8 TOP Business Ideas You Can Start With NO MONEY ($300/DAY)

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives.

Hey, guys, it’s Sharon Tseung. And today we’re gonna go over eight business ideas that you can start with zero to low capital. So you might be someone who’s always wanting to start a business, you don’t want to work for someone else, and you want the flexibility of running your own company, but maybe you don’t have a lot of money to work with. And it can be difficult. Starting a business usually requires time, money and risk. But contrary to popular belief, there are actually many ways to start a business without having a ton of money to begin. So whether you’re trying to build your income and wealth work on a side hustle while working a full time job or wanting to quit your job to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to create this list of business ideas that requires zero to low capital that may be interesting to you, I myself have essentially tried all the ideas from this list from doing each of these routes, I found that they all work and it’s just a matter of which one makes sense for you. It’s important to evaluate your time, money, strengths and passions so that you can decide which one really makes sense for you. So as we go through each side hustle, make sure to take notes and then evaluate at the end. So let’s just get right into it. The first one is to pick up free items and resell them, you can get free items on Craigslist and offer up, fix them up and then resell them. So according to this article, it says depending on how much time you’re willing to put into it, I could easily make an extra 50 to $100 a week, even if I just flipped one or two things that is basically one afternoon of work. There are people earning a ton of money through this. And if you want to make more money, you usually go with the higher ticket items like appliances and couches, which work really well. People like Ryan Panetta used to make five figures a month doing couch flipping and now he obviously flips homes and does other things. And also appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators are high ticket and can make a lot if you flip them. So what you can do is get the appliances from postings on Craigslist or offer up you can usually find them for free, even ones that are fully working. And you can even offer to go to their place and pick it up and take it off their hands. What you want to do is make sure you clean them up and repair what needs to be repaired and then sell them you can even sell it on the same platform you got it on once you have a buyer, you can even ask the new buyer what they’re going to do with their old appliance or things like that, if they say they’re just going to toss it away as that you’ll take it and do the same process all over again. The key here is to make sure that you do know actually how to fix up all these appliances. Once you have it already. Make sure you repair it to the best of your abilities, take better photos, write up a really good listing and just market it really well. And you may also consider selling your items on eBay Facebook marketplace offer up or Amazon number two business idea is print on demand. So basically, with print on demand, you are uploading your own custom designs, and a company is going to print and fulfill your orders for you every time we get a sale. So I currently do this with merch on demand. It is a great platform, I have tons of shirts selling and I would say on average, I’m making one to two grand every month on the holidays, it’s more like three to four grand but I haven’t touched this avenue for maybe four years or so. So that’s the beauty of it, it can actually be really passive, especially with merch on demand, because you don’t even have to deal with customer support, Amazon’s gonna do everything for you there and they pay you out in royalties. So if you are interested in merch on demand, go ahead and apply on merch.amazon.com I have a whole tutorial on my YouTube channel where you can watch through and see how to upload shirts, how to craft the designs how to best make the description and everything like that. And a lot of people have told me they couldn’t get into merch by Amazon, which is what merch on demand used to be called. But I have friends who are recently getting accepted. So I know that they are still accepting applicants. And aside from merch on demand, there are many other platforms like red bubble tea, public society, six Zazzle. These are all places that you can sell apparel and make money you can put it on their own marketplace so that if they get discovered you get sales. So the great thing about this is you can put the same design on all these other platforms and sell them there are other companies like prenta, phi and Printful that do the backend for you where they will connect to maybe a Shopify store or an Etsy store. And they will do the fulfillment for you. But because these are the backend companies, they don’t really have a marketplace that you would try to put your listings on and get discoverability that way, you would have to start your own shop on Etsy or Shopify. So again, there are tons of different platforms, go ahead and create an account on these different ones and try it out. For example, Teespring, you can go ahead and try that you can sell items like shirts, mugs, phone cases, it’s not just limited to apparel, there are different things that you can actually print your designs on now. And when you have the listing, you can even advertise it to your friends and family. When you get orders. These companies will print and fulfill your orders for you so that you just get commissions and it’s just really passive business idea number three is to sell paid online courses. So one way is to sell it on sites like Udemy and Skillshare. And these do have their own marketplaces so you can get sales without having to really promote them because if you rank well with SEO, it’ll be on top of their search and people looking for your course may buy it or you can start selling your courses or services directly From your social media handles by creating an audience, if you’re going to build a brand and do it that way, I do recommend teachable, I’m going to link it down below. And that’s what I use to make my courses. They just make it really easy to upload your video curriculum as well as any accompanying text or audio or photos. They also have features where you can implement an affiliate program or give people coupons and things like that. The great thing about online courses is there aren’t recurring manufacturing or shipping costs to worry about. So your margins are going to be really high. It’s a very scalable way of making money comparing it to a public school teacher, for example, public school teachers maybe teach about 20 to 40 students at a time. But if you make online courses, you can teach hundreds of people who sign up for the course and at a global scale, whoever finds your course and buys it, they’re gonna get a lot of value from it. The trick is you got to make sure you figure out what makes for a good digital product, especially for your audience if you have one. So think about your strengths. Think about what is something you are knowledgeable enough to teach as well as if you do have an audience. You can even survey people and see what they want to learn from you. Another way is to go on Udemy and look at the popular courses, see which ones have a High search volume, as well as maybe not that much competition where you can actually stand out with courses, the sky’s the limit, you can make a few $100 to six or seven figures. I know many seven figure creators now who are doing really well selling digital products and courses. So make sure you understand the market really create a comprehensive curriculum that has high value, make sure that you get testers and feedback on it. So you can really hone in on what will make it even better, and then sell it for what you think it’s worth. If you do want a tutorial on how to create online courses, I have a few videos on that on my YouTube channel. So go ahead and check those out. Number four, you can sell digital products on Etsy. So this is not just courses, it can be anything like Photoshop templates, and Microsoft templates, which is what I actually sell on my Etsy shop. It’s still making money to this day, which is really awesome because I haven’t touched it in a very long time digital products are intangible assets or media that can be distributed online without you having to buy physical inventory. That’s a huge strength. You don’t need to worry about things like that things going wrong. You also don’t need to spend a lot of money on product so it can be very passive. And if it’s a digital product, the platforms are going to automatically fulfill your orders for you. So some ideas of profitable digital products include ebooks, logos, spreadsheets, videos, digital art, I sell wedding card templates, photography, mini session templates, resume templates, media kit templates, there’s so many different things you can sell. So once you start getting your Etsy shop going selling these different things, you can also sell it on Creative Market, which is another place to do it as well. You can make anywhere from $50 a week to $1,000 a month or even more by selling printables on Etsy but it really depends on your product if it’s really high quality or not as well as your pricing and SEO and things like that. If you are interested in selling digital products on Etsy I do have a course you guys can check it out. It’s called the Etsy entrepreneur, it’s in the link in my description. It’ll help you step by step with creating your shop building your first few products as well as how to market them to get sales. Number five, you can start your own podcast. So with content there are different ways that people digest it and podcast is a great way a lot of people listen to audiobooks and podcasts while they’re on their commute while they’re at the gym. So podcasts are very popular. The way to monetize your podcast is usually through sponsorships, the sponsors might sponsor like a few episodes at a time and they will pay you per placement. So sometimes in the podcast, you might notice like a mid ad where the host talks about a different product and that’s where the sponsorship comes in. And if you have a lot of lessons, you may be able to charge a lot for a sponsor. Also, if you don’t get a ton of lessons, it’s okay because maybe you are niche on a certain topic, you are attracting a specific demographic that really resonates with a company that’s how you can attract different brands even if you don’t have a ton of listen. So with podcasts, not only sponsorships you can also make money through affiliate marketing, which we’re gonna go into in a later business idea number six, you can start a drop shipping business drop shipping is a fulfillment model where a third party supplier stores and ships inventory to customers on your behalf. So whenever you get sales, they’re gonna do it for you. It’s kind of like print on demand. And the great thing is you don’t need to handle those products yourself a third party is going to help you do that. So what usually happens is maybe you have a Shopify store and you curate products from one or more suppliers into your online store. You build a brand that focuses on a specific niche like for cat owners, people who love health and wellness, you can create brands around that curate products that you really truly believe in whenever people buy from your store, you’re actually gonna be dropship to them, meaning that whenever you get the sale it will notify the third party company who is going to do all the fulfillment on your behalf. You just need to know that you are still responsible for your own marketing and customer service. One of the things is people do underestimate the amount of marketing you have to do for your brand. So even though it might be free or low capital to set up for example Shopify is around 20 something dollars a month you might Need to pay for paid ads or you have to build up a social media brand to promote your products and brands. So don’t underestimate those different costs. So one way I did drop shipping was I started a Shopify store, basically an apparel site with trendy clothing and I would drop shipping from Aliexpress through a plugin called oberlo. I eventually decided to stop that business. But if dropshipping interests you, and you can put a lot of your energy and effort into it, go ahead and check it out. Because people still make a lot of money doing this. Number seven, you can start a YouTube channel. So obviously I love YouTube and I have been doing this for many years now, not just on this personal finance channel, but I used to make music as well I did that and then I pivoted to this but it can really open up a lot of opportunities can make money through sponsorships, affiliate marketing, selling products, ad revenue, obviously. So

if we’re talking ad revenue, the cost per 1000 impressions varies for each niche because it depends on what the advertisers pay for the ad space. So for a personal finance channel, the CPM is actually higher because a lot of these companies are willing to pay more for ad placement on your videos. If you want to monetize your channel, it might take a while because you do need to build up an audience and views because YouTube requires 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours in order for you to get monetized. So make sure you’re doing this because you are passionate about the topic. If you aren’t you may burn out before you even get to that point, I was initially able to get my channel to around 4k a month, but it’s dropped to around 2.5 to three km passive income per month. That’s the thing though the ad revenue can drop if videos don’t rank as well later on. So if you want to start a YouTube channel, make sure you figure out your niche, make sure you’re creating valuable content and then learn from other successful creators around you also use tools like to buddy so that you can use that to optimize your keywords and titles and tags, which will help you get discovered easier. The main thing here though, is watch time above all, you’re gonna get a lot of views on a video if people constantly just watch through the whole thing I would say that’s the main determining factor of virality of the video. And then secondly is engagement, you want to make sure people are commenting and liking the video as well. So if you like this video, go ahead and smash that like button. YouTube has really changed my life and I really advocate it. So if you guys want to try it out, go ahead and do it. Talk about something you care about and make sure you’re consistent with it and don’t just drop off you’ll end up learning a lot over time and you can see if it makes sense for you. Last but not least number eight is affiliate marketing. So with affiliate marketing, you don’t need money to start you’re promoting a product or service for another company in exchange for a commission on the sales you generate. Basically market your favorite products with unique referral links. Whenever you get sales, you make money. So it is both low cost and low risk. All you need really is a website, YouTube channel or someplace you can promote your links. Even if you don’t have an audience, you do have a circle you have your friends, your family and you probably have products you recommend. If people buy through your link on something that you recommend that you use a lot you will get commissions for it even if it doesn’t pan out as basically $0 to start because you are just pulling links and posting them you’re not risking money. In order to do affiliate marketing, you should probably decide on a platform because it is much easier to build an audience and increase your affiliate sales by selecting a platform you will mostly use so whether that’s blogging, YouTube, podcast, Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever you can do affiliate marketing through these means even through email, there’s so many ways to communicate with other people. Next you want to niche down like I mentioned, make sure you are passionate about it, and also specific with it. So instead of choosing a food niche, try something even more specific, like vegan food and then become a leader in your space, then you’re gonna find affiliate programs to join to sign up for affiliate networks like impact or ShareASale. And find products there or you can google affiliate program and then insert your favorite company. See if your favorite companies have referral programs, Amazon has pretty much the biggest affiliate program and it’s the easiest one to get started with. You guys can check out Amazon Associates, We all shop on Amazon, I’m sure you guys have something that you recommend through Amazon and affiliates usually get about four to 8% of commissions, which isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things. And there are other affiliate programs that may pay more. But if you have high ticket items that you promote, for example, if a customer buys a camera for $1,000, the affiliate might get about 40 bucks. And if you get a bunch of those sales, you could actually make a lot of money. Next you want to create great content that’s going to drive traffic to your affiliate site. Go the extra mile, make sure your content solves your audience’s problems and then you’re going to put links to those pieces of content. You guys want a more in depth tutorial on all of this, go ahead and check out my affiliate marketing tutorial that I recently put up, I kind of go into the step by step of thinking about the customer journey, the funnel, the keywords and everything like that. But really you want to build trust and provide value and that’s really the most important thing make sure that whatever you’re talking about is something you recommend or actually use affiliate marketing is essentially a win win for everyone. You provide value for your audience. The product owner receives sales and you receive commissions. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode on a Eight business ideas that you guys can start with zero to low capital. There’s so many ways to make money now I am constantly reporting more and more side hustles on this channel, but these are some of my favorite methods of doing so and I’ve tried all these different methods, they all work you just have to decide which one resonates with you and which one you’re gonna go after. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai