Online Business Ideas For Beginners (My Personal Online Business Journey)

Have you ever thought about how to build an online business, but struggled when it comes to finding a sustainable business model that would work for you?

In this solo episode of The Freedom Method podcast, I’ll be sharing my personal experiences as a female entrepreneur on how to build an online business and choose the most sustainable business model for you. I’m sharing ALL of the online business models that I have personally tried, from failed ideas to building a sustainable business model that actually gave me freedom.

I break down what worked, what didn’t, and how I finally figured out which online business idea for beginners aligned with my skills, passions, and lifestyle.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 How to build an online business that actually fits you

01:51 Why most online business models fail for female entrepreneurs

04:24 My failed online business ideas and what they taught me

14:51 How I built a sustainable business model that gave me freedom

18:02 What happens when I burnt my e-commerce consultancy down to become an online business coach

If you’re trying to figure out how to build an online business and want to learn how to choose the most sustainable business model - this episode will help you avoid the mistakes I made as a female entrepreneur.

YOU’LL LEARN:

• How to build an online business using your skills, passions, and market demand
• What female entrepreneurs get wrong when choosing an online business model
• How to identify which online business ideas for beginners will suit you best
• What it really takes to become an online business coach and build a profitable online business
• How to align your online business with your lifestyle goals

👉 Ready to learn how to build an online business and create your own sustainable business model as a female entrepreneur? Take my Free Quiz to find the best path for you ✨

Listen to Next:  The Freedom Model Method: Build an Online Business in Alignment With Your Life 

#howtobuildanonlinebusiness #onlinebusinesscoach #onlinebusiness #femaleentrepreneur #sustainablebusinessmodel #digitalnomadbusiness #freedomlifestyle #startanonlinebusiness

The Freedom Method Podcast is for women on a journey to find freedom through online business. Whether you're in a 9-5 or you're already a female entrepreneur, but your business is feeling anything but free - this podcast helps you build an online business that works for you, not one you work for.

Hosted by Sophie Biggerstaff - online business coach, strategist, and founder of the Freedom Model Method.

Subscribe for real female entrepreneur stories, practical strategies, and conversations about building an online business.

Find Your Starting Point:

🔍 Take My FREE Quiz: https://onlinebusinessschool.itssophiebiggerstaff.com/freedom-seekers-quiz

📖 Grab My Playbook: https://onlinebusinessschool.itssophiebiggerstaff.com/freedom-founder-playbook

🎓 Work With Me: https://www.itssophiebiggerstaff.com/#workwithme

Connect:

🗣️ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-biggerstaff-business-coach/

📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/itssophiebiggerstaff

Transcript

Sophie Biggerstaff (00:00)
Sophie, which online business should I start? It is a question that I get over and over again, and honestly, there is no one answer to this. Your online business model is going to be completely unique to you, but there are three things that I would usually use to determine what online business would best suit you. And I'm gonna explore these with you in today's episode of the Freedom Method podcast.

This chat today is going to be really useful for anyone who's still in their nine to five or have just quit their nine to five and is in the process of figuring out what kind of online business is actually going to be right for you to set up. So to help give you some online business idea inspiration, I am not only going to share with you the three things that I recommend my clients to look at before they're starting their business. I'm also going to talk you through every single online business method I have tried since 2016. And I'm going to be really honest with you about why and how I ended up building this.

and to give you an idea of the motivations behind it so that it can help inspire you to build your own online business and make your own online business model decisions based on the things that you already know you're going to be good at or passionate about. So I also want to help show you that even if you have one online business model now, it doesn't mean you need to follow that online business model through forever. As you grow, your business ideas are going to change and that is totally OK. Today, you're going to hear me talk about my

journey with my online businesses as I go along and I think you're going to be quite surprised by how many online businesses I've actually started and failed at before I got to the ones that worked. So if you've been struggling to figure out which online business you should start, I have actually created a free quiz that will help you figure it out. I've put the link in the show notes and if you take that I'll personally drop you an email and share my suggestion of which online business model would best suit you. So before I walk you through my own story, I want to share something really important with you.

When you're first starting out in your business, there is a big debate from many business mentors out there and it's all around should you start a business using your existing skills and passions. Now, many argue that no you should not because if you build a business around something you love doing, this might build resentment for you towards that one thing.

Should you keep your business and passion separate? I would argue that why on earth would you build a business around something you don't enjoy? Now I'm not suggesting you go and turn every single passion of yours into a business. You should definitely have some passions and hobbies and things that are just for you and just for fun. I definitely have that. And it's not all about making money out of the things that you love doing, but...

In all seriousness, life is hard and running a business is really difficult sometimes. When you love what you do, you're going to be way more motivated to show up and do it every single day. And you're going to have a stronger reason for doing it than just financial gain.

which gives you a much stronger sense of purpose. Plus, your love for what you do is gonna help you overcome any inevitable challenges that you end up facing along the way.

Now I can say this as I've personally built a business around something I'm not that passionate about and it felt 10 times harder, constantly like I was butting my head against a wall because I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I was doing it because I thought it would make me money. Now, if you're building a business with a huge team and a budget, maybe that advice isn't as relevant, but most of my coaching clients are solopreneurs. And I think when you work alone, having this extra layer of motivation is super powerful and it's going to give you more perseverance when things get

it

tough if you're doing something that you're really passionate about. Now the other thing that I share with my clients when they ask what online business should they build is to build a business using their existing skills. Make your life easy when you're first starting out why don't you do something they're already good at that can be transferred into a new venture.

Like yes, you could absolutely go out and learn new skills, but I can assure you, along your entrepreneurship journey, you're going to be doing plenty of that. So just make your life easy. When you're first starting out, find something you're already good at and profit off it.

Now using both of these two things, your skills and your passions is how I personally found success with my online business. So I want to share with you some of the ventures that I've personally explored. Now the first one, I've never actually really spoken about this in my content, but my first ever online business venture was actually a travel blog. It was called The Ineffable Travels and I started it back in 2016. Now if you go and Google it today, you're not going to find it because it doesn't exist on the internet anymore. I was 24, I was living in Italy and at that point I think I'd already traveled

maybe 25, 28 countries and travel was my biggest passion and my biggest inspiration at the time were travel bloggers like the blonde abroad, where's Molly, her life's a travel movie and I decided to follow in the path of doing something that I was passionate about and see if I could make money in that as well. I also really enjoy writing so I already had that skill so I started writing travel guides of all the places that I went and started publishing them those on my blog. Now as

As much as I loved travel and I was good at writing, what I didn't really account for was the time that it took to put these books together.

do all the editing, the proofreading, all of the things. And I was doing this alongside my full-time job at the time. I also didn't really factor in how difficult it was going to be to drive traffic to that blog and get people reading it because I didn't really understand the marketing world back then. I definitely didn't really understand how to monetize my efforts and make this into a business. I was just kind of doing it for fun at the beginning. But then a couple of brands tried to approach me. So I started doing some affiliate marketing, some brand partnerships, and I secured a couple.

But honestly at this point the blog wasn't really lighting me up enough to keep it running like I was really struggling to maintain the level of content that I needed to keep the blog

online to keep it going and consistently. So if you've had a blog before, you'll know that blogging is actually a bit of a long game. It takes a really long time for content to rank on Google, build that traffic and then to actually to convert into a sale, particularly if it's an affiliate marketing sale when it's not even your product. And if I'm honest, I just didn't have the patience back then to play that long game.

especially because at that time it wasn't really having a clear return for me, I was just doing this for fun. So I actually ended up stopping writing after about a year and a half after I started the blog. And funnily enough, that was actually when it started getting the most views, the most clicks online. I'd get these Google notifications being like, your blog's been viewed a thousand times in the past 24 hours. And I was like, wow, okay. Did that give me any more motivation to carry it on? No, it didn't. I think the time had already passed. I'd already kind of disregarded that as a business model for me. It wasn't quite.

the right fit, but I did learn a lot from starting this venture and particularly around the importance of SEO skills, how to back link on blogs, what affiliate marketing was, how that was a way to actually make money and how to monetize content and how demanding keeping up with the content hamster will can be, which I feel like I've relearned in so many different ways throughout my entrepreneurship journey. So my second online venture that I also don't really talk so much about was started in 2019.

And this was about six months before I quit my corporate fashion job. So at this point, I'd actually spent 11 years working my way up in some of the world's biggest fashion brands like Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Case Bain and Diesel. And a huge part of that role was hiring my teens. So I knew exactly what fashion brands were looking for. And I'd been informally helping friends of friends get jobs in the fashion industry for years. Girls would come to me, I would rewrite their CV, I'd coach them on interviews. And honestly, they'd get the job pretty much every single time.

And this was very different to when I started my travel blog because I wasn't building this side hustle business from a passion. I was actually turning a skill I already had into income. I knew how to get girls jobs in the fashion industry and the advice that I was giving worked, People would get in the results.

But the thing that I realised very quickly was that most of my ideal clients were students or junior level candidates because they were the ones that I knew how to help the best. And in all honesty, because they were so early on in their career or they were stuck in student debt or in university still, they didn't have money to pay for my services.

Although I could help them, I could actually get them into jobs very easily. And that was very satisfying. I very quickly realized I could not build a sustainable business model around this. So I actually pivoted that concept and I partnered with someone who had approached me to do career coaching at a more executive level who obviously do have that budget. And together we created a business around CV writing for senior professionals needing career direction support. And this was absolutely within my skill set. I have never not got a job that I've applied

for and the market was absolutely there and we did make money within the first couple of months of launching that business and the business lasted for about a year but unfortunately the partnership with my business partner didn't quite work out and honestly I really wasn't that passionate about what we were doing. It was causing me more stress than enjoyment so I walked away from that and I really learned that from this business turning a skill into a business is a great way to make money but you do have to make sure that the market can pay for it because like I said I had this vision

of helping all these students get into the fashion industry which is a great mission to have but they were not able to pay for it. Whereas then we used that same concept like helping people get jobs, put that into someone that can actually pay for it and it works but ultimately I wasn't particularly passionate about that subject so for me it just wasn't worth the effort that I was having to put in.

Now, alongside me running the career coaching business, I was actually building my e-commerce consultancy. Now, this was in lockdown 2020. if you've had me tell my story before, you'll already know that I quit my corporate job before the pandemic. And I'd actually planned to go traveling around Latin America, but instead, obviously, got stuck in lockdown in London and had to figure out what was next that I could actually pay my mortgage. So I had to really have a look at what skills that I had.

and realised that if I was building five-year plans for the £380 million business at Burberry and launching subsidiaries of global retailers in Europe, I could totally scale down my experience and strategies and the knowledge that I had to help start up e-commerce businesses. And that's exactly how I ended up launching my e-commerce consultancy. And I would describe my e-commerce consultancy as my first business because that's the one that I really like.

loved working in and the one that has made me the most money so far in my career in entrepreneurship because I had the skills, I was passionate about what I was doing, I'd had so much experience in this industry and the market demand was absolutely there because it was locked down, everyone was building product businesses from their living rooms and they needed help because a lot of people had come from a completely different career like law.

or they were a nurse or they wanted to start something on their own. So I started using LinkedIn to get freelance clients because of the brand names that I'd worked with, like Burberry, Kate Spade and Ralph Lauren, people trusted me and I managed to secure clients like very, very quickly. So some really cool projects came out of me doing that and I launched a whole e-commerce children's wear marketplace where we sourced all of

products from luxury fashion brands using the experience that I had and the contacts that I had. I helped a handbag brand build a wholesale channel and generated almost 200,000 pounds within nine months. I built marketing and sales strategies that grew people's businesses beyond belief. And I was consulting and mentoring founders and I really, really loved what I was doing. Like it was so rewarding. I could see direct results from the strategies that I was implementing in people's e-commerce businesses. So after about

six months in, I realized that everyone I was working with on a freelance basis actually had the same problems that I could help solve. So I started branching out into different online business models and I began offering mentoring, online workshops, and I started creating courses. That was all very successful. I made lot of money and I was really enjoying what I was doing. So then I pivoted into group coachings, more online courses or digital products, memberships, named an online business model and I probably tried it.

And I also tested out an agency style format, which honestly made me a lot of money. It was a very lucrative business model, but I absolutely hated it because there were so many moving parts. Essentially, I was the middle man for the business and then service because I was bringing people together and outsourcing a lot of the work that I was doing. And I really didn't enjoy that. There was just too many things going on at any one time.

I actually decided to strip everything back to the things I actually loved and were actually really working for me, which was my one-on-one mentoring, my group coaching and my courses. And the things where I was directly using my brain, my experience and my knowledge of the industry to help someone think through their business and get the results that they wanted helped me achieve really consistent five to seven K months within the first year.

And that business model that I created for myself, because I set it up to be fully remotely, was able to help me move abroad and become a digital nomad. So I ran that business model very successfully for about four years. And I learned so much about business in this time. But that business model didn't come without its challenges. And for a long time, I was working way too hard instead of smart and taking on things that didn't align with me for the money. And that led me to burn out big time.

So the biggest things I learned out of this business was just because something makes you money doesn't mean it is the right business model for you. You have to do something you love and that is in alignment with you and your energy or it's going to suck the absolute life out of you. And this happened because I essentially built this great business that was very successful. But over time I was taking on projects, working with clients that weren't fully in alignment with me and it burnt me out.

So this process of like trial and error in particularly in my e-commerce consultancy business is how I ended up creating my signature method, the freedom model method, which is essentially clarity plus alignment plus aligned action equals freedom. And I've personally gone on that journey and I spoke about my method in a recent episode of the podcast, which I'll link for you in the show notes. everything that I had learned in that online business of the e-commerce consultancy that I set up.

showed me that if I was working out of alignment, if I wasn't really clear on what it was that I wanted to achieve and I wasn't taking the action in alignment with those two things, the freedom didn't exist. The freedom that I've been craving when I left my nine to five to start my own thing wasn't there. I was actually burnt out, drowning in work and working more hours than ever. I wasn't working smart. So that has since then allowed me to shift into a different model, which I will come onto in a second.

Before I go into that, I just want to share with you a couple of other online business models that I have dabbled in. So I have actually been doing in-person events. I did one of my biggest events in 2021, I think it was, just before I moved to Bali. And I absolutely loved this. It was so much fun. I brought like 50 women together, 50 e-commerce entrepreneurs together in a room. We hosted panel talks. We had presentations from successful e-commerce business founders. We had brand sponsorships.

It was something I really enjoyed bringing people together and then just seeing what magic was happening in the room. But I will be honest, there was absolutely no money in this event. Actually, I think I lost money in building this, but I absolutely loved the energy of bringing people together, building a community. I did get Kyat off the back of me bringing that event together and genuinely it lit me up. I loved it. But on its own, I didn't really see that as a scalable business model for me.

And then in 2023, I also co-founded a mental health e-commerce marketplace, which was built on a drop ship and an affiliate brand partnership model. And it definitely did have some success. We did make a bit of money from this business and we fulfilled a wider purpose, which was to help educate people on the mental health world and help people find their own solutions. But what happened was that we built a mental health business with my business partner that lives in the US and

We built it alongside our own businesses. So I was still running my e-commerce consultancy at the time. And unfortunately, having those two things going on in parallel actually started impacting both of our own mental health. So we had this amazing mission to help support people with their mental health, but combined with everything else that we had going on, it actually meant we had to stop the business because we couldn't be building a mental health business that was impacting our mental health by running it. So.

The business at the time just didn't align with our capacity or our emotional bandwidth. So we did put that on pause. I don't see that as a failure. At some point I do see this business coming back later down the line. But what I did learn, massive takeaway from this business, is that mission led businesses are amazing, but you have to be able to hold the weight of the mission without costing you your wellbeing. And that was definitely something that for a while we weren't doing.

I really want to bring this business back at some point down the line. It brought me so much joy to create that business. It was so in alignment with the passion that I have to spread word about mental health challenges and solutions and also just help people in general. I love helping people and that was a business that really played into my passions and also my strengths. We brought in the e-commerce element of that as well. And if you noticed, I said about the word affiliates, which I obviously did right at the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey with the travel blog. So combined a lot of skills that I have, but

Ultimately, business is on pause right now. So it brings me to today in March 2026, which is six years of me being in entrepreneurship on my own. Literally, I think I'm recording this on the 30th of March, pretty much was when I first started my e-commerce consultancy. And I have gone through more experiments than I can count, more failures, lots of wins and so much clarity. And today I am an online business mentor and strategist for high achievers

who are leaving the nine to five as they know they're made for more. I help them start online businesses so that they can achieve their freedom filled lives. And I don't talk about freedom in an airy fairy way. I try and talk about freedom in a really grounded way because I know that freedom is a buzzword, but it doesn't mean or doesn't have to be this floaty concept that you see on Instagram. Cause I really believe that anyone can achieve freedom, but you do need a strategy and the right method to.

get there and I'm on a mission to support more people with my freedom model method. Because at the end of the day, I've been building this new business model for a year now and there's one thing I know for certain that the business that has always felt most natural, most sustainable, most me, is me helping people build businesses and get the lifestyle that they actually want. Helping inspire other people to step into the life that they want to achieve. So strategy of bringing ideas together is...

my core skill set and helping people achieve their dreams is my passion. And I do that in a way that is accessible to the market, that people that want coaching, because I've got mentoring courses, digital products, all built around the freedom model method and helping people who want to leave their nine to five and build something on their own terms. Now I set this business up in a way that works for me, having gone through so many lessons of business models that did not work for me. So I really built something that feels like

It works for me and it doesn't feel like a job that I'm working for because it's built with solid foundations. I've learned all the lessons from my past businesses and I've set better boundaries. I've got more self-trust and improved systems. And I'll always say that entrepreneurship is the biggest self-development journey you'll ever go on and you will grow and your business needs to grow with you. And ultimately I see none of these businesses that no longer exist as failures. They were all lessons that guided me to exactly where I am today.

I am a kinesthetic learner, I had to learn by doing and I had to learn and go through all of these transitions and now I love nothing more than helping other people go through these transitions themselves because I learned some lessons the really hard way but that doesn't mean you have to. Let me share my knowledge with you and help you figure stuff out in your online business that you can achieve the lifestyle, the freedom lifestyle that you actually desire. So if you are in the process of figuring out what kind of business you want to build,

I want you to take away one thing from this episode, which is, can you find the overlap between your skills, your passions, and the market fit for the freedom life that you want? Because that is probably going to be your sweet spot. I mentioned at the beginning, not everyone is going to give you the advice to turn a passion into a business. I agree with them. I don't think every passion you have should become monetized and become a business. But if you can find that combination between your skills and your passions and a market fit.

that could be your winning business model. if you're unsure about which online business you should start based on those things, I've actually got something that will help. You can take my freedom seekers quiz, it's completely free and it's designed to help you get clarity on the kind of business that's actually gonna be in alignment with your skills, with the lifestyle you want and with the passions that you have. So I'll pop the link to that in the show notes. it literally takes 30 seconds and the results might be something that you wanna pursue, so isn't it worth it?

And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who is in that figure out stage that doesn't really know what online business they want to start because this might just change the trajectory of their life. If they take that quiz and start that business, who knows what is coming for them next. Even just getting expanded by hearing other people's stories can really help people take action. And remember my Freedom Model Method is all about taking clear and aligned action to get the freedom life you want.

Freedom does not have to be a fantasy, but you do need the right method to create it and I have that method for you. So if you are looking to create that freedom in your life, come back next time and we'll be going into a more freedom filled topic.