It’s challenging for many people to answer the question, “What’s the best way to make money online?”
because there are so many options, and it’s hard to know which ones are suitable for beginners. But don’t worry! Today, I’m bringing you an online side hustle method that anyone can do, and it doesn’t require daily content updates or extensive promotion on social media platforms.
What you need to do is very simple—you might only need to post a backlink to your site every few days. It doesn’t require a lot of your time, but it can bring you significant returns.
Without further ado, let’s dive into today’s main topic.
Contents
1. E-commerce Independent Website: The First Step to Making Money Online
Today, I want to share a method for making money online: creating an e-commerce independent website.
Simply put, it’s about building a store website to sell products. However, unlike other e-commerce sites that sell a wide range of products, our site will focus on selling just one or a few products. This makes the website much simpler than the typical e-commerce site you might be used to seeing. You won’t need to constantly update the site—just spend a few days setting it up, and you’re good to go.
Building a multi-product e-commerce site can be challenging and time-consuming for individual entrepreneurs. That’s why this type of project is often referred to as a “single-page website” or a “single-product website.”
2. How Does an E-commerce Independent Website Make Money?
The profit model for an e-commerce independent website is straightforward: sell products and earn a profit.
There are two main ways to sell products:
Dropshipping
This is a popular method where you don’t hold any inventory. When a customer places an order on your website, you purchase the product from a supplier (such as Alibaba or Amazon) and have it shipped directly to the customer. You earn the profit margin between your sale price and the supplier’s price.
Self-fulfillment
In this model, you buy products yourself, either domestically or internationally, and ship them directly to your customers. This can potentially yield higher profits compared to dropshipping, as you can control the costs and margins more closely.
I’ll show you specific examples in a bit so you can see how it works in practice.
3. How Much Money Can You Make with an E-commerce Independent Website?
The amount you can earn depends on the type of product you choose to sell. Today, I want to share an example of a single-product website that sells a branded delay spray called Stud100. Let’s see how much profit you can make per sale.
If you use the dropshipping model, check the price on Amazon:
The Stud100 product sells for around $10 on Amazon.
Now, let’s see the price on an independent e-commerce site:
The same product is priced at about $18, meaning you earn a profit margin of around $7 per sale. If you sell 100 units in a month, that’s $700 in profit, which is quite substantial.
But…
The real profit margin can be even higher. The actual product cost can be much lower than the Amazon price. For example, the production cost of Stud100 from a manufacturer in China can be less than $2.
With your independent site’s selling price at $18, you could make $16 profit per sale. If you want a competitive edge, you could even lower the retail price to $10 and still make an $8 profit per sale.
If you don’t want to deal with dropshipping or self-fulfillment, there’s an even simpler way to monetize: Amazon affiliate marketing.
By promoting products on Amazon, you can earn a commission of around 5%-10% per sale.
While the profit margin is lower, it requires minimal effort—just get users to click on your product link, which redirects them to Amazon.
4.How To Create a Stud100 Website And Make Money Online
Product Selection
We’ve decided to create a website for a branded delay spray, specifically Stud100. This brand wasn’t chosen randomly. It’s crucial to know that if the brand name doesn’t have any search traffic on Google, building a website around it is pointless because our site’s traffic and customers will mainly come from Google searches.
Let’s first look at the search volume for this brand. We can also analyze the traffic of competitor websites. Using SEMrush, we find that related keywords for Stud100 have around 780 searches per month, and the Keyword Difficulty (KD) is only 17. This means ranking for these keywords is relatively easy.
Even though 780 monthly searches may seem low, the traffic is highly targeted. Customers searching for a specific product brand are usually ready to buy, leading to a high conversion rate. So, 780 searches per month could easily result in 100 sales.
And this is just the search volume for the brand name; we haven’t even considered other long-tail keywords yet.
Website Building
As mentioned earlier, we’re building a single-product website, one of the simplest types of sites. You can buy a pre-made theme from a platform selling website themes, install it on WordPress, and set it up with minimal web development experience.
Alternatively, you can look at competitor websites to see what platform they use. For instance, I found that competitors are using Shopify, which makes it even easier. Just register an account on Shopify and pay a monthly fee.
If you’re a complete beginner and don’t want to do it yourself, the easiest way is to hire someone on Fiverr to build the site for you. Such a single-product site only needs to be set up once, with no further updates required.
Since we’re building a store, essential pages include:
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- FAQs
- Shipping Information
- Product Details
- Product Usage
To enhance conversions, consider setting up a WhatsApp account for customer service.
Payment Integration
You have several options for payment processing, including PayPal and Stripe.
Product Sourcing
As mentioned earlier, I recommend starting with the dropshipping model. When a customer places an order, you can purchase the product from a platform like Amazon and have it shipped directly to them. Once your site ranks well on Google and gains stability, you can consider sourcing products from China to increase your profit margins.
Traffic Acquisition
Focus on ranking the brand keyword “Stud100” in Google search results to drive traffic. If you’re not familiar with Google SEO optimization, don’t worry. For single-page websites, there’s not much on-site optimization needed; focus on off-site optimization instead.
Off-site optimization mainly involves building backlinks. So, after your website is set up, your primary task is to find platforms where you can post backlinks to your site.
Social Media Accounts
Social media platforms can also help you generate traffic. You can include links to your site in your profile bios and posts. Even if you only use social media for backlinking, it’s still beneficial to register accounts on major platforms.
5. Project Challenges
From both the implementation and operational perspectives, this project seems straightforward. However, the main challenge for many might be achieving good Google search rankings for the website, which is crucial for gaining traffic and sales. This is likely the hardest part of the project.
(Some may think building a single-product e-commerce site is difficult, but it’s actually the easiest part. You can find plenty of people on Fiverr who can build the site for a few hundred dollars.)
Based on my experience of over a decade in SEO, ranking a site isn’t that hard if you invest time in building quality backlinks.
What are quality backlinks?
Backlinks come in two types: nofollow and dofollow.
- Nofollow links do not pass SEO authority.
- Dofollow links do pass SEO authority.
Focus on acquiring dofollow backlinks. Additionally, the authority of the platform where you post your backlinks matters. For example, a backlink from YouTube is much more valuable than 100 backlinks from low-quality sites because YouTube has a high domain authority on Google.
6. Conclusion
Today, I shared an example focused on the brand keyword “Stud100.” In reality, there are many similar brand keywords you can target on Google, and it’s usually easy to find product sourcing channels for them.
You can also explore niches and product opportunities in your industry by researching related keywords on Google.
Next time, I’ll break down an independent e-commerce site example for mosquito repellent lamps, another niche market that I believe has potential for profitability.
