Imagine a cashier at your local grocery store. How much do they earn for every hour they work? Maybe around $12, maybe more, maybe less, the exact number isn’t important. Now consider the manager at your bank. How much do they earn? Harder to say, but probably over $50 an hour. Now the cashier may work fewer hours than the bank manager, but that’s not the point here.
The point is that for every hour the bank manager works, he earns more than four times as much as the cashier, why? Well, quite simply, because time doesn’t have a fixed ratio or a fixed relationship to production or to income. Consider as another example, Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spans. Now, Sara definitely put in her hours, pounding the pavement, peddling Spans from store to store for years to build the brand and to this day, she’s a hard working lady.
But if today, Sara decided she wanted to take the week off and she spent all 168 hours curled up in bed, eating bonbons and binge watching her favorite TV series, how much money do you think Sara would earn? Even without lifting a finger, Spans would continue to fly off department store shelves and dollars would continue to fly into her company’s bank account. Sara would be growing richer by the hour, without even putting a pair of Spans on.
The math seems weird. How can one person be clocking hours for $12 each, well another earns $50, and still another is bringing in hundreds of thousands whilst just sitting on her assets? The math isn’t wrong though. And these situations also don’t defy math. They just aren’t a straight addition. Nope, this is more like one of those complicated algebraic word problems that you and I have long ago forgotten how to solve. Here’s the basic idea though.
Time and effort can be spent now for immediate cash out. You pass go, you collect $200 sort of thing. Or they can be invested. Like when you buy Park Place, and Boardwalk and build a hotel on each. Chances are you’re only a few hundred dollars away from broke at that point, but everyone else at the table is quaking because they know you’re about to rake it in and they’re about to be screwed. Said another way, you can start working at the grocery store today and start immediately earning 12 bucks an hour, or you can invest $100,000 go to college for six-plus years and get your master’s in finance and land that $50-an-hour bank manager position. Or you can be smart like Sara Blakely, and invest that time, money and energy, into building a business of your own that a few years from now, can be pulling in many thousands of dollars per week whether you show up for work or not.
Different opportunities require different initial investment of time, money and effort. Many opportunities also require that you have some specialized skills or experience. However, these are businesses that require work to start and time before they’ll start earning you any money. They’re completely the opposite of get rich quick, but they do have the ability to create wealth for someone who may be starting at the bottom.
Finally, a warning. If you try to cut corners and get rich quick with one of these ideas that really requires time and energy and effort, then most likely, you’ll just wind up wasting your time and anything else you invest into the venture. The first-high paying opportunity that I want to share with you today, is ecommerce and specifically, drop shipping. Now drop shipping is basically when you sell physical products online, but you don’t warehouse them yourself.
And generally, you don’t ship them to the customer yourself either. Instead, you are selling products that another company, a manufacturer produces and when someone purchases one of those products from your website, you then tell the manufacturer, typically with an automated software, that that product has been ordered and the manufacturer ships it directly to the customer.
Now you can also build a different type of e-commerce business that sells physical products and you aren’t a drop shipping, where you are actually warehousing the products yourself. However, most people would agree that it will be much easier and require a much smaller investment if you do go the drop shipping route because storing products and shipping them can be very expensive.
If you do your market research and you find a product that there is good demand for, there is a huge opportunity for profit here. Obviously, there is an infinite opportunity for selling physical products online. This very general industry generates billions and billions of dollars every year and you can find your spot in that market.
However, keep in mind that this is a business, like all of the ones we’re going to talk about today, that does require a fair amount of initial investment of time and energy, because you have to work to find the right products that there is a good demand for for your store. And then after that, you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort to effectively market your store so that you can stand out from the crowd and get found by your customers. If you do go the drop shipping route, though, it’s not going to require much of an initial investment.
It won’t be free, because you will have to initially buy some products to ensure quality of these physical products that you’re selling. But you aren’t going to need to spend more than a few hundred or a couple thousand dollars at most. Another type of physical product business that you could start has a really different business model. Instead of you selling the products on your own site and having them be shipped for the manufacturer, you’re selling websites on a third party platform.
Specifically, the common way that people do this is with Amazon. Amazon has a program called Amazon FBA which means Fulfillment By Amazon. And basically what it means, is that you send your products that you’re going to sell to the Amazon warehouse and then whenever someone buys one of those products, Amazon actually sends it to the customer. They deal with all the transactions and they also deal with all of the customer service.
This business model is similar to drop shipping, but it definitely has some different pros and cons. Now, specifically, because you’re working with a very well known company, Amazon, you can trust them more than maybe you could trust a manufacturer that you don’t have as much knowledge or experience working with, so that you know that Amazon is in fact, going to ship the product to the customers reliably. However, on the other side of things, there are some more unknowns, because with Amazon FBA, you do have to invest more money up-front because you have to buy your products and then have them shipped to Amazon.
This means you might invest several thousand dollars in your initial batch of products and you may not be sure whether or not these products will actually sell. And that means that it’s even more important with this business model, that you do plenty of upfront research to ensure that there is demand. And it can also be very helpful, like, you definitely should do this, to learn how the Amazon algorithms work to make sure that your products will rank well on Amazon so that you can ensure that you get the sales that you need in order to recoup your investment and earn profits.
Now, one of the reasons why doing Amazon FBA can be so incredibly profitable, is because Amazon already has an enormous customer base. And so it’s easier to actually generate sales with your products, than if you’re trying to sell the products on your own website where you have to drive all the traffic, you have to get all the attention, all the exposure for your products. On Amazon, you’re going to get some of that built in.
So you are potentially able to do a much larger volume of sales, which means more profits. Also, as you can see, this doesn’t really require any specialized skills or previous experience. You need to learn how the FBA program works and you need to learn how to do market research. But beyond that, you’re selling a physical product. So you’re not having to provide any sort of service or anything like that to customers that you need to have the technical skills in order to be able to provide well. Within the next type of business that I wanna share with you, there are many different options for specific versions of this business that you could start.
The type of business is an agency. You can start an agency even if you don’t have much experience or the technical skills to do the work that the agency might provide to the clients yourself. An agency is a certain type of business model where you have multiple people working for you that are providing services to clients.
There are lots of different types of agencies out there that you could potentially start. These include digital marketing agencies, advertising agencies, creative agencies, social media management agencies, virtual assistant agencies, and online business management agencies, just to name a few. Now, as I mentioned, you don’t necessarily need to have the technical skills yourself. You don’t need to be skilled or familiar with all of the intricacies of running an online marketing campaign, or of managing an online business or of doing all of the different tasks that a virtual assistant might do.
However, in order to be successful with this business model, you’ll definitely need to have a general understanding of how this field works and how the work needs to get done, so that you can make sure that you hire service providers to work for you, who are actually good at what they do. Now, this type of business does require time and effort to build because you have to take the time to find the right people to work for you, who are actually very skilled at what they do and then you have to take time to market your business to attract the customers who will be paying your business to provide services for them.
However, it’s again not going to require a very much initial investment of money because you providing a service. And typically, you’ll only be paying the service providers when you have client work for them to do. Though it doesn’t require a big upfront investment, an agency-style business often has a significant monthly overhead, which just means that your fixed expenses every month, can be fairly substantial. Those are just a few things to keep in mind if you’re interested in starting an agency business.
But an agency business can be extremely profitable. And especially it can allow you to create a large amount of profit for yourself to earn a lot of money, without necessarily having to put in a lot of hours of work every single week, since you have employees or contractors who are working for you to provide the services to the clients, so you aren’t doing that service work yourself.
The fourth high-paying opportunity that you can do with very little skill and experience, is one of my favorites and it is to create and sell an online course. What’s great about selling online courses, is that first of all, anyone can do it. But second of all, the expense associated with creating and marketing an online course is very low. You honestly could make an online course using just the camera in your phone and free software online. And then you could start selling it and start making even money without having to invest any money of your own upfront.
Now at first, you might think that this type of business or opportunity really would require some skills to get started with because you have to have some sort of skills that you’re teaching in your online course. And while that is true, I’m confident that you do have some marketable skills. These might not be skills that you think of right now as marketable skills, but there are things that you are good at, experiences that you have had in the past that you could share with others so that they could learn from them.
These don’t necessarily have to be business skills or skills that a client would need done for them. But if you have any sort of hobby that you are skilled at at all, that’s something that you could turn into a course that could turn into profit for you. The reason why selling courses does require time and energy and effort in order to start making money with, is because you have to invest the time initially to create the course, but even more than that, you have to spend the time and effort to market the course.
You have to do market research, to find the right customers and figure out how to best talk to them, to explain to them the benefits of your course. You need to invest effort and take time to get the word out about your course to people to even find out about it and you have to convince those people to buy. It takes time to get these things right.
Most people spend several months, if not a year or two, before they’re able to build their audience to a large enough size, that they’re able to support themselves with their core sales. But this still is a huge opportunity because the profit margins are so good and the online course industry is growing every single year. Every single year new, people are deciding to start taking online courses and are investing more and more money into programs like this. The final type of highly-profitable business that I’m gonna share with you today, is that of running a membership or a subscription program.
There are two different ways that you could do this. But both of them are similar in that, you’re providing something to your customers every single month that they are paying you for on a recurring basis. So instead of just buying a product from you one time, your customers are signed up or subscribed to pay every single month. The most typical version of this that we’ve seen in the past has been magazine subscriptions. But the two versions that I’ll mention now is, one, an online subscription.
This is often called a membership site. And in this type of business, you provide a website with content to your customers, your customers pay you every single month to continue to have access to this material. Most often, this is educational material, but it could be any sort of digital material that your customers or subscribers are paying you to have access for. Another version of this subscription model that you could consider, would be selling subscription boxes that you deliver to your customers every month.
They initially sign up, but then they pay you every single month for a package that you mail them containing items that are centered around a certain theme. The more profitable version of this business, definitely tends to be the digital version of a membership site because the expenses for that business model, will be much lower, which means you’re able to keep very large profits every single month. Now the great thing about starting a membership site like this is that your profits will snowball from one month to the next.
As you work every single month to acquire new customers, you will experience a little bit of churn where some of your customers decide to discontinue their subscription. But the majority of your subscribers, if you’re running your site well, will stick around. And that means that every single month, you will have more members than the previous month, which means that you will have more subscription payments coming in, and you’ll be making more money, month after month even if you’re working exactly the same amount each month, or even you take some time off.
As I mentioned earlier on, all of the different opportunities do require a fairly large, initial upfront investment of time and energy. You’re not going to start making money from them right off the bat. If you’re looking though, for some opportunities that you could get started with right now and you don’t have much experience or very many technical skills, I broke down a process that you could follow to go from where you’re at now with limited skills, resources, to having the skills and experience you need in order to take advantage of an opportunity like one of these that .
