10 Types of Online Businesses To Start in 2022

There are several opportunities out there to start a business online. The internet has revolutionized the way we update and work daily. Many people are making hundreds or even thousands of dollars every day from their online business and most of those businesses were just done at home.  Different from a brick and mortar business, an online business doesn’t require you to spend thousands of dollars before ever making profit which is why many are turning to starting their own online business.

There’s virtually no limit on how much you can earn with your online business. Your earnings are mostly dependent on how much effort, time you’re investing, and money you are willing to invest back into your business to grow it. . You can opt to work full time or part time. It may be daunting to start an online business especially if you have not actually decided on what type of online business to pursue. If you’re one of the many individuals who want to start an online business, check out these 10 online business ideas that you can do in 2022.

Information Business

Exploring the information business is a good way to earn money. We live in the days where almost every course can be taught online. The good thing about this is if you create a digital course, you only create it once, but you can sell it many times. At some point, you may have to update such a course, but it will only require minimal effort from you. What’s more is you don’t need many resources. All the things you will need is within you – your knowledge, your skills, and your time.

A lot of people turn to the internet when they want to learn something. In fact, a lot of businesses and courses are replacing some college education. How do you make use of all these people willing to learn virtually?

You can sell them courses, programs, memberships, and masterminds! I’m sure there is a particular topic you consider yourself an expert. Take advantage of this. You might be thinking, “There is an abundance of free blogs and tutorials on YouTube, will people buy my course?” Yes, of course!

You can compete with these free courses by promising to deliver not just free education, but actual transformation. For example, a lot of coaches have free tips and techniques on how to write a book. But, if you promise them that they can write a book in just 3 weeks, then your course must have something that’s uniquely different from the other courses.

In other words, you don’t just sell your course as the product, you sell the customer’s own potential when they buy and use your product! Sounds exciting? The all-in-one platform, Teachable, helps you create and sell courses.

If you have an existing reputation as an expert, then you can start selling as soon as you create your course. If not, then you can start building your reputation by giving away free courses just to generate leads. Eventually, these leads will be converted to sales.

Here are a few more tips in building your own online course:

1. Keep your content engaging – A typical text-based lesson might be a little boring for you students. You can add features like videos or audios for a better learning experience.
2. Shorten your lessons – Lessons that are too long like an hour long or more are harder to finish and even remember. Keep them at 5-30 minutes.
3. Find out your audience’s pain points and offer good transformation – Step into your audience’s shoes and know what they need. From that, enable them by giving them the knowledge to transform. For example, you could create a course to teach people how to get more leads for their business. They probably don’t have enough money to hire an agency to do it for them or would rather take full control in acquiring leads for their business. With your course, you can offer convenient payment terms, with lessons available at their own pace, and a good guide to help them start acquiring leads for their own business.
4. Take time to promote your course – Just as you give much thought to creating your lessons, make an effort to promote your course so you make the money.

The One Funnel Away Challenge is a good place to start if you want to start creating your own information product.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a type of online business model that allows you to operate an ecommerce store online without actually owning a warehouse, maintaining inventory, or even delivering the orders or products to the customers. But how does it work? The customer orders a product at your online store and you fulfill the order by placing an order through the business who actually carries the item. This business is known as the dropshipper or the supplier. They send the item out to your customer acting in your behalf. With this method, the only money you are spending is when you place the order. Unlike a traditional store where you invest in buying the products in bulk first and hope that it sells. Traditional stores are risky and most of the time causes a profit loss if the product is not popular. With dropshipping, you don’t risk any investment. Wayfair is an example of a popular dropshipping store. I bet you didn’t know that!

Although this type of business model will cut your business expenses for delivery and inventory, you have to be careful as some businesses who opt for dropshipping receive poor customer satisfactory. Some factors include, late delivery from the supplier, wrong items delivered, and product damage. You can lessen these incidents if you manage your dropshipping business well by finding suppliers who do a great job.

To get started with your dropshipping business, all you need to do is to sign up for Shopify. Shopify is an online ecommerce store that requires no coding of your own. It’s really easy to get started. You can read this tutorial on how to start your own ecommerce business without having your own inventory.

Online Consulting & Coaching Business

Being a consultant or coach requires you to be an expert in a particular field who provide professional feedback or suggestions to businesses and individuals. If you’re good at anything, then you may want to consider doing an online consulting or coaching business. Some of the most common types of consultants and coaches are health and fitness coaches, business consultants, and even general life coaches. With the use of video conferencing platforms, doing consultancy online is very possible.  You can be one of those highly paid consultants out there. Although being a consultant could really be promising, you have to consider a few things before becoming one.

1. Am I Qualified To Be A Consultant or Coach? – Depending on your niche and chosen field, you have to make sure that you’re an expert of it. You will be asked on things pertaining to that field and your clients will expect profound suggestions from you. The clients are paying you for your expertise. The more you know, the higher they may pay you. Consultants are more hand on and teach how to do things, while a coach helps you overcome certain problems.
2. Do I Need Some Certification? – Some fields require you to become licensed before you can act as a consultant while others do not require it. Make sure that you secure some certifications of your chosen field if it requires certain certification or licensing.
3. How Much Should I Charge My Client? – Appropriate pricing may be a factor for you to become a successful consultant or coach. You have to decide what your pricing is. You can choose whether you charge your client by project, or by time duration. Do a little research and you can get an idea on what your pricing should be. Know your price and commit to deliver the services expected from your client. Consulting or coaching may be a huge step to take, but when done right, this business could really be promising.
4. Where to Find My Clients? – Perhaps the most important thing you should have when starting an online consulting business is the ability to build leads. There are many different ways to acquire leads. The most common are getting your website on top of search results, using social media, paid advertising, and referrals. All of these ways will work really well if you have an effective sales funnel to support it. The best method for this is getting ClickFunnels. With ClickFunnels, you can be sure to convert traffic into sales with their tested and proven pre-designed templates. You can also customize your lead capture funnel to maximize its function. You can also leverage your social media following to find your clients. Fitness coaches, for example, use Instagram to grow their brand. The most important trick is to be honest and natural about yourself. Most people would love to see how your regular day goes by as health-conscious person. Of course, don’t forget to interact and promote your brand and content.

Graphic Design

Graphic designers have become a sought-after job online. If you are into designing, then you may want to earn from your talent. Business owners are always in need of logos, business cards, and other promotional products. Graphic designers play a huge role in the success of these materials. If you want to become a graphic designer, you’ll need to build a portfolio of your designs. Companies are more than willing to pay you for your design services after seeing your portfolio.

Some of the most common outputs of graphic designers are logos, product packaging, social media graphics, magazine designs, and so much more.

There are actually no set of requirements to become a graphic designer. There are classes available online. Like most skills, graphic design can be learned and improved upon. Be patient with yourself. If you really want to pursue a graphic design business, always challenge yourself to be creative and to keep improving. Many graphic designers started giving their service with a significantly low cost until they finally developed their skills as well as established their portfolio and become highly paid graphic designers. Of course, if your portfolio is so good, you don’t need to low ball your pricing. Set your prices for what you believe you are worth.

Checkout some of the tips on how to become a graphic designer below:

1. Learn How To Use Adobe – Now that we’re in the digital age, there is really no need to manually draw your designs. Although it would be helpful, it’s more important to have a reliable software to help you with your digital designs, and combine and refine your design concepts. Adobe is what professional designers use. You can sign up for Adobe here to get started with your designs.
2. Learn design concepts – Yes, it is true that you don’t need a degree or certification to become a graphic designer, but of course, it will be a big plus for you if you learn the graphic design concepts and theories. It gives you ideas on color balance, special balance, scaling, and more. Gestalt principles and color theory are so very important in graphic design and you can tell the designers who received graphic design education from those who didn’t.
3. Learn to find clients – Once you feel confident with the skills and knowledge that you have, you need to start finding clients. You can jump to Upwork and sign up for an account. It’s the biggest and most helpful marketplace to find your first graphic design client. Some graphic designers have been really successful in booking a regular gig through Upwork. You can also make use of Fiverr. Fivver is a marketplace where you can create your own services that people can buy. Unlike Upwork where you bid on businesses’ project.
4. Learn to accept feedback of your work – Along your way, you may find a client that will not be happy with your work. In order for you to improve faster as a graphic designer, you have to learn to accept feedback from your clients or from other designers. If it’s about your design, don’t take it personally. Learn from it, and more importantly, act on it.

Web Design Agency

The idea of putting up a web design agency can be a bit daunting, but when done right, having a successful web design agency is more promising than you can imagine. This makes web design agency one of the most sought online business ideas in 2022. Web design primarily targets on the look of a website and it’s other web pages. However, successful web designs are those that create customers.

If you plan to put up a web design agency, you might want to consider hiring a professional web designer working on color balances, logos, branding, and overall designs. Another wise move is to utilize web page builders to create page layout and content layout according to your taste. The Elementor plugin or Divi plugin for WordPress is an easy to use page builder that can be of great help to creating outstanding layouts. No technical coding is needed because it’s only a matter of dragging and dropping contents to build your client’s desired web site.

Remember that a website cannot be success through beautiful designs and content only. You must also give a superb user experience through styles and functionalities. The most important aspect in building a web site is making sure that it converts a viewer into a customer.

Below are some of the basic tips that you might want to consider when creating websites for clients so that they can get a return on their investment and refer you to other businesses:

1. Create Easy To Read Content – You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your client’s potential customers. Users will be able to go through the site more efficiently and take in the text with much ease if your contents are easy to read.
2. Keep Your Site Easy To Navigate – Don’t send users on a hunt when they are on the site. Keep it simple and easy to navigate. This is one key element that affects greatly the user experience.  If you’re utilizing menu, they should be placed in a visible section (ideally on the top of your website). It is also important to place your most important and appealing content in the most visible area, enough for your readers to know your service without having to navigate.
3. Create an Opt-In –  Websites are great for providing a ton of information, but what they should be doing is collecting leads. That’s the only way client’s can acquire customers. So to do this, as a web design agency, you should always provide an opt-in option for your client’s websites. You can do this by having your clients sign up for an email marketing software like ActiveCampaign and linking it with their WordPress website.

The tips above are just some of the basic tips that you can apply. It could be overwhelming at first, but with the correct tips, it’s not actually difficult. Make money designing websites by following a few more ideas here.

Lead Generation Agency

Lead generation is vital for all businesses. If a business needs customers, then lead generation is something you can offer them. What business doesn’t need more customers? None! They all need it, which is why this is one of the best businesses online to start in 2022.

Lead generation is the process of transforming potential customers or leads into actual customers of any business services. If you’re someone who’s interested in generating leads, not just for your own business but for others as well, then putting up a lead generation agency is a profitable idea.

First, you need these three important techniques:

1. Lead Magnet –Lead magnet is a critical element of lead generation. Lead magnets are simply a lead generation technique to get more visitors to give their email contacts. Instead of asking them to click the ‘subscribe’ button, a lead magnet is when you give something for free in exchange for an email address.
   It could be a consultation, a trial, a free e-book, a video, etc. This method will make any businesses’ email list grow much faster and in a much shorter time. You can utilize ActiveCampaign for your email marketing.
   Once you have a lead magnet, and a landing page, you can trigger automated emails that delivers the lead magnet once it is filled out. You will need ClickFunnels to create the landing page for your lead magnet.
2. ClickFunnels – ClickFunnels can help you with generating leads for your clients and simplifying. It is an online sales funnel builder that allows you to design and create sales pages and landing pages to effectively manage an entire sales funnel.
   It helps businesses market, sell products online, and it is a highly recommended tool for generating leads. ClickFunnels is the number one tool that every lead generating agency uses because it is so easy to use. ClickFunnels also is responsible for making sales funnels a huge hit.
   The best way to learn about lead generation is by reading this free book. It explains exactly how to produce leads and gain more customers so that you can implement it to your clients’ businesses as well as for your own lead generation agency.
   To really get to know the ins and outs of ClickFunnels, you should create your own offer. That way, you are using the tool and get to know how everything works. To get the in depth skill of creating leads and sales funnels, the One Funnel Away Challenge is the best course to take. You can set up your own sales funnels that acquire clients for your own lead generating agency, as well as learn the fundamentals of building lead generations and sales funnels for your own clients.
3. Facebook Ads or Google Ads – The last thing you need for generating leads for your clients is the ability to know how to drive traffic to your landing page, lead magnet, and sales funnels. The quickest way to drive traffic is through Facebook Ads and Google Ads. You learn how to do some Facebook advertising within the One Funnel Away Challenge.

To learn more about the steps in starting your own lead generating agency business in 2022, check out this blog article.

Amazon FBA

Amazon FBA stands for Fulfillment By Amazon. This is a great online business idea not only because it’s from Amazon, but this has been proven by many individuals to be very profitable. Another plus for this is that Amazon will help and do the hard task for you. This is a business model which you leverage Amazon’s powerful customer base and distribution network. You just have to search for profitable products and Amazon will do the rest, from warehousing, fulfilling orders, handling transaction, and following up with customers.

You will need to sign up for an account as an Amazon FBA seller to get started. You will need to have a debit/credit card for deposits and tax information of some sort. There are two types of accounts, individual account and professional account. The difference is that for an individual account, there will be no monthly subscription fee needed. But like any other free accounts out there, your account will be subjected to a number of limitations. For a professional account, there will be a monthly subscription fee of $39.99, and you will not be bound by the limitations of an individual account. If you really want to leverage your entrepreneurial spirit through Amazon, then professional account may be your best option. But if you foresee that this online business idea is temporary and small scale, then go for a free individual account. To make sure that you aren’t wasting your money on trying to set up your own Amazon FBA business, I highly recommend taking a course that actually shows you how to do the whole process. Check out this free training.

What Do You Need To Do?

Yes, Amazon handles the hard tasks for you. But that does not mean you’re free of any tasks at all. You will be responsible in choosing which products to sell. You can sell almost anything you want. You will also have to keep your inventory levels on Amazon to ensure that your products stay available for orders. And also, you may need to do some marketing and advertising especially if you’re selling a lowly-ranked brand name products.

If you’re a beginner, take a look at some of the common mistakes that you must avoid if you want to be an Amazon seller:

1. Sourcing A Product Of Low Quality – The success of this online business idea is dependent on the quality of your product. Make sure that your sourcing a high quality product. You don’t want to get any negative reviews on Amazon. Invest time and money on researching and analyzing functionality, durability, and quality.
2. Selling A Product You’re Passionate About – Of course, it is normal and even best if your selling a product that you’re so passionate about. It is crucial that you know very well and believe in your product. But be open to the responses of the public. Focus your attention to sales data and do not be biased with your judgment. The product that you like may not really be sellable in the market and you don’t want to sell a product that does not appeal to the people. Do not so attached to your product and just be objective on what really is the product that sells.
3. Skipping The Inspection Process – It’s not 100% guaranteed that all the products that comes off the manufacturing is in good quality. Make sure that you have inspected your products and have an organized inventory of your products, good and defective ones. You don’t want to shoulder the cost associated with the defects of your products. Your reputation may also be at risk when those flawed products reach your customers.
4. Placing Your Product To Incorrect Category – When you become an Amazon seller, you will be asked to categorize your product. During this process, keep in mind that you have to categorize correctly your product. It is never a good idea to categorize your product in a lower competition as a way to increase sales. Uncategorized product could be filtered out of the critical search results.
5. Sourcing An Expensive Product – Being an Amazon FBA seller does not always make you successful. You should allow net profit from your sourced products and all other necessary expenses. Have an extensive research with all the pricing. Between sourcing, promotions, Amazon fees, shipping, and more, there could be a number of expenses to be aware of before you dive in.

Social Media Manager

Becoming a social media manager has become a really hot online business idea for 2022. It may be an easy task, but a social media manager carries immense responsibility for the business. One mistake of posting content on social media can do great harm in the brand of your company. Hence, social media managers need to be well trained and careful in their job. They are in charge of representing the business across social channels as the sole voice of the company. They create content, compile promotional campaigns, respond to comments, and a lot more. Through social networks such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, social media managers should improve a client’s website traffic, boost marketing campaigns, build an engaged following, and help drive more sales.

Their roles and functions may not be limited to content and comments, as they are also responsible for creating and posting shareable photos and videos. They do marketing strategy based on the data results of their other campaigns. In simple terms, social media managers handles all correspondence and posts in the business social media account. This online business idea becomes so lucrative as businesses are willing to pay for your social media skills. This task however becomes crazy difficult if there are a lot of postings, comments, and events in a single account. You can utilize a powerful app called Tailwind. It is a social media scheduling tool that assist managing  social medias. This generates real results in a much shorter time. This app is used for Instagram and Pinterest. Pins and posts can easily be scheduled, get accurate analytics, and monitor a brand’s performance.

If you really want to pursue becoming a social media manager, then you may want to apply the basic tips and strategies below that you should do and remember:

1. Plan –  This can’t be stressed enough. An effective social media manager has a plan laid out for upcoming events and activities.  Plan ahead so you can come out with best ideas pertaining to the social media account. Plan your calendars and your future transactions.
2. Focus on Quality – Since you’ll be responsible for all the contents, it is not enough to just have contents coming on a regular basis. Content is ‘King’ and quality does matter. You would want to make sure that you are posting content that is good enough to be retweeted, reshared, and passed on.
3. Improve Your Communication Skills – This is a core requirement to become successful in this online business idea. There will be a lot of communications involved in managing social media accounts.  Be customer-oriented in all your communications. You don’t want to post any negative remark about a customer or about your company. It is also important that you understand very well the communications happening in all the accounts as misinterpretation of communication can harm your business.
4. Involve Your Audience In The Communication – Do not underestimate the impact that your audience can make in your communications channel. It’s not all the time that you have better content ideas than your audience. Listen to them and consider their voices as well.
5. Be Flexible – Generally, the job of a social media manager is not bound to 8-hour straight shift. This may not be a good idea for some but you can somehow think of it as a benefit as well. It gives you a level of flexibility in work hours. Social media is a world of interaction that can happen at any time of the day. Be flexible and manage your time.

Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is an individual who provides support services to other businesses from a remote location. Due to the advancement of technologies and higher accessibilities to internet, virtual assistant jobs become possible. Many are actually claiming that support services that virtual assistants provide are just comparable to the quality of services that non virtual workers provide. Hence, some businesses don’t actually mind that their assistants are not physically there for as long as they can deliver the tasks assigned to them.

If you want to pursue in this business, a basic and general understanding of internet and online sites is a good place to start. Virtual assistants do a lot of things such as but not limited to Event management, preparing reports, emailing clients, social media management, managing schedules, booking hotels and flights, marketing tasks, content writing, and many more. In fact, the list is never ending! An ideal virtual assistant should be flexible to the demands of the business. The more seasoned the virtual assistants are, the higher rate they can charge their employers or clients.

There are a lot of businesses who need virtual assistance and one of the most reliable avenues to find virtual assistant job postings is through Upwork.

Upwork is the largest online talent solution where businesses and independent skilled professionals including virtual assistants connect and collaborate remotely. What you need to do to get started is to create an Upwork account and prepare a good profile that has your experiences and competencies. Then you can start looking for virtual assistant jobs through the job postings available. The application is pretty straightforward and the process is undeniably much faster than a typical job application. Upwork is the most recommended platform and if you take your virtual assistant career seriously, then you are in the right platform. Upwork provides the best opportunities for aspiring virtual assistants out there.

It’s important to keep in mind that a lack of skills or experience should never be a deterrent. You just have to keep the motivation high, have the desire to learn, and improve on your communication skills. If you have hesitation because you don’t have the skills to become an effective virtual assistant, then it is recommended to get a course to learn a specific virtual assistant job thru learning platforms such as Lynda.com. You can learn better software technology, business, virtual assistant skills, and many more through this online learning platform. Lynda.com is a recommended subscription based online learning platform with many courses provided by experts in different business and creative topics. Virtual assistant skills are surely a part of what you can acquire through this learning tool.

Another step that you can leverage your virtual assistant skills is to join Facebook groups that specifically talks all about the virtual assistance jobs. Not only you will learn more skills by it, but you can also strengthen your connections and find more clients through referrals and recommendations.

Affiliate Marketing

If you want to start a blog and/or have a social media accounts with a good number of followers, you can explore affiliate marketing as one of the online business you can do from home. Affiliate marketing is basically about promoting another company’s product or service and earning a commission in exchange.

This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to earn without having to create and sell your own product. You only need to create a linked connection between a buyer and the seller. Once the sale is made, the commission is automatically credited to your affiliate account. You don’t have to deal with customer service and returns either. The company does all that for you.

There are many ways to earn through affiliate marketing, but first you have to sign up for an affiliate program. Amazon is one of the largest companies with successful affiliate marketers. ShareASale is another platform where you can find things to promote. There are plenty of other online companies that also offer affiliate programs. There are literally millions of products that you can choose to promote.  With a website and a social media proof, you can easily get approved to be an affiliate. Some affiliate programs don’t even require you to have a blog or social proof.

Once you’re in, you will need to get a unique tracking link and use that link whenever you post about that product. Affiliate programs use different payment terms. The most common are the following:

• Pay Per Click (PPC): You earn a commission based on the number of visitors redirected by your affiliate site to the advertiser’s website.
• Pay Per Sale (PPS): You earn money online when the sale is completed. The advertiser gives you a percentage of the sale.
• Pay Per Lead (PPL): You earn money online when the visitor from your site inputs his/her contact info on the advertiser website.

As you notice, affiliate marketing can be a passive income source for you. This is especially true when you are running ads to your affiliate offers. Check out how to make $100 a day with affiliate marketing through running ads from this blog post.

Affiliate marketing may be highly competitive, but if you find a product that you have confidence in promoting or one that you know a lot about, it would be very easy to encourage people to click through your link.

One of the most profitable products you can choose to promote is information products. These can be e-books, membership sites, or courses. Most companies give 50% or more in commission when you successfully refer a buyer to them. You have to find an information product under your niche, learn about it, and describe what it does. Of course, you have to apply some SEO if you are doing affiliate marketing through a blog. Copywriting skills are also required when doing affiliate marketing, especially if you are doing affiliate marketing through advertisement promotions.

It is important to choose only a few products you can focus on. Yes, there are a lot of attractive products, but if you can’t focus on them deeply, it would be difficult to reach a market. It is also not enough to just use one traffic source. You have to get your targeted traffic through several channels. So aside from a blog, you must utilize your social media pages, and even run advertisements to reach a wider market.

Affiliate marketing can be an easy way to earn money, but you need to have the right mindset and tools to successfully do so. To learn how to do affiliate marketing the right way, check out the secrets to succeed in affiliate marketing here so that you are attracting the people who want to buy.

Create your own blog or use ClickFunnels to start your own affiliate marketing business!

By this time, you may already have a little idea on what online business idea you want to start from home in 2022. These are just 10 of the many earning opportunities online and all of them can be operated successfully online. The list can actually continue endlessly. And with some niche research and exploration, you will surely find the best online business that works for you!