I Tried Every Kind of Online Business — Here's How Much Each One Earned

[00:01] just about every kind of online business that you can think of. So many so that I got a list here. I've tried affiliate marketing, coaching, Etsy, drop shipping, courses, memberships, print on demand, agencies, Shopify, freelance,

[00:15] blogging, YouTube, podcasting, and several others as well. And some of them, quite honestly, have been kind of a disaster and have wasted a massive amount of my time. But others have been really quite successful, earning me

[00:28] hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, a couple even earned me over a million dollars each. So, today I want to break down all these different kinds of online businesses that I've tried for you, tell you what I liked about each

[00:40] one, what I didn't like, how much each of them actually earned, and perhaps most importantly, which ones are actually worth starting today. One of the first online businesses I ever tried was affiliate marketing. Back in the

[00:52] day, it was promoted heavily as being one of the easiest kinds of online businesses. You didn't even need to create a product yourself. You were just selling other people's products basically on commission. Now, these

[01:04] commissions can range anywhere from about like 2, 3, 4% all the way up to as high as 75% if you sell Amazon products or any sort of retail product, and this is what a lot of influencers do, then you're

[01:17] generally looking at a commission between 3 to 10%. On the other hand, if digital products, then normally the commissions are in the like 30 to 50% or so range. Now, what is good about it is, just like they say, you don't have to

[01:31] make a product of your own. What's not so good is that you only get a small percentage of the profit because there's this huge middleman, which is the product and delivering the product to the customers. They've got all these

[01:45] profit, too, so they keep most of the profit for themselves. But not only are your profits kind of small when you do affiliate marketing, the bigger problem that I found was because I had not created the product myself. Ultimately,

[01:59] I was not able to be very successful with affiliate marketing because I needed to learn a lot more about content creation and building an audience and just kind of about marketing and branding in general. I really had to get

[02:12] my hands dirty making a product before I was ever able to successfully sell a product because I had to understand the product at a really deep level and really believe in it to be able to talk about it authentically. So, for me,

[02:25] affiliate marketing was a flop and I didn't earn very much money from it. To this day, I still earn a little bit from it though and it's pretty much totally passive. Basically, if it's a product that I already actually use myself and

[02:39] love and I'm going to talk about it anyway, then I go and I get that affiliate code so that I can earn a small kickback and it earns me anywhere between a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars per month, which, you

[02:52] know, it's not chump change, but that's with the big audience that I have. I'm passively. If you're just starting out and you don't have an audience yet, I don't think this would be my go-to for most people. In no particular order,

[03:05] number two on my list is coaching. I've done this throughout my business journey from when I first started my online business, what is now about like eight or nine years ago, all the way up to present day. I still coach a few clients

[03:19] as I have the time to do so. Now, of course, I'm able to charge higher rates than I could back then, but what I've always found is that it can be pretty profitable, but you are definitely trading your time for money, so it's not

[03:33] trading your time for money, so it's not passive, and it takes a lot of kind of like mental and emotional energy to be able to be a good coach. And so, I can't work with more than a couple coaching clients without it really taking me away

[03:47] from working on growing my business and building my business. Now, some people love coaching so much that they want to build a coaching business. They want to work with 20, 30, 40 clients at a time, and you can make a really good money

[04:00] about the coaching model is that you don't have to really create a product to be able to have something to sell. If you have knowledge, if you have skills, if you have some type of expertise, then you can set up basically a very simple

[04:15] sales page just explaining how you can help people, and you can take that product in the matter of just a couple of days. So, I would really recommend coaching as a great business model, a great type of online business for a lot

[04:29] any experience teaching people at all, years before I started my online business. And if you feel like you have table, if you have something that you can effectively coach on, and this could

[04:44] be something that you've been really successful at in your own life, or a something that you've helped people with in the past, maybe something relating to a corporate job that you have or used to have, then I think that this would be a

[04:58] great option for you to at least get started with. Later on, you might want bit more passive where you're selling a digital product or you are able to sell products at scale, but it's certainly a great place to start at least. Oh, and

[05:13] coaching? Well, it's varied from one year to the next, of course. The first earned a few thousand dollars a year with it, and then for most of these last like five to six years, I've earned tens of thousands of dollars a year working

[05:28] with just a couple clients each year. So, I would say like on average most years, maybe 15, 20, 25,000 dollars from coaching specifically. The next online business I want to talk about is Etsy. Now, of all these online businesses,

[05:43] Etsy is one of the ones I I done the least with, so I'm not going to pretend to know about something I don't know, but I have tried it. And what I like about Etsy is I find it pretty fun and that it's not knowledge-based. I do a

[05:55] information-based work. And so it is nice to sell something that is physical nice to sell something that is physical goods and it's a variety for me at least. Etsy is very competitive and I find that you have to really study Etsy

[06:09] to be able to learn how to kind of play the algorithms on Etsy. It's kind of like becoming a YouTuber or learning how to get your blog content to rank. So it's more kind of technical work rather than more creative work. But then

[06:22] when it comes to the products themselves. So overall, I really enjoy Etsy and it's definitely a valid, viable type of online business to start. Just know that it is really competitive and there is a fair amount of kind of like

[06:36] analytical, technical sort of work you will need to do. It's not all going to be just making art. Honestly, I haven't earned very much from it yet because it is one of the very most recent businesses that I have been trying out,

[06:49] but let me know if you would like to see a video on that maybe in a few months once I've had my Etsy store for a little longer. Now, next up is drop shipping. And drop shipping was an interesting one. Um I'll say right out, I never made

[07:02] any money drop shipping, but that was not for lack of trying. Uh I'm sure there are people who make money with it, but I spent a lot of time learning and researching products that I could sell

[07:15] and ordering samples of products. I spent money ordering samples of products and every product that I ordered a sample of for one reason or another, I decided was not going to work out. Either the product wasn't good enough

[07:29] quality or I ended up determining there was just too much competition or the profit margins weren't going to be good enough. So I'm sure if I had continued to invest even more time and money into this, I eventually could have gotten

[07:43] into the point where it was profitable. I'm not saying that drop shipping doesn't work at all, but I spent hundreds of hours on it and probably a couple thousand dollars on it and wasn't able to get to the point of making

[07:56] money. So, that's my experience with drop shipping. Okay, now let's talk about courses. And again, this list is in no order. I just literally wrote them in. So, courses are something that I have a lot of experience with. I've been

[08:09] selling courses since the inception of my business back in 2016-2017, basically like the very beginning of 2017. And initially, I struggled to

[08:21] successfully sell courses, but over time, you know, I learned what worked. I learned how to market them better and most importantly perhaps how to attract customers for my courses to the point where courses became a huge part of my

[08:35] business. And for years and years now, I've been earning six figures a year from selling courses on their own, not even talking about other things I sell in my business. And at this point I have earned over a million dollars from

[08:49] selling courses in these past several years. Now, courses I'm sure could be on tried that didn't work just like didn't work out so well for me because

[09:01] there is a learning curve and there are quite a few puzzle pieces or maybe I should say ingredients that are essential and if you don't have one of them, then you won't be able to successfully sell courses at all. So,

[09:14] have to have leads coming in. You do have to have a working sales process. You do have to have a working checkout process. You do have to have a functional course and a course platform and there's all these things you have to

[09:27] have, but once you have them all, you will sell courses and it ends up becoming at least in my experience one of the easiest business models and passive online business models. So, I love it and I would definitely

[09:41] recommend. Now, the next online business is pretty closely tied to courses. I started it a little bit after my first courses. So, I started trying to sell courses beginning of 2017. Then in mid-2018, I launched my first

[09:55] membership. And that was right around the time that I also started successfully selling courses. So, throughout 2017, I was trying to sell courses, it wasn't working. 2018 comes around, now I finally start figuring out

[10:08] selling courses successfully, then I launch my membership, and that was the launch my membership, and that was the thing that took my business revenue up like a huge notch. I wouldn't say it was necessarily like the number one best

[10:23] business decision I've ever made that has had like the biggest impact on my business. That really would have to be YouTube, but starting a membership again was the thing that like really took my revenue up. It took it from earning like

[10:37] and that was only when I was launching something, to suddenly earning over ten thousand dollars every single month consistently. And I still today run that same membership that I started back in 2018, still going strong. I've earned

[10:52] well over a million dollars from it at this point. And compared to courses, um it's a little bit I think a little bit more challenging to sell and to like to launch a membership. And I have to here compare it to courses because they are

[11:07] to create this thing, I don't know if it should be a course or a membership. They're both great. Courses I think are a little bit easier to sell because they are kind of such like a package of like a beginning and an ending and a specific

[11:22] get. So, yeah, they're a little bit easier to sell, but you only get paid for them one time until you launch them again or if you set up a whole evergreen funnel and that sort of thing. Membership, on the other hand, the big

[11:37] thing about memberships is the recurring revenue. So, once somebody signs up for your membership, they have signed up to pay you month after month after month until they eventually discontinue the membership. Personally, I found that

[11:49] paying a similar amount whether they choose to buy a course or they choose to buy a membership, but one the memberships create that more consistent steady revenue in your business, which is really nice to have. It can make your

[12:03] business a lot more stable, and it certainly can kind of take out some of the risks that come with running your own business. So, I do love memberships. Okay, quick break because we need to talk about something that most people

[12:17] are totally missing right now. And that is that search is changing and changing really fast. It's not just Google anymore. Now, people are increasingly anymore. Now, people are increasingly using AI tools like ChatGPT to do basic

[12:30] means for business owners is that even past to get your business to rank on Google and other search engines like that, now your business might not be showing up where people are actually

[12:43] experimenting with some tools that can help us to deal with this shift. And the one that I have been loving the very most is called SearchAtlas. SearchAtlas is pretty different from most marketing analytics platforms you might have tried

[12:58] in the past because it doesn't just give you data, it actually will implement the changes for you. And that is huge because I know I have used many different marketing analytics type platforms in the past that gave me tons

[13:11] anything with it because I didn't have the time to implement those changes. But SearchAtlas really solves that problem and does it in a way that takes into account this new AI landscape that we're dealing with. So, basically SearchAtlas

[13:25] can give you specific recommendations for how to improve your ranking both on traditional search engines such as Google, but also on these new AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, etc. And then, and this is where things get

[13:38] really crazy, Search Atlas can actually implement those changes on your website with Search Atlas's own AI capabilities. So, if you are looking for a streamlined and very strategic way to get your business website ranking everywhere that

[13:52] people are looking at these days, then check down below for the link to give Search Atlas a try for yourself. The next business I've tried, next one on my list, is print-on-demand. So, print-on-demand is where typically you

[14:04] design some sort of product. It could be a t-shirt with a design on it. It could be a book that you wrote. It could be a book that you didn't write, like a you just designed the cover and the interior of. It could be mugs. It could

[14:19] are all these different companies out there that offer these print-on-demand services. Now, you design the thing, you set it up with this service, and then you list it on Etsy or on Shopify or on Amazon or eBay or wherever you want to

[14:33] list it, or even just on your own website. Well, you don't have to buy the product because when the customer buys it on whatever that platform is, then the print-on-demand company prints it off and ships it to the customer. So,

[14:47] shipping and handling. Now, I've done several different versions of print-on-demand. The first one that I think I ever really did was when I did a print-on-demand or self-published book. This was, I believe, in 2017. And

[15:03] now, this had honestly has very little to do with print-on-demand. It has a lot to do with your book launch strategy, but that was very successful for me. It made me several thousand dollars. It started to grow my audience. It added, I

[15:16] think, about 850 people to my email list in just a few months. And it became like kind of a business card I could use, but I'm not so much trying to talk about self-publishing here, although I suppose that is another online business that I

[15:29] have tried, but print on demand as a whole, I really like it. There are so it's almost hard to talk about as just like a business idea cuz it can look like so many different things, but I

[15:41] sure that you do get samples of your product because I've tried to do some print on demand things where I got those samples and the quality was just eh, like not good, and I would not have wanted to sell that product and like

[15:55] been represented by that product. So, make sure you get those samples so you it's all just going to come down to your ability to get that visibility to advertise so that you can bring leads into the business. So, yeah, there's so

[16:10] really like it. Next on my list is freelancing. So, freelancing, you're providing services yourself as an individual to other businesses or to other individuals. Obviously, there's

[16:24] tons of different services that you can provide, and you can freelance offline as well as online. Online, some of the most common freelance types of work that are out there are different kinds of design work, like graphic design or web

[16:36] design, different kinds of coding-related work, um and then lots of others, too, but those are some of the most popular. And I tried a few different kinds of freelancing. The biggest challenge that I felt with

[16:50] freelancing was differentiating myself from other freelancers. There's so many people online who are offering their services, and even if you niche down, there's still going to be so much competition. And some people are great

[17:03] at what they do, and other people, of course, are terrible at it and don't really know what they're doing at all. They're total amateurs. And so, I was Whatever skills I was offering as a freelancer, they were things that I was

[17:15] pretty good at, had some experience with, but it was so difficult to again to differentiate. So if I could go back and freelance differently, what I would do is really focus on building a personal brand and marketing my

[17:28] freelance services that way using content marketing primarily and perhaps YouTube to really show that I knew my stuff because yeah, the marketplace was crowded. As far as how much it earned

[17:42] me, it was something that I did off and on for a few years and each job would was tough to get those jobs. So I would say as a whole I earned several thousand dollars from freelancing, but not a whole lot. Now along similar lines is

[17:57] the next business I tried which was having an agency. Now an agency is kind of like a bunch of freelancers working together. Really common options are having a marketing agency or a design agency. Of course, there's lots of

[18:10] others as well. And my experience with having an agency was fairly limited because I pretty quickly realized it it just wasn't quite the business model for me. It required me to focus on aspects of running a business that just weren't

[18:24] of running a business that just weren't really my favorite or my forte. So this realize that you need to choose the right business model and the right type of online business that is a good fit for your personality. I really love

[18:39] creating content and I love teaching more than anything. And when I ran an agency for a short period of time, I didn't get to do very much of that. I was mostly doing admin work. I was mostly managing clients and that's one

[18:53] of the things that I am perhaps the worst at and find the least enjoyable. So I didn't earn very much from my agency because I shut it down pretty quickly cuz it just wasn't enjoyable to me, but I will say that that was totally

[19:07] my failing or just the fact that it wasn't a fit with my personality. Really, I think agencies are a great online business model and they're a way that you can do similar work to a freelancer, but you are no longer,

[19:20] strictly speaking, trading your time for money. Now, you really can scale in a way that freelancers never can. Number 10 on my list is Shopify. So, this one ways, kind of like print on demand. In fact, you can even combine the two, but

[19:36] Shopify is a way that you can set up your own online store. So, instead of selling your products on Etsy or Amazon, you can sell them from your own website. different platforms. So, Shopify, I mean, it's kind of just a website

[19:50] builder in a sense, but a lot of people wonder like how to start a Shopify store online business. So, that's why I wanted to talk about it. I have sold primarily digital products and then just a couple physical products via a Shopify store.

[20:05] My husband also has a Shopify store. I really like Shopify for setting up really like Shopify for setting up online shop type websites because they have built like a really incredible powerful software. I love all the

[20:18] analytics that they offer and I find their website builder easy to use. It's not quite as like drag and drop and designer friendly as some other another video about like Squarespace

[20:31] choose. I will try to link it up there in the corner if you want to check that out. But, if you want to sell products on a website, I definitely would recommend Shopify. I really like it. Um

[20:43] as far as how much money is earned to me, it's earned me quite a few thousands of dollars, probably in the realm of like around $10,000 over the past year or so that I've been using it. So, it's not a full-time income for me and that's

[20:57] even with my big audience, but just like I was kind of saying with like print on demand, it really does come down to the marketing and I haven't made it my priority in terms of marketing, but if you did make it your whole business, I

[21:12] could take it wherever you want it to go. Okay, and now these last three things on my list are all kind of along the same vein, but I have had pretty different experiences with them. So, they are blogging, YouTube, and

[21:25] podcasting. So, they're all long-form content creation types of online businesses. Okay, so blogging was the one I got started with first, and I the most competitive. Like, there just are more blogs than there are YouTube

[21:39] channels or than there are podcasts. So, it's the most competitive, and you have to learn how to play the Google SEO game. You also have to create a fair should only try to make money as a blogger if you like writing, right? And

[21:54] probably if you also like taking pictures, although that's not always necessary, but it's often a part of it. So, you need to like teaching and there's also this huge kind of analytical side of it where you do need

[22:08] to learn SEO and how to get your blog to rank, um especially in your specific niche. Now, how you make money blogging, there's kind of two main ways. One is about. So, you can sell courses, you can sell a membership site, you can do

[22:23] other way is you can sign up with an ad network that will put ads on your network that will put ads on your website. For example, Google AdSense is one of them, but there are lots of other ones. They put ads on your website, and

[22:36] then when people come to your website to read your blog, a small percentage of those people click on the ads, and for every click that you get, you get paid a few cents or a few dollars. I have several friends who are bloggers who

[22:50] make really good money with these ads, but your blog does have to be quite popular to be able to earn good money. I'm talking head hundreds of thousands of page views per month. My blog got to a point where it was moderately popular,

[23:04] but never that popular. And I personally chose to monetize my blog via my own products, so via courses, via memberships, etc. Because I like that there, and I feel like I'm really helping my audience, my blog readers,

[23:20] when I do that rather than just kind of spamming them with ads. So, as far as how much money I earn from blogging, I mean I've kind of earned millions of dollars from blogging over these past several years, but it was via these

[23:32] I've talked about. And I don't personally choose to earn any money, really, directly from blogging, even though, honestly, when I first started with online business, making money blogging was kind of like top of my list

[23:47] of my strategy. Number 12 is YouTube. I love YouTube, clearly. I'm still doing know, doing a lot of these other things as well. YouTube is interesting and has a very special place in my heart because not only is it a means to so many of

[24:04] these other online businesses, you know, anything that you are going to sell, you are going to need to market it somehow, and YouTube is an incredible way to do directly. It pays you for those ads on your videos. And a funny thing about

[24:17] YouTube is that they put ads on all the videos whether you are getting paid or the money. And I mean, I guess that's like kind of a love it or hate it thing, but I personally really like YouTube, and so the fact that

[24:30] advertise my business essentially, you know, that I can build my audience, that I can build my personal brand, and get paid for it at the same time, I think is an incredible opportunity. Directly from YouTube, I have earned hundreds of

[24:42] thousands of dollars, and that's from videos that I would have made anyway, Don't tell them that, right? Yeah, I would have made those videos anyway would have made those videos anyway because they also indirectly earned me

[24:54] literally millions of dollars from the way they built my audience and the products that I was thus able to sell. So, would I recommend YouTube? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I recently made a video titled everyone should have a

[25:07] YouTube channel, here's why. I will also attempt to link that one up there in the hearing about why you should start a YouTube channel. Also, if you are and you know that, go to creatorfastertrack.com

[25:22] and you can watch my free 1-hour masterclass about how to grow your channel to 1,000 subscribers and get it monetized in just 3 months. You don't want to miss that, okay? If you are a YouTuber, if you want to be a YouTuber,

[25:34] go to creatorfastertrack.com. Okay, and now we come to the very last online business I've tried that I thought of as I was brainstorming for this video and that is podcasting. So, for me, podcasting hasn't really been

[25:47] its own type of online business that I've tried, but I know a lot of people consider it as a way to make money online and it certainly has made me make money with podcasting are again, all the ways we talked about before or

[26:00] working with advertisers. And this is generally with podcasting is not via ad networks, but with specific sponsors. And how much do sponsors pay? The answer dollars an episode to several thousand dollars per episode depending on how big

[26:15] your audience is. Personally, I don't work with sponsors on my podcast because I want to use it to talk about my own products and share my own products with my audience because that for me is more profitable and I like that I know the

[26:31] they'll be helpful to my audience. So, how much money have I earned from podcasting? Directly, zero dollars. In fact, it's cost me money from paying for you know, all that sort of stuff. Indirectly, I would say it's earned me

[26:46] hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't get as many customers directly from podcasting as I do from YouTube, but I still do get quite a few each year and yeah, it's amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars over these past I

[27:01] podcast. All right, well, that brings us to the end of this video about all the different kinds of online businesses I've tried. Which one should you choose? Well, as you can probably tell by now that really depends on your personality

[27:15] and which one you're interested in. Some of them I would recommend. I'm talking of them I would recommend. I'm talking courses, memberships, YouTube, Etsy, what else do we got here? Um, print on demand certainly, but you have to build

[27:28] your audience using Shopify, podcasting. Like there's a bunch I would recommend. recommend. I don't really love affiliate marketing. I don't really love drop shipping. Um, coaching is a great one to start with, but it doesn't scale very

[27:40] well, right? So, there's some that I think are better and some that I don't love, but at the end of the day it comes down to which of those better ones is more appealing to you because it's kind of like how they say like what is the

[27:56] best kind of exercise? Whatever kind you'll do. Well, which is the best kind of online business is whichever one you will have enough passion for and energy for to actually see through to the point of becoming profitable. And which one

[28:10] isn't everything. Again, if you're thinking about starting a business, you're watching this video, make sure that you check out the Validate waitlist that is linked down there in the description because it's going to be

[28:25] opening up for enrollment for our next live cohort pretty soon here in just a month or so and you're going to miss that opportunity if you are not on the in joining us for that intense 8-week accelerator, putting your business idea

[28:38] to the test, finishing your first successful launch and learning how to effectively sell your product, then again, get your name on that wait list at GillianPerkins.com/validate. All right, well, that is all I've got

[28:51] you to do next. First of all, if you are not subscribed to my channel, which you can tell by looking at that button down there below the video. If you're not subscribed, do that now if you want to see more videos from me in the future

[29:04] about how to start and grow successful online businesses. And then, check out this video right here, hand-picked for you by the YouTube algorithm.