Top 3 Cost Effective or Free Online Business Ideas

Online Business

An online business is unlike a business in the traditional world. For one, any business requires some sort of financial investment to kick-start the process. Entrepreneurs in traditional lines of work have to toil to get investors to fund their business.

An online business can be started with little or no financial investment. There are many online businesses which do not a large financial backing, but there are examples of others which need no investment at all.

The popularity of online businesses can be best understood by the increased popularity of digital marketing courses. Many students are taking up digital marketing training to kick-start their career as freelancers and entrepreneurs.

A knack for digital marketing is not necessary to start an online business. While it is an essential skill for some types of online business, there are other types of online work which do not require any knowledge of digital marketing.

In any case, digital marketing does help a given individual to set up an online business. In this article, we will go through three online business ideas for freshers, professionals, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

Blogging

One of the most popular options as far as low investment or even free online business ideas are concerned, blogging is the practice of sharing any type of content online through a unique URL.

To create a blog, a blogger has two options. The free option is to open a blog with any major blogging platforms such as WordPress or Blogger. These platforms allow bloggers to choose a URL of their choice and post content on these links.

The second option is to buy a URL from a domain-selling website and buy web hosting for the given domain. Ideally, freelancers serious about their online business should consider the second option and buy a special domain. The free option doesn’t come with premium features available in the second option. A little investment in the beginning to buy a domain and hosting can go a long way.

Once a website is created, bloggers are supposed to regularly post content and wait for the audience to come. Digital marketing is an important skill for a blogger to possess. Using their knowledge of SEO, bloggers can eventually monetize traffic coming to their website through methods much as PPC ads and affiliate marketing.

Do check: Top 5 major advantages of blogging

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a way for people to earn money by acting as affiliates for companies and earning commissions on each sale.

As a concept, affiliate marketing can be pulled off without blogging as well. All an affiliate has to do is make sure that a customer buying a product or service arrives at the portal through their affiliate link.

However, blogging is a much better way to drive revenue through affiliate marketing. If blog content is created to stimulate readers to click on affiliate links, the process yields many more clicks on affiliate links than manually sharing links without a blogging platform.  In affiliate marketing too, knowledge of digital marketing can be extremely helpful.

Do check: Affiliate marketing for beginners

Ghostwriting

Ghostwriting is the practice of writing anonymously for clients to earn money. While there are examples of digital marketers employing ghostwriters to write content, ghostwriting is most prevalent in the world of book writing and publishing where authors with ideas and interests employ one or more ghostwriters to work on a project.

Do check: Writing winners guidelines

A ghostwriter doesn’t necessarily need to have any knowledge of SEO. The only skill necessary is the ability to write.