5 Online Business Ideas to Consider During a Pandemic

As we have entered the new year, the time is to look for fresh business ideas or opportunities. In fact, you can find plenty of them to start this year. Do you think you’d rather take precautions and stick to home-based work during a pandemic? Hey, that’s smart! Start looking around the Internet since many businesses started with just a laptop, an Internet connection, and a business idea.

What sounds even more exciting is that you’ll only need a little to none of the startup capital to run your business online. Unlike a traditional business, an online business can be launched completely from scratch. The fact is that today it is possible to get online start-ups up and running with no huge expenditures at all. How? Just by utilizing free services that are available online. There is a full bucket of free services on the Internet today that are able to facilitate almost any business idea.

In this blog post, we’ll list 5 top business ideas you may consider working on during a pandemic.

Idea 1. Sell what you like on Amazon

Everybody knows Amazon these days or at least heard of it at some point. The Amazon website is the one that probably most people are familiar with. It is literally a global network where folks like to purchase physical merch, as well as digital goods from a wide variety of sellers. By the way, you can set up your own online Amazon store and start making a profit by selling goods on Amazon.

Here are some reasons why selling on Amazon is a good business idea during a pandemic:

• Let you start with a minimum investment. The fee for opening the seller’s account is pretty low (like $40) and you can purchase a product to resell for $5 or even lower.
• Low risk. This is about dealing with profitable products that sell well on Amazon and have good seller ratings. So, pick your merch properly! Once you do that, it will be hard to lose money and easy to make a profit with no hassle. Do your homework first, do some research, and don’t omit this step as you don’t want to waste money on products that won’t sell.
• Let you calculate profit. Before investing money, break down all the numbers to see and evaluate your projected profit. The Amazon FBA Revenue Calculator or the AMZ Scout chrome extension is pretty effective for breaking down the fees. Take the ASIN and plug it into the calculator to run the numbers. Make sure to take all shipping costs to you into an account (free shipping is even better) and then inbound shipping to Amazon.
• No experience needed. Once you figure everything out and understand what’s going on, you’ll see that there is nothing too complicated. Selling on Amazon is a pretty simple process – no need to advertise, generate traffic, handle customer service, etc.

Now, let’s go over product search a little bit more since this is important. Use Amazon, eBay, Google, Alibaba for conducting product research. This way you’ll get much better ideas of potential products that sell well on the Internet. Make a list of ideas and go onto Amazon to search for that product. Make sure that these products show up on the first page and don’t have more than 200 reviews. Reviews show the competition levels!

Click into at least 10 products and check their BSR (Best Seller Rating). This will show the demand for this product. Pay attention to products with a BSR between 0 – 2500.

A hint: Source your product on Alibaba (a website with tons of suppliers from China). Once you get on Alibaba’s website, search for products that you want to resell. Make sure that you ticked boxes: Assessed supplier, Gold supplier, Quality assurance, etc. After locating potential suppliers, start selling on Amazon and earn a profit!

In case if you have a supplier in China, ship the inventory over to either your house/office or directly to Amazon. You could create a PPC ad to start sales flowing, you could do a giveaway with some friends to get the reviews coming in.

Idea 2. Sell online courses

During the lockdown, many people already tried online education. The majority of online students said that they didn’t even realize how convenient it is compared to a traditional college education. Thanks to all those mobile devices and Internet technologies, now you can learn marketing, software development, design, philosophy, history, etc. from real experts. With online training courses, you can even master the latest cloud accounting software. Some online training offers to obtain an official certificate for starting your own, let’s say, bookkeeping business.

One of the best parts of online education is that there is no need to take a student loan to complete studies. Of course, there are still specialties that require real-world practice in labs, like medicine or chemistry. But still online education is on a roll now, and the tendency will only enhance.

So, if you have some knowledge that would be valuable to someone else. Why not share it so that other people can learn that specific skill? People would pay for a solution to a problem or to acquire a new skill.

There are plenty of platforms (like Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera, Grinfer) online that allow you to build and sell your own course. Take it a step further and end up with an e-learning company!

Online learning platforms is something that will grow proportionally with our informational appetites. Providing something useful and actionable is a proven way to attract people’s attention and stimulate them to get acquainted with pretty much anything you want. Plus, it provides a great opportunity for marketers and media specialists to do something both profitable and socially responsible.

Idea 3. Sell your knowledge in IoT security

Obviously, IoT (Internet of Things) is the next leap of tech development. The thing is that having a nice autonomous device can make a certain problem easier. But the whole ecosystem of products has the power to turn the whole living experience upside down. 

Such rising popularity among common users has resulted in IoT’s increasing popularity among hackers and fraudulent individuals. Moreover, IoT is much more interesting from this perspective. Infiltrating the least secure device can actually provide access to the whole ecosystem.

So, if you have good IoT knowledge, trying to build a business that would prevent online frauds and that would secure people from data leaks. This industry is already stimulating the market to pay a serious price for digital solutions.

Idea 4. Sell with affiliate marketing

One of the ways to start with no capital is affiliate marketing. With this business solution, you’re selling someone else’s products by using merchant marketing materials and receiving a commission on each sale.

There are just a few basic steps for becoming an affiliate:

• Choose a niche that is popular with plenty of customers bearing in mind what interests you.
• Pick through a number of websites that list products and pay good commissions like Clickbank or JVZoo (which are free to join).
• Find a product in one of these sites that fits your niche with that “hungry crowd” of buyers.
• Use the sales material provided by the supplier of your chosen product to promote the product on a blog or Facebook page.
• Post relevant content on the blog or Facebook page that is interesting and helpful. Try Facebook advertising campaigns to attract visitors to your page.

Idea 5. Sell your expertise through online coaching and tutoring

If you know you are an expert in a specific field don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and teach people how you can solve their problems. Get out of the mindset of “Oh, I’m not that good at what I do…” or “no one would ever listen to me!”. As long as you know more than your target audience – you are an expert in your field.

Being a coach or consultant takes no initial investment except maybe a website. Besides, recording videos and creating eBooks or online Skype sessions can all be done for free. And remember, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in your field, as long as you know more than the people you’re teaching to.

With all these coronavirus lockdowns, there are lots of students today who are seeking a good tutoring service online. No secret, there is a rather serious lack of really good tutors. So, if you’re good at tutoring, you can teach people online.

Start marketing yourself for the tuition service on the Grinfer eLearning platform. You can make decent money just by teaching people in your free time. There is no starting or sign up fees and you’ll be provided with everything that you need for launching your tutoring business online. Just go to Grinfer’s website for more info on this or contact Grinfer’s marketing team. You’ll get step-by-step instructions on what to do to launch your coaching and tutoring career today on Grinfer’s eLearning platform.

Online courses that will help you boost your knowledge and skills

Complete Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing for Web Apps

Learn how to launch a career as a web security expert and handle cyber-attacks day by day. In this course, you will learn how to do penetration testing on web-based applications and how to handle vulnerabilities on mobile-based applications that communicate with a cloud-based API. 

After taking this course, you will be having enough confidence to test a web application or test a cloud-based application in an API based application, a mobile application that is using a cloud-based API. Take this awesome online course today and make a step further to becoming a cybersecurity professional or being a cybersecurity enthusiast!

How To Start A Profitable Coaching Business

Learn how to make a life change by launching an online coaching business that can easily pay you a big buck for your coaching services. In this online course, you will learn how to build a profitable coaching business that will allow you to work from anywhere in the world! 

With this step-by-step guide, you will learn what coaching is all about, the main areas of coaching, different types of coaches, coaching business model, key ingredients for a profitable coaching business, how to develop your profitable niche, how to get clients without paying for ads, and much more! 

The Amazon FBA Seller Beginner’s Toolkit

Learn how to work with the Amazon FBA business model and start your own business! In this course, you will learn how to launch your first product with Amazon FBA and use a set of effective tools for successful sales. With this course, you’ll know it all about free trials or how to offer free trials that help to make the process go faster and more efficiently. 

After taking this course you will be able to calculate your fees and profitability, discover trends and seasonality, identify the right keywords for your product listing, get long-tail keywords ideas, track your rankings and follow up with customers, create campaigns, and find social media influencers, and more! Take this awesome step-by-step online course today and reach maximum success in your business!

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world and already changed many areas of life. Even a year ago, the industries that were on top, like travel and manufacturing, are now crashing. However, if you look at the bright side, you’ll see that it gave other industries a massive boost. Now we can even make some predictions about which businesses will be the most successful in 2021.

Yes, there is an endless list of businesses you can start in 2021. Everything greatly depends on your interests and skills. If you boost your knowledge and skills with some additional online courses, you’ll have a much greater chance of success.