The Growth Booth

#2: Top 10 Online Business Ideas for 2022

January 13, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 2
The Growth Booth
#2: Top 10 Online Business Ideas for 2022
Show Notes Transcript

What are the top 10 ways you can make money online in 2022? Stay till the end to find out the 'bonus monetization method' to double-down on!

Welcome to the second episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

In this episode, we explore the different ways you can make money online in 2022, and work through what I believe are the top ten ways to do so, along with a bonus monetisation method at the end of the episode!

The key takeaway here is to stick with one or two of these methods as you’re getting started. Ecommerce and affiliate marketing are two methods I would highly recommend starting with.

 Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

 Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:00 – Number #10 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

03:21 - Number #9 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

04:58 - Number #8 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

08:43 - Number #7 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

12:04 - Number #6 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

15:57 - Number #5 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

18:32 - Number #4 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

21:06 - Number #3 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

24:36 - Number #2 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

28:28 - Number #1 Way to Make Money Online in 2022

31:31 - Bonus Monetisation Method: YouTube

33:40 - Outro


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

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Top 10 Ways to Make Money Online: Welcome back to The Growth Booth! Because we’re rolling over into the new year, I thought that it would be timely to talk about some ways that you can actually make money in 2022. What we're going to do is work down through what in my opinion the top 10 ways to make money online in 2022. If you stick around to the end, I will also include a bonus monetization method as well. Hopefully something interesting here for everyone.

 

#10. Print-On-Demand: Print on Demand is where you can sell products, normally physical products, via an e commerce store of some kind. You can essentially make customizable products, so you could be selling a coffee mug and you could have whatever message you want on it, or you could be selling a t-shirt and you could have whatever image or slogan or message that you want on it. Essentially, it's a customizable form of dropshipping. 

It’s great as a standalone business model if you want to build out a website around that and you can pipe it into other marketplaces like Etsy in many cases as well. It's not just about selling on your own store, but because you've got the ability to make genuinely customized products but still leverage dropshipping so you don't need to buy inventory in advance, that gives you quite a lot of flexibility around being able to test different ideas that you might have. 

If you've got an existing audience around an existing brand, that's also a great way to potentially monetize that brand as well because your audience is going to be interested in something you know what there is. If you've got a product or an idea that you could visually capture, if you like, and turn that into a print on demand product, then you might have an easy way to cash it in with that. 

There are a wide range of different products; it’s not just coffee mugs and t-shirts. You can do everything from books, phone cases, laptop bags, backpacks, shoes, wallet, basically anything that you can imagine that could have something printed on it can be done with print on demand these days. It's pretty exciting. 

Something else which is getting really exciting as well are the 3D printers, so the ability to actually physically print something out. Now that doesn't fit perfectly into print on demand, that’s a little more complex, but there are some pretty interesting businesses being built around that at the moment. So definitely a way that, if you wanted to, you could make an extra $1,000 a week, a couple thousand dollars a week throughout 2022. That’s idea #10 on the list.

 

#9. Selling on Etsy: Etsy is first of all a huge marketplace. People I think oftentimes don't realize just how big he is, but it's one of the biggest ecommerce marketplaces with something like 45 million buyers. They are active buyers and it’s an active community. It's a great place to sell your own creations, sell your own products. In fact, if I were to do print on demand in addition to selling products through my own store, I would also sell them through the Etsy marketplace because that's really tailored perfectly to that. 

The big benefit and the big value of doing some kind of selling on Etsy is that you're tapping into an enormous marketplace of buyers. It's very much like a specialized version of Amazon, if you like, and you're tapping into that ecosystem. There's huge upside there. All you need to do is come up with a prior to sell. There are thousands and thousands of different ideas for you to navigate over to Etsy.com. Just by browsing around, you'll see that there's a pretty wide range of different types of products that you can sell there.

If you're selling a product that's $40, you might get a $10 profit on each product. How many then do you have to sell a day to be able to get to a point where you're making a decent amount of money? That's just one example. Etsy, I think, is an interesting opportunity to explore in 2022.

 

#8. Freelance Services: This is where you are trading your time, and for the most part, you're trading your time for dollars. It doesn't have to be that way though because there's an opportunity to get into a bit of arbitrage whereby you want a job, you take on a freelancing job, but then you have someone else actually do the fulfilment. 

What types of jobs can a freelancer do? You can do freelance writing, you can do graphic design, you can do data entry. You can do literally anything that you could imagine. Jobs that can be outsourced are expanding all the time because we're getting into a world where there's this whole work at home culture and people expect to be able to do everything from the comfort of their own home. 

I think this is a huge, huge opportunity, not just in 2022 but in the years ahead as well. Some kind of different examples, things I have outsourced recently include house renders. We’re building a studio in addition to our holiday home in New Zealand and we've had the interiors and exteriors rendered. We had a fully qualified architect do that for me. I think she was in Serbia charging about $15 an hour. That’s much, much, much cheaper than I would pay to get the same kind of service through the New Zealand or the United States, but the quality of the service is fantastic. This is an example of where it's potentially a win-win because, I don’t know what $15 an hour is like in Serbia, but in places like Argentina where I spend about half my time, $15 now is not bad money. To be able to earn that, the person in that country can make some decent money but I also get a really good price. 

I've also outsourced flight bookings and holiday preparation in the past as well. Specifically, I was flying to Tokyo, and it was complex because it was a long trip. It was I think a 25-hour flight time or something that crazy, basically the exact opposite to Argentina. This was when I was in Argentina, and I hired someone just to figure out all the logistics for me. They came back and they created a spreadsheet. They said “Look, these are your different options. These are your different costs,” his recommendation. They probably saved me 4-5 hours of doing that on my own. That’s a little bit unusual, but an example of something you can outsource a virtual assistant or a PA style job or tasks. You could be someone's PA or virtual assistant and do a whole range of assorted tasks if you wanted to. That's another really common one. 

The way that you get started with this would be just to head over to the likes of Freelancer and Upwork.com and create an account and create a profile so you can then bid on jobs. Just like anything when you're getting started, you're not going to have a track record. You're not going to have any social reviews or anything, but that's fine. Do a few jobs, get a few jobs under your belt, and then you can start ramping up. The way that you might get those jobs under your belt was just basically offering to do things way below what you eventually want to get paid per hour, but it'll allow you to at least build up a really good rating and then you'll be able to start applying for jobs and getting paid what you deserve to get paid. Freelancing I think is a really, really interesting opportunity in 2022 and something that's only going to be growing in the years ahead.

 

#7. Kindle & eBooks: The thing about Kindle is there’s such a low barrier to entry, so you can get started and build an income stream on Kindle without needing for much money or any money down whatsoever. The barrier to entry is very low. As is usually the case when there's a low barrier to entry, there's potentially low upsides, it's not quite the case. With Kindle, you can definitely make hundreds of thousands of dollars on a year with Kindle, but you might not get to making a million dollars a year on Kindle quite so easily. You'd have to sell a lot of books to be able to do that. Most books are sold for under $10, so you really would have to sell a lot of books to make a million dollars a year selling books on Kindle. 

However, that's not to say that you can’t earn a really good living on Kindle. A few years ago, my wife and I, really my wife, decided to launch a series of books on Kindle and these were nonfiction books in the travel space. They were city guides essentially. “You want to come visit London? Here's a guide, top 20 sights in London, and here's a list of things you can do at night as well.” These are simple guides. They were based on a list where you could just list out 1, 2, 3, 4 right through to 20 best tourist attractions. There was information that was readily available on the web, although my wife also hired local writers to help with that and each of the destinations and ended up doing really with that. We were living for over a year travelling around Europe and all of that was funded by this little Kindle venture that my wife had set up as a bit of a side gig and she had no previous experience. 

You can probably make even more money by going into the fiction style books. One thing I would do though, is probably choose a niche and double down on creating a series of books. I would map it all out so you know I've got a pipeline of getting from zero through to 30 books as an example. I might assume that I'm going to get two or three sales per book per day and it might give me 50, 60, 70 sales per day and I might make a few dollars on each one. As you can see, if you are willing to build a pipeline, then something like that can be really, really interesting and you can make a lot of money. It’s something that I've personally done and I think it's a really, really interesting business model. 

You also don't have to be the writer. It's very easy to pay someone else to do the writing. In fact, if I was going to get into Kindle again, I definitely wouldn't be the writer. I would find experts; there are plenty of people that can write a lot better than me, and I would find an expert on the topic and I'll just get them on the payroll and have them cranking out book after book after book. With something like that, you can pay on a project basis. It doesn't have to be hourly. You could pay an hourly rate or you could say, “Look, I'm going to pay $200 for each book that you create, and these are the specifications.” For $2,000, you can have ten publications. They'll cost you $2,000 and you might be able to recoup that money in your first month. Lots of things to be excited about with Kindle and ebooks.

 

#6. Becoming an Online Marketing Consultant: What I think is the best opportunity on the list is becoming a social media consultant. Not really just social media. It's I think the easiest option, but becoming an online marketing consultant for small businesses. In this new world that we're living in, I think more than ever before, people know that they need a way of communicating with their customers in the online space. You can't just rely on foot traffic to come in. You can't rely on many of the old marketing methods that have existed. Having that online presence and standing out and just at least being on par with the competition is really, really important. 

Small businesses, they could be anything. It could be a local printing shop, it could be a restaurant, it could be a tourism operation of some kind, it could be a vineyard that wants people to come in – anything at all. These local offline businesses are wanting help and support from experts who can help them get a bit of presence online. Now the funny thing is they want help from experts, but you don't need to actually be an expert to be able to provide this kind of a service. There's a great opportunity here for a service arbitrage, if you'd like, where you get the job because you've got a website or you put the feelers out to find the customer. But then once you've got a customer you can outsource the campaign, whatever that might be, to someone else. 

A great example, I could reach out to vineyards around our holiday home in New Zealand and probably in an hour or two, I could probably reach out to 20 or 30 local vineyards, send them an email, and offer them a social media service. Some of them would come back and probably want more information and eventually some people would want to do it. I could offer them social media management of some kind. It could be $100 a month or something like that to provide some kind of social media presence. I could then take the $100 a month and pay someone you know a package deal to deliver this for me at $20 a month or something. I could pocket the difference there, just good old fashioned arbitrage, have an expert, someone else doing it for me without having to do all the heavy lifting myself, or if I really wanted to, I can do it myself. 

You don't need to be an expert. Even if you're doing it yourself, you just have to know a little bit more, be a little more capable than the person that you are doing the work for. This is a great example of an industry where you can learn on the job you can learn while you're getting paid. In fact, this is one of the ways that both my business partner, Steve Clayton, and I got started out online in an industry that is continuing to grow. In fact, we've got an entire piece of software all around this industry called NetBlaze. You can check that out in netblaze.com, but what we offer in NetBlaze is a service through software that can help small businesses with a lot of their marketing requirements. They can never replace a human but it can go the whole stretch of the way.

I think there's huge opportunity and right now especially because the world has been through this interesting pandemic and a lot local businesses coming back stronger than ever and with big objectives to up the game in the online space essentially.

 

#5. Software as a Service: Software is something that does have a higher barrier to entry for the most part unless you're a specialist in software development. Saying that, the reward can be absolutely huge. In our company, we've got a bunch of different Software as a Service products that we market. Two of the ones that I'm involved with a lot of the moment are NetBlaze, which I mentioned a moment ago, it's Software as a Service for small business owners, and Cartzy, which is our take on a platform for people that want to sell e-commerce products. 

This you could say is competing with the likes of Shopify, although I would argue that Cartzy is much, much, much more specialized for people there are online entrepreneurs and want to sell via drop shipping on a range of platforms. Shopify have gotten so big that they really offer their run-of-the-mill generalist solution and their target market is as much offline businesses as online businesses, probably much, much, much more focused on offline businesses who want to have a presence online, whereas what we're doing at Cartzy is focused on the online entrepreneur who wants to build a drop shipping business or just sell their own products through their own store. 

These are examples of Software as a Service that we've put a lot of time and energy and development into, but the rewards can be very, very big. I know people who have sold software companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. Even on a lower scale, exiting for $50 million after a few years, it would be pretty appealing to a lot of people. Software as a Service, I think because of the kind of rewards, because of the upside, it's definitely something that you should consider if you've got an idea. 

The bottleneck for most people is just having an idea, something a little bit different. It doesn’t have to be completely different, but at least a twist on something that currently exists because you will need a unique position in the marketplace. Once you've got that, that differentiation, then you can start thinking about how would you actually go about building something like this and what would it cost to hire developers and so on and so forth. Software as a Service is something really interesting that we're going to continue focusing on and we need to get into. 

 

#4. Information Products: By information products, I’m meaning online courses, meaning workshops, anything digital that you can deliver as a training program essentially, but it doesn't even have to be a training program. It could just be a digital product of some description, like a plugin or something that's a little bit differentiated to a Software as a Service. 

It doesn't have to be difficult to create an info product. I think a lot of people overcomplicate it or they've got a misconception that “Oh my god, I'm going to have to create all these videos. I'm going to have to write hundreds of pages.” It doesn't have to be like that. I've seen plenty of products that’s made millions of dollars that are simply a PDF document, and you can make a PDF document using a Google word editor or whatever it is called or Microsoft Word. You can make a PDF document, save it as PDF, and away you go. 

In my business, my company has got quite a lot of experience in creating information products. We've done over $100 million in sales of different information products. We are the #1 sellers on Clickbank which is a marketplace, clickbank.com, where you can actually publish your own information products. It's much better interest to information products also physical products as well and we sold a lot of products in different niches in that marketplace over the years and obviously have done very, very well from it, and as I mentioned, we are the biggest vendor in Clickbank history. We know a lot of the people behind the scenes at Clickbank and they really are great to work with. They can handle all of the payment processing, and essentially publishing, if you like, of your product. 

Let's say you've got a hobby or you're enthusiastic about something, maybe you want to create a guide teaching people how to train for a marathon. You write it up, you save it as a PDF or whatever format it is. You publish it on a place like Clickbank and then you can start selling it. You can have an army of affiliates selling it for you as well if you want to. Also, you don't have to be an expert in the topic. You can always hire someone else to be the expert for you, pay them to create the content, or even consider partnering with them and they can partner the content and you can bring other things to the table. Creating your own info product or course or digital product, huge upside in doing that. A great way to build a brand and is not as complicated as what most people would think.

 

#3. Sell Physical Products on Amazon: This is still good, still beats digging ditches as we like to say. It sure as hell beats working for the man in my opinion, and is something that is very accessible for the average Joe regardless of where you are in the world. I think every single one of our top 10 items here are things that you can do regardless of where you are in the world. 

Selling on Amazon, there are multiple ways to do this, but what I'm specifically talking about here at #3 on our list is selling your own brand of product on Amazon. This is where you go out and develop a product line and sell different range of products under your own brand on Amazon. 

An example of this might be a special backpack that's designed for people who do photography. You might get this created, and typically, most people get their items manufactured in China. In fact, I think 80% or 90% of the world products are manufactured in China these days. They’re not the only game in town but absolutely an easy one to get started with. You can find a manufacturer on the likes of Alibaba. It’s a great place to find manufacturers there. You can order whatever the minimum order quantity is. Maybe that’s 100 products, maybe it's 1000 products, get them to send over to the Amazon warehouses, and then focus on the marketing at that point. 

I think my biggest rule or biggest tip for selling on Amazon would be to make sure you understand your numbers. Amazon will take a fee, and the fees, all said and done, in some way come in at around 30% mark, so you don't want to be underestimating that. Typically, if I have a manufacturer send a product for $10, I want to be selling it for $40. I like to 4x or multiply by four whatever my manufacturer and shipping costs are. If my manufacturer and shipping costs $20, then I probably want to be selling it for closer to $80. That'll mean that I get a decent margin, and by multiplying by four, you're probably going to end up with you know a margin of 30% or higher, which I think is pretty decent for this kind of a thing selling on Amazon with your own brand and product. 

One of the things I love about this is that can be a stepping stone to going offline. I'll talk about this in a future episode here. One of our brands has sold in over 10,000 stores offline. Offline can be a huge, huge additional income stream, and it's almost completely separate. You can start off selling on Amazon. You can then build out your own store if you want to and then you can starts selling offline. This is a starting point. 

Amazon has its own ecosystem of buyers, which I think is really exciting as well because when you put a product up, people will see it. If you've done a good job on differentiating, then you will be able to stand out in the marketplace and you will get some sales. With a little bit of savvy marketing, maybe some paid advertising on Amazon, you'll probably be able to move up through the pages and start gaining a lot of momentum. Amazon, still a really interesting opportunity in my opinion in 2022. 

 

#2. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing, lots of different ways you can do it, but essentially one of those is selling other people's products and earning a commission and of some kind. You can be selling a digital product, you can be selling a physical product. I'll give you a couple of examples of each from my own business. 

In the digital product space over the years, we've sold lots of different products from dog training to woodworking to online business to mindset and everything in between. Digital products, that’s one example. Physical products as well. There are a lot of physical products you can sell in affiliate these days. I think one of my biggest wins selling physical products were Halloween costumes. At one point in time, I had over 1000 different stores selling Halloween costumes. The reason I had 1000 was because I had specialist stores going back seven or eight years ago. You can get a lot of extra traffic by having what we called an exact match domain name. I was able to buy domain names like spidermancostume.com and that would rank at the top of Google inevitably for any time someone typed in Spider Man costume. I have Spider Man costumes for kids, for adults, for men, for women. I did a lot of sales and made a lot of money through that and ultimately sold my portfolio of Halloween websites.

Christmas as well. There's a lot of holidays and special events throughout the year that lend themselves nicely to selling physical products as an affiliate. This is quite an easy way to make money. You can make a percentage of the sale. That's one of the most common ways:  sell something for $100 and you get a $50 commission as an example. You can make money as an affiliate just for information. If you're able to send leads, send visitors to a vendor’s page, and they put in the email address or their zip code or something like this or their physical mailing address or something, then you can get paid as a result of that action. That's called cost per action or cost per acquisition where you get a flat fee based on people giving information. 

You don't even have to sell anything at that point, and this is something we do a lot of, overseeing figures in 2021 through CPA marketing, which is, as I say, a form of affiliate marketing. That's probably my absolute #1 favorite form of affiliate marketing right now, because I think you can easily break even on paid traffic and on the front end and ramp up to big profits when you start taking things like an email list into consideration. 

In terms of lifestyle freedom, I think affiliate marketing, whatever shape it takes, is one of the best online businesses just because once you set up, you really don't have to do anything. You're not providing customer support. You're not dealing with suppliers; you're not dealing with anything. You just got that traffic coming in. You're getting paid commissions, and there's where your responsibility ends. Still a really, really exciting opportunity, affiliate marketing. That keeps changing, but it's there constantly and it's not going anywhere. Affiliate marketing is an interesting one to consider in 2022.

 

#1. Drop Ship Ecommerce: The #1 in my opinion, without a doubt, is dropship e-commerce. The reason I think it's #1 is because there is a way that you can do it now whereby you don't have to wait for products to be shipped in from China as an example. If you're selling in the United States, you can be selling products that are already in the United States so you don't get stuck around supply chains and logistics and things like that, because you're selling products that are already in the United States. You also don't get hung up on needing to put a lot of money into inventory because you're only buying a product after it's been sold. You don't get stuck on branding or anything like that because you are selling other people's products. 

Selling on Amazon with your own brand, that was #3 on our list. A couple of downsides to that one is that you will need to put some money down to be able to buy your first round of inventory before you make any money. It might be $1,000 or $3,000, but you have to put some money down. 

With dropshipping ecommerce in the way that we do it, you can get around that because you're using other people's products. You're only buying the inventory once you've actually sold it, and it can be run from anywhere in the world. I think right now there are some really, really interesting marketplaces that haven't been tapped into very well. We're still getting amazing results with Google Shopping, Microsoft Shopping. Facebook Marketplace is a good one and there's some new ways to really leverage that in 2022. 

Then a whole range of other marketplaces as well below these ones or in parallel with these ones. Think about Walmart – Walmart is absolutely exploding. Pinterest – huge opportunity here. There are lots of other marketplaces as well. Lots of marketplaces but existing platforms that are looking at getting in on this ecommerce trend, which by the way is a trend that's here to stay. Facebook, for example, are doing a lot more around social selling, same with Instagram. YouTube wants a slice of the action. It's a really, really exciting space where I see a lot of upside. I think it's probably easiest place for a newbie started because you don't have that much risk. It's easy to get your head around it. You do need a store, but that’s something that can easily be solved. I think it's just a really, really solid opportunity. 

If you've been following us for a while, you'll know that we've had some training around how we do this called The Kibo Code. You can find out more by going to thekibocode.com or by checking our link or something that we’ll provide somewhere around this podcast episode, but definitely by going to thekibocode.com, you can find out more about drop shipping, ecommerce and our approach to that.

 

Bonus Monetisation Method: YouTube: I did mention at the very beginning that there was a bonus monetization method, and this is something that we're actually doubling down on. It’s pretty interesting, and it's YouTube. 

Starting a YouTube channel monetization is actually the easy part, but by creating content, putting it out there irregularly, you can very quickly start to build up an audience. You don't need an audience of tens of thousands of followers to be able to make good money. You can make money just with 1000 raving fans, and usually there’s a great way to do this. YouTube has its own ecosystem of viewers, and by getting video content out there in every deal or fashion, you will start to cash in on YouTube algorithm. You need to have something to talk about, but you don't need to be the face. You can hire someone or have a partner that becomes the face of what you're doing there and start to build out a channel. 

The way that we're approaching this in our business is we've got a few different channels. We're still looking at them like long term plays, like marathon plays. We know that it's not going to be one day to the next thing, and I'm talking about YouTube from an organic standpoint. 

Paid ads on YouTube are a whole other exciting opportunity, but from organic channel standpoint, we look at it as very much a marathon play where it could take a year or 18 months, maybe six months or nine months, but it's going to take some time. It's going to take some number of videos to be published before you start reaping the rewards of the YouTube algorithm rewarding you with lots and lots of traffic. 

When you've got lots and lots of traffic, and lots have been watching your videos, monetization is the easy part. I know people that make tens of thousands of dollars per day, just on the default Google ads that can appear on YouTube videos. Even if you don't have a product to sell, if you're getting viewers, you can make money. I think this is pretty exciting. We're doing this in a few quite diverse different niches, and maybe they all would work, but maybe one of them kicks on and that could be a million-dollar/year business very, very easily.

 

Get Started with Lifestyle Freedom! You've got a bunch of different ways that you can make money online. I think the most important thing is to focus on just one or two of these to get started. Don't try out a whole bunch of them. I do think that if you're getting started, ecommerce is a really great way to go. Affiliate marketing is also good. These are the ones that I would recommend you look at to begin with. 

As always you can find out more about how to get started in building an online business, how to get started with lifestyle freedom by heading over to thegrowthbooth.com. This episode will be published along with show notes, different useful links, and all that good stuff. 

I hope you got a few ideas, and I wish you all the best in your business endeavors in 2022.