If your monotonous day job is starting to bother you, then it might be time to diversify. Here are 5 profitable small business ideas you could start without breaking your bank.
Cloud Kitchen
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Covid-19 is going to have a huge positive impact on a market that’s already blooming. With social dining now on a decline, dining behaviour is going to shift to delivery more than ever before.
Given their business model, that is not surprising.
All cloud kitchen models operate around one key difference that sets it apart from traditional restaurants:
It cuts down on all front of house costs.
Those would be things like security guards, waiters, managers, hosts, bussers, and all personnel included in the social dining aspects. Therefore, with the primary and only focus being on cooking food and packaging it, the food can be priced more competitively, without having to miss out on a large profit margin. Focusing on superior food taste is also easier without all the distractions.
The biggest cost to considered would be a reduction in real estate costs. When it comes to a cloud kitchen, catering to a demographic does not require a physical presence there. Simply ensuring that servicing that demographic is possible from where the kitchen is located is sufficient.
The steps to opening a cloud kitchen is pretty straightforward. Find a location big enough to house all your cooking needs, hire a good chef, get your food, and trade licenses approved and enlist on your local food delivery apps. If your locality or district offers infrastructure with pre-installed kitchens to operate from, then that simplifies things even further.
A particularly important part of managing cloud kitchens would be POS software. It ensures proper logging and responding to of orders and once installed on your laptop, can go wherever you go.
There are various examples of cloud kitchens which have started out as a small business idea but have grown to be franchises. Fasoos is a good example.
Etsy/Amazon- Pick your e-commerce seller now!
Know any good underrated artisans around you, that people would love to get to know? Or do you make products and just need a platform to sell? Etsy is all about finding your niche and then majoring in it. If you have quality listing at competitive prices, then this may be the place for you. There is always room for you on Etsy’s competitive, but not saturated market.
Amazon is also a convenient platform to sell goods on and the process to list as a seller is straightforward and intuitive. They can also handle storage, shipping and delivery of products for you.
Given the wide variety of products available online, it’s important to manufacture products people would want to buy. While Amazon is a good place to sell more generic products, etsy is better known as a handmade goods marketplace. There are prices you have to pay your host website of course, but it’s justified by the amount of trouble saved.
You have to create an account, add your payment details, usually your PayPal account or your bank details and then list your products. As soon as an order is placed, you will be notified so that you can accept or decline them according to what you want.
However, the ease of access means there are an increasing number of people choosing this mode to sell their products, so this is a fast-paced and competitive market. But if your niche happens to be something that there is a fair amount of demand for, there should be adequate buyers.
Becoming an SEO expert
Marketable skills instead of a tangible product could also be a successful business model.
An SEO expert will make the targeted page or article easier to find on the Internet. It is a very sought-after skill in 2020.
The process however is not for the technologically challenged. It involves a lot of analysing and reviewing websites and then making changes to them to make them larger on the map. There are several courses you can pursue to learn SEO. Some of them are free. These experts maximise traffic on a site, boosting business, be it a company selling goods or a blog about food. The increased traffic improves the page rank on search engines like Google and Bing, making it one of the first things you see when you search on a related topic.
There is a great demand for this particular skill, with business and bloggers realising there is no use in producing content that no one can find. This is basically marketing on the Internet, with the help of various SEO tools. There are several like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Ahref.
It’s important to practise SEO strategies instead of simply learning it in theory. Every website is different, and new strategies have to be implemented for each of them. There are plenty of case studies that you can go through for ideas on how this can be done. Patience is key here. The Internet is a large place and getting ahead of other pages on such a large forum may take a while.
Web Designer
This is also another marketable skill that is a brilliant small business idea. Businesses, political parties, blogs are a few examples of ventures that need a serious website to showcase their work. While SEO is one where you will only need technical skills, web designers have to be creatively inclined as well.
What you will need to master to make this a viable business option is coding. HTML/CSS will be enough to begin with, conquering which you will be able to move on to more advanced options like JavaScript.
Photoshop is also something you must know to be able to create logos and banners for your clients. Being savvy with apps like these would make you more marketable and to be able to produce original content. Google Analytics, MOZ keyword explorer, SEMRush would be apps to handle the technological side of your business.
This option would also mean that you have to do a fair amount of analysing and reviewing website statistics. This would show you keywords used by users the most and also the traffic and amount of time spent on your websites. SEO also comes in here, important to know in order to improve traffic.
Freelance Writer
This is a small business idea you can implement with your existing writing skills, as long as they are good enough, and that is the main business tool you will need. The rest is persistence and hard work and frankly, a lot of running around.
The year is a good one for writers, however. A laptop, a word processor and Internet is all you’ll need to make a living as a freelance writer.
There is however no step by step process to making six figures from writing, however there are a few key points though.
- You must be disciplined as there’s no one around to make you do things when you’re working as a freelancer.
- Fluency in English or the language you write in is a must. It is quite easy to tell if you don’t have that figured out.
- If you’re looking to make an online presence, SEO seeps into this as well. Your content, no matter how good it is, should not be impossible to find among millions of web pages.
Creating an online profile would certainly help get noticed by editors as they can check out your work here. This could either be a series of articles you have worked on, or even better, a blog by you.
This is of great use when you are making a pitch.
Despite it being relatively easier to get noticed now than before, it can still be frustrating and will take some time for any real result.
| Business | Low start-up costs | Ease-of-access | One-person business | Low time for take off |
| Cloud Kitchen | No | No | No | Yes |
| E-commerce | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| SEO Expert | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Web Design | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Freelance Writer | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
If any of these ring a bell, it might be time to dig those rusty skills up, 2020 may well be the year for you.
Raj Kumar is a qualified business/finance writer expert in investment, debt, credit cards, Passive income, financial updates. He advises in his blog finance clap.
