Business First Family Business, Accounting, Finance, Investing, Marketing And Management
The internet has completely changed how a job is defined and how one can start and grow their own business portfolio. With only a few hundred bucks and a great idea, people have created marketing videos that went viral, and earned big profits in the process. Video, while popular, is only one of the many things you can do earn money online. Today, we are going to look at how to help your kids start earning money online while fostering the entrepreneurial spirit.
The list of ways to earn money online is near infinite but we are going to discuss two popular and lucrative options.
- Selling products online
- Starting and monetizing a blog
To help you decide which may be right for you, we are going to look at the pros and cons of each.
Selling Products Online
Ecommerce stores make billions of dollars each year and thanks to the availability of inexpensive items to sell online from large sites, the barrier to entry is much lower than in the past. What’s more, thanks to wholesale companies that offer dropshipping, you can start an online store without any upfront inventory costs. Both options could be good, it just depends upon your current experience and budget. Here are some pros and cons of each.
Buying Inventory for Resale
Traditionally, stores would have to be able to purchase inventory before they could offer it to customers. This means that a store owner had to accurately estimate the quantity of an item they could move or they would be left holding dated merchandise and the accompanying bill.
Those experienced in ordering inventory and estimating demand are rewarded with larger average profit margins than online stores that dropship. With that extra earning comes added responsibilities though, as you are the packing, shipping, quality control, and customer satisfaction department, unless you have a staff that is. If you do not have a large budget and experience in managing inventory, you may want to steer your kid away from this option in favor of dropshipping.
Dropshipping Items
Dropshipping items is a great way for your kids to get their feet wet without amassing a mountain of debt in the process. A dropshipping business allows you to offer a diverse range of products without having to keep any inventory on-hand. You setup an arrangement with a wholesaler that will ship items on your behalf once they are ordered and the you can add any products they offer to your store. If certain items don’t sell, you aren’t out of any money.
The downside of this arrangement lies in the profit margin and competition. Since the barrier to entry is low, a lot of people setup dropshipping stores which often leads to pricing wars which cut profit margins and leads to store failure. If you only teach your kid one thing for your first online project, let it be this “Don’t compete on price, someone is always cheaper”. In order to avoid competing solely upon price, you should be working to establish a brand people know, like, and trust. Brainstorming and purchasing a unique domain name and setting up a credible online store can go a long way in earning the trust of potential customers.
Selling products online isn’t for everyone though which is why blog monetization is another very popular method of earning money online.
Building and Monetizing a Blog
Like with online product sales, blog monetization can be done in many ways. Among those are two very common methods to consider if you want to start a blog.
- Promoting affiliate products
- Placing advertisements on your blog
Again, we are going to take a look at these two option so that you can better choose which may be right for you.
Promoting Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketers create reviews and information centered around topics that product buyers would be interested in. For example, if you want to people to buy car amplifiers, your blog should cover car audio tips and reviews. The reason this is so popular is that it allows people to make money blogging about things they are passionate for in the first place. While not all affiliate sites are personal interests to the writer, many of the successful ones are. Finding affiliate offers to promote is pretty easy too. Amazon has a great affiliate program and a ton of products you can promote, the payouts are a little lower than other sites though. If Amazon doesn’t tickle your fancy, Clickbank is a great place to review a collection of affiliate offers. Review them with your kids and together pick out items they are interested in to begin with, writing about Minecraft or Pokémon could be fun and profitable. The downside of affiliate marketing is that unlike showing ads on your site, if they don’t buy, you don’t get paid.
Placing Paid Ads on Your Blog
Allowing people to advertise on your blog is a pretty simple way to make money and the startup costs are minimal, making this a great choice for your kids’ first online venture. Whenever you decide to advertise, you have a couple of good options.
Google AdSense is a popular platform that will display ads on your site that visitors are likely to click on. This can include ads that are related to the content of your blog and ads that are re-targeting visitors of other websites.
A fun add-on to your blog could be a YouTube channel if you are blogging about a topic conducive to video content. You can also monetize your YT videos with AdSense, allowing you to maximize your earning potential.
While building traffic to your blog, you may also run across companies that contact you directly to advertise on your blog. Allowing businesses to advertise directly can be very lucrative as many sign on for recurring ad space. Don’t expect this happen when you have a new site without much traffic.
While we have only scratched the surface, I hope that you have a few good ideas now that you and your children can work on together. Even if the site you setup doesn’t make you a ton of money, the pride of seeing your children learn, grow, and succeed is priceless.
Image from http://kid-preneurs.ca/
