Best Online Business Ideas - Top 10 Lifestyle Businesses Revealed
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Okay, you need to scale your audience, which means you can give little bits of value to millions and millions of people. Or you can give large chunks of value to smaller and smaller amounts of people. But just starting a business is not enough. Make sure you keep in mind that it's all about your audience giving value to them growing your audience. That's really what you need to focus on within this. Also, one note, one more note, before we get into it.
Over the course of growing a successful business online, I'm talking to a three-year five-year 10-year plan, if you growing this, you're probably actually going to be earning income from several of these, my wife and I enjoy multiple streams of income. And you'll get there as well. What I'm trying to give you is a starting point if you haven't started, so don't feel like you have to choose one and you're limited to one because again, back to that audience idea. Once you have an audience of people who know you, they like you, they trust you they're on your email list, you can leverage different one of these with the same audience, effectively stabilizing your income stream. So without further ado, let's jump into the top 10. One more caveat, I apologize. This is ranked for me, you might have professional experience, you might have personal experience, you might have certain skills that would make something I put in number five or six, you're number one, so don't here's your grain of salt with this. And on that note, now we're into it.
So number one is information products. Now, I still love selling information products, my wife and I are his business, that's one of the biggest things we sell downloadable mp3 is downloadable PDFs streamable video courses. The reason I really like these is the very high margins. But one of the challenges is there's kind of a high barrier to entry, you have to be able to help people get results in their life already before you can start creating online courses. Okay, if you can't help women in their 50s lose 10 pounds in 30 days, you shouldn't be making a course about how to help these women lose weight.
There are other options for you. If that's your passion, though, I also think that the world of self-education is growing and will continue to grow. I think more and more people are looking at the Internet, looking at individuals like myself and like you to help them learn the professional skills and the personal skills they need to earn more income or to live a more fulfilled life. So I think it's a growing area. And the really high margins make it very, very worth your time. But again, you kind of need to be an expert, which leads us to number two, what if you're not an expert? What if you're committed to becoming an expert in something but you're not quite there yet. Affiliate marketing is a fantastic business model.
It's my number two on this list because it's so beginner-friendly. And as an affiliate marketer, what you do is you actually go create the audience, you create helpful content, you build a relationship with the audience, and you help that audience get what they already want, you help that audience get the things they're going to purchase anyway, through your affiliate links. But that all happens after you grow the audience and after you build trust with them. So it's a way to start with a very low upfront cost and a lot of energy. And ultimately, you can build an affiliate marketing site that helps women over 50 Lose Weight idea, right, let's say you build content, heavy site and an email list, and you promote affiliate products like Organa, phi, and daily burn, etc. And then eventually you create your own product to sell to them, you build the audience, you're able to monetize that process as an affiliate, but then you create your own course, once you get a lot of skill, helping people or maybe you start selling one on one coaching. And that's where you learn the process that you turn into your course, ultimately, and that's a little taste of how these all work together. Number three is coaching and consulting.
So to me bridging the gap between I teach this stuff online, or I'm using content to help my audience bridge the gap between that and creating courses is really going deep with individuals. If you haven't helped one person lose 10 pounds in 30 days. That's really what you need to do. Once you start growing your audience, you need to find somebody who's committed and you need to help them and you need to build a process and then you need to help somebody else and then you need to help somebody else. Now the cool thing about coaching is it can be done one on one, but you can also do group coaching, which is a way for you to leverage your time and get a little bit of leverage. So the income goes up, but the amount of effort and energy from you stays the same and that's usually the path of creating online courses.
You start learning about the world you gain a result for yourself, then you start helping individuals get that results in your career Creating a repeatable process, then you have a small group of people gets that result together. And once you've proven that your system works over and over for dozens, if not hundreds of people, you're ready to build it into a course, one of the other cool things about consulting and coaching, people are willing to invest relatively high volumes of money to get specific results. And they love being held by the hand, right? They love having an individual guide because there's part accountability in it. There's a lot of reasons why, when you're positioned as the expert for them to be able to do Skype calls with you, one on one three times a week, Skype workouts with you one on one three times a week, they stay accountable to you, they text you every single day with whether eating their calorie counts, etc, etc.
Sometimes that real personal touch of coaching is what's going to get them the result. And a lot of us like me, know we need that level of accountability as well. So that's how it can work really well. And I think there's a beautiful business to be had there. Number four is the membership site. My good friend, Dave Wooding, says that recurring income is the holy grail of income. And I totally agree great membership programs can allow you to do one body of work each and every month, and sell that hundreds, if not 1000s of times over.
Now, what do you include in your membership program, obviously, this needs to come from what you've been doing the results you can help people with, I use a forum for my membership program to where people can kind of get my training, my advanced training, but then they can ask me questions about the training. And that's a big part of it. So my membership program has a little bit of a group coaching type tweak, my wife's membership program is really on-demand access to a vault of past paid content. So it's video courses, it's PDFs, it's mp3. And it's kind of on-demand access to a vault. So we just put our body of work in this interface in this kind of learning management system. And people can log in and download what they want, and they get all the new things from there. The reason why the membership site is so high up is ultimately you sell it once and you can earn income from that one sale for months, years, potentially decades in the future.
As long as you're still delivering lots of great value. Number five, digital marketing agency, I did a video on this channel. And honestly, pretty much each and every one of these that we're going through, I have not just a video on these, I've deep-dive videos that teach you exactly how to set these things up the mindset, the macro, the micro, the clouds, the dirt, everything. So definitely dig through the videos on the ones that you're really interested in. But a digital marketing agency for me, if it all came crashing down, if my youtube channel somehow disappeared, my blogs and had disappeared and I was starting over, I would leverage these skills that I have about how to put a blog post on the first page of Google about how to put a video on the first page of YouTube about how to run Facebook ads. And I would go leverage that. And I would sell that as a service.
\Not only would I sell that as a service, but I would also build a team of people who would actually do the work. And I would stay focused on speaking on stages. And I would say focus on running local meetup groups, and essentially bringing in clients right, I'd be the figurehead, I'd be the position. And I would then let my team of experts do the actual day-to-day work for the clients. I think digital marketing agencies are incredibly powerful today because there are more and more businesses all competing for those top three spots on the Google Map. There are more and more businesses today competing for those top 10 spots on the first page of Google. But here's the caveat, you have to have skills, you have to actually be able to drive traffic, you have to have to actually be able to create the result for you to be able to sell it.
Now I ran an agency for five years very successfully. And the result that I had learned how to do was building my wife and my first website up to 30. And then 60,000 visits per month. And I was able to show local business owners Hey, I got this site, I get 2000 visits today, would your business be transformed? If you had 2000 people a day looking at what you do and your offers? And they thought to themselves? Well, yeah, of course, it would. And that was how I close the sale was the proof of my past work. So this is where you could start as an affiliate marketer, build your site, grow your traffic, learn the ins and outs of WordPress, learn how to rank posts on the first page of Google and then that could actually be your case, study your testimonial for you to go and start a little digital marketing agency. Number six, freelancing and doing virtual assistant type work. This is an easier way to get started than a digital agency. Obviously, there are SEO freelancers out there but I make this as it's this distinguished to me because I think it includes things like transcription, video editing, making show notes from podcasts, or even editing the audio for podcasts for people translating documents, translating books we have several of my wife's books are in Spanish we have those all translated doing copy editing or proofreading.
Now this is looking into what you're good at, right? Are you good at Photoshop? Are you good at video editing? What do you Love, what are you good at that other businesses, they would love to pass that side of their business off. Because most digital businesses are actually almost everybody businesses, right brick, and mortar business, most businesses realize they need to be active on their blog, they need to have a YouTube channel, they need to have a social media presence. And they probably don't want to do that, because they're so busy with the day-to-day operations of their business, you could step in and fill that one role for them.
\As a freelancer, this is drastically different than running an agency because you do the work in this scenario, and it floats you so you've got a number of clients who look to you to do specific work. And it's a great way to bridge the gap from the kind of being in a corporate setting, to the side hustle that can give you some time and location freedom, which is great. And from there, you can kind of build your own internet business, you could teach people how to do what you do, etc, etc. There's it's a stepping stone also, just like the other ones are a software as a service as an absolutely brilliant income opportunity.
Because if you are able to create a software tool that I personally use, that helps me drive more traffic or drive more conversions, okay, and my business gets greater profits from that, let's say your $97 per month tool helps me bring an extra $1,000 a month, I am never going to balk at your $97 price. As long as I'm getting a return on that investment, that's a multiple of what I'm putting in. The challenge is building software, right? You need to be a coder, or you need to be a visionary and have access to a coder. So one of the things I've done in my inner circle membership, I've created five different software applications, everything from YouTube optimization to SEO optimization tools, and I'm working on new software tools.
So this is how I'm almost blending software with my membership. Because as my members get more and more software tools that help them get the desired results they want, which is growing an audience growing list and growing a business, right when I build software tools that help them get way better results with their YouTube videos, they're gonna stick around longer, it's not just the content, it's not just the access to me, it's not just the info products. It's not just group coaching. It's also the software.
Okay, so that's pretty much what I'm offering from mine from a holistic standpoint, software requires a certain type of person who's ready to deal with the tech challenges that come from building scaling, and growing a software company. But again, the potential for long term income is amazing, I have tools within my business that I've used for I mean, 810 years straight, happy to pay for his keep paying for would not consider turning them off, because they actually are a part of my business processes at this point number eight. And I think this one's overlooked way too often sell handmade goods.
So crocheting niching, making jewelry, there are so many handmade goods. And it can come out of a story, right, let's say you have a baby who has very, very sensitive skin, you can't use normal sunscreen on your baby's skin, they break out into a rash, they're extremely sensitive, and you came up with this sunscreen that works. It's totally natural. It's totally nontoxic. There are no harsh chemicals in it at all. It's safe for even your baby's skin. That's a brilliant thing, right? And then you could start selling that. So there's they're selling it online. And I know this is the top 10 online businesses, but I think most people overlook their local farmer's markets. And I think the local farmer's markets are an amazing way for entrepreneurs who are creators to really get some real-world feedback on what it is they're creating. You get to talk right there at the moment with people you get to ask them questions. Do you have children with sensitive skin?
Do you have sensitive skin? Have you ever put on sunscreen that you can ask those kinds of questions right there with people who are just kind of strolling the park for the afternoon because it's the Farmers Market afternoon? And that's what they're there for. They're there for that community interaction. And these interaction moments are the things you can learn from actually trying to sell a physical thing over the table to a real person. It can speed up the process 3x 10x and beyond, versus trying to hide behind a computer and listing it on Etsy, listing it on Amazon listing it on a Shopify site. So I think you could do all of the things ultimately if you're one of these creators, but really, I think it's incredibly valuable to spend time if you're looking for a business model and you like creating things, soap is relatively easy to create. Go down to your local farmers' market. Is there a soap maker?
Is there a lotion maker? Is there a jewelry maker? Is there a candle maker is there someone selling mushrooms because mushrooms are really easy to grow microgreens you can grow in a warehouse, these delicate microgreens are a very hot item right now. So it's good to go to these and pay attention to what other creators are making and selling and then see if there's a little opening versus something you know how to do or you're interested in doing. You can learn how to make good soaps in an afternoon or a weekend and in fact, you To buy entire loaves of soap on Etsy, you could cut them down, you could put them in special packaging, special branding and put your little twist on it. And then you could go resell them. And that is actually a business model that you could do in person, build testimonials, learn a lot about your customer, Avatar, your audience, et cetera. Number nine, I have as influencer marketing.
Now, I debated whether I was gonna put influencer marketing on but I don't have a better word for it. So it's the word I'm going to use. Now, to me, influencer marketing is a podcaster. That was what I thought I was literally thinking about putting podcasting on here because I think more and more people are listening to podcasts, the growth year over year of podcasts is continuing to accelerate, and the kind of realness of podcasters. It's becoming an actual thing. It's becoming a respected world. So right now we're going through the election cycle here in North America. And there's a number of Democratic candidates going on right now. And I like to listen to what they have to say. And I don't like the debate stage that they're on. It's a joke. It's, it's an attempt to get them to bicker with each other for a rubbish soundbite. But then Joe Rogan, has had at least three different presidential candidates on and I've listened to every one of those podcast episodes, and they range from one hour to over two hours, the depth of understanding of that individual, their history, their story, their ideas, what their plans are invaluable to me as an individual. So that little story I just told you is why I think podcasts are going to continue to grow.
YouTubers are also influencers, obviously, people who take like Instagramers can be influencers as well. But I would put them at the absolute bottom of the totem pole. I think that's the most difficult nut to crack because it's 99% of the time. Cool. And doing cool is very difficult to sustain for long periods of time. Things can go hot or not. But if you're delivering real value, if if you love sports, if you love some obscure sport like drone racing, and you are just all infatuated with drone racing, and you interview all of the best drone race pilots and you cover all the best drone racing events. Your Podcast could be the number one hub for all things drone racing. And at that moment, you are an influencer. You can sell brand deals, you can promote things as an affiliate, you can eventually make courses like it could go in every direction.
So it's influencer means you're creating an audience with the focus and the goal of delivering value to that audience and helping them achieve their goals and solve their problems. How you go about that is kind of individualistic based on the platform's even Twitch streamers, right, somebody who's streaming games, they're like a professional eSports person who supports themselves 100% by streaming themselves playing the game on YouTube and Twitch both, I would consider them to be an influencer and they could be mega influencers in this day and age. They absolutely can be mega influencers. And then number 10 is dropshipping and E-commerce. This is almost related to that idea of you know buying the log of soap and cutting it up and selling it and reselling it. One of the most common ways to build a business and to earn money for eons has been buying and selling things.
You buy something over here and you sell it over there. No dropshipping means you sell it without ever buying it. Okay, somebody else's warehousing it someone else has the fulfillment centers, you build an audience of people, and then you sell it, you manage the transaction, you manage the customer support, but they actually ship it from their warehouse so it eliminates or it lowers drastically the cost of doing business. And for high ticket products like electric wheelchairs for elderly people who need mobility help to electric bikes, right? There's a lot of different $3,000 products that can potentially have a fairly good margin. Your margins shrink significantly compared to digital products and information products. But people are more willing to buy things right.
\We all buy things in our world, you've probably bought soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, you maybe bought a bicycle and higher ticket things as well. So buying and selling things is absolutely still a very real business today. You can sell on Amazon as FBA, you can sell again, Etsy, eBay, as we said, you could build your own website dropship through a Shopify store, which are very easy to run, you can do WooCommerce, which is essentially the WordPress open source alternate to Shopify. The truth is people buy stuff and they buy stuff all the time, which is why Amazon is a behemoth in its space. It's a crowded market, it requires more investment, generally speaking, and the margins are also lower, which is why it's at the bottom of my list, but maybe you have a logistical team.
Maybe you have fulfillment centers that you've used, maybe you've sourced products from another country before and you have really interesting access to some beautiful jewelry from Bali and you can go get loads and loads of this jewelry from Bali. Do you want to start selling that way? Very, very doable in this day people buy jewelry online, my wife sells a ton of jewelry online as an affiliate actually. So that's it. Those are the top 10 businesses for 2020. The real key to all of them, or the key to success that overrides everything here is your audience's everything. And showing up and delivering value to your audience before asking for the sale in return, is one of the keys of business. And that's why my channel has been so successful here. And this business that I've built around this channel of teaching everything I know about digital business, digital entrepreneurship, and digital marketing, why it's been so successful as I put out about 575 videos of really, really helpful shareable information with zero pitches,
there's no call to action here. There's no call to action coming. And I mentioned this because you need the perspective of an I want you to get started, choose a business model and get going. Think about your audience. Who are they? What do they need? Why are they searching for this? Why do they need to buy this right now? Are they aware of the problem? Or are they aware of the solution, meet them where they are through content and help them get what they want, learn how to build an email list? And at that point, you open yourself up to start to dabble in all of the different aspects of the business. I do very well as an affiliate marketer each and every month here from the content I've put out. But I also do very well with my group coaching program that also has a software tool.
So I'm mixing and matching about four of them. My wife is mixing and matching, even more, she has physical products that we sell, she's got about six of these dialed in, which means we have a very stable business that affords us the lifestyle we want with security. And if we lose anyone channel of traffic, if we lose anyone stream of income, we still have many others that are actually supporting us. And last note, Rome wasn't built in a day we've been building her business for 10 years straight. I've been building this business that you're watching on the Myles Becker channel for over three years aggressively not to mention the 15 years of hands-on digital marketing experience that I built before ever teaching and starting my first video here so who can you help who can be of service to if you want to start next go to my how to choose a niche video series that I have here on YouTube. It's gonna help you really kind of get all these ideas and who can I help?
That's the number one question you can ask yourself and then go forth create a ruckus create value for them give value first, we must put deposits into the bank account before we can ask for withdrawals. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it if you did thumbs up like comment, do what you do subscribe, hit the bell. I appreciate you and I'll see you on the next video. Till then be well