Starting My Online Business Journey - E-books or Amazon FBA?

Hello,

Glad to see people are taking action and doing something towards their success.

First of all, I really like your first IDEA. It' would be really interesting and very helpful for people like you to follow and see how you progress, how you test new methods, to see what's working and what's not, but the main issue here is it would take a lot of time from you. Let me explain if you just starting out and want to make your first $, you need to concentrate on the methods to earn your first $ and if you also try to build a blog and share all your experience with others, it can be overwhelming for you.

Personally, for me it would be interesting to follow you, BUT if you start promoting some affiliate offers/ebooks or start selling your own mentoring/guide before becoming successful yourself, nobody would buy including me. And trust me, it will take a lot of effort and time to start making money online.

You can start a journey, but only for motivating yourself and not for making money from creating a journey or offering people to join your list to follow you on your journey to make money.

My advice is just to start working on any method you see it's interesting for you. You can start affiliate marketing, it won't require any investments as you can use free traffic sources and later on after you made your first $ you can start a list building, tell your story for your readers and keep working on aff marketing, share your experience with your list and start selling your own products or affiliate products.

It's not a question which we can answer to(about choosing to create ebooks between amazon FBA). You need to decide what is more interested for you. Keep in mind that starting amazon FBA requires big starting capital, I would say do not start without having at least $5k to spend and without having other income stream and regular income as you would need to keep spending on FBA business on regular basis. Ebooks are easier and not require huge starting capital, but if you want to create an ebook in 'make Money Online' niche, you first need to be successful yourself in MMO niche and it takes time and effort.

Thanks!

One of the challenges with your "journey blog" for make money online, is that it can take a LOT of learning and testing before money gets made, and I would think most people want to learn from successes rather than read about a lot of failures first.

So, as someone else said, it probably makes sense to succeed first, then blog about it after you've found a system that is reliably profitable.'

Blogging takes a LOT of time and effort to start getting good results. You need to create very high quality content which is interesting and which people want to share, and promote it effectively on Social-media (which is not easy) and do really effective SEO (which takes time and effort).

I don't know much about Amazon FBA, but as the other reply said, it can take a lot of continual investment to have a good chance of competing.

So be realistic, learn a LOT more about how to succeed with both methods, and choose the one which is the best fit for your experiences, abilities and situation.

Hope that helps !

Chris

I personally think a journey blog is one of the best kinds, people like to see the journey.

With Amazon FBA, most countries have inbound FBA shipments on hold and reserved for essential items only

On this forum, you could find hundreds if not thousands of newbies who thought this was a good idea. I defy you to find even one who made it work.

Especially now when people are mostly looking for magic buttons and instant gratification, the "beginner journey" is a terrible idea.

Learn about affiliate marketing and traffic generation.

Absolutely acceptable to do this - Just remember PATIENCE. success is not going to happen tomorrow... traffic on the way to success will not happen tomorrow. As long as you ENJOY the path itself.. you will be fine.

You say writing books... what topic? If they are in the niche of making money online? then NO this would not be a good place to start. Do they parallel an interest or your day job where you can draw from experience, then I would be all in with that.

In terms of physical product... Take a look at my thread here : https://www.warriorforum.com/warrior...days-ebay.html and maybe start with stuff you have around the house. I am going to say that eBay is easier in terms of traffic than Amazon. After reading through that thread you will have a better idea of how to manipulate the Listing Algorithm - were as Amazon is very much a Click thru rate and Conversion rate based listing rank system.

What that ultimately means for selling on Amazon is you have to have the ability to draw outside traffic to your product - and eBay is literally the exact opposite.

Hope that Helps!

I think a journey blog would be really cool, because you could share your learning mistakes (and hopefully your successes) with other online business newbies. However, you will need to gain a lot of experience and add a significant amount of value before you can think about monetizing the blog.

When it comes to your two "make money online" ideas, I'll start with Amazon FBA. Even in good economic times, starting an FBA business is really tough. First, you will be competing against tons of Amazon sellers that are constantly scouting stores to sell the same products that you do - but cheaper! You can often end up in a a race to the bottom. Not to mention that you will have to spend a huge amount of money investing in enough inventory to really scale your business. Unfortunately, we are no longer in good economic times. Furthermore, Amazon is currently focusing on fulfilling orders for essential items. Depending on your product category, you could have an even tougher time.

As a writer, I love the idea of an eBook. Creating digital content is much less expensive than buying physical inventory to sell. However, you have to be good at creating engaging content--content that your audience will find valuable to read (and spend money to buy).

I hope that helps.

Good luck!

Hi!

First thing: focus on just one of the ideas and make it work.

Second thing: I believe that if you are starting to create a blog it is necessary that you have a regular volume of posts to start engaging your followers. After that you can start selling some kind of product, like an ebook. By engaging the audience, the conversion of your product will be greater.

Thank you everyone for the responses. I truly appreciate how willing everyone is to help us newbies around here.

I really like the idea of starting off with affiliate marketing. I'm thinking I'll focus on affiliate marketing for the blog and then right e-books in the same topic as my blog so that I can cross promote my e-books on my blog as well. If I do that, the blog topic and the e-books niche will definitely not be in make money online though, because after-all, I haven't made any money online yet..

To provide some background: I'm currently on a health/fitness kick in my life right now where I'm focusing on eating clean, working out etc just trying to live a healthy lifestyle overall. At the same time, I've also gotten serious about making a living online so I can quit my 9 to 5 (which is in HR, so I really don't feel like blogging about my day job to be honest). So I essentially have 2 topics that interest me: health/fitness and making money online.

You can say I'm more interested in the making a living online part and talking about that more so than I'm interested in talking about my healthy lifestyle kick.

With regards to the website, the 2 paths that I'm trying to choose from are:

1. Blog about trying to stay fit, healthy, eating clean etc and focus on affiliate marketing for that. At the same time, write e-books in that same niche or complementary to it and cross promote the books on the blog. But the only problem is I don't want to be known as a "health guru" or "fitness expert" etc because that's not the main/only thing I want to be known for.

2. Write e-books about staying fit, healthy eating, etc and then blog about the journey of making money from selling those books. In this case, the blog topic will of course be my journey to making money online. But my e-books will be about health/fitness etc. The only thing is, I may not be able to promote my books on the blog because the blog topic is not health, fitness etc.

So I'm just trying to see which one will work best in the long term, I guess.

Thanks for all your insight, in advance.