The Only Article You Need Before You Start an Online Business in 2026

Picture this: you’re scrolling social media, and your feed is showing you all kinds of ads. They’re all about how to start an online business. It’s that, or building your brand, passive income, and or AI stuff.

(FYI – AI makes it much quicker).

The Conflict

Before long, you’re being bombarded with conflicting claims:

“You’ve got to own your audience – build your emailing list”

“You’ve got to build your presence all across social media – you don’t need a website”

“You can be deplatformed at the drop of a hat – you’ve got to have your own website!”

“Build an active following that will buy your products”

“You don’t NEED followers – just marketing and annoying people in their DMs!”

“Blogging is DEAD”

“Blogging still works, here’s how”

“SEO is DEAD”

“SEO still applies, just ask ChatGPT how to–”

It just goes on and on and on.

Personally, I’m at my breaking point. Just today, I saw an article from a creator whom I really admire, and does similar work to myself.

He’s selling financial independence – and what’s more, his work is incredibly valuable, as is mine.

But this article he wrote was about how you can’t “own your audience” by using a store platform like Etsy or Gumroad.

Then goes on to talk about how YouTube is a great way to build trust with your audience.

I almost screamed at my phone.

You want to tell people to “own their audience” only to proceed to recommend the ONE PLATFORM that is probably the WORST POSSIBLE OPTION?

At the end of the day, he’s just trying to sell a product. A book. A course. A subscription. And fair enough. He provides a lot of value.

I won’t lie

I’m one of those people out here trying to sell a product, and I stand by it.

If we have something of value to offer, and we deserve to earn from it IF our customers can truly benefit from it.

What’s frustrating is how overwhelming it must be for people new to this space.

I remember how it feels to struggle with how to start an online business, only to be plagued with uncertainty from influential people who have already achieved moderate to major success, but can’t seem to pick a lane.

Guess what? You’re not alone.

What’s more? You can’t possibly be wrong, no matter what you try to do.

Build a website – but find that your audience is generally more active on social media channels anyway.

You can go without a website – but still gain no traction, only to find that people doing the same thing as you did better WITH a website, so you get on it.

Sell a course – but then you find out that your audience would rather just read a book.

Build an audience – only to find that they’d rather just watch than buy.

Pay for marketing – but then you gain no leads because your niche is full of people who are never ready to buy.

Build an email list – only to find most of your subscribers end up being too busy and fed up with the amount of emails they get on a daily basis.

Eventually, they’re all unsubscribing and you’re stuck having to market and sell subscriptions all over again.

Speaking of subscriptions, you could offer membership for your brand – only to find that a lot of your members end up forgetting that they’ve subscribed.

Suddenly, they see a random $29 leaving their account each month. Out of frustration they cancel the subscription before you can profit anymore from their forgetfulness.

I’m sure if you’re still learning, you’ve experienced all or some of these scenarios – you could probably add a few of your own too.

If you’re the kind of new that hasn’t done much yet, you’ve probably heard a few peaks and pits by now. Maybe you’re a bit confused.

So What Is The Solution?

How do we circumvent all the confusion, and just get started building our online businesses and finally be free from ever having to work for someone else?

TRY EVERYTHING.

EXPERIMENT.

FIND WHAT WORKS FOR YOU.

The typical influencer or guru seems to have this “my way or the highway” attitude that just makes my skin crawl.

This is why I feel so compelled to tell you that you really can’t do anything wrong – as long as you’re doing something, and you:

• Pay attention to what you’re doing
• Learn from your mistakes
• Act, adjust, refine
• Get results

And most importantly, know that your approach doesn’t need to be perfect.

Not now, not in a year, not when you’re making $1000 a year or $10,000 a month.

Every single guide, tool, resource or book that I sell provides you with resources – options – different things you can do when starting an online business from scratch. You don’t have to pick just one – you can do several.

• You can pick one thing at a time
• dabble for a bit
• try another.

Eventually, you’ll have to hone in on one that provides the best results.

But when that time comes, you’ll know.

Generally, the rule is to choose the source of income or business that generates the highest results for the lowest amount of work.

The other key thing is that you’ll have to learn to trust your own knowledge; when you get to the stage where you’re challenging or disagreeing with gurus, that’s a milestone in itself.

For some, that ends up being their affiliate marketing efforts. For others, it’s their blog, or their dropshipping store.

Some people own real estate generating at least 5 figures a year before they even THINK of starting an online brand.

The Path To Freedom Is Not Linear

After all, entrepreneurship is, at its core, experimental. You’re a scientist of making money.

A making-moneyologist.

You’re a student, a scientist, a creator, and eventually someone’s mentor.

The day I got to the point where I had learned so much, I didn’t care to know what everyone else is doing? That was a great day.

Because the bottom line is that there are a lot of different online business ideas for beginners to explore. You don’t have to do everything all at once.

But as long as you have that drive to learn, create, and act – you remain open to the possibilities your work will present you.

You’ll create the perfect breeding ground to attract the success you deserve.

You could be at any of the following stages:

• You’ve just started, and you don’t know where to go because you’re still learning
• You’ve started making money, but you want less work
• You’ve made money doing one thing, but want to branch out into another area of online commerce
• You’ve already made it, you’re “successful”, and now they’re all asking YOU how

The reality is the same in all of the same stages:

You do not have all the answers.

You only know what has been working for you.

Your success is a reflection of what you were willing to do to achieve it, and what you were willing to compromise in the process.

Where you end up will be a testament to your own unique and incredible journey to prosperity, and freedom.

• Trust the process.
• Enjoy the process.
• Give everything a try.
• Stick to what gives you back the most.
• And most of all, PROVIDE VALUE.

Now Here Are The Tools For Everything I’ve Done Or Am Doing

I wasn’t going to end it there. Of course I was going to button this with a list of all the things I’ve tried, I’ve done, or am doing to build my online business.

Platforming my brand

WordPress

A great platform where many successful businesses have launched their websites or blogs. Even if you keep it on the free plan, there’s no harm in having a “home” for your business, even if it is visibly “powered by wordpress”

Linktr.ee

Because a website can be a little overwhelming at first, Link Tree is a great place to start by listing links to your presence on different social media platforms.

If you like, you can list a few referral links or affiliate links with some punchy one-liner selling points to profit from visitors that way too.

Selling my products to my audience

Shopify

Shopify is probably THE ecommerce platform if you’re really serious about building an online business and you know exactly what you want to sell.

It has a huge number of benefits, features and customisations to build a thriving online business — at a cost.

Admittedly, I’m not currently using it because I prefer free platforms and casting a wide net across the internet to build my brand and spread awareness.

Shopify is ideal for an entrepreneur who wants to double down and hyper-focus on one platform, with all roads leading to it.

Some people prefer not to spend money because they don’t have it.

Others have it, but they don’t see the need when there are free options.

A few have found incredible success without ever having a website.

Bottom line? You do you.

Gumroad

Gumroad is a free platform with limited design functions, but it’s fine by me — the priority is to get those products seen and considered, and it does that just fine.

It also has the ability to design funnel pages using AI to sell your products to warm leads, but this functionality is experimental and still needs work.

I’ve been using Gumroad for over a year now, and I have a growing library of useful tools, guides and resources to help you build financial independence through investing and online entrepreneurship. Click here to check it out.

Amazon KDP

Amazon is basically the online self-publishing mothership, with good reason – it has probably the biggest user base of any online bookstore.

Whether you’re publishing low-content books (journals, planners, etc) or your fully written fiction or non-fiction books, guides, or mini-books, it’s a great way to sell your work to your niche.

I do a mixture of writing to self-publish, AND creating products specifically for other platforms.

You can make your book available to purchase once, or add it to Kindle Unlimited (where users can subscribe, and you earn from them reading the book online, per page).

Just be mindful that if you add it to Kindle Unlimited, the rights to sell that book become exclusive to Amazon for three months at a time. My books are currently available on Kindle Unlimited, so I can’t sell them anywhere else at the moment.

Etsy, Redbubble, and similar sites

These platforms are all perfectly valid options for selling digital art if you’re in that business. You can use one or all of them, depending on how much time you have, how much energy you have, and how you’re willing to balance your efforts.

Redbubble is the one I use the most.

Marketing my brand, my products, and my work

Canva

First things first – if you’re going to make branded content, you’ve got to start with making the designs. If you don’t have any design skills, that’s fine – Canva has a built-in AI function to get you started.

AutoShorts.ai

I love this because it automatically generates short, niche videos and regularly posts them to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram simultaneously, once a day or a few times a week, so that I’m always consistently sharing relevant content to my brand.

What’s more – you don’t have to let AI do all the work. You can go into your dashboard between posts, and adjust or rewrite the scripts entirely, to inject your own flavour into what you’re putting out.

Reddit users have said that algorithms recognise this, and have given them better results when they write videos themselves – or at least edit them. It’s free to join, but costs to access full features.

TikTok

An algorithmic powerhouse with millions of active users who are either looking for your content or stumbling across it, whether you have followers or not.

YouTube

Dominated by popular creators and viral brain-rot that hogs all the attention, but its shorts algorithm is catching up to TikTok.

It’s always interesting to compare the numbers when you post the same short on YouTube and TikTok at the same time, and seeing which algorithm likes it more.

Instagram

Same as YouTube.

Facebook/Meta Business

It’s free to have a business page on Facebook, and it has a huge active user base (as you may be aware). Just make sure you have a marketing budget, because the fastest and easiest way to build authority on Facebook is to run ads.

X (Twitter)

Elon Musk’s Twitter is controversial, but it’s nothing to scoff at. It still functions as a great tool for building your brand’s visibility online, simply by engaging with other users in your niche regularly, and posting a moderate amount of value for free.

The biggest pitfall is that the platform prefers that users stay on the site, and the algorithm seems to punish those of us that want to regularly post links for users to visit other sites.

But it’s free to put a “link in bio”, and you can always point your followers in that direction as needed.

Pinterest

I keep being told that Pinterest is more of a “search engine”, an “idea machine”, rather than a social platform – and that’s true. This is where Search Engine Optimization stays relevant.

When they talk about affiliate marketing or “making a living online without a website”, Pinterest is one of the methods they’re talking about.

Design pins with Canva, post them on Pinterest with a link to your blog, site, or product, and see how they do. Paid ads on Pinterest are hit and miss – a lot of the users on this site aren’t often ready to buy something as soon as they see it. It’s more about planting seeds – seeds that, by the way, don’t need followers to grow in popularity.

Investing for totally hands off passive income

In this section, I’m sharing with you the tools that I see as the “final frontier” in financial freedom – where huge portions of the money I’ve earned from my online business have been stashed away, working for me, as truly hands-off investments.

Sharesies

It doesn’t matter whether you have $100, $1000, $1,000,000, or just $5 – micro-investing platforms like Sharesies make investing accessible to ANYONE with an income. What’s more, they give you access to investing in just about anything from:

• Trusts backed by gold or silver (for hedging against inflation)
• Individual companies (for dividends and long term growth)
• Index funds (for low risk investments)
• Covered-Call ETFs (for high dividends, but with high risks)

Use my link to get started with Sharesies with a free $5.

Alternative platforms include Acorns, Stash, Robinhood, eToro, Interactive Brokers.

GoMining

This is how I invest in Bitcoin mining without needing any equipment. Almost two years prior to the time of writing, I simply signed up, bought an NFT, linked my Crypto.com wallet, and watched the rewards roll in, regularly buying power and efficiency upgrades.

As of now, I’ve made back everything I’ve spent, and then some. It’s a great way to stay invested in crypto with less risk than just buying into big coins or flop memes (in my opinion – not financial advice).

Use my link to sign up and get 5% cashback on your first purchase.

Finally, my main tools to assist me in anything I do

ChatGPT

Chat is my go-to for quick insights and motivating further research for anything I want to know more about. I’ve never needed to pay for it, because 4.0 is accessible for a certain number of prompts per day, and I’ve never needed too many.

I simply talk to it like it’s an incredibly knowledgeable person. I ask it what I can write about, what I can sell, what it can tell me about the platforms I use (or want to use) – the list goes on.

You can ask it to analyze images for their appeal, results from ad campaigns, or simply give it information about your online business so far, and ask it: what next?

Chat is amazing on those days when you’re just completely fed up with a lack of progress, and you feel like you’re not getting anywhere near where you want to be, so you just say to it: “How do I make a million dollars in 12 months?” and start working.

My other favourite prompts:

• “Make me as much money online as possible, with a budget of just $50”
• “How do I get [Insert Number] of visitors to my site?”
• “Act as my therapist. Don’t ask questions – just hold space and reflect.”
• “Write me a Pinterest SEO title, description, hashtags and alt text for [Describe Pin]“

I didn’t write this blog with ChatGPT – but it sure as hell told me to write an authority piece.

How did I do?

Grok AI

This is X (Twitter)’s native AI model, similar to ChatGPT, but it’s also free to use and generates images very quickly.

Not only is it useful for providing insights and research alternatives to what Chat comes up with, but it’s also really useful for generating graphics and images for marketing purposes or otherwise.

I will often take images from Grok, and google “free image upscaler” and use whatever comes up to make those images suitable for canvas prints, ads, or anything else I might use them for.

Sidenote: I highly recommend that if you’re not sure about anything in this article and you want to know more, simply ask ChatGPT or Grok about it. I would copy-&-paste entire sections and ask it to explain it more.

Final Word

So there’s a number of things you can start doing, or keep doing to build your online business. Just remember:

• You don’t have to agree with everyone
• Do what works for you
• Believe in what you’re doing
• Keep learning, and keep creating

In time, you’ll find you need advice far less than you did before, but you’ll have the confidence to hear it and consider it, without getting bogged down.

We’re all just trying to build and maintain success each in our own way. If there’s one thing that makes us all the same, it’s that we’re different.

This is why I wrote Financial Independence: Your Way: a guide to financial freedom that details what I do, and what I continue doing to remain free, with the goal to provide options and hope to anyone who wants to start an online business or build toward financial independence.

Just like this article, I’ll never tell you what you have to do.

But I will tell you what you can do.

Below are some of my other articles I recommend:

• The 3 Steps to Financial Freedom in 3 Years
• The Truth About Stocks that Pay 100% Dividends
• How To Start Investing Today With $0

Get Our Guides Here

Wealth Foresight has a wealth of knowledge and resources (eat that pun for breakfast). Below are links to our best free and not-free-but-cheap guides and tools for getting started.

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• 5 Proven Habits Of Financially Free Individuals – a short book that discusses the mindset and habits of people who have made it out the other end of the grind, and are thriving on that financial independence and freedom we keep talking about.
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• Goal Setting Worksheet for Wealth Building – a printable or editable template to write out your goals and regularly update your progress.

Valuable but affordable guides:

• 10 Proven Side-Hustles For Beginners – a mini ebook detailing proven online business ideas you can do by yourself, for yourself, even with $0.
• Affiliate Marketing Cheat Sheet – based on course content and my own experience, I constructed a cheat sheet to help kickstart the easiest path to making your first $100 with affiliate marketing.
• Ebook Creation, Publishing & Marketing Bundle – this bundle of guides is perfect if you want to make money from publishing books – even if you’re not a writer. From writing the first word of that book to making the first sale, one thing is for certain: if you weren’t a writer when you started, you will be at the end.

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You’ve got this.

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