11 Reasons To Start Your Own Online Business Today
There are millions of people in the world today who are completely unsatisfied with their lives. Much of that has to do with their current career, or a lack of income and freedom that would contribute to the kind of lifestyle they would love to live.
In the past several years, men and women were introduced to a money making option that they may not have been familiar with before.
Although it was created from a difficult situation, the fact that so many people were suddenly able to work from home planted seeds of ideas and opportunity for those who didn’t know it existed previously.
But taking the leap to be your own boss can be an intimidating change. You want to be solidified in your decision before you quit your job and start working for yourself. You have to have confidence that this will be the right path for you and your family.
While there are some difficulties, such as no guarantees, there are many more benefits to becoming an online entrepreneur. The potential you are going to see is unlike anything you could ever experience in the corporate world.
Your head is already probably filled with indecision and worries. So let’s take the opposite approach and look at 11 reasons why you should start your own online business today!
Reason 1 – You Have Unlimited Income Potential
A big reason that many people want to start their own business in general, whether it’s online or offline, is so that they can grow their income. You don’t want to have to rely on a corporation and individual management decisions about whether or not you have the right to increase your salary.
As an online entrepreneur, you may start off slow and build momentum, but the good thing is, you don’t have to hit a ceiling at anytime. You can continually earn more money the more you grow your business.
Your income does not have to start out slow, either. It all depends on which business model you choose. For example, you could create an info product today and launch it and start seeing money coming in.
Or, you could launch a business as a freelance service provider and get paid a deposit as early as today. But some of the business models take a little more time to ignite your earnings.
For example, if you were to start out as an affiliate marketer on Amazon, you would not begin seeing paychecks for at least 60 days. So you have to plan your financial strategy wisely before you quit a job and pursue life as an online entrepreneur full time.
The great thing is, once you set a foundation for your business on the Internet, you can build it into a massive empire that will provide instant and recurring earnings from you from that point on.
Reason 2 – It’s An Easy Entrepreneurial Start-Up
Another reason why you’ll want to start your own online business is that it’s easy to do. Many people get intimidated at the thought of getting set up online, but it’s really a very simple process that doesn’t take a lot of time or effort.
For example, if you want to start your own website and begin blogging about a niche topic that you enjoy, all you have to do is pay for a domain name and hosting, which is very affordable, and then use the push button process to install WordPress.
Of any other details, such as the style of your website and how it operates are simple selections within your WordPress dashboard. There are many free YouTube videos that you can watch to see how that is done, so that you aren’t overwhelmed at the idea of it.
Of course, it also depends on what type of business model you choose to pursue. But whether you are starting a business as an affiliate marketer with a blog, setting up a store on Etsy for digital downloads, creating your own info products to sell as a vendor, etc., there’s nothing too difficult for the average person to implement.
Another fantastic aspect of working online, is that the tools you will be using to build your business, such as an email autoresponder system, have massive knowledge banks that you can use to understand how something works, and they usually have a 24 hour customer service department that will walk you through anything you are confused about.
If you start off as an online entrepreneur simply listening to some of the spammy marketers trying to sell you a get rich quick course, they will often make it sound like you have to buy all of the tools they recommend and all of their courses in order to truly develop a thriving business.
But the truth is, getting started online does not require anything complicated or expensive. And usually, the complex tools that they want you to invest in will have a basic, free trial period or free use of the tool up to a certain level of use, which is usually when you have begun earning from your efforts anyway.
The hardest part of running an online business is probably reining yourself in from trying to go in too many directions all at once. You are going to see opportunities everywhere, but you don’t want to spread yourself too thin.
It’s better to grow a substantial business with a sharp focus initially and then branch out when the time is right. If you try to start three business models all at once, they will not receive the time and attention that it takes to make them thrive.
Reason 3 – You Get To Follow Your Passions And Enjoy Work
One of the best reasons for you to get started as an online entrepreneur is that you finally get to enjoy what you do. So many people go through high school and college pursuing a degree in something that they feel will give them a comfortable lifestyle, but it may not be something they feel passionate about.
Now, you have the ability to build an entire business based on whatever makes you happy, such as your hobbies and general interests. This may be something that you have gained skill in, something that you are still learning about but are excited about sharing, or something you take from a previous career and want to share with the general public.
There are many people going through their daily life right now feeling stripped of their ability to enjoy their personal downtime. When you spend 40 or more hours per week working for a corporation, not to mention the lengthy commute, it eats away at your off time.
By the time you get home from working a full time job, tend to the children, eat dinner, and do anything else that requires your attention, there’s very little time for you to relax and enjoy the minutes or hours left.
But as an online entrepreneur, you can turn any of your passions into a career. Do you love to bake, but it’s a time consuming process that you can only do on weekends or holidays?
There are many people who have started a thriving career simply by blogging about their baking endeavours, creating content for those who don’t know how to bake at all and who need to learn from someone just like you.
Would you love to spend time out in your garden each and every day, but you can only attend to it on the weekends? Gardening is a very popular niche online, and you can not only sell courses and earn money from your content, but you can also promote the very items you use in your own garden and earn commissions whenever someone purchases it from your link.
What about pets? They may be a part of your family that is very important to you. You can start a business teaching people about raising, caring for, and training a pet – whether it’s a dog, cat, reptile, bird, or other animal.
There are endless possibilities for tapping into your passions and hobbies and turning them into a bona fide business on the Internet. All of the content you currently see, such as YouTube videos or TikToks, as well as blogs that you read are probably monetized in some way for the content creator – and there’s nothing holding you back from doing the same.
Reason 4 – Your Schedule Is As Flexible As You Need It To Be
How many times have you had to ask permission as a grown adult to take time off of work so that you could do something? People have to ask their boss for permission to take off for doctor’s appointments, to care for their sick children, or to even take vacation time that they have earned through their work hours.
If the boss happens to have a conflict of interest with the dates you have selected for your vacation, you may be out of luck and told that you do not have permission to take off during that time.
Another problem with working for others is that they set the hours that you have to show up. Most corporate jobs require you to be there from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with a one hour or 30 minute lunch break.
Not only do they tell you the hours you show up, but they also tell you how long and at what time you can take a break if you need it. These are very strict conditions that we have become accustomed to, but you don’t have to put up with anymore.
Now, your schedule is as flexible as you need it to be. Maybe you don’t want to work a full 40 hour week. Maybe you only want to work on your career 10 to 20 hours, maximum.
Maybe you are a night owl and you don’t want to wake up early and have to begin working when everyone else does period now, you have the ability to work in the wee morning hours if you prefer to.
As for breaks, not only can you start and stop working any moment you choose to, but you can split your work schedule up during the day so that it’s convenient and works best for you and your family.
You can stop work whenever you start feeling a little drained and get up and energize yourself with a little activity or a meal break. You can call it quits for the day if you’ve had enough and don’t feel like putting in extra hours.
You can work a little bit in midmorning, take an afternoon break so that you can pick up the kids from school, attend their athletic games, fix dinner, and then work a little more at night before bed if you choose to.
And the best part is – there’s no one you have to ask permission from. If you want to take a vacation during the week of Thanksgiving, you don’t have to worry about whether or not a colleague has already asked for that time off because you can choose to schedule your vacations whenever you want to.
In fact, you can have working vacations if you want to pick up and hit the road on an RV trip across country or fly somewhere and work from a condo on the beach. There’s no one there to stop you.
This is a perfect situation for someone who wants the freedom to do whatever they want, when they want or for those who need freedom to care for family members or even for themselves if they have health limitations that require downtime.
Reason 5 – Expanding Your Business When You’re Ready Is Easy
When you work for a corporation, it’s usually up to higher executives about when and if the company is going to expand into a new area. You may not have any say over it. But as an online entrepreneur, you are the one that gets to decide when and if your business is ready for expansion.
There are so many possibilities that can pay off for you in terms of growing your online business. The first is that you can boost your business so that it is doing more of the same if what you are currently working on is paying off for you nicely.
If you have begun Internet marketing as a part time entrepreneur while still working for the corporate world, you might want to expand your business whenever you quit your other job.
You can also expand your business by tapping into another business model. If you started out as an affiliate marketer, you might decide that you want to begin developing your own info products, creating print merchandise that can be shipped out, or even offering coaching to grow your business.
Or, you can expand your business by doing the same thing you’re doing now, only in another niche. For example, you might have started out as a healthy food blogger because you love to prepare healthy meals for your family.
As time goes on, you are seeing more and more feedback from your customers about something related to this niche, such as weight loss. That may give you the idea to expand your business into that area so that you have a slant dedicated just for the customers who want healthy food for that purpose.
Or, if you have more than one hobby or passion, you may end up wanting to simply apply what you’ve learned to something you find fun. If you started out with a gardening site, but you love to golf on the weekends, you can start a site all about golf for beginners.
You’ll know when the time is right when you have automated parts of your business and you feel comfortable that you have the time and ability to go in another direction or expand out into something more – and you won’t have to wait for a decision from any higher ups in order to do so.
Reason 6 – There’s No Boss Or Colleagues To Answer To
Having to answer to others can be very annoying when you are showing up to work every day trying to get your job done. In the corporate world, there are often friendships that are developed, but many irritating circumstances unfolding as well.
You don’t get to pick your colleagues or your boss. The people that you work with might annoy you in many different ways, or cause you some sort of difficulty in your own job. For example, maybe they don’t share the workload as they are supposed to, and you end up having to pick up the slack for their lack of effort.
Having to spend 40 hours a week with people you don’t necessarily like can be very stressful on a person. You can’t get away from their bad habits or annoying personalities.
You are often stuck in a confined space side by side with them, with your only escape a small cubicle that feels more like a prison than a nurturing environment. And when it comes to bosses, we all know that those situations are often harrowing.
Very rarely do people gush over what an amazing boss they have. Human nature makes some people difficult to work with when they get in a position of power. So you end up stuck having to play nice with someone you don’t respect.
As an online entrepreneur, you can have colleagues in the industry – but you have the ability to cut ties with them at any moment. And you’re not surrounded by them for 40 hours a week.
If they have annoying habits or irritating personalities, you can limit your engagement with them and still benefit from networking with them on a smaller scale. You get to work by yourself and never answer to a boss again.
You won’t ever have to deal with being micromanaged or dealing with someone who puts too big of a workload on you – two of the biggest complaints people have about their bosses.
Even if your current boss is an amazing person, it’s still nice to be free from someone else’s decision-making and do everything the way you prefer. They may have their own systems and methods of working, while that doesn’t work best for you.
Reason 7 – You Can Say Goodbye To Your Commute And Work From Home
Working from home is something that can provide you with a wonderful oasis that lessens your stress from the minute you wake up until the time you go to bed. If you look at how most people live life, they set their alarm for an hour that they’re not prepared for.
Waking up sleepy, they have to get ready and drive to the workplace, which is often in a city that is burdened by too much traffic. Not only is there the time involved in commuting to and from work during rush hour, but you have to think of the expense, too.
When you are working in an office, you are expected to dress a certain way. So you have to have a wardrobe that is suitable for the corporate world. You also have to pay for gas to and from the office.
There are other little expenses that go along with a corporate workplace. For example, people are often asking you to pitch in for some sort of fundraiser or birthday celebration, and you will feel obligated to contribute, even if you don’t have the money.
Working from home allows you to carve out a space that is just for you and your productivity. It can be in a spare bedroom, a corner of the living room, or even outside on your beautiful patio if you prefer.
You don’t need any kind of fancy setup. All you need is a way to access the Internet. You won’t have to set an alarm and get up at the crack of dawn. There will be no commute, so you will save money and time that you can pour into your business.
Your stress levels will go down because you won’t be dealing with rush hour traffic and people who have road rage. Instead, you can wake up, stretch your body and put on some comfortable clothes – or even stay in your pyjamas if you prefer.
You can prepare a nice cup of coffee and relax with some meditation before you immerse yourself into your online business. Whenever your body signals hunger, you can break to prepare yourself a healthy and delicious meal in your own kitchen instead of a break room where you have to smell everyone else’s food, even when you don’t like it.
When your day is done, you don’t have to dread fighting traffic just to get home. You’ll simply close your laptop and be finished with it. You can start your evening or downtime without the additional stress others are going through.
Instead of looking at the same four walls of a cubicle everyday, you can change up your location anytime you choose. If you want to sit in bed and work when you first wake up, you can do that.
If you want to take your laptop and head to the park, you can do that. You can go to the beach, the mountains, the pool – wherever you want. And you won’t have to deal with the ugly side of offline work that requires a strain on employees’ time and pocketbook.
Reason 8 – It Can Be Started On A Shoestring Budget Or Totally Free
Most people go into corporate jobs because once they get hired, they have a guaranteed salary. They don’t have to pay in order to work for someone else. But when they begin thinking of being their own boss, most people are limited to thinking about offline businesses.
These can have a huge financial burden. Not only do you have to find space to rent or buy for your business, but you have to pay for insurance and all of the overhead that goes with having employees and products in person.
As a digital, online entrepreneur, those costs are eliminated. This is one of the most budget friendly career options in existence. You can literally start a business online from absolutely no investment.
For example, you can start networking on free social media platforms and get clients as a freelance service provider. You can start out as an affiliate marketer who uses social media platforms and earns commissions without paying a penny.
You can become a content creator that is paid for the content you are churning out, and not pay a single cent to get started. Of course, there are some aspects of certain business models that do require a very limited investment.
For example, instead of using social media, if you decide to start your own blog, you will need to purchase a domain name as well as hosting for your site. A domain name should not cost you over $17.00 per year, maximum.
You can get hosting accounts for as little as $3 a month. These are costs that are affordable to almost any individual, and WordPress is free, so it will not cost you anything additionally to start a blog.
You can use many of the tools to build your business, such as email autoresponders and graphic design tools on a limited basis without having to pay in the beginning. Autoresponders typically allow you up to 500 subscribers before you have to begin paying.
You can use graphic design tools such as Canva on a free basis, and simply not use any of the professional level features. Or, if you want something like an element that costs money, you can pay for that one element, which is usually no more than a dollar.
If you pursue a business model such as info product development, there may be some additional costs, such as the fees you will pay to whatever platform you are listing your product on.
For example, if you are listing it on JVZoo or Warrior Plus, they will take fees out of each sale to pay for your use of the platform. But those are not up front costs that you will be responsible for.
This takes the burden off of new online entrepreneurs and allows them to start earning money without having to have deep pockets. If you were to start a franchise offline, you might need anywhere from $50,000 and up in order to get started.
Reason 9 – Much Of Your Work Can Be Automated And Delegated
Imagine being able to go into a corporate office and automate your job. There’s no way executives would pay you to do a job that could be automated. If you figured out a way to do that, they would simply use the automation and get rid of you so they wouldn’t have to pay you a salary.
They definitely wouldn’t allow you to delegate your work to someone else, either. But as an online entrepreneur, you can use both of these strategies to further your success and free up your time for more important things.
There are many things that you can automate as an online entrepreneur. For example, if you are blogging about your niche topic, you can set it up so that your blog posts will go live on a certain schedule, auto publishing without you having to have a hands-on approach.
You can also automate your email autoresponders. These will either go out on a schedule that you choose, or you can drip them out on a regular basis to each new subscriber.
There are other things you can automate, such as posting to your social media accounts. You can use tools that will allow you to manage all of your social platforms in one place, and schedule your posts ahead of time so that you can be free from that task in that moment.
Delegating is another amazing strategy that you can use as an online entrepreneur. It doesn’t take a lot of money to delegate tasks that will free you up from some of the more burdening responsibilities.
You can outsource some of the drudge work in your day-to-day business activities, or the tasks that you simply don’t enjoy or don’t have the time or talent to do. You can find individuals to outsource to for your content creation, graphic designs, and even administrative tasks.
Hiring a freelance ghostwriter or graphic designer can be easily done on a site like UpWork or Fiverr. You can also hire a virtual assistant to help you with some of the technical and strategic tasks that you want to hand off to another individual.
Reason 10 – It’s An Asset You Can Hand Down To Your Heirs
When you are working in a corporate career, you never have the opportunity to hand something down to your children or your spouse. You are simply retired from all responsibilities and that is the end of it.
But with an online entrepreneurial start-up, you are building something that can often be handed over to your heirs so that they can run the business and earn from it, too. This will depend on what kind of business model you are pursuing, and whether or not they have an interest in taking over.
If it’s something simple, like an affiliate marketing website that has money coming in from your product reviews, that will be easy for you to hand over to someone else so that they can continue earning from it after you are gone.
They can either add to it or just let it continue operating as is. But if you pursue a business model such as freelance ghostwriting, the person you are handing your business over to would also have to have an interest and talent in that same area.
This is something you will need to talk to them about to see what their level of interest is and if they are prepared to take over at a certain point in time. If they agree, you’ll want to set up a business plan that shows them how your company operates.
They’ll need to know everything from the tools that you are using to your pricing strategy, people you network with, the products that you create, how to use the platforms that you sell them on, etc.
If you are considering handing this over to someone else, take time to train them fully so that the handoff is seamless. You don’t want them to struggle and fail because they weren’t properly educated about how to run the business from a hands-on approach.
You may want to give them the opportunity to sell your business. If you have a website, and they don’t want to continue running it, even if it is earning money, they will be able to flip your business and sell it to someone who is willing to take over.
There are many places such as Flippa or other domain auction sites that they can sell an existing business to other online entrepreneurs. Or, they may be able to contact people who you networked with, who would be more than willing and happy to take over the business in exchange for some sort of payment that your heirs could earn from.
Reason 11 – You Can Keep Earning From It Even After You Retire
And lastly, one of the other reasons you may want to start an online business today is that, even after you decide you no longer want to work, this is a career that can continually pay you.
There are recurring promotions you can set up and memberships that you can sell, there are info product empires you can prop up that will all continue delivering a solid income for you.
Whether you are creating your own products or promoting other people’s work, you can choose to develop business strategies that have long term financial rewards. This residual income strategy, where you have diversified your funds into many different areas, is a great way to support your retirement years.
Having diversified streams of income is important because it will protect your retirement income, even if one of your income streams dries up or is suddenly stopped for some reason.
Make sure that, when you start out as an online entrepreneur, you’re not just exchanging time for money as a freelance service provider. You want something that will continue paying off over and over again.
So if you are being hired to ghostwrite info products, such as eBooks for another online entrepreneur, make sure you are also writing your own eBooks that you can launch, too. If you only work for others, the minute you quit accepting new jobs, your income will dry up.
But if you have your own info product empire, you’ll continue earning from those year after year, assuming that they are evergreen topics and that you have promoted them in a solid manner.
Have to keep track of some things to ensure you continually have money coming in. For example, if you have a thriving affiliate marketing blog in a certain niche, you want to use a tool that will tell you whenever you have any broken links.
If you have an affiliate marketing blog that has a high performing page on it, and you are linking out to a product that is earning you a lot of money, you’ll want to know if that product is suddenly off the market or the link is broken.
If you’re not paying attention, you might be losing those commissions, but if you’re aware of the broken links, you can quickly go in there and replace it with something that will continue earning for you.
This is something you can pay an administrative assistant to do, or you can use a tool that will check your links for you and log in about once a month just to make sure everything is operational during your retirement years.
Working as an online entrepreneur is a very rewarding career. While you may not have the confidence yet, you surely have the motivation now that will carry you through any obstacles so that you can see your success materialize in the coming year.
