Revealing The 3 Best Businesses To Start In 2024 As A Beginner

the economy is off to a rough start to the year and with all the layoffs happening right now you really need to establish multiple streams of income through either a business or a side hustle to protect yourself financially so in this video I'm going to give you my top three businesses to start this year to earn some extra money on the side what's up everyone my name is Steve Chu and I'm a formal electrical engineer turned entrepreneur I run a seven figureure e-commerce store selling handkerchiefs over at bumblebe lens. com a top 25 e-commerce blog and podcast over at mywi quitter job. com and an annual e-commerce conference called the seller Summit I'm also the author of The Wall Street Journal bestselling book The Family First entrepreneur now in terms of business models I pretty much tried them all which is what puts me in a unique situation to make this video for you today now there are many businesses that you could start but the side hustles that I'm specifically going to discuss in this video fall under this criteria so first off I'm going to assume that you are all beginners watching this video so the business needs to have moderately low starting capital and moderately low risk most of the ideas that I have for you will be free and at most cost you a couple thousand to start second of all the business needs to be scalable so it has the potential to make you six figures and Beyond because the worst is if you start a business that plateaus at only a couple thousand dollar a month and turns into another j o my next criteria is that it has to leverage technology in some way the way you scale any business is by having a computer do most of the work machines are efficient they don't complain and they do work faster than any human can and my final criteria is that it's not too easy to start now there are ton of get-rich quick schemes out there that promise you riches for doing very little work to get started and that's the absolute wrong way to think about it because if something is easy to start there's going to be tons of competition and tons of noise in an ideal world you should start a business that very few people can or want to do because it requires work work that you are willing to do that they are not and here's a bonus criteria you should start a business that teaches you valuable skills on the job that you can retain and leverage later on in life for example I've been playing around a lot with AI lately because I know it's a skill that I'll be using going forward even though the knowledge itself isn't making me any money right now and with that let's start with business idea number one if you are a total beginner in the business space and you have no money to invest whatsoever the best business for you is to start free freelancing everyone has a skill or a hobby that they can charge money for now you might not think that you have any marketable skills to offer but you do trust me for example my friend Caitlyn wanted to make some extra money on the side she didn't think that she had any marketable skills but one of her Hobbies was that she loved reading blog posts and papers and often helped her friends with their work so to make some extra money she decide to offer her Services as a professional proofreader now in the beginning she proof read for her friends but eventually she posted a couple jobs on Fiverr and upwork and from there she built up a reputation as a reliable proof reader and made several thousands of dollars a month on the side if you just sit down and think about what you are knowledgeable about you can easily find a skill you can charge for and today I have friends who freelance editing podcasts editing videos doing graphic design coaching writing you name it now the more specific you can get with your skill the better for example if you enjoy writing you can specialize in freelance writing for business Publications now you're probably thinking to yourself freelancing is just like a regular job where you are trading time for money and you are correct but only at first after you've developed a reputation as a freelancer you can start hiring people to help you with the work and create an agency for example my friend JK started out by doing freelance writing for Twitter and then later created his own Twitter agency he would charge clients about $3,000 a month and then hire a $500 a month employee to do do the work under his Supervision in my earlier example Caitlyn eventually went on to start a proofreading agency and a digital course to make over a million dollar per year so overall freelancing is free to start but it's not as easy to scale as some of the other business models I'm going to talk about but it's a great starting point that requires no money to start now the next step up after freelancing is to actually sell a product and the idea here is that you can create a product once and then sell the exact same thing multiple times to multiple people selling a product is by far the best way to leverage your time because you only have to do the work once selling products is how I made the majority of my money early on I've been running my online store bumblebe linen.

com for over 16 years now and it generates a healthy s figure income every single year I have a set of suppliers that sell me products at wholesale prices and then I sell them at 90 plus% margins on my online store and on Amazon if you interested in learning how to start your own online store then make make sure you sign up for my free 6-day mini course below this course is 100% free and will teach you everything you need to know now there are many flavors of e-commerce such as Drp Shipping selling other people's products with inventory and private label and they are not mutually exclusive Drp Shipping is where you have an arrangement with the supplier such that you take orders and the supplier stores and ships the inventory on your behalf and under this Arrangement you do not have to spend any money upfront for inventory you just collect money pass along your customer's information to the Drp Shipping supplier who ships it to the End customer now the main downside to this business model is that the margins are low at between 10 and 30% and at these margins you can't really afford to advertise and you make very little per sale as a result Drp Shipping is a very slow way to make significant profits the upside though is that it requires very little capital and it's highly scalable since you don't have to worry about buying or storing the product up front now on the other end of the e-commerce Spectrum is selling private label products private label products are products that a factory makes just for you under your own brand and they are the highest margin products that you can sell online incidentally this is the primary business model for my online store at bumblebe Linens our margins are offering 90 plus% and we sell personalized products to our customer base now the main downside of private label is that it costs more money upfront to start I would estimate that you should be willing to invest at least $33,000 to sell a private label product now both Drp Shipping and private label are highly scalable and the beauty is that a machine will take orders for you 247 and you can have either Amazon or a 3pl store and fulfill your orders for you now between myself and my kids we actually run three online stores bumblebe linen. com is our Flagship business that makes seven figures my kids started a print on demand Drp Shipping Store over at kid inch charge. com and my daughter sells her own jewelry over at rab.

com feel free to check check out their shops now another type of product you can sell is a digital product digital products include ebooks memberships online courses basically any product that can be shipped over the internet and the main advantage of digital over physical is that nothing physical needs to be shipped at all there's no inventory and when someone places an order a machine magically sends the information to the End customer in many respects selling digital products is the Holy Grail of e-commerce you can never run out of stock and the business model is infinitely skilled one of my friends Aaron Chase sells a digital meal plan service where she charges just $5 a month but she has thousands of digital customers which allows her to make a lot of money sending the same exact meal plans to everyone another one of my friends Chase Diamond sells a paid email newsletter he just has to write a single email and many people pay him for the exact same content now the main disadvantage of selling digital products is that you must build a reputation first in order to generate any sales for example I I sell an online course called create a profitable online store that teaches e-commerce to over 5,000 students now if I were to list that course online without an audience or a following I would never ever be able to sell a single copy but because I've developed a reputation and a following through this YouTube channel and my blog which gets over 300,000 visits per month and my podcast people are willing to pay me to learn how to sell online as a result even though selling digital products sounds easy you have to create content and slowly build up an Emil list or a subscriber list in order to generate any sales this is in direct contrast to a physical product that doesn't really require any audience to generate sales for example people will often buy jewelry or clothing from anyone regardless of their reputation but no one will pay for a course or an ebook without at least knowing a little bit about the author which leads me to one of my favorite business models of all creating content did you know that I make well over a million dollars by writing content over at mywi quitter job. com in fact this YouTube channel that you are watching will generate me a healthy sixf figure income just from advertising alone in addition my podcast makes me over $100,000 a year as well if you are willing to slog it out and create content on a regular basis then you can make money in a variety of ways that does not involve selling your own product for example you can sell advertising you are all watching this video right now every time you watch an ad I get a cutof the profit and ads alone makes me over $100,000 on this channel you can also do affiliate marketing affiliate marketing is where you recommend tools that you love if someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase you get a cut of the sale I've recommended numerous tools that I use on this channel over the years and some of these tools pay out over $100 per sale other ways to make money with content include sponsored content membership sites and group coaching once you become popular companies will literally throw money at you to talk about them in your content now while I rarely do sponsored content for for this channel I can easily command between $5 to $10,000 per video the only thing you have to be careful about is your reputation never promote or endorse any product that you do not personally stand behind now while I consider creating content one of the best businesses to start this year there are several drawbacks first off making money with content takes a long time to execute my blog over at my wife cter job. com did not make any money at all until year two but after that it hit six figures after three years and seven figures very soon after that this YouTube channel made no money at all for the first year but then started making six figures per year at year three my podcast didn't start making any money at all until year 2.