Surefire Way to Start a Successful Online Business with Zero Investment: Sell an Outsourced Service

People tend to think too much when it comes to making money online. Typically many of you think that you need to have the knowledge of building a website and SEO in order to be able to generate something online; many of you think that you need to be skilled on something so you can sell your expertise online.

Those are cool, but those are not required. You CAN establish an online business even when you don’t have the skills to offer or money to spend. How?

Other people’s expertise

You know what, I understand that it can be difficult to start something without having the knowledge of it. However, I have done it myself: I build my online business on other people’s expertise – via outsourcing

Sure, I know PHP/MySQL a bit; I am learning WordPress from scratch, and I am now able to tweak any WordPress-powered site I want. I also know SEO, but I achieve it via a painful self-learning process and trial-and-errors.

But the thing is, I never have passion in those. It’s better to have someone else doing those things for me – this allows me to concentrate on what’s important: Growing my business.

But why borrowing other people’s expertise?

I enjoy building website, but making it into a profession is not what I want.

I tried 3 years ago – I make hundreds of dollars a month creating WordPress themes for clients. I also build websites, grow them and sell them for a total of tens of thousands of dollars. Good business, I think?

Well, yeah – but doing that for a year or so makes me grow tired of working for money; sure, those are great making money online ways, but I want to own a business, not creating my own job: That’s a world of difference in them!

Owning a business means I build brand and a system in which the business can run without my active involvement. Creating my own job is starting an “online business” in which I work on clients’ orders. If I didn’t work on them, I won’t get money.

I’m a big fan of outsourcing, in a sense that I can a build a business that shines not because I’m THE MAN, but because I serve my clients well. Since I don’t have powerful skill-set, I “borrow” others expertise, letting them create great products/services for my business, and my business builds credibility on those quality stuffs. Neat, no?

Then how to borrow other people’s expertise?

It’s dead simple: You are going to establish a business as a middleman. When a client orders through your online business, you will take that orders to others (companies and freelancers) and let them do the work. Your job is to please clients and promote your business.

Want to start a content writing business? Then you need to have a good front-end design and a decent website to take orders, and bring those to freelance writers or writing agencies. The margin between what you pay to them and what you get from your clients is your profit.

Want to make money online by building websites for clients? Just partner with a group of web designer, web developer, content writer and graphic designer – either freelancers or agencies – and send over your clients’ details to them. Your job is to oversee things so the end “product” has a top-notch quality.

You see, the possibilities are limitless. Better yet, you don’t have to spend any money to get started: When an order comes, all you need to do is charging your clients a down payment – or even a full payment – and use that amount to pay your outsourcing partner.

Your key success factor is your ability to identify the market for your service. As we all know, competition is stiff in online business, simply because almost everybody can jump onto the bandwagon even with very little money and knowledge.

What you need to do is separating yourself with the rest by offering top notch services – this can be done by carefully choosing the outsourcing partners, as well as carefully crafting your sales proposition.

For example, if you don’t want to compete with other WordPress theme designers on price or to compete with world-class WP theme designers (unless you are a talented WP theme designer yourself), you need to find other things to focus on.

Headway Themes is one good example of how a WP theme designer can compete with the others by offering great benefits others don’t: Drag and drop WordPress theme maker – you don’t have to understand a single code to do so.

If you are looking for the right freelancers or agencies, try Freelancer.com, Fiverr.com, Webmaster forums like DigitalPoint Forums, and so on.

If it’s so simple, why not everybody is doing it?

You see, I remember the same question asked to one of my well-respected mentors, Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad)… the answer is simple: It’s all coming back to your mindset. There are ways and tools to make things happen -but it seems that people are too lazy to get out of their comfort zone. They are too busy saying “It’s not possible” or “I can’t do this.”

Getting into online business is not as hard as you think. However, starting one requires you to have certain mindset. If you want to start an online business that matters, you need to be willing to challenge yourself every single day. You need to be able to say, “Yes I can do this – even if I can’t I will find a way to do this.”

The big question is: Are you willing to do what it takes?

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon via photopin cc