The online business world is a gold mine and only those tapping into it are getting the gold.
You too can become one of them. It takes just the first step, which is to start.
With hard work, commitment and faith, you can become one of the gold-miners.
There are so many crowded niches in the online business circle, leaving other lucrative fields in the dark, waiting to be harnessed.
However, I will be revealing some of the untapped online business ideas in Nigeria today that you can harness and perhaps make a fortune from.
8 Untapped Online Business Ideas in Nigeria
1. Lead Generation
When it comes to online business, this niche is quite scanty and that makes it a viable option.
Let me simplify the term lead generation.
If you’ve ever obtained contacts from people before with the intent of texting them later and inviting them for an event, then you’ve done lead generation for that event. Whether you did the texting or the event organizers did.
Now it doesn’t really matter what you told them just to get their contacts, the most important fact here is that you got the numbers and they’ll be receiving messages soon.
In the context here, you’ll be generating these leads (contacts) online for companies and making some decent income off it. All you need do is to attract customers to the company you are generating the leads for. So the company can obtain their mail addresses in several ways.
There two prominent ways of generating leads online. They are organic traffic and paid traffic.
When it comes to organic traffic, you’ll be providing email addresses for the said company through download links, discount coupons, horoscope reading and other means. While in paid traffic, you’ll have to create gripping content rich in keywords and related to what the company offers. You will be paying Google for this service which is known as AdSense, to drive traffic to your site.
It demands a little technical knowledge and it’s something you can master in days through proper guidance.
2. Email Marketing Business
Two guesses and you will be right, but no need for that. Email marketing is an online hustle you can do.
It involves the use of email to promote the products and services of business brands. Much more than that, email marketing is a tool used by both small and mega business brands to build and sustain relationships with customers.
Remember all those spam emails you usually receive urging you to subscribe to a newsletter, buy a product or register? That’s email marketing but done the wrong the way.
The reason that’s a typical example of email marketing-gone-wrong is that you did not solicit for the emails, worst still, you not interested in whatever is displayed before you.
If you will be doing this for the money, you will have to build your email list through leads rather than buying them and develop a healthy relationship with the customers of the company you are working for.
When this is done, it will be easier to market new products, services, and offers to them via email. This works faster than social media marketing.
If you want to double your hustle, study the business thoroughly and hop into this train right away.
3. Virtual Assistance
This is one online business idea many are still in the dark as to how it works and the bounty potentials that it comes with.
Business executives, bank managers, businessmen, CEO’s and just every other class of people on the corporate ladder can become your oil well.
You can make consistent income off them by becoming their virtual assistant.
With an itinerary that is loaded all week, they barely find time to schedule appointments, reply mails, type letters, send out emails and even receive calls.
This ultimately becomes your role: handle everything formal that they can’t do because their hands are tied and yours is not.
You can even do proxy negotiations. In other words, negotiating on behalf of your boss.
There are a lot of things you can do as a virtual assistant and a lot of money to make. The interesting part about this is that you don’t need to be present in flesh, blood and suit to carry out this role.
You can work remotely will all the details that will be made available to you. If you maintain integrity, a lot more can be entrusted in your hands.
If you don’t want to work this way, Amazon Mechanical Turk is a platform where you can work as a freelance virtual assistant. It is owned by Amazon and so its legitimacy is not in doubt.
4. E-Commerce Online Store
These days, a lot of businesses are building an online presence for their brands, that’s laudable. Beyond that, buying and selling online is yet is to be adopted by many businesses in Nigeria and if you can propose the idea to them they’ll gladly opt-in.
Building e-commerce sites for retail or wholesale stores around you can land you in a very comfortable position of wealth.
People now love to shop online because of the convenience it offers. Business brands are aware of this and they will pay you handsomely to build an e-commerce site for them.
To thrive in this online business, you need to build tons of e-commerce sites and keep them for sale. Once any retail stores buy the idea, all you need do is to customize the site to blend with their business brand and sell it to them.
You can start by buying a domain name and going to use a Shopify tutorial to seamlessly create an e-commerce store.
Suggested Reading: 10 Lucrative Work from Home Jobs for Moms in Nigeria
5. Stock Photography
If you are a photographer, then you need to level up your hustle if you are tired of earning peanuts with traditional photography.
In stock photography, you take mind-blowing pictures and sell them online on stock photography sites like iStock, Shutterstock, Fotolia, Pond5 and many others.
Remember, the photos should be great and stunning.
To get started, you need to register in any of the aforementioned sites and upload at least 10 of your pictures and wait for them to be approved. If they are not approved, it’s not a license to stop trying.
You just have to wait a little while and upload another 10, repeat this cycle until you are taken. And before I skip this one out: ensure your camera is top-rated and your pictures of high-quality resolutions.
6. SEO Business
As demand for content continues to soar, the rat race for who occupies the front pages of search engines, especially Google, becomes a race every blogger must run.
Making that happen demands employing best SEO practices for website optimization.
Let me break it down for you.
When you type in a phrase on Google and wait in split seconds to obtain search results, naturally, you’ll click on the first five search results that appear before you. And in very rare cases, you could click on the next page for more results.
Those websites and blogs that appear first on the search engine results have deployed search engine optimization (SEO) as a tool for web visibility. Basically, this will be your job.
A few online courses on the technicalities involved would suffice for the time being and as you advance, you’ll learn more.
Many bloggers are willing to pay you for this service because they stand to benefit from the number of clicks their blog will be receiving; thanks to the first-page advantage you will be providing.
7. Sell Your Designs Online
If you are a top-notch designer, this online business is for you. Don’t feel left out if you can’t, just learn and become one.
Do you know you can sell printed shirts online without even getting a material shirt and printing a dot on it physically? While you are about to ask how, you can still do designs on just any item, but majorly souvenirs without having the item present.
Now to answer your question of how the first step is to register on www.spreadshirt.com. When this is done, you are halfway on your quest to making money online in one of the untapped media.
After registering, you can then upload your designs and the site will take it from there. The site will print it on a t-shirt, cap or umbrella and put it up for sale.
You get about 12% commission from every shirt or item sold with your design on it. You can go to Canva to create premium designs that will bait in customers.
8. Create WordPress Themes and Sell
Blogs are created daily and they all use themes.
WordPress is the most popular platform for creating blogs because of how seamless it is to use, plus it’s entirely free of charges to create a blog with this platform.
If you are great at website designs and coding, then this online business is capable of giving you a full-time well-paid job. All you need do is to create fascinating WordPress themes and sell them on Themeforest or other online theme market places.
Your success here depends on how creative you are in making beautiful themes that people will love to buy. This hustle demand that you bring in your A-game.
