What online business should I start?
Question by Mason Goldberg: What online business should I start?
I’m 15 and would like to start earning real adult cash (50k-100k a year). I don’t want to do affiliate marketing or anything like that. I really would like to start my own online company. I want to provide a service to businesses or people.
One idea is to start a social media marketing firm, where I create basic websites for small businesses who are not yet online (like using webs.com), and I could also create and manage facebook/twitter pages for companies and help advertise them using social media.
Another idea is to start an online music distribution service company. A site called Tunecore lets you sell songs on iTunes and other music stores. I would provide a service to new bands/artists where I could use Tunecore to sell their music, while also advertising their band/music online by creating sites and/or social media marketing.
The last idea I found was a free website script i came across that creates a website where bands can share their music and listeners can rate, listen, share, etc. The problem is, I would be competing with big names such as Myspace Music and Purevolume.com.
Do you think any of these ideas could make me a lot of money (50k-100k a year)? Any other ideas for an online company that could be profitable? Thanks. I’ve been researching for two years, but still can’t find that perfect thing to start. Maybe one of my new ideas above could be the one. What do you think?
Best answer:
Answer by Peter Druber
Hi Mason,
These are all good ideas, however you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned your competition in the last idea. Each of these ideas will require a fair amount of set up time but the real work will start when you have to start promoting your business. If your idea fills a real need that is missing out there you might get some good viral promotion from a well placed press release and some direct marketing on relevant forums etc.
Your ideas are for businesses that exist already and therefore you would have to give much more value to your customers to even begin to compete for any business. For your first idea you could operate as a freelancer at least in the beginning to get yourself some capital to promote your own website. Places such as freelancer.com and rentacoder.com always have clients looking for this kind of marketing.
Your second and third ideas are very different from the first. What are your passions? You say you don’t want to do affiliate marketing, however it can be an easy way to get started online in a niche that interests you. It will teach you how to market properly, build websites and promote them. These are skills you will need for any business you set up online.
Affiliate marketing doesn’t have to involve promoting dodgy weight loss e-books or things like that. Amazon has an affiliate program that is very easy to join and they sell almost everything. Here’s an idea for you, pick one of your passions that has physical products related to it in some way and set up a product report style blog. You would be providing people with valuable information about the products which they are online researching and looking to buy. This is a useful service and if you are passionate about the niche you will have no problem searching for the information on the web. These kinds of sites need only a little promotion to get them in the Google results within weeks.
You seem to be into music. Check out RottenTomatoes.com and do something similar for music dvds, mp3s and cds etc.
Check out Chris Rempel’s Conduit Method and VIP Essentials Pack if you need a plan of attack and instructions for building this kind of site. If you built enough of these sites or even one really big one and promote them well, I think you could be on track to your income goals within about 5 to 10 months.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do!
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