Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (11) - Creating A Business From Unusual Ideas

We’ve discussed the more conventional means of starting an online business. There are some unconventional means as well that should be looked at. 

By unconventional, we mean those ideas that people came up and were laughed at by others. Those people than took those ideas to the top and made a huge living from them. 

Here are some of those ideas that people thought would never get off the ground:

Selling old seminars- One guy made a nice living by finding and selling old seminars that originally sold for thousands of dollars.

Domain names- Someone came up with the idea that they could sell a service of naming domain names for other people. Sounds crazy, but the business took off for them. Turns out quite a few people needed that service.

Selling used engagement jewelry- This idea reportedly came from someone who broke off their engagement, got the ring back but found they couldn’t return it for full value. They started a site for other people in the same boat to sell their jewelry and earn back what they paid for it or as close to it as possible.

Selling butterflies for a living- Yes, it’s possible or at least that what one person found out when someone bet him that he couldn’t sell them. He not only won that bet, but made a huge business from that one little idea.

There are tons more ideas that people have come up and made them work as an online business, so check your memory banks and see if there’s one idea hiding there that no one would believe could work. It just might prove them wrong…

Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (10) - Make Money With Desktop Publishing

If you’re a creative person and can use a computer well, consider an online business with desktop publishing. This is where you create documents, flyers, brochures, calendars, and advertisements.

All these types of documents are created using a program or two from your computer, so having expensive machinery to create them will not be needed. 

There are a lot of people looking for these creative pages for all kinds of uses and don’t know how to create one themselves. 

If you have some knowledge in this area, you could use it to make money providing them with these creations.

What skills are helpful?

The ability to make your way around a computer and use various types of software programs are some skills you should have. You don’t have to be an artist to be in this business, because everything is done using the computer.

What Tools are needed?

Besides a computer, you should have the following equipment:

1. Desktop publishing software

2. Photo editing software

3. Laser or Color Printer

4. Scanner

5. High Quality printer paper

Make sure you know how to use all the features of your equipment well so you can provide the best quality service for your clients.

How to get started?

You should obtain all the necessary equipment to run your business. Decide on a niche to target your marketing efforts to and then create a website to reflect that niche. 

Your website should provide potential clients with samples of your work to show your expertise in this field. You could also brush up on your skills by reading any tutorials or guides about the desktop publishing field.

Desktop Publishing can be a very rewarding business for anyone to undertake who loves to achieve creations to make anyone envious. 

If you are one of those people and you want something that will provide flexibility, this is the business you should check into.

Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (9) - Make Money in the Genealogy Business

This is a perfect business opportunity for those who love to research and love to learn about our ancestors. 

Genealogists make a living by creating family trees for other people who don’t have the time or the patience to do it themselves.

Almost everyone likes to know where they came from and what their ancestors did that might have made a mark on the world. 

You can cash into their curiosities by doing the research for them and providing them with their family heritage.

What skills would be helpful?

Excellent research skills and organization skills will be of high priority. 

These skills are what genealogy is all about. You will need to know where and how to research each family’s heritage and be able to place all the information in an easy to understand format for your clients.

What Tools would be needed?

You would need a computer with a reliable internet connection. You should subscribe to some of the best genealogy websites available to use for your research. 

You should also invest in some guides or attend some classes to learn some tips and tricks on researching family trees.

A website would be needed to run your business from. Clients will need to know how you perform you work as well as how much you charge. 

Provide some samples if possible to show clients how thorough your work is.

How to get started?

Get all your supplies brought together and find genealogy websites to subscribe to. 

Create a website to sell your service from and then start marketing your business to get clients to your site.

Utilize your internet resources for your research as well as local libraries, courthouses and historical societies. 

You may need to interview people to access some information, so you may need to look into a phone to use.

Create your family tree document that will hold all the family heritage information or use software programs that provide that for you.

If you love to research and are interested in historical documents, then you should be considering this type of business. 

Meet the demands that people have to find out their family history and make money doing  something you love to do.

Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (8) - Making Money Coaching Others

A coach is one who takes their know-how in a particular craft and sharing it with others who want to be successful in that field as well. 

Coaches can be experts in anything from writing to marketing to business itself.

If you have good knowledge or experience in a particular area you can become a coach quite easily and make money doing it. 

There are many coaches who help others in web design, graphic design and even in the coaching field as well.

A coach would offer tips and techniques to newbies within that field and answer questions throughout their learning process.

What skills are helpful?

The most important skill you should have for this type of business is the ability to be a good listener. You should also have great patience for your clients.

Those who hire you to coach them want you to listen to their bad experiences and help guide them out of the muck they find themselves in no matter how strange they may sound. 

To build rapport and credibility in this business, you should know your field well.

If you’ve never designed a website before, then being a web designing coach would not be a good idea, because your lack of experience will be spotted right away and trust will be lost.

What Tools will be needed?

You should have the following in this kind of business:

1. Computer

2. E-Mail program

3. Website

4. Informative content for your site

5. Shopping cart feature for your site to handle payments

6. Telephone dedicated for business purposes

Most of your conversations with clients will probably be through your e-mail programs, but some people may be more comfortable being able to talk to you on a more one on one basis, so a phone should be included in your list of tools.

How to get started?

Plan your business out. What service will you be offering that you have knowledge in? Get some articles and other written content created to place on a website to help build credibility and expert status for your business.

Explain on your site how your service works and how much your rate will be. Show some testimonials from others who have used your services before and were pleased with the results. 

Make your site easily navigated so others won’t get lost trying to find information about your coaching business.

Market your coaching business to get clients to come to you. Plan the goals that the client wants to achieve by using you and discuss how those goals will be obtained. 

Listen to their problems and questions and provide insightful answers and support to keep them moving forward to their goals.

Coaches are well sought after online for those who have good knowledge or experience in a certain area. Use what you know about a topic and provide a coaching service to others to help them become an expert like you in the same field.

Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (7) - Make Money Blogging

Blogging started out years ago as a way for people to connect to others and share pictures, stories and experiences. 

It was considered to be a great personal journal type tool that one could use to leave their mark on the internet through their encounters.

Blogs then evolved to become excellent Marketing Tools as well as a medium to make money off of. There are a few different ways to earn income from blogging. Here are a few:

Adsense ads- The popular search engines offer a way to earn a little extra money with any blog or website. 

The idea is to place these ads on your site and when a visitor clicks on an ad from your site, you earn a pre-determined amount of money. 

The more clicks you can get from your site visitors, the more you can make. 

There are some rules, so if you choose to go this route, be sure to learn what not to do before signing up for their programs.

Product Reviews- There are some websites that you can sign up with that can help you connect with other companies who need people to review their products and get them some exposure on your blogs. 

Usually the main requirement for this is to have a blog that’s been around for awhile and has a fair amount of visitors. 

Those companies would pay you a specified amount to review their product on your blog.

Contextual Links- Some business or website owners will pay a blogger to post one of their links within their blog posts. 

It may be the owners themselves contacting the blog author or a company that acts as the middleman. 

Those businesses will find blogs that relate to their companies sites, so the links provided on the blogs will be search engine friendly. 

This is a great way to earn some extra traffic for a site.

Sell products- Blogs are another way you can sell your own products from. 

Those who have businesses selling home décor items or food container items use blogs a lot to help sell their products and make more money online.

What skills would be helpful?
There isn’t much skill involved in this type of business except the ability to market your blog. 

You would want to research blogging as much as possible to learn some of the tricks of the trade to get your blog popular.

What Tools would be needed?
Your main tool, besides a computer with an internet connection, would be a blog. There are many blogging programs out there to choose from. 

Some are free to set up with, while others require a monthly or annual fee to get started with.

The paid versions of blogging programs can help you connect with other blogs and increase your blog’s traffic. 

The free versions are extremely easy to set up and most are extremely popular amongst bloggers, so finding people to connect with wouldn’t be too hard to do.

How to get started
Sign up with a blogging program and start posting entries to it. Make sure you’re blogging on a regular basis, which would be about 2 times a week. 

Blogs that aren’t updated regularly tend to get lost in cyberspace.

Market your blog as much as possible. Get listed on blog directories, get on other people’s blog rolls and comment on other blog author’s posts to get some exposure to your blog. 

The more traffic you can drive to your blog, the higher your chance of making blogging a lucrative way to make money.

Most of the blogging programs will have a sign up for adsense ads already included in their set up feature, so getting started with that will be easy. 

If you want to provide product reviews and contextual links, you will want to be blogging for awhile and have a fair amount of traffic coming to it.

When your blog is ready, find the companies that will help you connect with businesses that want to pay to have their products reviewed or have their links embedded with your blog post entries. 

Once that’s set up, you can start earning some extra income with your blog.

Blogging is an easy way to earn some extra cash if you plan to work hard at marketing it. 

The ones successful at blogging for money use every route possible to get their blog well known in the internet communities. 

The ones that don’t, tend to earn only a few cents a week.

Become one of the more successful bloggers and make your blog your business and not just a hobby to partake in once in awhile. Your pocketbook will thank you for it.

Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (6) - Make Money From Selling Informational Type Products

The internet is a great place to sell your knowledge. There are many people who will pay almost anything to get information they’re desperately looking for. If you have the knowledge that they want, you could earn a substantial income.

Informational products come in many forms. It could be one of the following:

1. E-Books

2. E-Courses

3. Tutorials

4. Guides

5. Podcasts

These are popular informational products that are well sought after by internet users all over. If you have something to say, this could be the business for you.

What skills are helpful?

You should have knowledge of the topic that you’re going to present to your consumers. It won’t be necessary to have a doctorate degree or of any kind to do this, but having a good amount of knowledge in the field would be helpful.

The ability to market your materials will also be helpful. The more people you reach with your products, the more people who may want to buy from you.

What Tools will be needed?

The tools you need will depend on what you plan to provide. E-Books and Guides could be written on word processing software and then converted to a PDF document, which is the most popular type of document people want.

Autoresponder programs will be needed for creating successful e-courses. Podcasts would need audio recording and editing software. Tutorials could be done a couple of different ways. You could use a power point presentation to present you material or you could use video tutorial software. 

Video tutorials are great for showing users how to use a specific program step by step. Websites and blogs will be necessary to promote your informational products from as well.

How to get started?

You will need to decide on a topic for your product. What do you have the most knowledge about that you could provide your potential consumers? When you know what you want to provide, then research that topic to see if you can find a new and unique angle to present it in.

Since there are lots of E-Books, tutorials etc. on the internet for sale, you will need to find something new to give to your customers. They won’t be as willing to hand over their money if they don’t think you have something new to give them.

Write out or record your informational product and then edit them to your satisfaction. Once you have it the way you want it, then you can start selling it. Create a blog or website to sell it from and make sure the site’s web copy content grabs internet user’s attention so they can purchase what you’re offering.

Hire a copywriter if you can afford one to write the copy to promote those materials. They can write content in a way that makes your product so desirable that anyone would want to purchase it.

Creating informational products won’t cost you much, but you can sell them for a nice profit. This is an excellent way to earn income online while maintaining a flexible schedule which allows you to spend more time with your family.

Types Of Legitimate Online Businesses (5) - Making Money The PLR Way

PLR stands for Paid Label Rights. Its written content that can be sold to others to use for whatever they want to use it for. Website owners search these out to get content for their sites for a smaller fee.

It doesn’t sound like a money making opportunity when put that way. The thing is, the same package of written content can be sold numerous times to other people. Here’s how it works.

For example, let’s say you are selling a package of 10 articles - all about a certain topic like pet care. Typically, these packages are sold at about $1 an article. 

Someone who has a website about pet care needs articles to place on their site, so they buy a package from you. You just made $10. Now, that same package of 10 articles can be sold again and again and again. 

In the end, you can sell the same 10 articles 50 times bringing you the grand total of $500 just for that one

package. You can sell more than one package of PLR articles at the same time increasing your profit potential.

Everyone charges something different and offers different types of PLR content as well as different article topics. You can sell E-book material and special reports as well as articles. People can take these articles, change them to their needs and use them wherever they want.

What skills are helpful?

Writing skills would be necessary. You would need to write good quality articles even though the people that buy them will change them anyway. 

You could hire a ghostwriter to write them for, but keep in mind; you would have to pay them for their time, so this is a good option if you don’t mind losing some of the profit.

Marketing your PLR content would also be necessary. In order to make good money in this business, you will need to get people to find your content, so pull out all the stops when starting this business.

What tools will I need?

If you’re going to write the article content yourself, you would need a computer with word processing software installed. A website will also be needed to sell your PLR content from.

If you choose to hire someone to write the content for you, then you will need to find a ghostwriter that fits your budget and provides good quality content.

How do you get started?

The first place to start will be in getting the articles written. You will want to make sure that the package of articles that you will sell together relate to a certain topic. Topics could include gardening, pet care, nutrition, exercise etc.

Decide how much you will sell the articles for and get a website set up to sell them from. You can certainly use a website that provides the service of selling them for you, but you’re better off selling them off your own site and marketing them yourself.

There is good money in PLR if you choose to get into this kind of business, as there are millions of websites out there that need content. With good marketing techniques, you can make a good living for you and your family quite easily.