SPI 853: Ranking the BEST and WORST Business Ideas for Beginners (2025)

SPI 853: Ranking the BEST and WORST Business Ideas for Beginners (2025)

Pat Flynn: I’m going to rank the best and worst business ideas for beginners in 2025. And we’re going to use a tier list. And there are five levels to this tier.

The lowest tier is the D tier, which is challenging for beginner entrepreneurs. People who have an audience of any size, this would take the longest, these would be the most challenging, that is D tier.

C tier is overhyped and quite risky. Doesn’t necessarily mean, none of this doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t work, but again, we’re in search for the easiest or the golden opportunities. So D tier is challenging for beginners. C tier is overhyped and risky.

B tier are the sort of side hustles, I’d say, that they could work pretty well for you. They are not as difficult as the C and D tiers, but they do take a little bit more time and require some sort of being in the space for a while, right? It, it takes time, a little bit more time.

The ones that happen more quickly are the A tier proven winners and the S tier golden opportunities. So this is a tier list.

Best is S tier, worst is D tier, and that’s exactly where we are going to begin today. Now let me preface all of this by saying this is part of your two step process of starting an online business. Number one, build an audience. We’re not going to talk about that here today. We talked about that in the last episode, and we’re going to continue to talk about that because that’s very important.

We have specific sections inside of the SPI community about just building your audience, growing your audience base and such, and becoming an expert or go to resource for those people. Great. But what happens when you do that? It’s not just about growing that audience. It’s about monetizing and not just like, because you have an audience, therefore you have money.

There are a million ways to generate revenue. Some are better than others. Some are faster than others. Some are more genuine than others, and some are more long lasting than others, right? You might have the ability to make a quick buck, but we want to build a long lasting business and, you know, make use of that audience that you’re building so that everybody can win. That’s what we want here as well. We want to do business in a way where everybody can win. And that’s what I want for you too. Meaning that’s great for you. You’re generating revenue. You’re building your audience and your audience is loving it.

They’re thanking you for the money that they’re giving you because it’s giving them other opportunities. It’s allowing them to have something be more convenient, etc. So we’re going to start here at the bottom tier D tier. We’re going to make our way up from D, C, B, A and S tier. There’s either three or four different business ideas within each of these tiers.

And we’re going to talk about them a little bit with each just to show you why they are at that tier and kind of what to look out for.

Okay, so let’s start with D tier. These are again, challenging for beginners.

Number one, this is a very popular idea. A lot of people are doing it. For beginners, I wouldn’t recommend it.

If you don’t have a huge audience or you’ve been doing this not for so long, writing a book is going to be a D tier. Very challenging opportunity for you. Again, just, I’m gonna explain this just for this once one more time. It doesn’t mean it cannot work. And yes, there are advantages, obviously, to writing a book.

It builds authority. It’s a way for you to share information in a packaged manner that then allows you to, yes, generate some revenue. But, there are some problems with writing a book when you are just starting out. Number one, on average, it’s going to take about six to twelve months to create the thing.

Trust me, writing a book is one of the hardest things you can do. I know, I just have written my fourth book that’s coming out this June, and it was definitely the hardest. It feels like it’s getting harder and harder, not easier and easier. And if you’re an audience building mode, you need to focus on building your audience, there are better ways, faster ways to generate revenue than taking six to 12 months to not just write the book, but also promote it and launch it and get distribution for it. There are so many parts to it. And I wouldn’t worry about that at the start. It’s really, really hard to maintain momentum and growth while writing, unless you already have a team and let’s say you write it, great.

Well, you’re going to get very low profit margins unless you are a huge name and you get huge reach. Again, a book I’m saying is not great for beginners, but once you get to a point a little bit further along, you want to separate yourself from the competition, you have a lot more ideas to share and you want to package it and share it with more people, great. Write a book. That’s not what you should be doing off the start.

Next, and this is our second and final D tier listing item here. Again, challenging for beginners. And that is to sell physical products. By either inventing something or white labeling it. If you don’t know what white labeling means, that just means taking a physical product that already exists.

It actually doesn’t have to be physical to be technically white labeling it. It just means taking something that already exists that is allowing you to put then your brand or brand name or whatever label on it, white labeling it. And other people can do the same thing with the same product now That’s not why you should avoid it again.

Many people do succeed with white labeling products and inventing products I have done both and trust me. There are very high upfront costs and inventory risks. I and my partner, Caleb, who is now CEO of this company, SPI media, which is amazing. We partnered to work together to invent a physical product in 2019.

We launched the SwitchPod. You can check it out actually at SwitchPod.co for proof. What I realized the biggest lesson from that experiment. And again, why did I do that? I didn’t need to, because I wanted to know about it before sharing this kind of information with you. And I can tell you. Quite honestly, from experience, there are major high upfront costs, especially with inventing, especially if you want to invent something of quality, but white labeling as well.

You have inventory risks. It’s very complex in terms of logistics, i. e. shipping, storage, returns, physical products just takes so much time. If you can get into the digital space, digital marketing, creating digital products, that’s going to be so much easier, faster, easier to change and update if you need to, and it’s going to allow for passive income to happen much, much faster.

Again, passive income does not happen right away, if not, Almost ever until you are able to remove yourself entirely from the process, which takes time. Plus inventing and white labeling physical products takes focus away from audience building. To manage operations, you’re going to need to know how to operate the business, let alone have to market it.

And for a person who’s wearing many hats, the physical product had early on in the business phase is very difficult. Now, there are many cases where people who have created physical products have found success. It’s not impossible. Again, this is not a avoid this at all costs, but these are just the most challenging writing a book and inventing or white labeling a physical product.

But let’s move on to C tier now. And this is a one level a little bit easier, but still a bit overhyped and a bit risky. Number one, creating a software product, creating a software product in general. You will find that it has high development costs. You will find that there are often long developmental cycles and you have to be, if unless you have your own background in coding and programming and even then, if you did imagine having to code thing while also marketing and also building an audience and et cetera, there, there’s a lot that goes into launching a very successful software.

There are many great case studies about doing this. If you’d love to see a case study, I recommend checking out the interviews and podcast episodes that we’ve had with Nathan Berry, founder of Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. He’s been very transparent about his journey and the decisions that he’s had to make in order to make kit a multimillion dollar company.

And it is a software, it’s a email marketing software that we use and we do recommend, but extremely high development costs. And here’s the one that caught me when I tried my hand at software back in I think it was 2011 or 2012, ongoing maintenance diverts attention from content and other things, right?

The ongoing maintenance piece of this is something to think about. So I had attempted to build a software back in 2011 or  2012, I’m not going to go deeper into the story, but I’m glad it didn’t work out. And the reason I’m glad it didn’t work out is because if it did work out, because it was a WordPress plugin, every several months I would have to get another person or the developer to go and update the thing to stay up to date and with the way the world works, the way technology and software and integrations and all those things kind of work, it was just going to cost way, way, way more than my initial investment. So not only did I have a five figure initial investment that I lost because I attempted this and it didn’t work, I would have had to spend way, way more to keep it updated. And again, it is successful for many, but if you’re just starting out, it is pretty risky.

Not as easy as many people say. Another risky and often costly decision that some people make once they start building an audience Is a live in person event. This is number two. Again, we’re in the C tier of this episode right now. This tier list. A live in person event. Another thing that I have had experience with over the past 16 years, 17 years now, wow, it’s 2025. 17 years of doing business and There again, the costs seem to be a pattern here in the early parts of this tier list. There are major financial risks that come with, see, even the ambulance and the fire truck is out here because of the financial risk, if you can hear that in the background.

There are major financial risks that come with the venue, the catering commitments, the hotel block that you might need. There’s so many logistical complexities that come with the the idea of an in person event. Not to mention, it can be pretty nerve wracking. That being said, I am very, very grateful to have had the opportunity to run live events.

I still run live events with my card party event that happens once or twice a year for the Pokemon space for the new business that I have on the side. And that’s been really going really well. I’ve held an entrepreneurial event in San Diego in 2019 before COVID. And I have spoken at probably over a hundred different events and live and in person settings.

And again, it’s, it’s, it’s a wonderful way to bring your community together. There are so many benefits to doing that. It is a difficult logistical thing to do. You need other people who know what they’re doing when it comes to bringing people together in a space and how to manage all that. And there’s travel and it’s costly for your attendees.

And there are ways to scale this down. There are smaller in person events that you can create like little meetups at coffee shops and things like that. This could work too, but it also limits. It’s also limited by geographical reach, right? If you’re running a little meetup in your hometown, well, then only people who are in your hometown can go, and that’s still beneficial, but when it comes to focusing and building a business that’s longterm and, and expanding out there in this internet world the live in person events can be pretty difficult to do.

Now, thirdly, in the final thing I want to chat about here in the C tier, again, overhyped and this one is a little less risky, there’s less upfront costs, although there still is an upfront cost, but compared to software or a live in person event it’s far less. And it can be something that you could pre sell to test or you could experiment with.

And that is merchandise, so merch, right? Not every brand can benefit from having their logo put on a shirt and then sold. I’m very lucky that in the more entertainment space that I’m in, inside of the Pokemon space, that is possible. People become fans of you. However, I also saw some of that In the world of SPI.

People have bought our shirts with our mantras on it, like Serve First, and the riches are in the niches. We’ve had people buy pins and other things that have the SPI logo or the Pat Flynn name on it. So, it’s not to say that if you just aren’t in the entertainment business that you can’t sell merch.

But, in general, from what I’ve found, there are very low profit margins with these kinds of things. You need a massive audience to get some sort of ROI on this kind of stuff. That’s again, merchandise is great and I highly recommend doing it for brand loyalty. But when it comes to a business, right, longterm, viable, reliable income over time, merch is not going to get you there right away. There are better ways to monetize this audience that you’re building in a way where everybody can win. But I do, I have changed my mind on selling merch. I used to be not against it. I was just like, why do that? You can focus on other things and you know, you don’t want to become a t shirt company.

But I’ve realized that the merch part of all this for your brand is not actually for you to generate revenue. It’s about giving something to back to your audience who would be happy to pay for something because they want to rep what you are about they want to rep the brand they want to put put their ball cap on for their favorite team, right?

That that’s what it’s about and that is important and that long term and indirectly can turn into more business. It’s building brand loyalty. It’s building the community and that’s great. But there are inventory headaches, I mean shirts, especially. With the sizes and you got to get all the sizes and one size runs out and then you got to get more and or there are you know order minimum quantities that you get that are very high and all this stuff and plus the quality of them you got to do a little bit of research and hopefully find the right company if you find a company that does it kind of print on demand it’s going to be more expensive if you get a company that does it well but doesn’t do print on demand you’re going to have to order a bunch up front. There are a lot of headaches that can come with merchandise, which is why sticking with simple things can work really well.

A lot of people in the business space have created workbooks and journals and things like that, and that has worked really well. Hats and mugs and those kinds of things can be okay too. But again, merchandise, as far as like the business that you should start, once you build an audience, it’s often overhyped because it’s just what everybody seems to be doing and there are better options for you.

Okay, moving on to B tier. And after that, we got the A and then the. S tier, which are the golden opportunity. So, so we’re getting there. We have three here in the B tier of this tier list. The first one I want to talk about in by B tier, I mean, like, okay, not a bad idea. You’re going to need to build a little bit of an audience, but it can help you build your audience too.

And that is virtual events. This is number one virtual. And this is instead of creating a live in person event for your audience, this is creating a live internet event for your audience, a virtual event a webinar that people may need to pay for, for example or a live virtual summit that if you use a tool like, Hey Summit can help you manage really easily, which is really nice.

The hard thing about this is it can be hit or miss. It depends on your audience, and your niche, and how loyal that brand is that brand audience is to you, or how loyal that audience is to you, excuse me. And you can have unpredictable attendance rates. Again, all of these things that we’re talking about today, I have done before.

We ran a virtual event at SPI in 2017? 2018? Before the in person event that we tried. And again, the in person event was great. It was not profitable. None of the events that I’ve held in the Pokemon space so far have been profitable. The virtual events were profitable and we wanted to do more of them, but it was technically difficult to do.

Now it is a little bit easier to do now. And again, with tools like, Hey Summit, you can, it’s all in there. You can set it up to have tickets for sale. You can set up an affiliate program within it. You can set it up so that you can guests and other experts in your space come in and you can sort of manage that ticket selling and guest scheduling process.

And it could be something that could be used both as a lead magnet to bring more people in or in many cases, I know people who are running virtual events and generating revenue. You can use those virtual events to sell into other things that you might have to offer. And it’s a way for you to connect with your audience too and build intimacy and build connection to other people in the space.

A lot of people run virtual events because it allows them to actually with other people in the space. You can get sponsors for the virtual event too. It takes some time and management. It is a logistical process to do. However, it can be quite profitable because it is just a virtual event. People are watching, either live or they’re buying a ticket to get also the replay. There’s different ticket levels that you can have. You can have special meetups at a higher price for people again, to go into a breakout room together. These kinds of things again, can be all handled with software, but it is not a bad idea if you have that audience. It’s a bad idea if you don’t have an audience yet. It’s a hard thing to manage when you can’t get people in the room, right? So getting people in a room, maybe testing it first with live streams to see if people show up and want to connect and then putting a paywall behind it with some special things inside a special event, a special themed sort of thing.

If you’re in the personal finance space, for example, it’s like, okay, here are the 2025 tax implications and things that you need to know. And you get access to people during that event. You have presentations, et cetera. Virtual events can be great. They’re fun as well. And but can also be quite challenging too.

B tier list number two, sell a newsletter. Now I don’t mean build a newsletter and then sell it to somebody who wants to use those email addresses to sell stuff. I mean, you can actually. sell or charge people to join your newsletter. This is something that has become more and more popular over the past five years, tools like sub stack have really made this popular. Convert Kit, now known as Kit allows you to do this as well, which is, I’m really excited to see. You can ask people for money to join your newsletter. Now you might be thinking, Pat, aren’t newsletters supposed to be free? Honestly, they don’t have to be. It all matters. What matters most is the value inside that newsletter is worth the price of admission, right?

Think of it like how people pay for Patreon to get access to a person that they might follow and special insider information. Well, it can just be wrapped in a newsletter. That special insider information could be, okay, you can get it if you pay this amount per month. And the nice thing about a newsletter and this kind of thing is, You know how to deliver the product.

As long as you stay on schedule and stay consistent and fulfill those promises, you’re just writing emails and you’re hopefully writing emails that are valuable. People enjoy them. They open them because people are paying for them. They’re more likely to open them. So you get open rates that are much, much higher than a free subscriber newsletter.

But the demands can, can burn people out. I’ve seen people who’ve been because they say they’re going to create two newsletters a week if they join and they, and they pay. Okay. They’re now beholden to that at least for a while until they maybe make changes and you have to be very honest about those changes that you make, right?

So there could be high content demands and I’ve seen people burn out from just like the hamster wheel of a newsletter. But imagine a hundred people paying five dollars a month, right? And then the next month another hundred people come in now you have 10,000 people or excuse me 1,000 people paying 5 a month.

5,000 a month. And then the next month you get 1, 500. And the next month after that you get another 500. So now you have 2,000 people paying 5 a month to get access to your newsletter. And it can stack over time. And that can be really great. The other challenge with it is maintaining that consistent value.

But I do find that some of the most successful newsletters that sell are ones that are essentially sharing what they’re already doing, right? They’re not just sharing information that can be found elsewhere. They’re bringing people in on a process. The ones that I’ve seen work really well are in the stock market, right?

Hey. Join my newsletter and I’m going to give you all the trades that I’m doing as I do them. Right? Like, that’s really valuable for people who are into that space. And you could see how a person would want to pay to get access to somebody’s brain and the investment decisions they are making. So, just something to think about.

So, that’s number two in the B tier. Number three. We had talked about live events and hosting your own live event in the C tier. But here in the B tier, we’re going to talk about speaking at events. I know many people, Grant Baldwin comes to mind. He teaches people how to do this and people can make really, really good money by speaking at events.

When you position yourself as an expert, there are people who want to buy your time to come on stage, to teach their audience at live events and also virtual events as well, but live events are great. You get on a stage, you talk, you present and you help that audience and you can get paid in a couple different ways to do that.

You can get paid by the event organizer, which is really great, you know how much you’re making, and you know how much you need to to bring, in terms of knowledge and value, etc. You can also get paid back of house, and what that means is, perhaps you might sell a program, if you have another program, you sell on stage, which I thought was super icky before.

And the reason I thought it was icky, because when I watched people sell on stage before, I just wanted to take a bath. But I do have to thank a mentor of mine who helped me understand that you can sell and serve at the same time, Chalene Johnson, and she really, really encouraged me to sell on her stage.

So I got to speak at a live event called Marketing Impact Academy, MIA. And this was in Anaheim, California. I spoke at her event. There were 800, about 900 people in the audience. And she convinced me that I could pre sell. I didn’t even have this product yet, but I could go on stage and pre sell a podcasting course.

And she told me that her audience wants podcasting information and that there was nobody better to teach it than me, which I would appreciate it so much, but I was still nervous as heck, but she taught me how to do it. She told, she told me just to tell story, share how podcasting changed your life, and then present the option to come and join you to learn how.

And just, that’s exactly what I did. So I got on stage and 170 people in that audience of about 900 came to the back of the house after I spoke and paid, I think at the time it was 250 to come and learn from me in my course, Power Up Podcasting, shout out to those people. Cause that changed my life. Dr. B one of the, one of the people who signed up Dr. Shannon Irvin. Rob and Carrie Stewart. I mean, the names go on. Those are people who are in that audience who took my course, who started podcasts. I mean, even Rob and Carrie talk about how the pot that they have to push clients away to other people now, because they’re just getting so much business from their podcast.

Anyway, knowing that podcasting was going to help them helped me when you know that what you’re talking about on a stage or on a podcast, or just in your business in general, when you confidently know that you can serve them, then it doesn’t even feel like, it doesn’t even feel like selling at all.

Anyway, more on selling. We’ll have other podcast episodes about the psychology of selling later down the road. We have some in our backlog already from people like Ramit Sethi who really get into the psychology of selling. It’s a difficult thing to understand, but it takes practice. Anyway, going back to speaking at events, so many benefits.

Building your audience in person, building a relationship with the founders and other people. The here’s another big reason why I love speaking at live events. You get access to the other people who are also speaking at that event. And there are so many new partnerships and business relationships that happen in the green room.

The green room is at these events where the speakers hang out and kind of prepare or get snacks and get water, cough drops, et cetera, before they go on stage or when they just kind of want to escape the audience for a little bit. And I’ve made so many connections in the green room. Connections that have turned into eventually tens of thousands of dollars because of connections like that.

For example, like Chalene Johnson, the mentor that I just talked about. She and I connected because we were at a very we were at the very same event. We connected and then she came on my podcast. I came on her podcast. She invited me to her event, et cetera. It’s, it’s amazing. The tough thing about speaking at events is number one, you got to learn how to be a good speaker.

Number two, and oftentimes you have to do it for free first. I highly recommend going to Grant Baldwin from the Speaker Lab. To learn more about this I have some YouTube videos that might help you become a better speaker as well. I do have a book recommendation for you too, the one that helped me called Stand and Deliver by Dale Carnegie, which was amazing.

The traveling though. It takes time, it takes resources to travel, it takes time away from family and other things. And it can get in the way of a lot of other business things. I’ve noticed that when I go and speak, and I used to speak two, three times a month. I don’t do it that often anymore, just one or two times a year now, and mostly locally.

When I was speaking quite often, it was not just, A 24 hour period at this event and then I left. It was a day to travel there. And then maybe I spoke on the last day, so I’d be there for a couple more days and then speak. But then I’d need a day to travel back. And then I’d need a few days to recover. But, even before that, I would need days to prepare for this thing.

And so, it was very difficult as an energy drain, and it also took time away from my family. And just to be honest with you, not all of it was worth my time. Some of it was, but I think I said yes too much. However, I got to the point where I was generating 20,000 to 30,000 for a 60 minute video keynote presentation and it was very good money, but I decided that eventually I found better ways to maximize my time and ROI with the work I was doing with, which relates to a lot of the stuff we’re about to talk about here in the A list and the S tier list.

So let’s talk about A listers. These are the A tier proven winners. So if you have built an audience again, step one, number two, this is a great way to generate revenue and start a business. You can sell done for you services. Is this passive? Not at all. You are doing it for them. Whatever it might be. The hard thing is, you’re trading time for money.

The hard thing is, there’s only a limited amount of you and your hours to go around. And number three, client management, especially when you start to gain momentum here, it can actually absolutely burn you out. It can, it can overshadow content creation because you’re so focused on helping the individuals who have signed you on maybe it is as a as a consultant or something like that, for example.

Or in fact, you are doing those services for them. You are a bookkeeper, you are helping them with their social media. You’re doing graphics for people, right? You can only do this for so many people. You’re a copywriter, whatever the target audience you have and the services they need, you are providing those services.

However, this is one of the most genuine ways to generate revenue. It’s one of the faster ways to begin generating revenue. The reason I say genuine is because you’re either doing the thing they’re paying for or they’re not or you’re not, right. You can you you are delivering on what the promises of what it is that you’re offering or not.

And when you do that and you do it well, they’re going to book you again or want to have you stay on. And or they’re going to recommend you to other people and other friends and things like that. The other thing that can happen here, and I’ve seen it time and time again, is the done for you services. You say yes to a client, you get some money.

Awesome. You say yes to another client, then you’re saying yes to so many clients that you’re getting burned out. Or you start hiring people and now you see this business opportunity and all of a sudden you are a manager of five people who are doing the things that you’re doing and one of them doesn’t do it to the quality and then now the person who you assigned that person to the client is upset at you and and this like you start to lose and the quality begins to degrade and you start to lose your mind because you’re no longer even doing the done for you service anymore you are a manager. And a lot of people who have a talent Or who have an expertise end up if they go down the agency route when they start this sort of done for you service.

They, they hate what they’re doing. They’re not, because they’re not even doing the thing they were doing before. They become managers. And managing is, is not easy and it’s not for everybody. Right? But it is something you could, like, you could just ask your audience right now, I will do your books for tax season in 2025 for this much money.

I will take five people, send me a DM, and we’ll do it. Right? You don’t even need any sales pages. You can all just manage this communication inside of social, which is cool. So that is a proven winner. But there are, of course, cons and things to worry about with each of these things. And that’s why we’re talking about them today.

One thing that’s possible when you start to build an audience, whether that’s on a podcast, whether that’s on a YouTube channel, a blog, a newsletter, even on social, on all these different platforms, sponsorships and brand deals. This is A tier number two, sponsorships and brand deals. Now, traditionally you needed a substantial audience size.

I don’t know why I said it like that. You need a substantial audience size, but that’s actually not the case anymore. I think brands are getting more exciting or excited about the loyalty of an audience, right? We’ve had a number of people on the show who have talked about how small their audience is, but how much money they’re generating from companies that want to get in front of that loyal audience. Wojciech from the fire science show. He was a guest on this podcast. He has a podcast that gets maybe 600 to 800 downloads per episode. That is minuscule in the world of podcasting. When you consider how many millions of listens and views and other, you know, that other podcasters get, however, he’s generating more revenue from a sponsorship deal with a company that wanted to get in front of his audience than he is in his day job.

And that’s amazing. So no, you don’t need a huge audience, but you do need to know who your target audience is. And. You need to know and understand how loyal that audience is, like share what those signs are from your download numbers or the emails that are coming in and you can get sponsors and brands to pay you money to get in front of that audience.

Right. It could be as easy as a, an ad read on a podcast or a video or something a little bit more choreographed or coordinated, like a 30 day challenge that is sponsored by this particular company who then pays to have their brand be part of the challenge process, for example. Or you connect with a physical product company who then sends you product that then inserts itself into the videos and you use that product and you talk about it.

These are what sponsorships and brand deals look like. It can be very intimidating to work with a quote unquote bigger company or corporation. I remember when I first started doing sponsorships and brand deals. This was actually back in 2008. It was one of the first ways I generated revenue after Google AdSense.

It was a brand deal and sponsorship where. I, I got $25, I made 25 for putting a little 150 by 150 pixel on the right sidebar of my architecture website. And eventually that turned into 100 a month, and then 250 a month. And then 500 a month for that very same ad because I kept sending traffic and people over to them, which was great.

Sometimes though with the sponsorships and the brand deals, you got to be careful because you may with this larger audience that you’re building have opportunities from companies who want to get in front of this audience, but that company is not the right fit. They want to get in front of that audience because they want to make money.

I mean, let’s just, let’s, let’s just, that’s exactly why they’re doing that. And they might offer you a lot of money to make that happen. But if that company isn’t in alignment with the kind of audience that you’re building or the message you’re sharing or worse off, they start not treating your audience well.

Maybe they start scamming people in your audience or overcharging them for things. And sure, they might not be happy with that company because that’s what they’re doing. But guess whose recommendations they’re never going to take again or whose trust is being lost. The trust that they have with you, right?

So you got to carefully choose the sponsors and brand deals. It could feel inauthentic if you haven’t at least done your research there. It’s best if you use those products, of course, and the income can be inconsistent, it could be rather significant. Right, you couldn’t land one major brand deal, just like Wojciech did from the fire science show and have five figures coming in for the entire year, you know, just, Hey, I’ll book the whole year for, you know, 50 K or whatever it might be.

I don’t, I don’t know the exact number from Wojciech, but it’s, it’s significant. It’s more than his day job. But you were then beholden to that one single company, right? But there’s a line. You don’t want to have 50 ad reads in an episode either. So. It takes a little bit of balance, takes a little bit of time.

The income can be inconsistent if the company just doesn’t want to spend their ad budget anymore, or they blew it out somewhere else. And they’re like, Hey, we don’t want to sponsor anymore. It’s like, you can’t do much about that at that point. Right? So that’s something to worry about, but it is an opportunity, definitely an opportunity.

And if you have an audience, you can get sponsors and brand deals. You just have to go out there and ask. And, and start to prove yourself, build those relationships, meet them at live events, and build a partnership with the CEO who’s there, et cetera. Okay, the final A tier, proven winner on this tier list before we get to the three S tiers is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of my favorite ways to generate revenue online. I’ve been doing that since 2009. Remember how I told you that I sold ad space on my architecture website and I was making about five hundred dollars a month from pushing people to a very particular company through a one fifty by one fifty pixel ad on my sidebar.

Well, eventually that company and I connected. We created a partnership beyond just the regular ad that we were just talking about, but we created an affiliate relationship. And I saw on their website that. I could earn $22 for their $99 product, so a 22 percent commission, essentially, if I brought customers over and they purchased.

So not a flat fee for an ad or sponsorship, but rather they would pay me for every new customer that would come in as sort of a commission. Thank you. This is affiliate marketing. So I put a link on my website for this product. And after the first month, I had sent over 100 people. One hundred people over through that link.

And so, Not only, I actually did a double dip here, not only was I making $500 a month because that, that ad was still there, I didn’t know that I probably should have changed that ad to the affiliate link, which I eventually did and started generating more revenue. But anyway, you learn, you learn as you go.

But with a hundred people, And a 22 payment or commission. I mean, that’s 2,200 that I was making which was far beyond what I was making just as a sponsorship deal. And eventually I started generating over, over five figures through affiliate marketing, just on an architecture website about, about a very specific exam called the lead exam, very niche exam, a niche in a niche, if you will.

The hard thing is if you have a very small audience, well, then the volume is going to be low, right? The volume is going to be low, but you can inject these affiliate links inside of your content such that as you grow, right, they’re almost like, it’s like planting seeds. As you grow, these things will start to be found more and more, especially if you’re creating evergreen content.

And as your audience grows, they want to go back and listen or watch or read all those older things that come across those links. Your income continues to stack and generate because of the seeds that you plan a long time ago. So. I love affiliate marketing. You can generate revenue sooner than later, but it’s often a small volume at first.

That’s, that’s why it’s not an S tier golden opportunity right now because it’s not an immediate thing. Now, if you have a larger audience, great. You have an definitely an open opportunity to generate more revenue sooner by having more people go through links faster. Right? But again, you want to make sure you affiliate with the right company.

So, commissions can be low, especially for things like Amazon. If you’re an Amazon affiliate and you have to be approved to be an Amazon affiliate and apply for it. But other companies, I mean, we’ll have a very generous commission. It depends on what it is. Software usually is around the 15 to 30 percent range.

And products and online courses from other people, brands, individuals are often all the way up to 50, which is insane. And it requires more, however, than just like, here’s a link on social media, right? That’s not going to get it for you. You want to treat these products that aren’t yours as if they were yours.

And so it takes a little bit more coordination to really, really amplify the affiliate earnings I’ve generated over, gosh four million five million dollars in affiliate earnings since starting in 2008 across all different niches and topics I’m even generating thousands a month in my Pokemon community by promoting a Binder a card collection binder from a company called Vault X and I get several thousand pounds because they’re in the UK But it translates to dollars for sure every single month Because people watch my videos, they click on my link, and they take my recommendations.

And it can happen in, in any of these niches that you’re in. You just have to find the products that people are buying. A quick tip, if you want to know what people are buying, just ask them. Ask your audience on social, what’s the latest thing you bought that has been the most helpful for you related to blank?

And that just gives you an idea of the kinds of things you’re buying, and then you can build a relationship with those companies you may already have a relationship with those companies and sign up for their affiliate program or partner program or revenue share program. There’s different names for them.

Referral program. These are things that you can look for on a website. And if they don’t have it, this company that you use and want to recommend to your audience already. Ask them, send an email. Sometimes those affiliate or referral programs aren’t public.

All right. We are now in the home stretch, the S tier, AKA golden opportunity tier.

And I think I said earlier, there are three, I actually have four here on this list that I want to cover here at the end of the show. And the first one is actually one that’s going to be similar to one that we mentioned earlier, but a little bit different. And this is offering coaching. Not all business types or audiences lend themselves to coaching, but you might be surprised to know how people, not how much they pay, but how people respond in your audience to the opportunity to just get a little help.

And there’s a lot of mental hurdles that have to happen in order for this, for you to be successful at it, right? Because you have to believe that you are qualified to help people, which you don’t know unless you start helping people. The other trap that a lot of beginners fall into when it comes to offering coaching, actually, there’s two traps.

Number one, it’s charging too little. Charging too little for your time. And again, very similar to the consultations or the done for you services. You could, you could just be working your butt off and you have multiple clients and then start to create an agency and start to get burned out very easily.

Right? So starting out when you’re beginning, I do recommend coaching if it makes sense for your audience. If it is a win for your audience. The second trap before we get into some strategies and it’s actually relates to strategies is you have to learn how to be a good coach just because you know, something doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a great teacher of it, right?

Just because you know something doesn’t mean you’re going to be great at teaching it. You have to know how to coach, right? It’s not just like if you’re a soccer coach, say, Hey, kick that ball. And if they don’t kick it. Well, you go kick it again. Try again. Sure. That’s maybe a way or style of coaching, but a great coach asks the right questions and understanding which questions are the right questions to ask at the right moments is really key.

And like anything, it takes practice, it takes understanding, and it takes a book called The Coaching Habit by a good friend of mine, Michael Bungay Stainier, he’s been on the podcast before, and that book has changed my life as a coach. Somebody who coaches, I, I don’t call myself a coach, but I do coaching, I do have students, and I do use his work for the work that I do.

So shout out to Michael MBS, and you can find his book, The Coaching Habit, anywhere books are offered. It was actually a bestseller as a self published book too, and that’s inspiring to me as well. But with coaching, you can definitely have high profit margins. Right, people, especially in certain industries, will pay quite a bit of money to learn something that will, in many cases, make them more money, or help them not lose as much money, or help them save a lot of time, because that stuff can be extrapolated into dollars and cents, and make a lot of sense for people.

It can just take one student to help you get started, which is great, you just need one person who wants to learn about something that you have done, or have gone through, or can help people through, and sometimes it just takes asking the people you already have access to. And you can start small, same problems arise with the done for you services, which is charging to a little and you know, overburden burning yourself out when you say yes to too many, but again, like I said, it can just take one and that is amazing.

And it’s a great thing to start. It also strengthens your authority. Especially this is what you want to shoot for when you get those testimonials, when you get those results for your students and the people that are coached that you’re, you’re coaching, those become your sales mechanisms, your students themselves through their success, right?

And that’s what, what I love when they succeed, you succeed. And when you succeed, more people succeed. And I love that, right? So you can offer coaching, you can use a tool. Like Stan Store to just sell coaching right now. If you haven’t heard of Stan store, it’s definitely one of the best things to use online to get started.

It’s a way for you to create a little store that allows you to then sell coaching, sell a course, sell other digital resources, and a hint, hint, other things that are here in the S tier list that I’m about to share with you. But go to Stan.store/patflynn. If you want to see what my Stan store looks like and how I use it.

So it’s much, much better than using a link tree in your LinkedIn bio. And definitely go to SmartPassiveIncome.com /stan. If you want to go through our affiliate link and get a free 30 day trial, which is an extended trial that you can’t get anywhere else. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/stan. I am a Stan of them, that’s for sure. Okay. That was offering coaching.

Next up on the S tier list is creating a paid community or paid membership. Now, when I say that, I don’t want you to imagine hundreds of people paying you for a recurring monthly revenue that is eventually going to be the goal, but I want you to imagine just a small group of people paying you to get access to you in something like office hours.

Or access to your thoughts and a little bit of access to Q and A, perhaps it might be something like a little membership where people can connect with each other and it doesn’t take much to start something like that. And if you have a loyal audience already, you can start with a small group, like 5 or 10.

And what that does is it starts to give you immediate and direct access to people in your community. So you can learn more from them just as much as they are learning from you, but also so that they can connect with each other. And it can be easy to start if you shoot small and if you go through our course inside of the SPI community, the community business blueprint, you’ll see how we launch with an alpha group and then a beta group and then a more public one that can bring more people in.

But it is something that if you can get some recurring revenue coming in early, early, you can start to really, really start to feel that momentum of online business taking hold, right? It’s not just like a one time sale and then you have to like hope it works again next time. You have a small group of people and i’m talking even like five to ten people paying you 20, 50, 100 a month.

I mean, this leads us to the sort of true fans thing that Kevin Kelly was talking about in his article. One thousand true fans. Because I want you to imagine this. Imagine you have a thousand true fans, something to work toward. Just a thousand in this world of billions, right? One thousand true fans. And each of those true fans, a true fan being somebody who you know, will show up for you because they are a fan of what you do.

If you’re a musician, they wait for you backstage to get an autograph. If you sell a product, they don’t even read the sales page. They just buy immediately, right? These are the people who stand up for you against trolls and haters out there on the internet, right? If you have a thousand of those people each paying you a hundred dollars a year, that’s less than ten dollars a month.

You have a thousand times a hundred. That’s a hundred thousand dollar or six figure business, which is a great step to achieve, right? And so a thousand true fans, you don’t need millions of people to have an incredible lifestyle and, and business for you. And in fact, running a business that earns a hundred or two hundred thousand is far different and far easier, of course, than running a business that is generating millions at least to set that up.

And then over time you can start to build it out if you want. But there are a lot of people, like Paul Jarvis, the author of The Company of One, who prefers just to stay small, to stay lean. And to have just a few things going so that they can generate enough revenue to live but also have this incredible freedom, freedom of time, freedom of of, of decision making and, and their, their own boss.

And it’s incredible. The community builds itself. Once momentum starts, this is another huge benefit of the community. People start to invite other people in. If you want a good read about this, I’m going to be selfish and plug my book, Superfans, which is all about this building a community and bringing people together.

Again, I’m not just talking the talk here. I’ve done this and I’ve continued to do this with the Deep Pocket Monster and Pokemon community. This isn’t some stuff, stuff that’s just regurgitation. This is stuff that has been lived and experienced. And I want to pass these things forward to you. Now, like I said, if you want to get into the finer details of how to learn these kinds of things, or just pick one of these models.

And actually move forward with it. We have courses and information and people and experts inside of the SPI community. If you’d like to join, or at least check out what the offerings are, and even get a little access to me as well, to help you along the way, SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. If you want to see what tiers are offered there, but.

Speaking of tiers, let’s continue on S tier and let’s finish up this thought about a paid membership and community. It doesn’t have to be as complicated as many people make it out to be, right? You don’t have to necessarily even set up all the technology and the systems and the drips and the automations and the spaces and the events and all the things that are happening in there, right?

That stuff can come later. It could be as simple as having people pay you to get access to a little private community, and this could happen again on the Stan Store that you build. It can happen by setting up a Stripe account and then feeding those people who purchase through a sales page or even through ConvertKit or, or excuse me, through Kit.

Man, 2025, I’m still getting used to saying Kit instead of  ConvertKit since the brand name changed. But anyway, they have a shopping cart that you can use to bring people into a community that you can then serve them with whatever it is that you want. But so long as you bring those people together, that is what community is about, right?

Community, communication, they’re similar for a reason, right? In word. And again, the revenue model having be being a monthly or quarterly or annual payment is just so cool to see, right? It took us years over a decade to get to our first recurring revenue at SPI. And it’s been such a blessing because it’s more easily predictable.

You can plan for things much better. It’s much easier to then allocate revenue or money to different places in the business to expand. And it’s just, again, more predictable. So first I said, offer coaching, then create a paid membership, but with the little asterisk of start small, make it simple.

You already have people in your audience that want to have a little bit more access to you and communicate with you. And that’s where that can come in.

Next is sell an online course. And this is something that is very, very opportunistic for several industries that aren’t used to having more honed in, more consolidated course material.

If I were to say create an online course if you are a person helping business owners, I would say okay. You need to think beyond that because it has already been saturated, but there are so many new industries now that are benefiting from online courses to have this noisy world be consolidated until one spot that people can pay to get a result.

And there are a lot of things in and around the idea of an online course, right? You need to understand not just what’s in it, but how to present it, how to sell it. And the beauty of it is you can create it once and sell it infinitely or indefinitely. Now, I say that again with another asterisk that you have to update it.

I sold an online course at one point that required updating and we, in fact, our online courses inside of our community are updated and, and we’re updating many this year as well. Smart from Scratch is one we’re updating very shortly here and we’re going to be giving that, in fact, away for free. So more on that later because we want more people to just get started.

Right? And we believe that if we help you get started and get you a little bit of momentum, you’re going to want to come into the community and get that help because you’re already starting to see success from us, even from a free perspective. And imagine what we can do for you with a little bit of investment and connection to community and some help from myself and others on my team.

It can build credibility, having an online course while generating income and you can automate the delivery, right? People purchase it. They get it. Delivered or they get a login delivered to their email and they’re in and they’re learning and you just create the course once and it’s pretty hands off.

After that, you can work on the marketing after you build it. I would recommend seeing if it is something that your audience would want, and you can do that in a few ways. My other book, Will It Fly?, a lot of my books in here in this episode and my new one coming up too, but I’m not going to talk in detail about that quite yet, but more on that later. In my book, Will it fly?, the subtitle should give away how it helps you. It’s so you can test your next business idea, so you don’t waste your time and money and it will enable you to communicate with your audience, understand what they need help with, build a sales page, or even just an understanding what your position is in the market so that you can pre sell and see if you get enough interest so that You can then build the thing.

Many people tend to build the thing and then shout from the rooftops. And you know, that’s a mistake because you’re not exactly sure if people want to buy, but what if you had conversations and knew ahead of time and then built the thing? Well, that’s what Will It Fly teaches you how to do. So selling an online course can be fantastic.

Again, many industries can still benefit, even though online courses have been around for a while there’s even a, a, a version of selling online courses. You can sell a cohort based course, which can lead into a membership. So there’s a lot of combinations between each of these things, right? You can offer coaching and then all of your coaching students get put into a paid membership community if they pay a little bit more inside of that paid membership community.

You can put online courses like we do at SPI, but if, if again, you’re just starting out, just pick one and just one of these strategies and focus on it. Learn about it adopt lean learning strategies to sort of make sure that you’re focused on that one thing and nothing else can sort of get in the way.

And again, we have all the material you might need to learn how to do any of these things. Our course about building online courses called Heroic Online Courses is one of our best sellers. And when we put it inside the SPI community, that means everybody who’s in the SPI community gets access to it.

So, if you want to learn how to build and sell an online course, that’s a great one. And to finish off, let’s talk about the final S tier golden opportunity. And that is selling digital resources. Now, technically an online course is a digital resource, a paid membership and community with information and access to each other.

Yes, it’s technically digital because people are logging in digitally. But what I mean by a digital resource are things like templates and worksheets and guides. It might be walkthroughs that that word right there really hits home with me a walkthrough on how to do something or achieve something Because that was the brand name for my first ever online resource and first thing that sold that ever made my first dollar which was called the Green Exam Academy Walkthrough. The Green exam or the Leed exam is the exam for the architecture business that I started in 2008, and that was a digital resource.

It was simply a PDF file that was instantly delivered to people who clicked a button on my website after I had built that audience. And the beauty of it is whether it’s one person buying or a hundred people buying it or a thousand people buying it. It’s a digital resource. It scales and you could sell it on your Stan Store or on a place like Etsy or on Amazon even, or other places through your Shopify store.

But Stan, again, is probably the easiest thing to get started with. So. Anyway, all the resources and links mentioned in this episode can be found at smartpassiveincome.com/session853. But the digital resources can be amazing. You can ask your audience or your community, your social following, what kinds of tools and resources and guides and worksheets and templates can be helpful to help them go to where they want to go.

So step one. Build that audience step to know where they want to go. And step three, when it makes sense, build a digital resource to help that audience. Now I didn’t sell this digital resource that I’m about to share with you, but I am using it to generate leads and, and build my email list. And this is, you know, when you don’t think that you might be able to figure something out for yourself in the world of digital resources, I mean, you just got to think about it a little bit and ask, we have a digital resource on our Deep Pocket Monster channel about collecting all of the Pokemon. There are 1,025 Pokemon as of today. And I created a spreadsheet of all of them along with a little check mark. And I just simply used Google Drive or Google Sheets to create that. And I put it behind an email opt in form so that people give me their email in order to get the spreadsheet that yes, of course they could just create themselves, but it’s over a thousand Pokemon and it allows them to track their progress in a challenge that I recently finished. So they see that challenge. They see that I built this spreadsheet to help myself. And I say, if you want to get access to this too, go get the Gigadex at, and I did buy a domain just for this, TheGigadex.com, if you want to see it. Yes. Again, we don’t just talk the talk here. I’m walking the walk and I want you to walk the walk too. So digital resources, much, much easier to create than an online course, much, much easier to do than coaching, but it is something that can definitely help. You’re not going to make as much money per customer, but they do scale and you can easily sell these things on social, TikTok Shop is a great thing too, if by the time you listen to this, TikTok still exists, who knows.

But all I know is I want to thank you so much for listening to the tier list for best and worst ideas for 2025. If you build that audience, here are the things you should and shouldn’t focus on and pick one and go. There you go. Also go to smartpassiveincome.com/session853 for links and resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you so much. More coming soon and I appreciate you.