Online Business

To make money online, you generally need 3 things:

A website (don’t worry, they’re not that hard to make)
An audience
Something to sell

There will always be exceptions to this rule, like the YouTube celebrities who don’t have their own site, but most of the successful entrepreneurs online (myself included) have figured out those 3 things.

An online business is a great asset; you can work from anywhere and serve people worldwide. Depending on how you have it set up, you can even earn money while you sleep. Ahh that elusive “passive income!”

The location-independent business models you’ll find here include blogging, podcasting, self-publishing, teaching online courses, and more.

If you’re not sure where to start, let me recommend this “Greatest Hits” collection:

355: The Dream 100: Stop Building Links and Start Building Friendships

January 9, 2020October 3, 2019

If you have an online business, chances are you’ve tried your hand at outreach.

If you want to expand and grow your business, especially from an SEO standpoint, you need good quality links pointing to your site from other websites.

The problem is that getting other sites to link to you is not easy, as I’m sure you’ve found it. The “traditional” method is to send out dozens, even hundreds of emails to other site owners trying to land a guest post.

There’s got to be a better way! Enter the Dream 100…

354: Turning a Service Business into a Passive Income Stream – Part 2

December 2, 2020September 26, 2019

Sick of trading time for money?

Looking for ways to turn a service or a skill you already have into a digital product?

This is exactly what Matt Bochnak of HowtoMotorcycleRepair.com has done. He’s turned a “blue collar” service business–repairing motorcycles–into a lucrative business with multiple streams of time-leveraged income.

353: Small Blog, Big Income: Recurring Revenue from a Low-Traffic Site

October 31, 2021September 19, 2019

A small blog doesn’t have to mean a small income. By helping a specific group of people solve their problems, Carol Tice has attracted more than 1500 members — at $25 a month — to join her community. Carol went from working as a freelance writer, to coaching others how to become freelance writers, to … Read more

ActiveCampaign Review and Demo: The Best Marketing Automation Tool for You?

September 29, 2023August 20, 2019

Now that I’ve been an ActiveCampaign customer for over a year, I wanted to share a review of my experience so far.

In this post, I’ll go through why I made the change from AWeber, and in-depth look at the pros and cons of Active Campaign.

Lead Generation on Amazon: How to Reach New Qualified Prospects on Autopilot

June 19, 2021June 24, 2019

As a blogger or business owner, are you using Amazon to generate new leads and reach more potential customers?

If not, I think you’re missing out.

Amazon is the 4th most popular site in the country (according to Alexa), which means there are probably a metric ton of potential customers searching there for what you know about.

340: Affiliate Review Sites Done Right: How to Market and Monetize Like a Pro

December 4, 2020June 20, 2019

Robert Brandl is a German entrepreneur now living in Spain with his wife and twin 16-month olds, but 10 years ago he was working full-time, wanting to travel, and was just trying to figure out how to get a blog online.

He did what most aspiring bloggers did, he turned to Google for answers. But was disappointed with what he found. Nobody was doing a great job answering his question and comparing all the different options.

With that, WebsiteToolTester.com was born.

339: Low Content Publishing: Can You Make Money Selling Blank Books on Amazon?

August 25, 2023June 13, 2019

This week I’m excited to introduce one of the hottest side hustles of the moment, and that is low-content self-publishing.

What is low-content publishing?

Let me explain — self-publishing has been around for a decade, and we’ve covered that quite a bit in both fiction and non-fiction — it’s one of my favorite and perhaps most passive side hustles. Write the book, hit publish, collect royalties for years.

335: The 6-Figure Pivot: How Shifting Your Customer Can Dramatically Shift Your Results

April 26, 2024May 16, 2019

Chris Ritter from RitterSP.com has worked as little as 8 hrs in a month, his target audience is swimming coaches, and he still grossed 6-figures in his first year.His biggest source of growth?He started a podcast for swimming coaches, by interviewing swimming coaches.

333: The Raw Truth About Blogging – How a “Dog Mom” Built her Online Business on the Side

August 13, 2024May 2, 2019

Kimberly Gauthier has been running KeepTheTailWagging.com since 2011, but things really started to take off when she niched down her focus to raw feeding for dogs.

Raw feeding is basically the paleo diet for dogs — attempting to mimic their ancestral diet.

Her blog had than 2 million page views last year — almost entirely from organic search in Google, and she’s monetized the traffic with a few different income streams.

331: A Look Inside a 6-Figure Online Business: Traffic, Monetization, and More

March 31, 2025April 18, 2019

A few years ago, a side hustler named Brock McGoff reached out to me with a guest post pitch.

The post detailed how he was making, at that time, $4,000 a month, from his blog about men’s fashion, on the side from his day job.

Since then, Brock has turned TheModestMan.com into his full-time focus, into a 6-figure income, and into a media empire that expands well beyond the blog itself.

Usually Hustling, Occasionally Social