Lucrative Businesses You Can Start With 500k or Less in 2024

Are you looking for a lucrative business you can start with 500k or Less in 2023 that will guarantee you up to 30k to 50k income every month?

We live in a time and season where every thoughtful person who cares about the well-being of their family is already thinking of how to earn an extra income. It’s worst for salary earners whose income is not only static but has continued to lose its purchasing power.

If you are a salary earner, a business owner struggling to scale or you are already planning how to Japa but don’t have enough resources to fund it, you need to take this article more seriously than everyone else. And if you know anyone who fits into this target audience, share this article with them after reading it.

Yesterday, I was at the popular Balogun Market on Lagos Island after a long while and I used the opportunity to verify firsthand the authenticity of some of the things I will be teaching you today.

Can N500,000 Start a High-Income Business?

The answer is yes and no, depending on the perspective you are looking at it from. Yes, if you choose to run the business online and you have some existing basic business skills. No, if you want to rent a physical shop of 7 million Naira in a year then stock it up with Swiss and Austria lace of 27 million Naira before you can start.

If you are in this second category, this article is not for you. This is because you will be too much in a hurry that you will miss the fundamental things. That said, let’s first and foremost discuss the top fundamental skills required to succeed in business:

• Content writing skills
• Negotiation skills
• Sales skills
• Advertising skills
• Copywriting skills
• Communication skills
• Public speaking skills
• Leadership skills

You don’t have to be a guru in all these skills but you would need a fraction of each of them to be able to excel in the businesses I will recommend shortly.

List of Lucrative Businesses You Can Start with 500k or Less in 2023

Acquiring copywriting, content writing, and advertising skills at the basic level will cost you anything between 50k to 100k. At this point, you are left with N400,000. After 45 days of learning and implementing, you should be ready to take the next line of action which is to choose a business idea from the list of ideas I will be sharing.

1. Information Marketing

This is simply the process of creating, packaging, and selling your knowledge as a product. One of the fascinating things about information products, especially if it is digital is that you can sell and resell them every single time and it will never be exhausted.

Information products can come in the form of an ebook, online course, coaching program, seminar or webinar, etc.
Knowledge money is real money. Interestingly, every adult has something they know that someone else doesn’t know.

If you know 1% better than someone else, you have the right to teach the person. What you consider simple knowledge may not be simple to others. By simply teaching the 1% you know and doing it convincingly, a good-thinking person can take it, amplify the knowledge and it will give his or her business a 30% increase in revenue.

No, you are not the one who determines what a good product is but your audience. Read my previous article on how to identify a hot market for clarity on that. Your experiences, expertise, and passion can guide you in choosing a good information marketing niche. But if you don’t have any at the moment, you can try these information product niches:

1. Finance, investing
2. Dating, marriage, sex, and relationship
3. Marketing
4. Fertility
5. Make money online
6. Beauty
7. Weight loss, weight gain, and fitness

Each of these niches can be further broken down into other highly profitable sub-niches. And of course, the easiest way to stand out as an expert when it comes to selling information products is to niche down.

How To Spread Your Budget

Let’s talk about how to spread your budget of N400k to maximize profit.

• Creating the information product — FREE
• Packaging of the information product — N50,000
• Email marketing (using Mailchimp) — FREE for the first 1,999 subscribers
• A simple web page — N50,000
• Daily content marketing — FREE
• Paid Facebook and Instagram ads — 5k per day for 60 days — N300,000

If you have a good product and you effectively combine paid ads and organic content marketing, you should be earning an ROI of at least N5,000 per day and that will amount to N150,000 in a month. Remove personal expenses of N100,000, and you will have a balance of N50,000 that you can reinvest into the business.

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Also Read: Comprehensive Laundromat Business Plan For 2023

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Like every other business, there are challenges. Pay attention to them and when they come, don’t complain and back out. Instead, face them headlong.

2. E-commerce

The e-commerce business is the process of selling physical products on the Internet. The way it works is this:

1. Identify a problem.
2. Source for a product that solves that problem.
3. Look for a complementary product that you can add as a bonus to the main product.
4. Create a sales copy and build a webpage.
5. Start running ads on the sales page to convert the visitors into customers.
6. Receive orders and start calling them to confirm their orders.
7. Receive payment and ship the item to them via a reliable logistics company.
8. If you choose to go with payment on delivery, send the item to a reliable self-delivery agent in the city nearest to your customer, and the self-delivery will take the item to the customer and receive payment on your behalf.
9. Receive your payment from the self-delivery agent and call your customer to know how well the product is working for them.
10. Rinse and repeat the process.

Here’s the thing

For every customer you acquire via ads, make sure you don’t have to pay any advertising platform again to make the customer continue to buy from you. By that I mean, keep in contact with your customers so that they will always remember your brand anytime they need your product again.

When choosing a product to sell, pay attention to these factors:

• Don’t choose products that can EASILY be sourced from a nearby store
• Don’t choose a product that has a specific price tag
• Don’t choose a product you can’t easily increase the perceived value by simply adding a complementary product
• Don’t sell heavy items at this early stage of your business
• Don’t choose products people can only buy once in a lifetime and never use again except you are using such as an entry product to acquire the customer first then you can continue to market other products to them.

Are there some profitable e-commerce products I can recommend to you?

Yes! But for the purpose of concealing the business interest of some of my friends who are into these businesses, I won’t be mentioning the specific products. Instead, I will only mention the industries. I expect you to do some further research to uncover specific products that solve unique problems.

That said, let’s look at the various profitable e-commerce niches:

1. Safety and Security
2. Car Accessories
3. iPhone accessories
4. Fitness
5. Weight loss
6. Babies
7. Kitchen Appliances
8. Beauty, etc.

Before now, importing these products used to be a better strategy but with the new dollar rate, local arbitrage has become the best alternative.

What does local arbitrage mean?

It simply means sourcing the products locally at a cheap rate and reselling them online at a higher rate. If you identify products in these niches I mentioned that are not yet popular online, you can make a decent income every month reselling them.

Every month, importers bring in new products to test the market and if it works, they become the sole importer. By simply doing thorough market research, you can identify these wholesale dealers and partner with them.

If the product is too expensive such that it will exhaust your remaining 400k, drop ship the product. If you enter Balogun Market or Computer Village to conduct thorough market research on any of the niches I mentioned above, you will find products you can buy for N10,000 and resell at N20,000 or slightly above that.

I’ve done this many times and I can tell you for free that it works. When you identify a hot product using the strategies I shared in my previous post, you can buy 5 units to start testing the market.

For a start, only target Lagos, Abuja, or Port-Harcourt. Start with the one nearest to you. You can start by delivering the product by yourself to save cost on delivery.

A bulk of your capital will go into the purchase of the product and Facebook/Instagram ads. You can do without a webpage by simply sending the traffic to WhatsApp, which is a faster closing platform for physical products.

• N200,000 for 20 units of the product.
• N200,000 for ads at N5,000 per day (target just one city) and the ads will run for 40 days.
• Monitor your ads closely.

If you sell 2 units per day, that is N40,000 with N5,000 ad spent. If you live in that city, go and deliver the item by yourself to save cost. I’ve done this before.

But if you don’t live there, it won’t cost you more than N5,000 to deliver the item to the customer (public transport driver & self-delivery agent). The logistics cost will be further driven down when you ship items in bulk say once or twice a week.

If you sell what people need and you maintain constant communication with your customers, many of them won’t have a problem waiting for you. As the sales begin to come in, reinvest the money.

Like every meaningful business out there, you are going to encounter some challenges. When that happens, face them. Don’t tell me that it is not as easy as I think. Nothing is ever as easy as it is written and I don’t expect this one to be. Moreover, saying such will limit your critical thinking capacity.

I hope you got value from this one, especially with the way I simplified the process.

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