How can I make money online with small investment?

To make money online with a small investment, 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 that I have compiled on this website. You may find other sources too.

To make money online, you have to find that sweet spot where all the following six criteria overlap. Then you have to develop and implement a strategy related to that sweet spot.

1. You are so passionate about and committed to your money-making idea that you will spend all your free time working on it (even on weekends!).
2. You want to create value for people and desire to make a difference in people’s lives trying to solve their problems.
3. You have desperate niche customers who are willing and able to pay you for your unique product or service because you can solve their pain points or problems, which is the ultimate outcome of your online business activities.
4. You can create a sustainable stream of income out of the money-making idea when you do decide to quit your 9-to-5 job. Remember always that you have to pay your bills!
5. You have or are capable of acquiring the necessary skills and experience to build that online business without much re-skilling or learning.
6. You want to align your business and work with your personal and religious reasons and beliefs. Your WHYs of embarking on an online business must be crystal clear.

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.

This may require some money or investment, depending on the type of product or service you choose.

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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 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.

This will reduce your initial investment to the minimum.

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.

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.

You would need to spend some money here to test out the products and processes.

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:

• 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. This will require some investments on your end.
• 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. This option will reduce your initial investment.
• 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. This option will keep your investment low until you find a winning product or service.
• 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. This option will cut your financial loss and you move on to do other things.
• 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. This strategy will reduce or minimise your financial exposure, preserving your investments to low-risk activities.