Written by Tina Dahmen
4 Online Business Models Explained Which Will Survive Coronavirus
Which businesses are most likely to survive any epidemic?
The coronavirus has shaken up the world and has shifted perspectives in many entrepreneurs’ minds on how we have been doing business and what we can do better in order to secure our financial income.
Small business owners who hadn’t been working online yet are looking for alternatives in order to have more stable income sources that will survive epidemics like the current coronavirus.
A lot of bigger corporations hadn’t had a structure set up for their employees to be able to work remotely and are paying for their ignorance right now (though love, I know!).
Remote work has been on the rise for many years, a few companies had adapted to the change and demand of their workers, but certainly not all. In times like this, a successful company is being determined whether or not it will adapt to change.
‘The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.’ – John Maxwell.
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Which one are you? Will you adapt? Or will you stand still and feed into fear and panic? Has it made you re-think your current business structure as well?
No matter if your business has been taken a hit by the coronavirus or not, it would be definitely wise considering adding one or even multiple of the following online business models or income streams to your current business.
Here are four online business models you can add to your current business or build up as an individual income stream on the side. Those models or income streams will certainly survive coronavirus or any other epidemic.
Let’s dive into the power of online businesses and let’s take a closer look to the most popular online business models out there
1. E-Books:
This is probably one of my favorites. Having a book published is better than having a business card.
Not only does it provide an incredible stream of passive income once the product is ready and distributed on different channels like Amazon or maybe Audible, but it also makes people perceive you with much more respect.
You are much more likely to be seen as an authority in your space in the public eye which is always a bonus for your brand.
You can self-publish a book easily these days on Amazon, which is a much faster way than going the traditional route via a publishing house.
It depends on the mission of your book. If you write books for money matters, I would recommend having it hosted on your own server/website like I have and do your own marketing for it. If you write a book for authority purposes, Amazon would be the place to advertise.
It’s smart to use your ebook as a low entry offer to get people into your funnel and to give them a taste of your work.
If they like your content, it will be easy to up-sell any of the following products, since they got the opportunity to get to know you better. Since they also already spend money on one of your products, it also becomes easier to turn first-time customers into repeated customers as trust has already been established.
2. Membership Sites
Membership sites assure you recurring revenue every single month. You can also offer your members to pay yearly and get a huge sum of financial injection upfront, which is also awesome. Or you offer both options to choose from.
Personally, I provide both options to my members, monthly as well as yearly payments.
You can create a membership site around basically anything.
Think about which type of business are you running?
Are you providing marketing services normally?
Are you a consultant in any niche? Are you the queen or king of knitting or cooking?
Your niche doesn’t matter which is the awesome thing about memberships sites.
You can create digital content, masterclasses, and courses on a regular basis for your members and place them into a content library that they have access to at any time.
What we do at The Biz Heroes is:
- Provide a Content Library (Watch pieces of training at your own pace)
- Organise Regular Online Meet-ups & Masterminds (Very important for community building)
- Invite Expert Speakers (We have experts coming to teach us about their area of expertise)
- Yearly In-Person Meet-Up (We meet up once a year and get everyone together in person)
- Private Discord Channel for Communication 24/7 (Very popular when you have people in different time zones & your members just want to chat about different topics, available for the higher tier level only)
- Private Facebook Group (People can ask for feedback on their work, accessible for all membership tiers)
But you don’t have to have an engaged membership site like described above.
You can also have a more passive membership site which means it doesn’t have the community aspect to it and you can provide regular content updates to the membership site.
To built The Biz Heroes, we have used the following services:
- Siteground Hosting (They have pretty good support service if you aren’t very tech-savvy)
- Divi (It’s the most flexible WordPress theme out there, a theme by Elegant Themes)
- MemberPress (comes with a lot of integrations, one of the market leaders when it comes to membership site plugins, BUT it clashes a lot with other plug-ins)
- Convertkit (integrates with MemberPress perfectly fine, we have been using it even before we built a membership site)
- Learn Dash (the most affordable LMS out there, and after their latest update, their interface looks very similar to Teachable).
3. E-Courses
According to Forbes, e-learning is the future. A market research company called Global Industry Analysts projected that the e-learning industry would reach $107 billion (in 2015), which became true.
Now, Research and Markets forecast reports that e-learning will grow to $325 billion by 2025, which is triple the revenue of 2015.
Universities are adapting to this change and so are bigger companies. More and more training is being put online in order to use time and space much more efficiently.
In order to get started to create your own online platform, you don’t need to have a huge budget.
You can easily get started with a few hundred dollars. We are hosting our online courses on Thinkific.
We used almost the same tools as above for the membership site:
E-courses are an amazing way to scale your business. You can serve more people, you will free up more time in your business to focus on other things and you will increase your revenue.
Doesn’t that just sound perfect?
If you are running group programs, e-courses serve as a very good preparation tool in order to get everyone to the same level of knowledge before you start your program.
This leads me to the last, but certainly not least suggestions for your next online business model to consider implementing.
4. Online Group Programs
Many people buy online courses, but only a few actually follow through with executing anything they have learned.
Make sure you understand that this is not your fault as an online course creator, this is simply human nature. Yes, you must assure your course content is created in an engaging way and there are a lot of tips and tricks for this, however, you aren’t responsible for lazy people’s behaviour.
That’s where online group programs come into play.
Lack of accountability is the biggest obstacle for entrepreneurs these days to get things finished.
Many of us suffer from the shiny object syndrome, and if not this, life gets really busy and it is harder than ever to finish a project (lame, I know!) since we have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.
If you are enrolled into a group program and you are announcing your goals to the group, you are 65% more likely to reach your goals and follow through with your plans compared to not announcing your goals publically.
Being held accountable and showing up to regular calls will give
you that extra push and motivation needed in order to get things started, done or even just to give it a proper think through.
Your chance to follow through increases to 95% if you are actually meeting up with your mentor, the group or your accountability partner on a weekly basis until the project has finished (insane, I know!).
There is a tremendous amount of power when people get together, make sure to take advantage of that either way, as a consumer or as an online group program creator.
Personally, I have done both and would choose it over and over again as it assures me to reach my goals and to keep putting awesome content out there.
These were the most popular online business models you can implement into our business right now with little investments in order to survive coronavirus (or any epidemic).
Which one will you choose next? Are you interested in creating an online course for your audience? Check out my group programme and apply to be selected one of the very few students who get to work with me.
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Not sure where to start?
You have a skill, hobby or expertise which you would like to put into an online course so you can serve more people on a broader scale and make bank while you sleep? Great!
There are a few things you need to consider before you get started, download the guide now and avoid working endless hours for free creating a product nobody wants to buy!