Don't Start This 7 Online Businesses As a Beginner In 2025

Hey everyone. If you’re considering starting an online business, this article is for you. I’ve spent the last couple of years trying all of the popular online business models and I made over $3 million so far doing them. In today’s article, I’m going to share the seven worst online businesses to start from my experience testing them all.

Now, what’s going to be cool about this article is that these businesses are ones that look really good at first, but after you start doing them, you find out that there are actually some really big drawbacks that nobody talks about. So let’s get started with the first online business I’d avoid.

01. Dropshipping Without a Niche

The first online business is dropshipping without a niche. In the last couple of years, dropshipping has absolutely blown up because it’s cheap to start, you can do it from anywhere, and you can scale it up really quickly. However, fast forward a couple of years now, and the market’s very saturated, and it’s harder than you’d think to stand out.

Now, just to put this into context, the dropshipping market is expected to be over $557 billion in 2025. That is an absolutely massive market, and there’s a lot of money to be made. But what’s not said is that a lot of this money is coming from the very established big players with their niche-specific stores.

This is a very important concept to understand. There used to be something in dropshipping called having a general store, where you could sell many different items all at once. However, nowadays this is a lot harder to pull off.

Without going into dropshipping with a unique niche or a product that genuinely stands out, you’re just competing against a ton of other people who are selling the same products as you. So, if you’re thinking about starting dropshipping, just know that it’s still very possible to succeed.

But I definitely recommend spending the extra time, in the beginning, finding products that genuinely stand out. My personal recommendation on this is to look into a website called Viral Vault, which is essentially a website that researches and finds unique products for you.

What’s cool about them is they find them as they’re just coming out, so you’re the first to know about them, and you can be among the first to sell them. If you wanna look into this, I’ll put a link to this down in the description.

02. Affiliate Marketing

So just like that, that brings us into the second business. This business is starting a generic affiliate marketing website. Now, affiliate marketing in itself is a really good business model, but starting a generic affiliate website promoting products in multiple different niches is just setting yourself up to fail.

Now, I have a lot of hands-on experience with this one, and the reason that a generic affiliate marketing website is not going to succeed is because these affiliate marketing websites are all based around SEO. Now, if you’re not familiar with SEO, SEO stands for search engine optimization, or in other words, getting your website to show up on the first page of Google.

If you make your affiliate marketing website about a very specific niche, Google knows exactly what your website’s about and who to show that to in the search results. However, if your affiliate marketing website is about many different niches, Google doesn’t know who to show your website to, so you’re not going to get any organic traffic.

Now, something else has happened that also affects affiliate marketing websites right now, and that is the rise of artificial intelligence. If you’ve heard of the free artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT that came out just a while ago, that was the first very successful artificial intelligence tool.

But the problem was it made it very easy for people to write blog articles using that artificial intelligence. Well, what happened here was Google was flooded with all of these AI articles, and now they’re trying to get them taken down from their search results. So, Google created a kind of automated filter to try to detect if your articles on your website were created using AI, and if they think that they were, they will take them out of the search results.

Now, this is one that there is a lot of speculation, there’s a lot of rumors about, but I was personally affected by this on multiple of my affiliate websites. So, I’m speaking from hands-on experience here. Now, with that being said, you can still succeed in affiliate marketing. Like I said, it’s a great business model.

I would say if you do wanna get into affiliate marketing, I would recommend looking into starting a YouTube channel instead of a website and trying to just stay away from all of the AI automation tools. For those of you who do wanna start this business properly, I’ll put some good affiliate marketing tutorials down in the description.

03. Multilevel Marketing

So that brings us to the third business model that I don’t recommend starting, and this one is called multi-level marketing. So MLM businesses, which is short for multi-level marketing, have been around for a long time, but they get a really bad rep because they have a pyramid-like structure. Now, to be fair, I really don’t like them either, and I have hands-on experience with this, so I’ll share why.

The way that MLM programs work is similar to affiliate marketing where you get a commission if you refer a buyer. However, in MLM programs, you continue to get commissions on any referrals made by the people that you refer.

This is where that pyramid structure starts to take place. Anyone who you refer, you make money on whoever they refer. The commissions keep going up to the top of the pyramid. Now, the big problem with this is that the business model turns into getting paid to refer people solely for them to refer other people.

The thing about this that really gets me is that these MLM programs are supposed to be focused on selling a product, but the whole business turns into selling the idea that you get commissions from referring other people to join the program.

Now, my experience with this was not actually being in an MLM, but having people who were in MLMsalways trying to sell me to join under them. They would try to lure me into hanging out, but really it was a business meeting to try to sign up under their MLM program.

I did get information from them. So, I do know that most MLM businesses, require an upfront investment for you to join. This is what covers the commissions, and then in order to stay a part of that program, you have to continue to make purchases.

So that was my experience with MLM, and what’s kind of funny about this is the FTC did a study on this and they found out that 99% of people who take part in MLM programs, end up losing money.

So all in all, if you’re about to join a multi-level marketing business, I recommend not doing that and instead looking into affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing still works in the same way where you can promote other people’s products and you can get commissions, but it’s by far a much better business model all around.

04. Content Farms

The next step on the list is number four, which is content farms. Now, if you haven’t heard of content farms before, they’re basically websites that you can hire to write blog posts for you. So the reason that content farms kind of became a thing is that a lot of people don’t realize when they’re starting an affiliate marketing website and have to write blog articles, that writing those blog articles is very time-consuming.

It’s not a very easy task to do. So, these content farms are websites that offer their team of writers to write these articles for you. This is something that I also have a lot of hands-on experience with, and essentially how it works is you give the content farm, you give them the overall topic of your website or specific articles you want them to write.

They go out and they research the article, they write it for you, and they deliver it to you fully edited and proofed. In theory, this sounds really good, but in reality, the articles are written with very general information, and the people who end up finding them on Google and reading them, from the analytics that I’ve seen on my websites, they end up just clicking off of those articles, going back to Google, and finding a different one to read.

Now, because these articles are generally low quality, the blog websites that end up publishing them often get penalized by Google for not providing real value to readers. This, again, is something that I can personally vouch for after spending over a hundred thousand dollars on affiliate articles from content farms. I tried to do this the right way. I hired one of the most reputable content farms out there.

I paid a super premium for these articles, and I still got penalized by Google. So if you’re thinking about starting a content farm business or if you’re thinking about hiring a content farm to write your articles, I would recommend against it. If I’ve learned anything from this expensive experience, it’s been that creating real, original, valuable content is crucial to succeeding in any online business.

05. Paid Surveys

Now, that brings us to number five. This is paid online survey websites and get paid to websites. So if you’ve looked up how to make money online, you’ve probably come across paid survey websites or websites that are offering to pay you to do certain tasks like watching videos or playing games.

These websites look like a really quick way to make easy cash, but the reality is that they are too good to be true. I’ve done a ton of research on this, and there are many studies out there that show how much money you can actually make from these types of websites, and the average hourly rate is typically only a couple of dollars per hour, or in some cases only a couple cents per hour.

The other big drawback that not a lot of people talk about is on these paid survey websites, you have to give away a lot of personal information to complete the surveys. If you don’t complete the surveys, you don’t get paid. So, for the vast majority of people out there, it’s simply not going to be worth it to get your phone number and your email spammed for years just for a couple of dollars in the end.

06. Online Courses

Just like that, we’re onto number six, and this is overly saturated online courses. Now, this is one that I wanna be very clear on. Creating and selling online courses can actually be a very good online business model if you do it right. The online education or online course market is projected to reach $375 billion by 2026.

However, if you’re going into this just blindly creating a course and trying to sell it yourself, you’re not going to get anywhere. Unfortunately, in the last couple of years, online courses have gotten a really bad reputation because it seems like every content creator out there was offering a thousand-dollar course, and once you signed up for it, you couldn’t get your money back and it was filled with really nonsense.

This has put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths and they just won’t go and spend money on an online course. I will say that I have personally purchased a thousand dollars course in the past, and I had a really good experience with it. It was definitely worth it. However, I’ll also say that I’ve purchased a lot of other courses that were definitely not worth it at all.

Now, to give you some real hands-on experience with this one, I’ve personally created and sold multiple online courses over the years. Some of them have succeeded and others have failed. I think the best thing you can do if you want to get into creating an online course is to look up Udemy and Skillshare.

These websites are online course marketplaces where you can create beginner or entry-level courses. They sell for just a couple of dollars instead of a thousand dollars, and they do all the marketing and sales for you.

I think if you haven’t created an online course before and you wanna kind of get your toes wet, this would be a good place to start instead of creating a full-fledged course and trying to sell it yourself.

07. Crypto Trading

So with that being said, that brings us to number seven. This would be cryptocurrency trading without having experience. Now, trading crypto is one of those trending ways to make money some people will make an absolute killing, and other people are going to lose everything. What I like is having numbers behind things.

So, the Wall Street Journal did a study on this, and they found that 70% of retail crypto traders, so just regular people trading crypto, ended up losing money. And I would say from personal experience here, the big problem is that you’re not just investing your time in this one like you can start other businesses. You have to actually invest your money as well.

So if you get this one wrong and you fail, you actually lose your money and there are no money-back guarantees on this one. Now, the last thing I’ll say about this one is just looking ahead a little bit, the way that the world is trending right now, I think some kind of cryptocurrency or digital currency may become a household name, but if you’re trying to make reliable income with trading cryptocurrency, I just don’t think it’s a viable way.

Final Thoughts

These are all the online businesses that I’ve had the most success with over the years, and I filled my channel with videos that have step-by-step screen-recorded tutorials showing what I did to succeed in each one of them. As always, if you guys enjoyed this video,