8+ Online Business Ideas You Can Start with Little Money

Updated: 07/06/2023

For many millennials, starting a successful online business is considered one of their life goals to achieve financial freedom.

Some may opt to find an appropriate business idea in accordance with their work experience and technical skills. Others prefer to take advantage of the internet revolution to start online businesses and search for different ways to make money online.

Whatever the reason they want to achieve, millennials need to take serious research to figure out the pros and cons of the particular online business they plan to start working on. It’s because money is one barrier that hinders many young entrepreneurs from putting actions to work.

The following are several online business ideas you may consider selecting the best online business to start and finding different ways to make money from home. Based on the list, anyone can start with almost no money or little money upfront.

Key Takeaways

• There is a list of several ideas you may consider to build a home-based business and make money online.
• Make money blogging is considered the best online business to start with little investment. One of the critical aspects of creating an online presence for your business is to select a reliable web hosting service such as Hostinger.
• After finalizing the price for each domain, you can list them back on the domain marketplace like Flippa ( the leading domain marketplace to let users buy and sell online businesses) and resell them for profit.

1. Make Money Blogging

Make money blogging is considered one of the best passive income ideas that allow bloggers to make money even while they sleep constantly.

With a little investment upfront, freelancers can start a blog as an online business that pays daily. In particular, there are several ways to make money blogging, including monetizing your site traffic and direct selling your products and service online.

When it comes to blogging for money, Google Adsense would be the very first reputable ad network that enables websites to monetize traffic and make extra money online. It’s because the platform is well known for its global reputation and advanced technology that provides different ad placements for bloggers to display on their sites.

Alternatively, there are other Adsense alternatives such as AdMaven and Media.net, bloggers may consider monetizing their site content and increasing earnings with them. You may run the experiment on different ad networks to find the right one and ensure maximize your site ad earnings.

Before thinking about different ways to make money with a blog, you must select a profitable blogging niche based on your personal interest and passion. It’s because you will commit to putting consistent work on your blog in the long run.

For this reason, I highly recommend choosing reliable and affordable shared web hosting, which is Cloudways or Hostinger The platform is a perfect start for small business owners or beginner bloggers to build a great online business website.

In addition, the starting price is around $2.75 for one of the shared hosting plans, which allows users to use the free WordPress platform and access Cpanel.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is considered one of the lucrative side hustle ideas that freelancers or bloggers can make money online by offering valuable products and services to others. Every time someone purchases an affiliate product, they receive a commission.

In particular, if you are an influencer with thousands of fans on social media, then you can directly include affiliate links on your page and promote products and services to your fan. This is one of the great ways to make money from home as an affiliate marketer.

With a blog, you can include affiliate links in your content and promote valuable products and services to the audience. You must deliver value to your readers by offering reputable and affordable items so that they can buy with confidence and use it for an extended period.

It’s easy to say than done because blogging for money requires discipline and a long-term commitment to make money online. In particular, you will require to update regular content on a weekly basis as it will increase the chance of bringing more organic traffic to your site.

When choosing the website or blog to reach your targeted audience and make money from affiliate programs, the priority is to continue creating high-quality content to explain how to use a product or a system process. 

For this, you need to employ professional graphic design software like Canva, which not only helps to create professional blog posts, infographics, videos, and presentations, to name a few but also can boost your site’s appearance on the internet.

To increase site traffic and search ranking, bloggers would need to employ an effective SEO tool that they can use to find both short and long-term keywords. Customers may find your content by searching those keywords on search engines.

And Semrush is the magic keyword tool that has some useful features and services, which make it different in the market as you may not find on other platforms. Members can access the Semrush platform to analyze organic traffic, find backlinks and find keywords for their blogs.

Related: 8+ Best Affiliate Marketing Programs of 2023 (Updated)

3. Start a Youtube Channel 

Monetizing your Youtube channel is another way to make money online, but the main obstacle to this idea is that too many people use the Youtube platform to earn a side hustle income.

In other words, you will face intense competition from other Youtubers as the road is full of people, which makes it even harder for you to earn a real income.

However, there is no secret to making money online as a Youtuber as it requires keeping up with the work and commitment by releasing regular videos every week.

Once your site meets Google’s minimum requirements: 4000 hours of watch and 1000 subscribers– then you are entitled to monetize traffic with Youtube. In other words, Google Adsense will pay monthly salaries based on the number of views and clicked-on ads.

With this in mind, I suggest using a powerful video editing tool like Wondershare Filmora. This brilliant editing software will enable users to quickly create professional videos and edit to more quality audio. For this, your Youtube channel can remain the front-runner to stay competitive and gain more views.

4. Run a Podcast

Running a podcast is another best online business to start with little investment upfront. The main priority is to conduct research to figure out the particular niche that is relevant to your knowledge and experience.

Besides regularly updating new episodes, you must ensure to deliver quality and genuine content that can attract the audience coming to your site. In particular, the topic you select must be interesting and help them to improve general knowledge in their field.

Similar to other online businesses, there is no secret to success as podcast speakers because they need to have a commitment and discipline to record and publish the podcast on a regular basis.

5. Dropshipping

Many people consider this online business as a way to make money from home. As a small business owner, you will get paid for each product that was purchased successfully by customers online.

One of the benefits of running a drop shipping business is that you don’t need to invest a lot of money in purchasing products and handling the delivery. Instead, the third-party supplier will do the job on your behalf by receiving an order and arranging to ship an item to your customer.

The whole idea of dropshipping business is you buy cheaper products from the wholesale or suppliers and resell them for making a small amount of profit.

By listing products on global E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Etsy, you may increase the chance of selling more products to global consumers.

6. Make Money Online as a Freelance writer

Becoming a freelance writer is one of the great ways to make money from home. This home-based job is well suited to those who have a passion and interest in writing because you help others to write up content and make money online based on your work.

In particular, this type of online job is particularly great for students and professional white-collar workers who want to make extra money as a side hustle. It’s because they have academic knowledge and writing skills to deliver quality content for clients.

If you want to pursue a career as a freelance writer, then you should invest in improving your writing and reading skills. Thus, I suggest you find relevant material and media you may consider to improve those skills.

Recommended Book: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Updated): Proven Professional Techniques for Writing with Style and Power

Popular Media for reading articles: Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and CNN.

FlexJobs, and Fiverr are the two reputable sites to get started as a freelance writer.

7. Flipping Domain

Flipping websites is among the great ways to make money online because your job is to buy a domain with a high authority ranking at a relatively cheap price, then you may consider selling domains when someone offers you a better price.

The process of buying and selling domains is quite simple. The very first thing you need to do is to sign up with a popular domain marketplace, then conduct research to figure out the list of domains you want to buy.

After finalizing the price for each domain, you can list them back on the domain marketplace like Flippa ( the leading domain marketplace to let users buy and sell online businesses) and resell them for profit.

The hardest part of this online business is to determine the intrinsic value of each domain you want to purchase. It’s because your main priority is to sell quickly for a profit. Thus, you don’t want to keep those domains with you for a long time.

In addition, if you are an expert in web design and know-how to add quality content to your site, then you should select this as one of the passive income ideas to make extra money.

In particular, you buy a quality website with quality content and regular traffic, then make a change to ensure your site can increase revenue, which you can resell back for a higher price.

Overall, the flipping domain is one of the home-based businesses that allows one to determine the potential domain and resell it for a better price. However, the main obstacle is figuring out the real value of each domain that you plan to purchase.

For this reason, I highly suggest anyone who plans to get started with this online business, must take at least several months to build the technical skill and knowledge in the field in terms of buying and selling domains for profit.

8. Resume Writing and Editing 

Depending on your skill and work experience, you may select the appropriate online business to deliver value to your customers. The most important thing is your commitment constantly work towards achieving both short and long-term goals for your business.

You may face some bumpy roads along the way to reach the destination, but make it an opportunity to make an improvement and compete with other competitors. Hence, it’s the only way to develop the business into the next stage.

Here are several links to additional coverage showing you different ways to make money online. You should find out those relevant articles if missed out.

→ How To Start Freelancing for Beginners of 2023

→ What is Affiliate Marketing & How does it work

By Jiro Nguyen. 

Disclosure: the article may include affiliate links and images that we may receive compensation if you click to purchase