9 Business Ideas that Will Be BIG in 2022
I was researching Business Ideas because I had some ideas I wanted to share but I also wanted to discover some new opportunities that were the very best opportunities for 2022. As I was doing this, I was watching different videos and reading different articles and I was shocked and horrified to discover how outdated the ideas are! There are some big names out there are saying in the year 2022 that the best business ideas and opportunities out there are things like joining focus groups, filling out surveys, and selling your old stuff on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace.
What year is this? How are people not aware that there are much better much more scalable opportunities out there?
With all those things, it's just not sustainable and you're going to be trading your hours for dollars which means that the dollars you earn will be very limited because your time is limited. Obviously, we all have a finite amount of time, and also even during the hours you are working with those opportunities, your hourly rates going to be so-so.
Today, we're going to be talking about some different business ideas. Some of these ideas you may not have heard of that are scalable and earn you a much higher hourly rate. We're talking a minimum of about $50 an hour and like I said scalable. You could be earning a whole lot more over time as you build these things out if that is what you want.
Business Ideas #1: Flipping Items …on Steroids
The first business idea on my list is flipping items. I'm not at all talking about just selling stuff you already own and I also want you to know there are so many options with this. Essentially, what you're doing is reselling items. That's what Walmart and Target do to make money too, right? They buy items from wholesalers, they buy items from manufacturers, and they sell them in their stores for a profit. That's how a lot of businesses are run.
The easiest way to get started with this type of reselling business model is simply by buying items that are out of discount or items that people don't really want or just want to get rid of. You can buy them for cheap and then sell them for higher prices. It's simple math. It's an age-old business strategy, and it works. Now, of course, you could do this in a lot of different ways. You could be flipping houses or flipping cars and it is true that when you buy and sell things that are more expensive, your profits tend to be larger because even if the profit margin itself is small.
For example, if you bought a house for $200,000 and then you sold it for $210,000. That would only be essentially (and this is simplifying things but essentially) a 5% profit margin, but you're earning $10,000. Now yes, there'd be fees and all that I'm just keeping it simple for the moment here. In contrast, just imagine that you are buying and selling something that only costs a few dollars, you have that same 5% profit margin. So for example, maybe you bought something for $10 and then you sold it for $10.50 Same 5% profit margin, but now you are only making 50 cents instead of $10,000.
That's why it is good to buy and sell kind of the most expensive things you can afford. But of course, when you're starting out, you can start smaller, and then you can reinvest your profits to be able to invest into bigger and bigger or more expensive items to resell.
My favorite way to do this is to take advantage of kind of the different market dynamics that are happening on different platforms. So for example, you may have noticed that stuff tends to go for a lot cheaper on Craigslist than it goes for eBay. This is just simple supply and demand.
There is way less demand for an item if you sell it locally. When you're selling it on Craigslist, there might only be a few people who want it and so you cannot charge very much for it. However, if you put it online and now you're selling it to an international audience, that means there are way more people interested. Higher demand means you can ask for a higher price. You can find cheap stuff, sometimes even free stuff on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. Those sort of local groups and then you can sell it in the international market by listing it on eBay or somewhere like that.
Business Idea #2: Podcast Editor
You've probably noticed that podcasts have become increasingly popular over the last few years. They are still relatively new, and it's an industry that's exploding as more and more people are discovering the platform for the first time.
Yes, you could become a podcaster and monetize that but that's not the business idea I have in mind here because while that business idea is a great one, it can definitely be difficult to grow and to turn into a sustainable and significant income for yourself. Here's an idea that is much more actionable, and that is to support those podcasters.
You can pretty easily learn how to edit podcasts yourself. In fact, this is some of the easiest work out there. I would say it's quick. It's simple. There's not a lot involved. So with just a little bit of self-education, you can become a podcast editor. From there you can either simply offer freelance services by listing yourself on a site like Upwork as a podcast editor, or you can expand your services and become a podcast manager or producer.
Podcast editors typically earn anywhere between about $20 and $50 per hour when you're first getting started and then as you build up more of a portfolio and more skills, you can increase your rate up to $50 an hour. As you expand your services you can become a producer or podcast Manager and you can charge up to about $100 per hour. You can also in the future scale this opportunity by hiring people onto your team and delegating the work so that you can do very, very little of it yourself while still earning the difference between how much you charge your clients and how much you have to pay your different freelancers who work for you.
For example, as a podcast Management Agency, you might charge your clients about $1,500 per month, at least that's how much I pay my podcast production agency. Of course, there's a range of some agencies that might charge as little as $500 per month and some might charge as much as about $3,000 per month. Let's say $1,500 is what you’re charging and then you need to hire an editor, perhaps a project manager, perhaps a marketing manager, or designer. Of course, you can do as many of these jobs yourself as you want if you'd rather work and keep more of the profits, or you can delegate them so that you can work very little.
Let's say you delegated all of them and you paid each of these contractors about $30 per hour producing one episode of the client podcast could take say eight hours for all these contractors together and eight hours times that $30 per hour rate means that your out of pocket per episode would be $240 for your agency. If your client produces four episodes in a month, that would be just under about $1,000. If you're charging your client $1,500, then you are going to be pocketing a little over $500 per month per client with you doing none of the work.
Obviously, that's a very scalable business model because as long as you're not doing most of the work yourself, you can take on a lot of clients in your agency and all you need to do is oversee the contractors and the big picture project management.
Business Idea #3: Course Creation Manager
The third business idea I wanted to share with you is that of a Course Creation Project Manager. I'm sure you know courses have gotten really big really popular and a ton of people want to create and sell courses. It can be really scalable and really fun as well!
However, there are a lot of people out there who might be small business owners or they might be teachers or professionals of some sort. They have a skill they want to teach and they know that if they created a course they could make money with it, but they do not feel like they're capable of creating the course itself. Maybe they feel like they're not tech-savvy enough or it's just too big and overwhelming of a project for them to take on or they're not sure how to organize the curriculum to make a good course.
If you learn about how to put together a course and if you learn about how to structure a course, then you can offer services to those people. You could do this locally and actually go to their location and film them or you could do it virtually and have them film themselves and send in the videos. You can even manage all of the different aspects of the process like having the videos edited, and all the post-production and having the PDFs, or the course design, and all of that people are willing to pay a premium price for this because they see it as an investment. They want to create the course because they believe that creating the course will be a profitable thing for them to do and so it's not just up for fun purchase, they can justify the purchase in their mind. For that reason, they're willing to pay $1,000’s of dollars for this service.
Another thing I love about this business idea is that you don't need a whole lot of clients for it to be really profitable and it's the sort of business model where you're going to have a lot of word of mouth referrals. If you effectively successfully produce a course for someone and they're pleased with the results, then they're definitely going to tell their friends who also want to create courses about you and recommend your services because you've helped them out so much.
Business Idea #4: Transcription Service
Next up is Transcription! A transcription service is a really easy job or gig to get started with. There are very few barriers to entry. If you can transcribe something effectively and by the way, transcribing is just when you listen to audio or you are watching a video and listening to the audio and you're typing what you're hearing.
You're turning an audio piece of content or an audiovisual piece of content into written text. This is something that there is a huge demand for these days and there are many different companies that offer transcription services. If you can become decently fast at this simple skill of transcribing, then you can earn anywhere between starting at around $5 an hour, but the faster you get the more you can earn up to around $50 to $60 per hour.
Now, I will admit this business idea is a lot less scalable than most on my list. Of course, you could expand this into a transcription agency and there are plenty of people out there who've done that, but it's also just an easy way to get started making some money online. If you need an extra source of income or you want a side hustle as you're working on building a sustainable and scalable business.
Business Idea #5: Self Pubish a Book on Amazon
I'm sure you're aware that you can sell products on Amazon and you probably are also aware that you can write and self-publish a book and sell it on Amazon. That might be a bit more of a project than you want to take on even though you know it could definitely be profitable, so here's an interesting alternative.
You can sell essentially blank books on Amazon. Now, these books tend to not be completely blank. A lot of the time they are a workbook or some sort of planner where there's a ton of blank space but you've added some either design elements or some very sparse content throughout the book. These books are really easy to create because there's not much content going on and a lot of the time they're also very repetitive. You might have the same thing on every page of a journal with prompts for example, or a certain type of planner. What was really cool is that you can actually create these books like the manufacturing of them by using print-on-demand services.
The same services you can use to self-publish a book, (which by the way these services don't cost anything) you just upload your designs for the book. Then when a customer purchases the book, then the book gets printed. Of course that costs the manufacturing company something but you don't have to pay for that because instead they just subtract that cost from the price the customer paid.
For example, maybe the customer buys your planner on Amazon for $15 and it costs $3 for them to print and ship that book. So then you earn the $15 minus the $3, so $12 is your profit. All you had to do was initially design that book and list it on Amazon.
Business Idea #6: Freelance Writing
Writing might at first sound oversaturated like there would be too much competition, but I want to explain why that's not the case. I know that you know there's a million people out there who want to become an author and they pine away writing all the time trying to get their work published, it doesn't get published, and they don't make any money.
However, if you don't want to become an author and have a publishing company, choose your book and publish it but instead, you just want to be a writer and you're decently good at writing. There is a huge demand for your skills.
I run a business where we create content, we write written articles, I write a ton of emails, I write written content for students who are in my programs. There's a lot of writing that has to be done, and I do most of the writing myself, but sometimes I want to outsource parts of it. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to find someone who can write reasonably well. I'm not talking about someone who is Shakespeare or Hemingway, I'm just talking about someone who is a fluent English speaker and knows the basics of punctuation and grammar. I know it might be hard to believe but it's very difficult to find people who can write well.
If you are someone who has good English skills and can write well then there's demand for your services writers often earn a starting wage of around $10 an hour but you can earn so much more as you build up your clientele and you build up a reputation and you show that you have good skills. When I say many people start at $10, that doesn't mean you have to start at $10 an hour. You definitely could start at $30 an hour if you have a little bit of a portfolio to show your potential clients and as a writer, if you have good skills, and you can write also reasonably quickly, you definitely could earn 50 or even $100 per hour.
Business Idea #7: Pinterest Account Manager
If you don't know much about online marketing, you might not know that a lot of businesses use Pinterest as one of the main sources of traffic for their website. In other words, Pinterest is how they get people to visit their website and read their articles. Clearly, they have to use Pinterest and they have to manage their pins on Pinterest and then their ads and things like that.
Pinterest is a surprisingly simple platform. That doesn't mean that there's not a fair amount of legwork to do just with managing those accounts. If you're interested in becoming a Pinterest account manager, you can watch free videos on YouTube about Pinterest strategy and account management and you could also take courses on a site like Udemy all about get Pinterest strategy and account management to learn the skills that you need.
You could experiment with it for yourself or for free for clients at first and then you can start charging for your services once you feel like you know what you're doing. Another thing that's cool about this opportunity is that much of Pinterest marketing can be automated. A lot of it is just about the initial setup, and then managing things once they are systems that are up and running on autopilot, which won't take very much of your time. Once you have a new client that is onboarded you might spend as little as about four hours per month managing their account, just making sure that all those automated systems are running well.
They might be willing to pay you 500 or 1000 or even higher amounts for those services. So I just mentioned Udemy and how that can be a good place. For you to potentially learn some of the skills. Udemy is just a learning platform. You can purchase inexpensive courses on the platform to learn different skills.
Business Idea #8: Course Creator
The next business idea I want to share with you is being a course creator. I want you to know that there are so many different ways to do this. I specifically mentioned Udemy because a lot of people want to create and sell courses, but they feel really stopped by the fact that they don't have an audience to sell those courses to.
There are a lot of ways to get around this but what I'm talking about right now is you can create and sell your courses by listing them on Udemy and Skillshare. Using a site like teachable to be able to sell them also to your own audience as well.
What's cool about this is that there's absolutely no reason why you can't put your course on multiple platforms and sell it on multiple platforms. That way instead of putting all your eggs in one basket and then having to work super hard to try to get enough sales on Udemy or enough sales just from your own small audience to be able to support yourself. Instead, you get to create multiple sources of income kind of instantly. You just create the course once and then you listed on these different platforms and while some of them might not create very many sales because you diversify, there are good odds that your course will take off and start getting reviews and getting promoted on one of these platforms.
If you create several courses and you do this, you just have a really good chance of one of the courses organically taking off and making you a significant amount of money. From there you can take advantage of that and you can use that one course to be able to get other courses in front of the same audience.
Business Idea #9: Drone Videographer
The last business idea that I wanted to share with you today is a local business, not an online business. It's that of a drone videographer. I don't know if you've noticed, but drones have gotten much and much cheaper over the last few years. It used to be that you had to pay at least about $500 or $1,000 for a decent drone but now we've started seeing good quality drones for as little as $50 to $100, which is just insane.
A lot of people think that flying drones and doing videography with them is really fun work, especially if you like being outside that's an added perk. Drone Videography is a highly sought-after commodity in several different industries.
For example, event planners need to hire drone videographers for their client's event and Realtors want to hire drone videographers for the real estate listings. Of course, you've also got content creators, movie producers, YouTubers, course creators who want to hire drone videographers to be able to have some amazing footage to add to their content.
As you can see, there is an increasingly large demand for these services but here's the thing. In order to be a drone videographer legally in most areas, you have to get some sort of certification or get a license to be able to professionally fly a drone and that limits your competition, which can be good for you.
Of course, there are pros and cons to this but it can be good for you when you're trying to start this business. If you're willing to jump through those few hoops, getting your certification, and getting your license then you can really take advantage of this opportunity and get a lot of the work that is available out there doing something that can be really fun.
I hope you enjoyed learning more about some business ideas you can pursue in 2022. I hope that some of these ideas really stood out to you and were interesting to you and sound like good opportunities.
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What I do professionally is I help people start online businesses and that's what I talk about on my Youtube Channel, how to successfully start and grow online businesses.
