What is the best way to make money?

Future of Work, Future of Work - Question and Answer

What is the best way to make money?

The best way to make money and future-proof your incomes, even if you are currently employed or don’t know where to start, is to vigorously and quickly validate your money-making ideas with a minimum viable product. Always get your ideas and minimum viable products validated by your customers before spending any more time, effort, and money including building your own website (should be the last thing to do). This will guarantee your long-term financial success using this risk-free strategy.

To launch a profitable business quickly and safely, there are four steps to keep in mind:

  • Step 1: Identify your idea to make money.
  • Step 2: Convert your money-making idea into a minimum viable product (which includes services).
  • Step 3: Validate your minimum viable product with your customers in established marketplaces.
  • Step 4: Scale-up with your own website, find new ideas or ditch your idea altogether.

Step 1: Identify your idea to make money from this website.

Get your creative juices flowing by browsing the comprehensive list of ideas from this website.

Brainstorm different money making ideas that excite you and which you are passionate about. Push the boundaries of your imagination. There are so many creative things that you can do to make money quickly in 2018. It’s a matter of taking action.

Businesses exist to serve people. To make money quickly, you must give value to people and solve their immediate problems.

Step 2: Convert your money-making idea into a minimum viable product based on researched assumptions

Using Google, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends, perform online desktop research on your proposed money-making idea, or on the product, you want to sell.

Head over to existing online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Udemy, or Fiverr to confirm whether your product is something people are looking for, are willing and able to pay for and can be delivered by you.

Read all customer reviews and feedback on similar products. These will help you validate or improve your own product, and assumptions about your product and customers.

These marketplaces are technically digital marketing platforms for you to advertise your product. Compared to paper-based medium, these platforms are the quickest, safest, and cheapest way for you to validate and sell your product.

Quickly develop a ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP) based on assumptions formulated from your desktop research. Test, learn and validate your minimum viable product and assumptions by selling your product on existing marketplaces.

Launching first with a minimum viable product keeps your risk, exposure, and expense low (or nil). It gives you the license to test the waters and validate your ‘good enough’ product with your potential customers. It confirms whether your product can fully meet the requirements of your target market and for you to make money quickly.

Most importantly, it confirms or modifies your assumptions about your customers, their requirements for and expectations of your product, and their ability and willingness to pay you your asking price.

Don’t undervalue yourself when pricing your product.

A ‘good enough’ product does not mean that it’s of poor quality. All elements of a quality product must still exist to fully gain peoples’ trust and confidence.

The reality is that no matter how well you think you know about your potential customers and what they require or expect from your product, you can easily misjudge their requirements and end up wasting a lot of time, effort, and money.

In a post-mortem of more than 100 startups, CB Insights found that the number one cause of startup failure (42% of the time) was “no market need.” Many start-ups spent months or even years building a product before they found out that they were wrong in their assumptions: that someone was interested in their product and people who are willing and able to pay for it.

In testing your product and yourself, you may end up saying, “running a business (or selling a product) is not for me”. It’s OK to walk away from starting a business or making additional money knowing that you have given this a try.

Step 3: Validate your minimum viable product with your customers in established marketplaces

Traffic is vital for all businesses to make money. If people don’t know about you and your product, you will not make money.

For a café owner, she relies on human traffic to visit her café and make purchases.

For an online business owner, he relies on Internet traffic to visit his website and make purchases.

There’re countless techniques, tactics, and strategies that you can use to drive traffic to a digital marketing platform (i.e., your own branded website). There’s no shortage of people trying to sell you solutions and tactics to drive traffic to your website.

But if you are starting out, these tactics can be very technical, overwhelming and costly, especially in terms of time and money. You need a web hosting, a domain name, a content management system like WordPress, and you need lots of time and technical expertise to put them all together. Or you can pay someone else to do it for you.

That’s where established marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Udemy, or Fiverr come in handy. These websites are already well known. There’s a good amount of Internet traffic going to these established websites.

The main headache of driving Internet traffic to your own website has now been taken away from you should you adopt this strategy of using existing marketplaces to sell your first product.

People who visit these websites are your potential customers. People go to these websites as visitors wanting or motivated to buy something, which is good news for you.

All you need to do now is to convert a fraction of these marketplace visitors into paying customers by putting mouth-watering irresistible products in front of them to buy.

Here’s the deal.

If you have creative skills to sell, go to marketplaces like 99Designs, Behance, Coroflot, CrowdSpring, DesignCrowd, Dribbble, Fiverr, and UpWork

If you have technical skills to sell, go to marketplaces like Envato Studio, Fiverr, Freelancer, Guru, Toptal, and UpWork

If you want to sell online courses and educational services, go to marketplaces like Codecademy, SkillShare, Teachable, Treehouse, Udacity, and Udemy.

If you want to write an e-book to sell, go to marketplaces like Amazon and Smashwords.

If you have digital products to sell (either your own or purchased from third parties), go to marketplaces like Affpaying, Amazon, ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, Gumroad, JV Zoo, Max Bounty, Offervault, PayLoadz, Peer Fly, Warrior Plus, and WeLoveAffiliates.

If you have physical products to sell, go to marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Fancy, Gumtree, Handmade, Newegg, ShareASale, Tophatter, and Wish. You may want to drop ship your products by heading to AliExpress.

If you have professional services to sell, go to marketplaces like Freelancer, Gigbucks, Guru, and UpWork.

If you are a handy person or like to run errands for people, go to your local digital marketplaces like Craigslist that advertises micro-jobs.

You will learn how business and online transactions are conducted on these established marketplaces. You will learn about various management processes that will be invaluable to you when you do start your own business. You will learn about which website features that you would want to replicate on your own branded website if you do decide to have one later on.

Established marketplaces are just great online classrooms for you to build your knowledge, experience, and confidence.

What’s so great about this risk-free strategy is that there’s no shortage of how-to videos on YouTube to get you started immediately using one of these established marketplaces.

Until you give it a go, you don’t know many things about yourself. You don’t know about your capabilities and interest in sustaining business and developing and launching products. You don’t know whether your products will be in demand so you can make a sustainable and profitable living from it, perhaps even quitting your day job and going full-time in the future.

Step 4: Scale-up with your own website, find new ideas or ditch your idea altogether

After validating your product using established marketplaces (rather than having your own branded website at the initial stages), you have a couple of choices.

(Option 1) Scale up on what you already have by developing and launching your own branded website to sell your winning product to your paying customers. Launching your own website should be the last thing to do after focusing on your product creation, design, testing, validating, and launch. You have better control over the profitability of your product because you are not at the mercy of marketplace owners. What’s more, you want to build up your own customer list because ‘money is in the list’. With control over your very own customer list, you can continuously nurture your leads and transform them into paying customers when it’s time for you to sell more of your products to them.

(Option 2) Continue using these established marketplaces and sell your products without having your own branded website. You should plan to continuously improve your product offering as competitors will set in. Be a step or two ahead of your competitors.

(Option 3) Continuously refine and improve your product in collaboration with your customers using existing marketplaces until you are truly satisfied with the product’s quality, benefits, and features. Roll out newer versions of your product with improvements suggested by your customers.

(Option 4) Scrap your original product idea altogether if it’s a flop and go back to listening to your customers for new ideas. Continuously refine your money-making idea for a specific target customer group. Use established marketplaces to continuously test and validate your idea, product, and assumptions.

Abort your desire to start a side gig or business altogether without further loss of time, effort and money. You should not have any regrets whatsoever. Some personality types are just natural at being business owners and entrepreneurs. Don’t be stressed over this option; it’s just who you are.

Don’t follow the advice of many gurus; that is to have a website first prior to vigorously validating your money-making idea and minimum viable product. Always get them validated first by your customers before spending any more time, effort, and money. This will guarantee your long-term financial success using this risk-free strategy.