You don’t need to be the Wolf of Wall Street to run a business any more. In this article we run through some of the best business ideas for introverts.
So you are fed up of working the 9-5 and wish you could tell the boss where to stick their job right? Trouble is, the thought of going out and selling yourself makes you feel sick to your stomach. You are not a natural salesperson and having to put yourself out there every day is terrifying. This is why so many introverts end up settling in a job they hate, for the rest of their life. No matter how much confidence coaching and CBT you go to, you realise that you will never be that charismatic person who everyone knows and remembers.
Stop thinking like that right now. Just because you are not going to be the Wolf of Wall Street it doesn’t mean that you have to give up on that dream of being a self sufficient business person. There are so many businesses that can be run by introverts from the safety of your own home. No face to face selling and no scary sales pitches.
- Drop shipping business for introverts
Drop shipping is an amazing business to run for both introverts and extroverts. With a drop shipping business you don’t actually handle the products you are selling. You simply list products sold by other companies that ship directly to your customers. You essentially act as the middle man. It is your job to drive traffic to your website but once a customer places an order through you, the whole shipping and manufacture is handled by others. This type of business means that you have to get very good at digital marketing. You have to deal with customer service issues but that can all be done through a live chat or email so theoretically you don’t need to actually talk to a customer. Plus, as you only buy stock from the supplier once you have an order, it means you do not need huge sums of money to set up a drop shipping business either. We will cover how to set up and run a drop shipping business using Shopify and Oberlo in an upcoming blog post.
2. E-Learning
Running an online learning business is a great job for an introvert and is actually how our founder made her money. There are a load of e-learning platforms out there and we cover which e-learning software platform is best in another of our blog posts. You will need to create the course content, which could take some time, but once it has been created you can resell it an unlimited amount of times, making it a lifelong stream of income. Your content can be video or written content, but if the thought of being on camera is too much, you can do a voiceover a slide deck. You do not have to show your face! Again, you will need a strong understanding of digital marketing to build up your business.
3. Book Publishing
Introvert naturally tend to be good at (and enjoy) writing. This lends itself well to setting up a writing based business. Our founder also has a thriving book publishing business, all of which has been built up using a combination of digital marketing and Amazon’s self publishing marketing tools. It takes as little as 10 minutes to get a book listed on Amazon. Your books can also be used as a promotional tool for your other businesses.
4. Affiliate Marketing / Blogging Site
There is still big money to be made in affiliate marketing. Plus there is no real set up cost over and above your domain name and the time taken to set it up. With an affiliate site, you write quality content and then through that you promote other companies products and services in return for a commission when a sale is made. There are several things to consider when setting up an affiliate marketing site. You will end up writing hundreds of hours of content for this site. So you need to work out if it is something that you are passionate about and whether you have enough content ideas to make it worth your while. To do an affiliate site properly, you need to devote around 10 hours per week, with more time being put in at the start. You also need to have an excellent working knowledge of SEO and social media, as you will need to publicise your new content in order to get the necessary web traffic that could turn into commission.
5. E-Commerce
It is so easy to set up a fully functional e-commerce website using a platform like Shopify. This has removed the barrier that many faced in previous years as you no longer need to have the in-house expertise of a website developer that can build you an e-commerce website. Selling online requires a good working knowledge of digital marketing techniques, but it means no customers physically coming in that you have to sell to and that is an introverts dream. You may get the odd phone enquiry, but to be honest if you have an online chat, then you may not need to publicise your phone number at all. If you decide to open an e-commerce business, you then need to decide what to sell. Take a look at Chinese wholesale websites like AliExpress, where you can pick up shop stock straight from the Chinese factories that make them. It will take a while to arrive, but the prices are very low as you are cutting out the middleman.
