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Are you dreaming about quitthing your 9-to-5 job and work from anywhere in the world on your own business idea? Are you looking for the most trending business ideas for online?

No wonder! The travelpreneur lifestyle is hotter than ever. Location-independent digital nomad entrepreneurs are becoming a more commonly explored work profile.

As a matter of fact, there are many profitable online businesses opportunities that require solely a laptop and a stable internet connection. In other words, working remotely is not only a dream lifestyle but a reality for many. 

And it can become your reality, too! … especially when you know the most trending business ideas and how to use your marketable skills to start a profitable online business that gives you freedom.

You will agree with us on this. The benefits of having your own online business are great: you get to be your own boss, do work you enjoy, manage your hours flexibly, and work from anywhere in the world.

Another plus point of starting up an online business is that the upfront investment is usually very low compared to traditional businesses. If the entrepreneur brings in the required skill set, the investment is often limited to the time of the entrepreneur themselves.

After traveling for over one year and meeting digital nomads from various countries across four continents, we can say that the most popular online business models that can make you $100,000 a year have a very low entry barrier.

Whatever your motivation for starting an online business may be, here is a list of the 8 most trending business ideas we see that allow you to work from anywhere.

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Do you dream to quit your 9-5 job and work on your own online business idea in 2020? Are you looking for the most profitable and trending business ideas to earn money online? After meeting countless online entrepreneurs in our worldtrip, here's a list of the 8 most popular online business ideas of digital nomads that let you to work remotely. We picked business ideas that make $100,000+ & cost under $50 to start up.

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. If you use them to make a purchase, we will earn a small commission. There are no additional costs to you, but it helps us keep this blog alive. We only recommend products and services that we personally use and love. Enjoy!

How to choose the right trending business ideas for you

Probably you know this already but before we dive into the list of trending business ideas that let you work from anywhere, we would like to emphasize this: Your success as an online entrepreneur will largely depend on two things:

  • 1) your determination of making it work
  • 2) the robustness of the business model you choose

That’s why, before getting fully invested into executing your online business idea, make sure to spend some time to clarify your key business model components.

For example, consider the following: 

  • Who is your ideal client?
  • What is their biggest pain point?
  • How will your product or service create value for your customers?
  • What is the best revenue model for your offering and niche? (e.g. pay per hour / pay per product sale / click-based advertising model / commission-based model)
  • Which resources do you need to develop and sell your offering?
  • What are the sales channels or reaching your ideal client?
  • How do guide leads from first touch point to paying you?
  • Download our Free Workbook for more guided questions and to capture your answers.

Want to turn your skills into a profitable online biz? Turn your trending business ideas into a profitable online business

Answering these questions upfront might seem like a lot of work. However the time investment you make in the beginning to sharpen your online business idea will save you time and trouble later.

In our post How to Test if your Online Business Idea is Good we go step-by-step over the most important aspects of setting up your business idea for success. We tell you how you can strategically use market research to test your idea without having everything figured out yet.

Also, keep in mind that even for trending business ideas, over-night success is a myth. To make an online business succeed will require persistence and willingness to learn. It helps to make sure you are working on something you truly enjoy. In this Free Training, you learn how to turn your passions into a business idea, so you stay excited and motivated.

8 Trending business ideas to work from anywhere

The following trending business ideas are selected based on their popularity among online entrepreneurs, the possibility to work from anywhere in the world, a zero to low initial investment, and lastly, their revenue potential.

1. Consulting Services

Leading the list of trending business ideas that let you work from anywhere are consulting services as Consulting is a business that is relatively quick and easy to set up. The idea is that you leverage your strengths and expertise as employee at a previous job and offer your services as a self-employed consultant.

This business model is very popular among business and strategy consultants, accountants, online marketers, designers, developers, and engineers. But also professionals in the health and wellbeing industry such as nutritionists, medical practitioners, psychologists, and other health consultants offer great opportunities.

The customer segment for consulting services is in most cases business clients. Clients are acquired often through the existing professional network of the entrepreneur or through online networking, e.g. on LinkedIn. (Read here how to Find Remote Jobs on LinkedIn).

To get started, think about how your areas of expertise can add measurable value to clients. Define numerically how your services will deliver results for customers. However, don’t be overly self-critical! You might be surprised how a skill that you consider as trivial can be a game changer for others. Don’t forget to also leverage your personal experience to help others. For example, if you have suffered and healed from a corporate burnout, your learnings can help companies to avoid employee burnout.

  • Required initial investment: $0
  • Revenue potential: $48k – $112k per year (source: PayScale)

How to start your Consulting Business:

Learn here our 5 steps Framework to discover your marketable skills and turn them into a desirable service offer and acquire your first clients. The Free Video Training comes with a Free Workbook with guided questions to nail down all necessary components to launch your consultancy service.

Want to turn your skills into a profitable online biz? Turn your trending business ideas into a profitable online business

2. Coaching

Next up are personal coaching services – the cousin of business consulting services. Coaching services are mostly targeted towards private persons or small businesses and solo-entrepreneurs.

According to market analysts, personal coaching services are growing strongly and are believed to be the second fastest growing industry in the world.

Trending business ideas for personal coaches span from online fitness coaches to social media coaches, health and wellness coaches, productivity coaches, business startup coaches, and many more. You can pick your competence area based on your interest, skills, and experience.

This is also our chosen business model, combined with blogging and content creation. We used our expertise as new business developers and startup coaches in Fortune 500 companies and paired it with our passion for travel and creating a freedom based lifestyle to help aspiring digital nomad entrepreneurs launch profitable online businesses. Coaching niches are so versatile and anyone can become a coach!

On average, a U.S. coach makes $62,000 per year. The entry barrier to become a coach is low as the industry is loosely regulated at the moment. However, keep in mind that the lack of regulations can frequently lead to complaints about coach incompetence. Therefore to succeed, make sure you build up credibility. In our post 5 Basics to Selling Online Courses & Coaching as a New Coach, we show you how to build a desirable and credible coaching offer that people will be happy to buy.

  • Required initial investment: $0
  • Revenue potential: $62k – $100k+ per year

How to start with Personal Coaching:

Learn how to create and sell a premium coaching service in our Set Yourself Free Training (Free!). In only 30 minutes, you will learn how to pick a coaching niche and develop a credible coaching offer.

Selling online courses: Free training to start a profitable online coaching and course business

3. Blogging

If you like writing and sharing knowledge in a creative way, blogging can be the ideal trending business idea for you. Blogging is one of those career paths that let you combine work with passion and purpose. And on top of that, can come with lucrative income potential. You might have come across numerous blog posts of bloggers showing income reports of 5-7 figures a month!

However,  becoming a blogger does not automatically equal making money blogging. As fabulous as blogging may sound, and as quick and cheap it is to start a blog, it takes significant time and effort to earn a full-time income from blogging. We have experienced this first hand when we started this blog. 

You might have read before that the most common ways to make money online from blogging are advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, and selling digital products. Yet, the basis for unlocking any of the revenue potential is to generate substantial and stable website traffic.

We have spent countless hours reading blogging guides and watching blogging tutorials to realize that we have been committing some of the biggest mistakes beginner bloggers can make when we started out. You will want to make sure that you avoid those mistakes for your blog!

We share 8 secrets that successful bloggers don’t always tell you in our guide How to Start a Blog for Beginners. To help you avoid wasting time and start focusing on the right things right from the beginning, we captured our biggest learnings in our free Blogging Secrets Checklist. 

  • Required initial investment: $3.95 for domain and hosting with Bluehost
  • Revenue potential: $50,000 – $100,000 in Year 3 (source: Financial Samurai)

How to start making money with Blogging:

The most important pre-requisite to making money as a blogger is to generate traffic to your website. Successful bloggers swear by Pinterest as a traffic generation machine! Get an introduction to Pinterest marketing and Pinterest SEO in our blog posts here. If you are looking for excellent courses on Pinterest marketing, we recommend those of our mentor Anastasia Blogger. Anastasia is a Pinterest marketing expert with over 300,000 monthly page views generated on Pinterest. You can check out her courses here.

You will notice that all successful bloggers are selling courses and online coaching, as these are premium priced and therefore significantly multiply the revenue potential of a course. A good FREE resource to start with to create your money-making online course or coaching program to be sold via your blog is our free 5 Steps training here.

4. Selling Digital Products

One of the most trending business ideas that let you work from anywhere is selling digital products such as online courses, eBooks, and webinars.

Selling digital products is a highly profitable business model because the investment of creating online products is very low compared to the margin they can generate. Furthermore, most investment for creating digital products happens before launch, making digital products a great source of collecting passive income. In other words, you create the course once, set up your sales funnel, and let sales coming in while enjoying a spa day or sipping a mango juice on the beach.

The key challenge of the digital products business lies however in effectively marketing and distributing digital products. Low barriers to enter the market lead to large competition and increased consumer confusion and skepticism about the quality of digital products. Also, to make a passive business model succeed, you need a consistent and large number of new leads, making this trending business idea work best if you already have solid website traffic, an established social media following, or are willing to pay for ads.

The key to successfully selling digital products is to build trust and credibility by creating strong customer relationships online. Examples of establishing trust are nurturing your ideal clients with value free content via social media (e.g. Instagram) or through email marketing.

How to start with Digital Products:

Learn the fundamentals of designing digital products that people will love in the Online Training: Set Yourself Free with a Premium Service.

5. Setting up an Online Store via Drop-shipping

If you have always dreamed about becoming a retail entrepreneur and opening your own store but were afraid of the large upfront investment, drop-shipping can be the ideal solution for you! It’s never been easier to step into e-commerce than today.

Drop shipping is a supply chain management method in which the retailer (= you) does not keep an inventory but instead, forwards online orders and shipment details to the supplier. Your supplier then ships the goods directly to your customer. The huge benefit of this business model is that you don’t need to manufacture, own, or store the products you’re selling. You’re basically only re-selling goods based on incoming orders  a win-win for you and the product supplier. This brings down your risk as business owner to zero!

You can set up your online shop using the platform Shopify within a couple of hours and start selling products on your online store the next day. Shopify is made for non-techies, so the set-up of your online store becomes super easy!

  • Initial investment: starting from $29 for basic Shopify subscription 
  • Revenue potential: $100,000+ per year (some make 6 figures a month) (source: Shopify)

How to start with E-commerce:

In the Online Training Building an Etsy Shop that Sells you will learn the key strategies for e-commerce success for beginners. If you want to start your online business on Shopify, we recommend this Shopify eCommerce MasterclassGrab your 2 months Skillshare trial for free!

6. Fulfillment by Amazon 

Did you know that not all products that are being sold on Amazon are actually owned by Amazon? Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service provided by Amazon that allows suppliers to sell their products more flexibly. Amazon is offering online retailers services like storing, packaging, and shipping of goods.

Using FBA, you don’t need to set up your own online shop via Shopify. Instead, you select which products you would like to sell and market them directly in the Amazon marketplace. That way, you can benefit from Amazon’s strong brand and customer base.

A disadvantage of FBA is the challenge of standing out among other retailers on the platform.

In our opinion, FBA is an ideal option for entrepreneurs who want to first experiment with e-commerce before setting up an own branded online shop (e.g. via Shopify).

  • Initial investment: $0
  • Revenue potential: $2,000 – $4,500 per month (source: JungleScout)

How to start with Amazon FBA:

Learn everything you need to know to get started with FBA in the Online Training: Alibaba to Amazon FBA – Product Importation Masterclass. This e-learning will walk you through the entire process of setting up your online business. You’ll learn about finding quality suppliers, negotiating deals, setting up your operations, and more. Grab your 2 months Skillshare trial for free!

7. Social Media Marketing & Influencer Marketing

Online marketing has been around since the emergence of the internet. However, a new form of digital marketing is changing the industry. While in the past online marketing has been handled by specialized marketing agencies, brands are increasingly looking into social media for peer-to-peer marketing.

The revenue model is an affiliate marketing model in which the marketer ( = you) earns a commission for every sale made. Popular sales channels are InstagramYoutube, TiktTok, Pinterest, and LikeToKnowIt.

If you are a beginner, we wrote a blog post specifically for How to Make Money on Instagram with Under 2000 Followers. In the post, we tell you about the different ways to collaborate with brands. We also link to an email template you can use to reach out to brands as a beginner influencer!

Marketers establish a strong personal brand and social media following. These serve them as their target customer base for promoting third party products. Social media marketers are typically referred to as social media influencers because they actively or passively influence the purchase decisions of their audience.

  • Initial investment: $0
  • Revenue potential: estimated average of $1,000 per 100,000 followers (source: Mic)

How to start with Social Media Marketing:

Learn the Secrets of Pinterest SEO to drive organic traffic to your affiliate offerings for free via Pinterest. We love Pinterest marketing expert Anastasia Blogger. Anastasia has 10+ million unique monthly viewers on Pinterest. She drives over 300,000 monthly page views to her blogs trough Pinterest. She helped us grow our Pinterest account by 100k+ unique monthly viewers within 2 months.

8. Software Engineering and App Development

Software engineers and developers create, test and maintain software on various platforms. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for software developers is forecasted to grow by 17 percent yearly through 2023.

With many online entrepreneurs looking into trending business ideas such as blogging, e-commerce, and digital marketing, the demand for website development, data processing, open source software, and new apps is steadily rising. 

The average revenue of a web developer starts at $100,000 per year. This makes software engineering and development an excellent business opportunity for those who pick up the skills. Typically, they work project-based as freelancers, independent consultants, or develop their own digital products. For example, new software or mobile applications.

  • Initial investment: $0 if you are a software engineer or web / app developer
  • Revenue potential: $100,000+ per year (source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

How to start with Web development:

If you are an experience web developer and interested in selling your valuable skills as a profitable online service to clients, check out our Free 5-Steps Training for how to create and sell a profitable premium service.

If you’re new to web development and interested to find out if web development is for you, here’s a training recommendation: Understanding Web Development – a Beginner’s Guide to the Web. In under 3 hours, you learn the basics of web development, programming languages, and get an introduction to WordPress. Grab your 2 months Skillshare trial for free!

It’s your turn! Learn how to turn your trending business ideas into a profitable online business

Becoming an online entrepreneur is a great way to earn money online and work from anywhere in the world. In this post we shared with you 8 trending business ideas. We selected those 8 because of their popularity amongst digital nomads and because they require hardly any upfront investment.

But don’t forget that picking an online business idea is only the beginning! After you have chosen your online business idea, the actual work begins. You need to create a profitable and desirable online offer and start acquiring your first clients! 

One of the key challenges is to build trust online and establish an audience of perfect-for-you people. It’s crucial to know how to market your service to get people excited to buy from you.

Want to turn your skills into a profitable online biz? Turn your trending business ideas into a profitable online business

In our Free Training: Create Your Premium Service & Set Yourself Free, we take you through our proven 5 Steps Framework to discover your unique marketable superpowers and market them. If you are a beginner to online business, this is an ideal resource for you!