498: Top 5 Most Profitable Side Hustles You Can Start Today (With No Money) – Family First Friday

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Every year, thousands of new businesses are launched in the United States, but unfortunately, not all businesses are able to make a profit and many don’t survive. Now, if you look at small businesses as a whole, a 10 % net profit margin is considered average for a small business. Anything below 5 % isn’t going to cut it, while anything above 15 % is excellent. Now, if these percentages sound really low to you,

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It’s because these numbers are calculated across all business models and types, including brick and mortar stores and restaurants. But don’t be discouraged. The online space is way more profitable. So in this episode, I’ve compiled a list of the most profitable businesses that you can start this year. And trust me, the margins on some of these business models are greater than 90%. What’s up, everyone. You are listening to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast, where I teach you how to make money online.

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by exploring different tools, strategies, and understand how to leverage human psychology to grow your sales. This is a special segment of the show, called Family First Fridays, where I go solo to give you my thoughts on how to make money without sacrificing your lifestyle. By the way, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and get over $690 in free bonuses. And right now,

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The book is actually 38 % off on Amazon. Now the first most profitable business that you can start is a blog. Now you might be thinking to yourself, does anyone read blogs anymore? Didn’t blogging die like 10 years ago? Well this is 100 % false because I run a seven figure blog myself. And here’s what you need to realize about blogging. Everyone in business needs a website in order to gather leads and to close sales. Without a website, you can’t build a customer email list.

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you can’t build a list of subscribers. And the number one way to get traffic to any website is to start a blog that attracts search engine traffic. Now, if you look at my blog over at mywifequitterjob.com, I get roughly 250,000 visitors a month, where 80 % of that traffic comes directly from Google and other search engines. And with that traffic, I generate over a million dollars per year, of which 90 % of that is profit. And here’s why my margins are so high.

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The cost to run my website is literally $50 a month. And back when I first started, I was only paying $7 a month. And today, you can start a blog for less than $3 a month. In fact, if you go on my YouTube channel right now, you can find step-by-step instructions on how to set up a WordPress blog with Bluehost in less than five minutes. My largest expense for my blog today is my email service provider, where I pay roughly $500 a month. I also have a few writers and editors on my staff.

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that write a good chunk of my content for about $3,000 a month. And then I use various software tools like Ahrefs that cost me a couple hundred dollars per month. Meanwhile, I’m bringing in anywhere from 80 to $160,000 a month from a multitude of revenue sources such as affiliate marketing, advertising, and sponsorship deals. Blogging is perhaps the most profitable business model that you can possibly have because it’s just words. Writing content doesn’t cost anything

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and the overhead expenses are super low. Now the only downside to this business model is that it takes quite a while to get off its feet. I didn’t start making real money until about three years in. In fact, here’s my exact revenue trajectory with mywifequitterjob.com. I started my blog in 2009. In 2012, which is three years later, I broke six figures for the first time. In 2013, I made 171,000. In 2014, I broke 350,000.

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In 2015, I hit 712,000. In 2016, I hit over a million bucks. And in 2017, I hit over $1.4 million, and the rest is history. Trust me, once your blog gets going, it is a cash cow. By the way, if you’re interested in starting a blog, make sure you sign up for my free six-day blogging mini course over at profitableaudience.com slash free. Now the next most profitable business idea is to sell an online course.

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And right now I run two online courses. Profitable Online Store is my flagship course that teaches people how to start an e-commerce store. My other course is called Profitable Audience, which teaches people how to make money with either a blog, a podcast, or a YouTube channel. Online courses are great because you can create a product once and sell it to many people with extremely low overhead. Now the current course setup that I use is based on WordPress and a free plugin called S2 Member. So I literally just

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pay the cost of web hosting to run all of my courses. And remember how I said that I pay $50 a month for my blog? Well, that same 50 bucks also pays for all of my courses as well. To host all the videos for my class, I pay roughly $20 a month for Amazon S3, which is an online storage service. Meanwhile, my profitable online store course costs roughly $2,000 for lifetime access, and my profitable audience class costs about $1,000.

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And between these two courses, I have over 5,000 students. By the way, the cost of my Create a Profitable Online Store course goes up on October 12th. Now, if you do the mental math, my margins are like 99 % plus to run my online course. If you have expertise in practically any subject, I would strongly encourage you to teach an online class. And if you’re thinking to yourself, I’m not really that good at anything, well, that’s the wrong attitude. You don’t have to be world class at what you do.

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You just have to be expert enough to teach someone who knows less than you do. For example, am I the most successful person in the world in e-commerce? Not by a long shot, but I do run a seven-figure e-commerce store over at bumblebelinens.com, and I feel comfortable teaching students how to launch their e-commerce businesses to seven or eight figures. But anything beyond eight or nine figures is not my area of expertise, because once you get past eight figures, it involves a lot more knowledge on how to structure and build large teams.

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how to set up HR, how to scale your operations, et cetera. Now, even though I don’t run an Amazon.com, I’ve had tremendous success teaching students in my class to generate seven figures or more. For example, Amanda Wittenborn, who’s been on this podcast before, makes over seven figures selling party supplies over at Amanda Creation. My student, J.K., makes over seven figures selling home supplies over at SaratogaHomeOnline.com. Abby Walker makes millions selling high-heel inserts on her site over at VivienLoo.com.

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Now, if you’re scared about the amount of work involved in starting a course, I have a fun story to share with you about how I started with my first course. Now, back in 2011, before I launched Profitable Online Store, I was actually dead set against teaching an online course. After all, it felt like such a monumental task, and I didn’t want to waste my time creating a class unless I knew people were going to sign up. But everyone from my blog started asking me to create an e-commerce course over and over again.

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Until one day I just got fed up and I said, all right, I don’t have any content right now, but if I get 10 signups by the end of the week, I’ll create a class. And sure enough, I got 35 signups right away, made a quick 10 grand, which forced me to launch my class. Anyway, you probably don’t have to go through the same drastic measures that I did to get started, and you should do whatever works for you. The easiest platform to launch an online course today that’s super cheap to get started is a site called Teachable. There’s no excuse.

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Now the next profitable business that you can start is an e-commerce store. Now you all know that I teach e-commerce and that I run my own seven-figure online store. So why did I list e-commerce at number three on my most profitable business list? Well, it’s because the margins to run an e-commerce business are far less than that of a blog or an online course, but selling physical products online is probably the quickest way to make money. Whereas monetizing a blog takes two to three years, you can easily start making money right away

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with an online store within a year or less. In fact, my online store made over $100,000 in profit in our first year of business selling handkerchiefs. One of my students made over $100,000 a month within six months of launching her business selling jewelry. Now I publish many videos on e-commerce on my YouTube channel that you can watch for free and you can check out my blog as well. But the beauty of e-commerce is that you can sell the same widget over and over again on a website that takes orders for you 24 seven.

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Now there’s a common misconception that you have to store your own inventory and ship out your own orders. That’s 100 % false. Today, most online stores don’t do their own shipping and fulfillment at all. Instead, they use 3PLs to handle all their fulfillment needs. 3PL stands for third party logistics, which is a company that specializes in processing your orders. All you have to do is have your products shipped to a 3PL, and when an order comes in, they’ll ship it to your customer.

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Amazon FBA, for example, is one of the largest 3PLs in the world. There are also e-commerce business models like dropshipping, where you don’t have to deal with any inventory at all, and there’s no upfront costs. Dropshipping is where you take orders online, and when someone makes a purchase, you pay your supplier on demand to have the product shipped to the customer. Now, overall, the margins for an e-commerce business is between 30 and 40%, which is far less than the 90 % for a blog or an online course, but you can start making money sooner rather than later.

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In fact, if your goal is to make significant money within one year, then e-commerce is probably your best bet. By the way, if you’re interested in learning how to start your own e-commerce store, then sign up for my free six-day mini course over at mywifequaterjob.com slash free. Now another profitable business that you can start is what I call a service arbitrage business. Service arbitrage or drop servicing is a business model where you offer services to clients without doing the work yourself.

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Instead, you outsource a task to freelancers or agencies who complete the work on your behalf. Think of it like dropshipping, but instead of selling products, you’re selling services through another service provider. For example, let’s say you own a website design agency and you sell your services for $5,000 a website. You can then hire a freelancer who charges you $3,000, allowing you to earn a profit of $2,000 from the project without doing any of the physical work. There are many service-arbitrary business ideas that you can try,

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including SEO consulting, content creation, graphic design, virtual assistant services, and copywriting. Now the easiest service arbitrage business that I can think of is for content creation. One of my colleagues, Katrina McKinnon, runs a service arbitrage business that creates blog posts for e-commerce stores. She employs a team of writers that are based in countries with a lower cost of labor, such as Kenya or the Philippines, and then she charges US prices to her clients.

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Now, if you can take advantage of disparate labor costs around the world and you know how to attract clients, then running a service arbitrage business might be a good option for you. But probably the most profitable business model in the world right now is being an affiliate for a company that you love. Affiliate marketing is a commission-based business model where you recommend products to others and in return earn a commission for every sale. There are hundreds of affiliate marketing programs, but Amazon Associates is one of the biggest and most well-known.

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To make money with Amazon Associates, Amazon will give you a special link to recommended products that you love on Amazon. And whenever someone clicks that link and makes a purchase, you get a cut of the sale. And the best part is that you don’t even need to have a large audience to do this. Most of us have friends on Facebook and Instagram, and all you gotta do is create reviews of everything that you buy and post them on your social media channels. And if you create enough content about different products, someone will be bound to be interested in something that you’ve reviewed.

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I have friends in the personal finance space that make millions of dollars per year recommending financial services to their audience. Affiliate marketing carries zero overhead costs, so your profit margins are literally 100%. You don’t need any money to start, and you can make money right away. Now that you know the most profitable businesses to start, if you didn’t see anything that you like, make sure you check out the podcast episode with Nick Loper, where we give away a whole bunch of different million dollar business ideas.