I’ve got TWO great online business ideas, and I need to choose one – how do I do that, and know I’ve made the right choice?

(BTW, this is a great problem to have!)

I get practical and look at the numbers, of course…and once I do that, the decision is much easier than I thought.

I also talk about the higher motivation behind my online businesses, and why having one can keep you going when it all feels like too much hard work.

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Resources mentioned

Business Idea Blitz – my free online course that helps you nail your perfect (and profitable) business idea. Yes, even if you have multiple good ideas!

Dye DIY – my side project and other full-time business option. Feel free to check it out!

Transcript

Hey there! I’m Kelly Kotanidis, and welcome to Online Business from Scratch. I’m taking you behind the scenes as I build my new online business from scratch to a full-time income while making sure it’s a great fit for my traveling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do and why, so that you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

Now, this update is from December 19th, so it’s a full 3 weeks after my last update, and that’s because of life. So, you know, that thing that we’re building our flexible online businesses around happened to me recently. It’s been a hectic few weeks. We’ve packed up our house ready to travel again. We have had a flood, and our town was cut off for a few days, and we even had a crocodile in the main street. So, welcome to North Queensland, everyone!

We also had a letter from a kind of long-lost relative that I hadn’t heard from for years. They kind of disappeared, and so I did a road trip to visit them because they were only a few hours away from where I was, and I just missed getting stuck there. Actually, the water was hitting the bottom of the bridges as we drove back. I’ve also spent a stupid number of hours on NDIS-related busy work, and it was my husband’s birthday, so I haven’t been thinking about business a great deal. But that’s life, right? This is why we’re starting businesses like this because often we have to drop them to attend to the other urgent stuff in our lives.

Okay, so now I’m hitting the end of my self-imposed time off, and I’m getting to the time when I can actually start this business. It’s only 12 days away now. So, my big thing has been making the final decision on what to do next, which is a pretty big decision, really. So, right now, I have two business options that I can jump into. I can start fresh and go all in on teaching online business, which is the option I’ve been investigating and planning recently to see if I liked it, or I can dedicate some or all of my time to Dye DIY, the tie-dye site I’ve been dabbling in for a couple of years.

So, I’ve had all that swirling around in my head for a while, thinking, well, should I do this or that? This one has this positive, but also this negative, and so on and on. Basically, I’ve been overthinking and getting confused because my brain is very good at that. But then I got tired of that, and I did the sensible thing, and I sat down, and I did the numbers because that’s really the only way to know what to do. I find when I get things out on paper, then problems that seem like they have no resolution at all when they’re swirling around in my head often look quite clear in black and white.

So, first, I did a thorough assessment of Dye DIY. As background, I started this site in 2020 as a bit of a side project with the goal of getting YouTube monetization ads with Mediavine and affiliate marketing, mostly via Amazon. I did all the work to set it up, but since then, I’ve just done a bit here and there, so I haven’t reached YouTube or Mediavine requirements. And I’m currently getting about $30 a month from Amazon from the evergreen traffic. So, it is not really an earner at the moment, but the foundation is there. I’m 3/4 of the way to YouTube ads even though I’ve only added one new video in the last year. I have a really good domain authority, and it does quite well in search. So, if I dedicated some time to it, it would grow very quickly, and it wouldn’t take long to really scale it up.

So, I did the numbers to work out what I could realistically earn with YouTube ads and Mediavine based on people’s income reports, plus I scaled up my affiliate income to match that level of page views. And it looks all right. I could reasonably expect to earn $3,000 per month or more when I hit the targets. And of course, I could grow more from there. So, that’s okay. That’s a decent starting income, but it also doesn’t look that great. I would have to make a fair bit more content to reach those goals, which is a lot of hours invested, and search volume has gone down a lot since 2020, most of it over 50% since I started the site. So, my original keyword projections are way off. I’d need to make much more content than I originally planned, and there’s also not a lot else I can do to extend the income and repurpose the content. It’s such a visual thing that I don’t feel it would translate well to a podcast or summits or any of those sorts of things. And I could do courses and such, but I can’t create them while I’m traveling because I obviously can’t take tie-dye with me and do it in Airbnbs. It’s not very portable at all, but my entire life needs to be portable at the moment because we’re about to spend a month in Melbourne with family and then go to Europe for a few months.

So, after I did the maths, I then did the next sensible thing. I actually did some of the work that I would need to do to see how much I liked it. So, I made another video and I published the related post, and the video is doing quite well, but I just decided that I don’t really like the content treadmill. I don’t want to keep pumping out the videos and the posts. I don’t really enjoy doing that part of it, which is the main part. And I don’t want to hire someone to do all the video editing. I think I’m just over it, really. It’s an experiment I tried that wasn’t for me, and with Google’s constant updates smashing my traffic regularly, it feels like it’s two steps forward and one step back. It’s frustrating to get to a certain level and then have it drop overnight by 50% just for no reason at all. It doesn’t suit my personality, you know? Keeping up with their requirements and updating everything constantly and jumping through all their new hoops. I mean, that’s why I don’t like Facebook or Instagram much either. There’s too much change, a lot of it seems arbitrary and just frustrating, and I don’t want to play their game.

But, on the other hand, it feels like I’m getting lots of prods towards the online business business. I’ve had someone I worked with ask me to do a paid marketing plan for them. I’m already doing a summit, which is my old summit next March. I had an offer to do a live workshop for a world schooling group. There’s been a few things pop up nudging me, saying, “Hey, opportunities here, get off your arse and take them.” And really, it’s because when I look at what I like to talk about, it’s all business. It’s throwing around ideas, looking into the data, working with people to come up with a profitable plan that they’re excited about. I love all of it, so I do it naturally, so opportunities end up coming way.

And I think a lot of it too comes down to making a difference. So, that’s always been a core part of my businesses. You know, with my nappy business, I loved that I was saving thousands of kilos of plastic from entering landfill, to helping people homeschool their kids, to becoming a nurse, showing people how to make pretty colors on their clothes is just not as rewarding. And no insult intended to people who work in that sort of area. I love dyeing stuff, I know clothes can make people feel good, but having someone say, “Hey, I made this cool t-shirt from your instructions,” compared to having someone say, “Hey, my kid hated life, and I did your course, and I got the confidence to homeschool, and now they’re at home and happy and engaged and learning so much, and we’re having an awesome family life,” well, the second was really the sort of review that keeps me going when work gets boring. So, having people say to me, “Well, I can actually earn now, I can afford to stay home with my kids,” or “I have more options in life now because we have some more income,” right up to, “Hey, now we can quit our jobs and travel full-time,” whatever, it’s really rewarding to hear that I can help people make those sorts of huge positive changes to their lives.

Now, on the practical side, because I am always practical, the income projections are also much better. I can create endless products really at a sustainable price. I can create content in whatever way suits me, so I can do written, video, audio, whatever I want, and it’s very portable. The stuff I need is all in my head, so as long as I have a laptop, I can create whatever I need to. So, it was really interesting to go through all that. It seemed like a difficult choice when it was all swirling around in my head, but when I put it down on paper, it was quite obvious. The answer is to start the new online business business, don’t put any more time into Dye DIY except for maybe selling it.

So, that’s it. The decision is made. I still don’t have a name, which is deeply frustrating, but I’ll choose something when it’s time. So, I’ve consciously put it aside so I don’t waste time on it, and I’ve just reviewed my initial content list. I’ve picked my first article based on what should be most useful, and I’m about to plunge in and get it as close to finished as I can before something else derails me. So, wish me luck there and absence of natural disasters.

So, if you’re like me and you’re not sure which online business topic you should start with, please go and do my free Business Idea Blitz mini-course. It will help you get your ideas out in black and white and then assess them, so you know which one will be best, and you can get started without those feelings of, “Oh, I wonder if I should have done something else,” or even worse, trying to create a confusing business about multiple topics because they are slow and so, so hard to grow. The Business Idea Blitz will show you how to really narrow it down and choose a topic that’s clear and has people saying, “Yes, please, that’s perfect for me, sign me up.” The link is in the show notes.

Now, that’s all for this episode. Thank you for listening. I will be back showing my next online business steps very soon, and they will involve actually starting the business. So, don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.

Thanks for listening!

Got any questions? Feel free to to drop them in the comments below.

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