18 Internet Business Ideas To Make Money Online

6 min readMay 19, 2023

If you want to learn how to make money online, you need to have good business ideas, but you also need a great marketing plan. The good news is with a domain and hosting, alongside some basic skills, your ideas can become a reality. Each of the internet business ideas below is competitive niches, so make sure you go in with all guns blazing!

1. Become an affiliate

Learning how to earn money online as an affiliate isn’t easy. But there are lots of people worldwide that are making over $1,000,000 a year doing it. Most will not be successful unless they have some formal help and training. Affiliate stores are web stores where people purchase items on a site but through a third party.

Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs in the world, but it really shouldn’t be considering the commissions are so low! It’s not just Amazon that you can affiliate with; there are 1,000 affiliate programs to choose from. Although Amazon can be lucrative, there are some much better options out there, allowing affiliates to earn up to 75% commission in some cases! Work on your own time

Build multiple sites
Work on your own time
Focus on product niches that you have an interest in!

Example — Affilorama is a great resource for anyone looking at starting their journey in affiliate marketing. The email marketer’s best friend is their email list; you have to have an email list! I use Aweber to collect subscribers.

2. Start an eCommerce store

At the forefront of the internet, a revolution has been eCommerce stores. Nowadays you can get an easy-to-use, fully functional eCommerce store design for as little as £500; then you just need a domain and hosting. Of course, how much you profit depends on your methods and effectiveness of marketing which might include:

Print media
PPC (pay-per-click)
SEO (search engine optimization)
Networking
Event Sponsorship
The list goes on…!

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Example — Zappos

You might not have even heard of Zappos, an online shoe store. Well, that goes to show how big the internet really is and how big your online business could be. Maybe it might even come to close to the acquisition of Zappos by Amazon for a reported $900,000,000.

3. Earn Cash From Blogging

Starting a blog isn’t as hard as you think. All you need is hosting and a domain. To make money online from a blog you need to gain large amounts of traffic from a specific niche. See how I do it here. You can earn cash using:

AdSense
Selling banner advertisements
Affiliating to sites such as Amazon & eBay (see #2)
Offer premium services or member areas

Example — TechCrunch

TechCrunch is a popular Web 2.0 blog and makes a reported $200,000 per month. Originally started by Michael Arrington, it was eventually acquired by AOL for a reported $25,000,000. There is money to be made by blogging and it’s cheap one of the cheap and easy home-based businesses to get started with.

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4. Sell on eBay

Selling on eBay successfully is not easy. You need to be able to able to target a niche where the profit margins are high and competition is low. If you pick the right product (particularly unbranded products) you have a chance to import items and make huge profit margins.

Example — Linda’s Stuff

There are some extremely large sellers on eBay. Take “Linda’s Stuff” as an example, with around 150,000 items online and nearly 350,000 confirmed sales.

5. Train and mentor

Perhaps you have a specific skill set that you could teach. There are hundreds of skills that can be taught over the internet, especially due to the fact that services like Skype are free.

You might have to offer a free service now and build a freemium model (offer free accounts with limited features, then charge for upgrades) for the future in order to make some large amounts of cash. It’s one of the good business ideas for those with extensive amounts of knowledge. You could:

Teach a language
Offer marketing training
Help improve writing skills
And more!

Example — Code Academy

Although it is only in the early stages Code Academy is going to be one of those online training centers that really stands out from the crowd. More than one investor has seen the potential that has with the Academy getting over $12.5m in investment within the first 12 months, including investments from Richard Branson and Yuri Milner.

6. Become a drop shipper

Dropshipping is fairly similar to running an affiliate store. You act as the mediator without ever touching the product. The difference between a drop shipper and an affiliate is that the sale with drop shipping websites is not completely managed. You might have to set up systems to automatically make a purchase with your drop shipping company, in order for it to be sent directly to the end consumer.

Example — iPhone store

There was a sale confirmed on Flippa a few years ago for iPhoneStore.com. It was producing nearly $30,000 in revenue every month and sold for $90,000.

7. Paid blogging

With over 350,000,000 websites on the internet, there is a huge demand for content. If you have experience or skills relating to writing, offering a blog posting service could be for you. Lower-paid projects might start at around £1 per 100 words, with quality-focused projects being in the £2.50–10 per 100 words range. Sites like People Per Hour and Elance are great for picking up paid writing gigs, without actually having a website.

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8. Become a virtual assistant

A virtual assistant is a great job to have if you want flexibility. You’ll be able to maintain multiple clients at once which means you can easily fill gaps in your week or work overtime if you need to. A virtual assistant will generally charge £15–20 depending on the specifics of their job role. Expect to be assisting with tasks such as blogger outreach, product listings, research, and responding to emails.

9. Offer web design

Nearly every company is now looking to build a website. In fact, even those companies that have a website are looking to make sure that theirs looks bigger and better than the competition. You can learn how to earn money from home with practically no investment and this is certainly one of the best business ideas for someone wanting huge amounts of flexibility.

You can learn the basics of coding on CodeAcademy and do specific online web design courses to build up your skillset. Sign up for freelance sites such as People Per Hour and start building up your portfolio! This portfolio might even lead you to a high paid job!

Example — City College Brighton

Many of the students from City College Brighton have gone on to be successful freelance web designers, and you could do the same!

10. Deal with domains

You’ve heard of antique dealers and even car dealers, but what about dealing in domains? Domains are internet real estate and like real estate, they could be considered as an investment. Don’t just buy any domains, spread your risk with a portfolio and make sure you hold out for the highest price possible.

Learning how to connect with the end consumer, rather than other domain dealers, will enable you to get the highest price possible for your domains.

Example — Domaining.com

If you are not familiar with some of the prices that domains have been sold for, then the all-time list here is worth looking out for. Check out hotels.com, which went for $9,500,000! One of the highest domain sales back in 2012 was silver.com which sold for $875,000.

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