too far. You can use humor, but not off-color humor. You can show vulnerability, but you don’t want to appear weak or indecisive. You can ask questions and admit what you don’t know, but be strategic (not lazy) about trying to resolve issues yourself before coming to your clients with them. And be yourself, absolutely always be genuinely yourself, but don’t expose so much that you cross the line into overintimacy or inappropriate divulgence.
By speckling your client interactions with individual touches as you simultaneously maintain proper decorum, you will put a personal face on your business name. And that name will leave more of a mark on your customers precisely because of your adept balancing act between the personal and the professional.
Part of making a meaningful impression on your clients is consciously putting your best face forward every day, in every way. Don’t let them see a messy office behind you on Zoom, but let them vent about their kid’s tonsillitis for 10 minutes if needed. Don’t bad-mouth other clients or finger-point when things go wrong, but get to know them well enough that you’d love to grab a drink next time you’re in town.
Take every opportunity you can to show your clients — and then remind them often — that “business as usual” to you means being prepared (as in learning an org chart), producing quality output (that’s been proofed), scheduling face-to-face encounters, observing special occasions in their lives and sharing your authentic self, who happens to be a multifaceted, wonderful human being with flaws who’s also an utter professional and a real pro at what you do!
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Protect Your Business Computer From Hackers and Trackers with This $70 VPN Deal
Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.
Browsing online and using public networks can make your computer vulnerable to a wide range of hackers and trackers. For entrepreneurs running a business, being bogged down or having your team members bogged down by dangerous, cost-threatening disruptions like these is unacceptable.
A good way to keep you and your team safe and working fast while online is with a reliable VPN subscription. To help, this Windscribe VPN Pro Plan three-year subscription is available for $69.97 (reg. $207) through May 12th at 11:59 p.m. PT.
Windscribe can be a great VPN subscription for entrepreneurs and small businesses because it supports unlimited devices. Going beyond typical VPN services, Windscribe offers itself as a desktop application and browser extension. All-in-all, it can be used to unblock websites, block ads, and keep you safe without expecting you to configure a wide range of complicated settings.
Windscribe’s no-logging policy will keep your team safe, and its high-end encryption methods will keep their data safe from hackers and trackers.
This service runs on a system of servers in more than 69 countries and 112 cities. It uses something called split tunneling, which allows users to choose which apps use the VPN and which ones don’t. This is a great feature for teams with remote employees who toggle between work and personal programs on the same screen.
Windscribe is rated Very Good on Tom’s Guide and 4/5 stars and above on Tech Radar, PC World, and G2.
Don’t forget that this Windscribe VPN Pro Plan three-year subscription is available for the best-of-web price of $69.97 (reg. $207) only through May 12th at 11:59 p.m. PT.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Get Microsoft Office Plus Windows 11 Pro for $70 This Week Only
Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.
When you run a company, you need every basic tool available to streamline your communications, content creation, and sales abilities. You also need to operate on a computer outfitted with a capable and robust operating system designed to support modern productivity.
Through 11:59 p.m. PT on May 12th only, you can get The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows: Lifetime License + Windows 11 Pro Bundle on sale for just $69.97 (reg. $438).
Known by many for a long time, Microsoft Office Professional features a suite of apps designed to help you write, present, organize, email, and more. Unlike with Microsoft 365, there are no additional monthly fees with Office. These are the ones included with this lifetime license:
- Access
- Publisher
- OneNote
- Teams
- Outlook
- PowerPoint
- Excel
- Word
This bundle also includes Windows 11 Pro, the latest Microsoft operating system, which offers advanced security features and productivity elements that can help keep any modern professional on task and safe.
On the security front, the system uses tools like Smart App Control, biometric logins, and TPM 2.0 to help keep you protected. When it comes to productivity, it offers tools like improved voice typing and the support of AI-powered tools like Microsoft Copilot. And because Office includes Teams, you get a hub of communication for your team.
This deal has several 5/5 star ratings on the Entrepreneur Store, and Windows 11 Pro is rated 4/5 stars on PC Magazine and TechRadar.
Through 11:59 p.m. PT on May 12th only, you can get The Ultimate Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows: Lifetime License + Windows 11 Pro Bundle on sale for just $69.97 (reg. $438).
StackSocial prices subject to change.
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