If you have something potential, there are high chances to meet success.
Yes, solve a problem, add some value or just help people make their life easier in any aspects; you will wonder seeing the result at the end of the day.
To touch your milestone, you just need to have a valuable idea with a smarter plan. Although, most of the small businesses die before a year.
But your hard work and dedication can lead you to long term sustainability
Inspira, a marketing agency and Interworks, an IT and data consultancy company both increased the revenue gradually $71M and $57M and became the successful small business of the USA.
Sheryl Page, President & CEO of Page One Consultants, an engineering consultancy company, who has taken her business to the success but it took 25 years of ceaseless efforts.
In the past two years, her company got bigger in revenue, size, and number of employee. She has managed to triple the revenue in just the last two years and achieved the esteemed recognition as the small business person of the year by Small Business Administration (SBA).
In this post, we have covered 5 profitable yet low-budget business ideas with actionable tips. Dig down onto the main article to know ‘what to do, how to do and where to start.’
Get prepared
You should know the industry very well that you are going to embrace. We generally know that small business is a small volume business, but there are more facts to know deeply.
Small businesses are independently owned and operated firms which can be in any form of partnership, corporation, or sole proprietorship.
Generally, a business needs two criteria to be considered as a small business; The number of employees a business has and the average profit that business makes annually.
But if you are looking for a single and constant definition then there’s nothing to satisfy you highly. Because the definition of the SMEs varies depending on the type of your business industry.
Like, If your business is in the agricultural industry and the average annual profit is $750,000, your business can be certified as a small business. In terms of retail trade and health care business, it is around $7.5 million. If you consider the number of the employee, then it can be maximum 250 or 1500 depending on the industry.
Here’s a comprehensive standard table from Small Business Administration (SBA) for you to know all the ifs and else.
Impact of small business in GDP and employment
Nowadays, small business is considered as the heart of the national economy of any country. The effectiveness of small business has made it popular to the entrepreneurs through the decades and it’s evolving years after years.
Today, small businesses contribute around $17 trillion in the GDP of the USA where it was around $5.2 trillion in 2008.
The picture is almost the same across the countries. So that you can easily understand the output of SMEs. And SMEs change the employment curve in a way that you can’t even imagine.
Employment of the total population of a country has an incredible impact on the economy where small business has a great contribution. For instance, the United States could manage to create 8.4 million net new jobs (65.9% new job) from the small business sector in the time period of 2000 to 2017.
That’s why small business is also known as the fuel engine of the innovation and economy.
5 profitable yet low budget small business to open from home
Studies show that 69% of U.S. entrepreneurs start their business from home. This is not only validated for today’s economy, but rather big companies like Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s and Apple also started as a small business with the dream to go big as they are now.
So, set up your mind like start small, grow big!
Since small business is easy to start and gives a person the freedom to work as preference many people intend to own their own business. Research shows that 35% of US small business and 39% of UK small business owners prefer business just considering independence.
Now here I’m going to recommend you some low-cost small business ideas to open with necessary steps and required tools.
Online store
eCommerce is the most lucrative, easy and best small business to open and start these days. Entrepreneurs today prefer the online business to make money and many of them have success stories.
But why?
The reason is you will not be needed that much money to start with since it’s online based business and there’s no need to hire huge employees like brick and mortar store. Also, you can make money while you are in sleep since the store will remain open 24/7.
How to start?
First, do your planning and market research, think which type of products are you going to sell and will it be tangible or downloadable products. Then do some research on your niche to find out your probable target market as well as competitors. And then after selecting a name, get registered for legal benefits.
When you are done with all these, create your own online store with the help of an eCommerce shopping cart platforms.
There are several platforms like WordPress based WooCommerce, CS-Cart, Shopify, Bigcommerce, etc but before choosing, do compare which platform is best for you to start your online business.
Now you might feel why most of the people prefer and suggest WordPress and WooCommerce extended plugins for eCommerce business. Here’s a source on Why Use WordPress For eCommerce where you can learn the advantages of using WordPress.
As the most powerful yet popular CMS platform, If you want to rely on WordPress to build your own marketplace and customize it as a customer-friendly site, you should go through this step by step tutorial.
Freelance content creation
If you are not that much willing to spend money to start a business, then you can use your creativity and skill with freelancing. There are several sectors to start freelancing as in content writing, graphics designing, and developing software for clients. But it depends on your expertise that which sector you will choose.
Now, For the sake of this writeup, let’s think it’s Content Marketing. You can get inspiration from Content Writers to start.
Content is the king of this digital era. So there is no backward for you to start freelancing as a content writer.
To start freelancing, first, decide the focus arena where you are good at in writing. Secondly, create a website for your portfolio. Show your expertise on your niche.
Are you thinking of coding and design knowledge for your website?
Stop worrying while there’s an open source CMS platform like WordPress sets all for you and it’s easy to use. When you’re done with your website, now write some content as a sample.
There are some more free platforms like Medium, Linkedin that I would recommend to share your content with the community. Now it’s time to look for the clients. You can find at Upwork, Freelance Writing Blogs, Problogger.
Bonus tips – Guest posting to other prominent sites related to your niche can enrich your portfolio to be hired.
Some tools for a content writer:
- Unsplash – For Visual Content
- Canva – For graphics
- Snappa – For Infographics
- Visme: for brainstorming, planning, and designing
- Keyword Everywhere and Keyword planner – To research keywords
- Buzzsumo – For content suggestion
- CloudApp – For screenshot
- Grammarly – to check grammar
Marketing service
This business idea can make you as successful as Thrive and Fuel Online.
It is surely one of the best small businesses to open as beginner. Perhaps an entrepreneur has some great ideas for the business to outreach but if the person is not a good marketer then all s/he has are just ideas.
To implement these, you will be needed some marketing experts. Where a Marketing agency works as a rescuer.
First, Do research on Marketing services and your niche like SEO marketing, Designing adsMarket Research, Social Campaign, Creating Visual content for clients, etc. And then hire some skilled employees who will be able to complete projects.
Since you will provide marketing services, must ensure that you have great outreach in all marketing channels and pricing model for clients before going to clients.
Online courses
Internet is the best platform to learn. Everyone who browses the internet must seek to learn things they don’t know. So online courses are the best way to generate money by selling courses. Researchers say that this industry will grow big up to $325 Billion by 2025.
People who are interested in teaching and expert in any sector can start an online course, share and spread the knowledge with the world.
First, choose your topic you are going to teach people and then target the audience. Now create a website, select some course topic based on the target audience. You can use WordPress and WooCommerce to sell your courses.
Then have a bank account and get your business registered for legal issues. Create an online campaign to outreach the target audience. If needed, you can hire some course instructor to assist you and conduct the courses. For a more detailed guideline, follow this article to get started.
You can start selling your course in giant online course platforms like Udemy, Coursera, and Teachable.
Since having your own Learning Management System (LMS) will cost you high, as a beginner, you can start with platforms like Udemy. This is easy to grab big targeted learners with these platforms. While choosing a targeted audience, emphasize on the local audience and prepare your direct marketing plan targetting them.
And when you will be well known, you can start your own website to grow the business.
Event management and planning
Event management scales up to any sort of events like conferences, conventions, trade show, concerts, etc.
An event management company successfully executes the whole event.
For that, it needs minimal manpower. If you start your event management company, you also have to find where the target audiences are, generate the event concept and plan according to the concept, also planning the overall logistics and supervise event planners and other workers.
As an event management company, you and your employees should have some skills like professional certifications, time management, multi-tasking ability, risk management, creativity, communication skill and, leadership. Here is a complete guideline to start your event planning business.
So, undoubtedly, we can say that event management is another best small business to open with low-cost.
Returning to you
Since all these business ideas are low budget and easy to start, I’m considering these as the best small business to open in 2019. If you want to start a small business for real and ready to be your own boss start with any of these 5 ideas which suit your expertise and passion.
Now, if you are planning to start something with WordPress, here is the source to help you with some powerful WordPress plugins.
To easily manage your projects at free of cost, you can rely on the WP ERP Project Manager.
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