While ‘low cost’ and ‘high profit’ are subjective, this post will show you businesses you can start with as little as $50 or less (and some with nothing at all).
You’ll notice all the ideas are all internet-based, so you won’t need much more than a website, if even. That means as a bonus, you can do all of these from home.
Online Courses
Online courses are one of our favorite types of businesses. In fact, this blog you’re on now, which has been around for over 20 years, sells many online courses.
With online courses, you make a product once, and then you can sell it as many times as you want. You don’t have to rerecord the course again every time you make a sale, and you won’t need a physical warehouse to hold stock like how a traditional business would.
Online courses businesses can make a LOT of profit. We have multiple courses that have sold many millions of dollars worth, and a lot of our students and readers have grown sizable course businesses as well.
One of the best courses we’ve taught our students is Earnable. If you’re keen, check out this sneak peek inside the Earnable course library!
Costs to set up an online course:
While our courses are quite highly produced with full camera crews and a recording studio, that definitely isn’t the norm. Phone cameras are excellent these days, and anyone can record good enough video courses to sell just using their phones. If you don’t want to use your phone, you can consider using the screen recording software Loom, to record your screen as you narrate through your course. That way, you can jump straight into creating your course material without having to worry about additional setup costs.
As for hosting a course, you can use a platform like Skillshare or Udemy to host your course material. Purchasing and setting up your own website isn’t even necessary. In fact, there are many creators out there who simply put up their courses on Notion or similar tools and share out the page links to their buyers.
For marketing your course, you can use social media to share your course to the people that you’re already connected with, instead of having to pay for ads. I’m not saying you need to be a social media influencer with thousands of followers either, you can market your course to your connections, and chances are you will get some sales from them given that they’re already people who know and trust you.
For our business at IWT, we use several marketing channels to promote our courses. For example:
- My podcast which has over 200,000 downloads per episode.
- My YouTube channel with over 500,000 subscribers.
- My Instagram (800K followers) & TikTok (100K followers).
- And our Insider’s newsletter that we send to over 800,000 readers.
All of which are completely free to start.
I know that having so many marketing channels to manage sounds overwhelming, but keep in mind that IWT has been around for over 20 years. You don’t need to be on every single platform all at once, just start with one and keep increasing your reach as you grow.
Don’t think you have what it takes to make a course? You don’t need to be a super expert with 10 PhDs to make a course. There are courses on all sorts of topics like gardening, investing in the stock market, and even courses on how to make courses out there, so if there’s something you’re passionate about, there’s probably someone who’d love to learn from you.
We feature stories of successful course businesses on our Insider’s newsletter which we send to over 800,00 readers, check it out if you haven’t already:
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is similar to setting up an online course business, except you don’t need to make an actual course. Instead, you just sell other people’s products and make a cut!
Sometimes it’s an online product you can sell from someone you trust in your industry. Or, sometimes this involves selling physical products by sharing your unique Amazon links.
The easiest way to start with affiliate marketing is by joining an affiliate program. Although it varies from company to company, the basic premise is that you’ll get a special link that tracks sales, and you’ll receive a commission from those sales, that’s it!
Social Media Management
The above options are high profit and low cost, but can take some time to start up. But guess what? There are already a ton of course businesses, affiliate businesses, bloggers out there and they all need help with their marketing in some sort of way.
Instead of starting your own business, you can offer services in a field like social media management to an existing business. Just focus on one marketing channel, like Instagram marketing for example, but you can have several different clients at once.
There are already a ton of resources out there (which are free) that you can use to learn social media management, and I recommend you dive deep into the platform you personally enjoy and spend the most time on.
Start off as a sole freelancer to build your portfolio and reputation, and perhaps if you get big enough, you can even hire other people to work for you and form an agency.
Have you read my NYT Bestselling book yet? If not, watch this 10 minute summary while you’re here!
Or, download the first chapter right to your device:
Blogging
With blogging, you just focus on making content that people want to read and won’t even worry about sales. If you reach a point where you get high enough traffic to your blog, you can monetize your blog by selling ads.
However, if you don’t have a huge audience just yet, there are also other methods to monetizing your blog. For example, you can charge for paid subscriptions on Substack, where paying readers will get exclusive content from you that’s not available to your free readers.
With the barrage of AI written content that’s being thrown on the internet nowadays, my personal tip is to write in your own voice, because ultimately, readers will want to read from another human and that’s how a deep connection with your audience can be built.
Creating content doesn’t have to be difficult, in fact, I wrote a complete Ultimate Guide to Remarkable Content which you can use to kickstart your blog, just tell me where to send it:
Freelance Writing
There are a lot of different things you can start a freelance business with. Writing is one of them.
Writing is an umbrella term for many different kinds of writing, you can choose from content writing, ghostwriting, or something higher value like copywriting – basically sales writing.
All you need to start a freelance writing business is your laptop. You can use a freelancer platform like Upwork to get started. It’s going to take a while for you to build a strong, reputable portfolio given that you’ll be in the market with many experienced freelance writers out there, but clients are aplenty and with the right skills and attitude, you should be able to land your first freelancing client sooner rather than later.
In my experience, copywriters are the writers who make the most money, given that they write sales pages/sales pitches for their clients. Their value is derived from the money they make their clients, not from the number of hours they work.
So if you’re going to give writing a shot, try out freelance copywriting! And who knows, maybe you’ll write copy for an online course business and be inspired to start your own.
If you’d like a head start, we have two courses on IWT dedicated to teach you how to write sales copy for both landing pages and emails, check them out:
By finishing this post, you already got started
Guess what? You already started making progress towards building a business.
As I mentioned, this blog you’re on right now is part of my online business. We sell millions of dollars in courses and other products every year, and our students and readers have started many more businesses themselves.
So by reading this post, you’re already immersing yourself in how a profitable business works.
There’s obviously so much more to business than can fit in this one blog post. But I have an email newsletter which is read by over 800,000 people where I share more exclusive advice and examples that’s not available on the internet.
If you’re serious about starting a profitable business of any kind, come take a look:
