Three Simple Steps to Create a Profitable One-Person Business

Running a one-person business that actually makes a profit isn’t easy, but there is a pretty simple formula that almost anyone can follow. Whether you’re setting up a side hustle, or hope to make a full-time living eventually, there are just three simple steps to take initially.

Assess Your Skills and Expertise

Sit down and list everything you’re good at and everything you’ve learned so far: in your day job, your education, and your life in general. Include hobbies, obsessions, and everything you’ve done a deep dive on and learned a lot about.

Remember to include both skills and expertise. A skill might be something like copywriting or web design: maybe something that you learned at your last job. Whereas expertise might be an in-depth knowledge of Thailand, gained by living there for six months and totally emerging yourself in the Thai culture. If that’s you, your business might be setting up a website specifically for those who want to live, work, study, or travel in Thailand.

Your skills and expertise may be different. You may be skilled in crocheting, golf, or parenting toddlers. Your expertise might be in education, training for endurance events, or pet care. There is relatively little that can’t be monetized as a business or side hustle, as long as there are others out there interested in the same topic, and looking for help, experiences, or solutions you can provide.

Monetize Your Skills and Expertise

There are probably numerous ways to monetize your skill set, but remember we’re aiming for a profitable business here, not one that just generates revenue. Profits are maximized when you find a cost-effective way to use your skills or share your expertise in exchange for money, so always keep that in mind.

Good Way to Monetize

With the above example you could sign up as an affiliate with specialist travel sites and make money on hotels, trips, and tours, with an up-front startup cost to you of zero dollars (beyond your website costs).

You could also offer paid one-to-one online consultations with people traveling to Thailand, or — if you have the skill set required — set up a YouTube channel about living and traveling in Thailand and monetize it with paid ads and sponsorships.

Bad Way to Monetize

You could decide to ship in artefacts from Thailand, set up a physical shop in your town and sell them. Your deep interest in Thai culture would allow you to create a stunning collection, but would you actually turn a profit in the foreseeable future?

Straight away you have upfront costs, ongoing overheads, and a whole lot of headaches with shipping, customs and paperwork, not to mention a business that will be hard to sustain without employing other people.

That’s an extreme example perhaps, but the main idea here is to set up a business with absolute minimal costs to you so you generate not just revenue but profit as well, fairly quickly.

Sell Your Skills and Expertise

This may well be the hardest part, especially if you’re starting without a relevant audience. Selling starts with having someone to sell to, so an audience willing to buy from you is key. But there are plenty of ways to sell without one, or while you’re building one. Here are a few of those ways.

Use Existing Contacts and Their Networks

If you’re using a skill you learned in your previous job for example, you probably already have contacts in your industry you can sell to, or who can refer you to their wider network. If you’re selling something with a more general appeal start with friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances, and ask them to refer or recommend you to everyone they know.

Word-of-mouth is your cheapest form of marketing and a simple business page on all the social media sites you use makes it easy for people to share your business with others.

Just make sure you have a way to retain the leads sent to you and stay in contact with them. An email sign up form so they can join your mailing list is best. But an invitation to follow you on social media is better than nothing (and can help later with paid advertising).

Get in Front of Someone Else’s Audience

Accessing someone else’s audience is as simple as finding someone to collaborate with in some way. It could be guest posting on a blog, being interviewed on a podcast, serving as a guest on a panel or webinar, giving a talk, contributing a digital product to a bundle or giveaway, or simply getting someone with a relevant audience to give you a shout out on social media and recommend you to their audience.

Target those who already have an audience who might be interested in what you have to say. Just not direct competitors obviously. In the case discussed above it might be bloggers, podcasters or influencers in the general travel niche. You can come in as their expert in Thailand, with way more in-depth advice than they could give on the region.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising no longer implies a full-page spread in the New York Times. Paid ads can be highly targeted and relatively cheap. Your first foray into paid advertising could be as simple as buying a spot as a sponsor in a relevant newsletter or sponsoring a YouTube video that reaches your potential buyers.

Social media advertising can also be pretty cost effective and can allow you to carefully target people already interested in what you’re selling, or those people who already followed or interacted with you on social media.

You do have to know what you’re doing though, so either dive in and learn about it yourself or pay someone to do it for you. Just because you’re not employing anyone else full-time doesn’t mean you can’t outsource tasks that are outside of your expertise.

Are these the only things needed to run a profitable one-person business? No, but they are the basic building blocks. Complete these three steps correctly and you’ll feasibly be able to start building an audience and a client base straight away.

Karen Banes is a freelance writer specializing in entrepreneurship, parenting and lifestyle. She writes articles, website content, ebooks and the occasional award winning short story. Her work has appeared in a range of publications both online and off, including The Washington Post, Life Info Magazine, Transitions Abroad, Brave New Traveler, Natural Parenting Group, and Copia Magazine. Learn More About Karen