An easier way to make £25k

Thinking of setting up a small business? Want to make extra cash? Think you can make money on the internet? Here’s a really cool bit of business wisdom. Apparently it’s much easier to make £5,000 each from five micro-businesses in a year than it is to generate £25,000 from one small business.

It’s an idea that resonates with me for two reasons. First, as a freelancer it took me three years to hit the £25k mark. In year one I made about eleven grand. In year two, nineteen. In year three it topped thirty. Second, I spent a year playing with micro-business ideas so I know it isn’t particularly difficult to make five grand over the year each.

I tested mosaic services, creating huge mosaics in people’s gardens and homes. I found it far too tiring, seasonal and weather-dependent but I made six thousand pounds over the twelve months. I tested being a virtual assistant which generated four grand over the year. Being an arty type I painted and designed things for people and businesses, clocking up about £3,500. I sold stuff on Ebay. Plus I did copywriting for local businesses and edited their websites for them. In total I generated just under £25k over the year running five tiny, weeny businesses.

As little as fifteen years ago when the internet was new, it would have been a lot harder to test one small business. Never mind five in one go. The internet means you can set up an ecommerce site in a few hours if you know code or can get to grips with a simple, automated site building tool. There’s plenty of free images online. Hosting costs are incredibly low. You can change a site in seconds and make it visible in Google in a couple of hours if you use AdWords. You can take your site down in minutes and sell the url to someone else. And hosting is remarkably cheap.

A word of caution: get rich quick schemes don’t work. If they did we’d all be doing it. If an online money-making scheme seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is. The harder the sell, the harder it probably needs to be! But if you’ve got a talent, a passion, a specific skill set, expertise or experience in several areas and want to cut loose from full time employment, think about setting up a clutch of micro-businesses, test them head-to-head and find out which works best.

Published August 18, 2011 & Filed in Discount Coder Chat

Tags: make extra cash, make £25k, micro-businesses

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