When you get a hang of building a business online, you are going to have a lot of fun doing it. When you are having fun doing it, you are going to love teaching people how they could be also be building a business centred around something they love too.
I am dedicating this post to wannabe Coffee Business Owners (CBO) 🙂 . A lot of the principles and procedures explained here will apply to a lot of other niches as well. For even more fun, we will try to do this for a lot of other interesting niches in the coming weeks. Okay?
Good. Let’s get to it, shall we?
How to Build an Online Coffee Business
When it comes to building any kind of business online from scratch, there are 4 simple steps involved:
- Choose a niche/interest
- Build a website
- Write content
- Monetize your website
Now let us take a look at each of these steps and relate it to building a successful online coffee business.
Step 1: Choose a Niche/Interest
If you came here specifically looking to find out how to start a coffee business online, you are in a better position than a lot people. Most people that want to get started with building a business online do not know what kind of business they want to start. In your case, you have a huge area you are interested in: Coffee.
One thing about business online, or business anywhere in life, is that you could have the most awesome ideas and solutions but your ideas and solutions count for nothing if people do not get to hear or see them.
The first and costliest mistake beginners make online is convincing themselves a very wide niche is profitable. While it should in fact be profitable, it will not be if nobody gets to see your website.
The key to having a profitable business to drill down to a smaller niche where the people whom you are providing solutions to actually get to see what you have to offer. What we want is a niche that is not very competitive, gets a decent amount of searches and a lot of content can be written on.
As you would imagine, building a profitable online business in the niche “Coffee” will be very difficult to achieve. As much as I do not like to say anything online is impossible, I will say it is highly improbable. Why? Because the competition will be too stern, and will feature brands that are paying a lot of money and some that have been there for many many years.
Our best bet with building a successful coffee business online is to drill down into this “coffee” niche and find a niche with a lot of income potential and far less competition. Below is a search I did using the WA Keyword Tool. An alternative keyword tool you could use is the free version of Jaaxy.
The term “coffee” has a grand number of searches but as expected, it has high competition as well. Still under the same search in the screenshot above, let us take a look at some of those terms and their competition. “Coffee shops” has even more searches than “Coffee” but its competition score of 375 is still on the high side, especially for a brand new site.
Besides let’s be honest here: people searching for coffee shops are probably looking for the nearest coffee shop, rather than content about coffee. I usually advocate for competition of under 300 but the closer it is to zero, the better.
After a bit of checking the keywords within that same search, I saw that “coffee espresso machines” will make a pretty good niche choice. It makes a pretty good choice even though it has the lowest number of searches in the screenshot because its competition score of 187 is the lowest. It also ticks our boxes of low competition, decent number of searches, and wide enough to write content on.
Of course, there are other options you could choose as your niche. Other good options I found were electric coffee grinders, coffee roasting machines, coffee vending machine, decaf coffee beans, commercial coffee machines, acid-free coffee…The list goes on and on.
*It is better to rank on the first page of Google for a term that has 20 searches a month than to be on the second page of a term that gets 200,000 searches a month. At least the 20 people get to see what you are offering. The 200,000 will not. So let’s do a search on the term “Coffee espresso machines”.
Looking at this and knowing there is an abundance of coffee espresso machines in the world, we know there will be no shortage of content to write in this niche.
Step 2: Build a Website
A few years ago, this might have been a really daunting task. But I have good news for you….this is not a few years ago!
These days you could have a website up and running within a couple of minutes without any coding knowledge. We have a post on how to build your website but to save time, you can just hop right into it by entering a domain in the website builder box below…
Simply create a free account and you are good to go.
And by the way, your free account comes with 2 free websites and an entire training platform – training that will actually help get started with your online Coffee Business.
Step 3: Write Content
If you had a website based on the “coffee espresso machines” niche, what sort of content will you be writing? Reviews!
When someone wants to buy a particular coffee espresso machine online, what do they do? They go on Google or any search engine and search for a review of the product they want. It is after reading this review that they can now make a more informed decision on whether to still go ahead and buy the product or not. This is where you come in.
This is where the business is, quite literally. You write reviews on different espresso machines and your website content gets ranked on Google. Whenever these people search for a particular coffee espresso machine, they find you. The best part of all this is you do not go looking for them, they come looking for you.
If you came here by looking to build a coffee business, chances are you are interested in coffee. If you are that interested in coffee, you might have had first-hand experience with some coffee espresso machines. Start with those machines you have had experience with, they will make great reviews. If you have not used any espresso machines, you should do some research on it or you could choose another niche still under coffee (I listed a few above).
The more content on different products you write, the more people find your website. Ultimately, more content leads to more traffic.
Step 4: Monetize your Website
Since your target are the people that already know the particular product they are looking for, they are already at the stage where they are ready to buy. All they needed to know was all the information on the product to decide on whether to buy or not.
In most cases, if you give a product a positive rating in your review, these customers go right ahead from your website and buy. They do this through your affiliate link, and you earn a commission for each sale made through that link.
At this stage, you might be wondering where the heck you can get these affiliate links?
The most popular affiliate program is Amazon Associates. Then there are a couple of Affiliate networks that house many affiliate programs, networks like Linkshare, Shareasale and Commission Junction. eBay also has an affiliate program, and you could find more independent programs by typing “coffee espresso machines + affiliate program” in a Google search.
My strongest recommendation for this niche though is Amazon Associates because you get a whole lot of products you could review and everyone knows and trusts Amazon. You also get to use the pictures of the products for free if you are promoting the product.
So basically,
More Content –> More Traffic –> More clicks on your affiliate link –> More Money
Closing Thoughts
Congratulations! You made it to the end.
Now you know how to start an online coffee business. If you need video walkthroughs or written tutorials on how to go about everything, I suggest you sign up for the free account of the program that taught me all this in the first place.
If you have any questions or any thoughts you would like to share, please leave them in the comments. My job is to help you, and I’ll be more than happy to do so. See you in the comments…Cheers 🙂
Hey Medu. This is a great story and I’m going to act on your step by step advice for a new website.
Do you think it is that simple to choose a niche. I always feel overly cautious when choosing a niche and then I end up getting kind of paralysed.
My ideas are maybe too broad but I’m worried that a narrow niche will get boring….unless it makes money!
Hey Janelle,
The midway point between too narrow and too broad is where the potential to earn a lot of income is. The first niche I chose when I started building a business online was men’s footwear. It seemed narrow enough and profitable to me at the time, but I soon found out that my niche choice was too broad. I learned from people with a lot of experience online that if I wrote a few posts on dress shoes, sneakers, boots, sandals and the rest, that Google would not consider me an authority on any of them. My time would be better spent focussing on just one type of men’s footwear. Naturally, I changed the direction of the site towards writing reviews for Men’s sneakers. It was then I was able to get some traffic, and then some money off the site.
My advice to people when choosing a niche is do some research and pick a niche that is narrow, but broad enough to have many products to review. And by the way, it should not get boring even in a narrow niche. The niche we worked with in this post is coffee espresso machines. Nothing stops you from writing about coffee pods and other coffee related products every once in a while. Just pay more attention to your narrow niche and when you become more of an authority, you can definitely branch out naturally.
Thanks for stopping by Janelle.
Thanks for sharing this article. Online Coffee Business is very interesting. I want to try this. I think that this is a very profitable business.