35 Creative Business Ideas For Marketing Experts

My intention during and after high school was to move to Europe and play soccer (football) as my career. However, I was persuaded to try my hand at college which eventually took me down the path where I am today.

I grew up in a family full of entrepreneurs, thinkers…people smarter than me so I was definitely lucky to be in the right room.

My first job was selling credit card machines and processing. I was raw in business but determined (or stubborn) to make it alone with the help of no one (NOTE, this was a dumb idea and everyone should get help at every stage of life). When I started, I thought I was in a finance position. It turned out I was in a sales position, responsible for calling businesses to sell them on our services. It was the best thing to ever happen to me at this stage in my young career.

I was forced to talk to people, negotiate, persuade, help strangers over the phone - I learned one of the greatest skills of all time, how to sell over the phone. I had never sold anything, I learned sales in 3 days, then practiced every single day. This position lasted 30 days, but the grass only got greener. I was somehow recruited to a company called Homestore, which owned Realtor.com where I eventually became a top sales account executive managing the East Coast as my territory.

I went from the worst at sales in the company to the top 10 in the company. I took my sales learnings from my first job selling credit card processing to selling to internet advertising to Real Estate Agents, Brokers, Lenders and those involved in the real estate transaction.

After just a few years, I left Realtor.com (for no reason whatsoever, I loved working there) to start my own company. Young, dumb, no plan, no office, no product, no smart idea, but I had one thing to offer… I decided to help realtors manage and promote their listings on the internet.

Growing up, I went to private school and was very blessed that my parents cared about my education. Somewhere around 9th grade, my perspective on the education system changed. I realized through books and YouTube videos that the life trajectory of a lot of the people I looked up to, was not aligned with what I wanted in life.

I was never a fan of what was taught in schools. Instead of religiously following what was being taught in high school, I self-educated in business, personal development, and leadership. When I was fifteen, I tried out various online businesses. I failed miserably at first. At this time I was very much into Fitness and I tried to sell training and diet plans. I managed to sell a few plans to my classmates for like $50, but it never really amounted to anything and most importantly it wasn't scalable.

After that, I tried stock trading and the likes. That too didn’t really work for me. One day I stumbled across SMMA. I was so intrigued by the concept, so I went ALL IN. I didn’t care what people thought. I was going to make it big here. I needed some proof of concept, so I convinced my dad to make me run his restaurant's Facebook Ads. I watched 100’s of videos and read tons of blogs, to know how to run successful ads and we were both pretty stoked about the results.

I knew it was the right business for me, but it was not all gold and green forests. In fact, at the start of my “agency journey,” it was so hard getting my feet on the ground and getting my first few clients after my dad.

I originally fell in love with the online industry when working for a large online classified network. The job was an immense learning experience but once the recession hit, the company decided to lay off the marketing department. I lost the best job I ever had but I was determined to turn the bad into something great.

With the devotion to improve a little bit every single day, one can accumulate incredible improvement and success.

Five days later, I'm on a plane to South America to go on a life changing trip. Four months into my backpacking trip I was on a four-day trek through the incredible Inca trail towards Machu Picchu. By the end of it, I was sitting on top of Wayna Picchu reflecting on my experiences throughout my trip. I have had the most fulfilling time of my life and it finally clicked:

I went to school for audio engineering, initially wanting to produce records for bands and artists. After graduating in 2012, I interned at a big studio in my hometown of Vancouver, and while I learned a lot, I quickly realized that I didn’t have the drive (or financial ability) to show up at the studio at 8am and work (for free) until 4am six or seven days a week for a year or more before moving up into a position that might pay $10/hr and actually start getting paid to work on music.

I went home that night, started a profile on UpWork, got my first client three days later, and within six months had quit my landscaping job and was working for myself full time as a podcast producer.

After interning just a couple of days per week for over a year, while also working full-time at a retail job, I quit the internship and put my dreams of working in the music industry behind me. I worked a number of manual labour jobs including landscape construction and maintenance, tree planting in northern Canada, and others before taking a year off to travel, bicycling across Europe, and backpacking through the Balkans, and Asia.

Both my wife and I are software developers. We decided to start building software that helps bloggers understand the results of their content and its impact on social media. My wife had experience as a blogger and for me, digital marketing is one of my passions, as well as Internet businesses. At the time, I had 14 years of experience in software development with different companies and I felt confident that it was time to build our own project.

My way of managing the business is quite conservative and prudent, I often question whether or not I should have taken a more aggressive path when it came to investments and funding.

It all started as a side project because we both had our respective jobs. Metricool was initially offered at no cost as an experiment. However, in a short time, between 4,000 and 5,000 people had signed up, which encouraged us to make the jump and test a new business model based on a Premium subscription. We included some professional features focused on social media managers and the results were promising. Six months later, we reached a monthly recurring revenue of $3,000 which was the final push to help us decide that it was the right moment to dedicate more time to the project, quit my day job, and start building a team to boost the growth.

The business started with $10,000 that we had earned during the first few months of Metricool. We contributed an additional $10,000 from our family savings and $30,000 that my mother lent us. We wanted to avoid external financing (such as Venture Capital or Business Angels) because with 50k and some recurring revenue we could proceed even if it was a little slower at first.

I have been building websites and doing SEO since around 1998 (yes I’m 39!) which was pre-Google. The good old days of Alta Vista, Excite, keyword stuffing and transparent text on pages!

I studied Software Engineering at University and helped fund this by building websites and doing SEO in the evenings and spare time.

After a few years of employment after leaving University, I co-founded a business that built tools and extensions for Microsoft SharePoint. Part of my role in this business was looking after the marketing website and so I continued to work in the SEO space.

I’ve personally kept a journal for 10 years now, ever since I first went into therapy to recover from PTSD. My mum took her own life 2 years prior to my breakdown, and I never really got to grips with my emotions or how to process everything that had ever happened.

When I started therapy I was still stuck in the mindset that talking about how I felt was not something I should do. So talking therapy was the most unnatural experience for me. So to help, my therapist recommended I tried journaling – as a way of privately thinking about how I felt and what was on my mind. It was a game-changer of a moment for me.

My mum took her own life 2 years prior to my breakdown, and I never really got to grips with my emotions or how to process everything that had ever happened.

My day job is a travel editor for a national newspaper in the UK, which I absolutely love. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, I was put on furlough at the beginning of May.

The great thing about launching a newsletter as a subscription product is that the overheads are low - or in my case, zero. The only thing I had to give up was my time, and I had plenty of it.

That month coincided with lots of journalists around the world getting laid off. Needless to say, I was seriously worried about whether or not I’d have a job by the end of the furlough period and how I’d make up the difference in income.

I started my business in 2015 when I was made redundant as a result of business restructuring. Luckily for me, someone who I knew through a past business relationship in the industry heard about this and head-hunted me as a contractor to run his PPC campaigns. So I walked straight from redundancy into a contracting position.

I’d recommend making plans and setting targets. If you just work without something to aim for you’ll just coast along and without a sense of achieving things you’ll struggle.

In a sense I hadn’t planned on becoming a business owner, it just sort of happened naturally. Had I never been made redundant, I might still be an employee.

Hello, my name is Arsen Sultanyan. I am the founder and CEO of Digital Caramel company. I have been in the digital business since 2006 when we just started with software production, and I was engaged in promoting and selling the product online.

At the moment, our company generates $150,000 monthly revenue, and this is not our endpoint. We are constantly working on improving the quality of services, expanding the geography of service delivery, and developing other technological solutions that will further increase the monetization of websites.

Hi, my name is Ľubomír Lajoš and I'm the CEO of UXtweak - a user research platform. Simply said, our platform can tell you if your users like your website if they can use it, or find what they are looking for.

We launched UXtweak.com about a year ago and so far we have MRR 60k without any external investments. To be sincere, we only have some investment from ourselves as I also own one of the biggest marketing agencies in Slovakia.

Hi, I’m Philip Taylor, CPA, blogger, and personal finance nerd living in Texas. I created FinCon, an annual conference and trade show for content creators and brands in the personal finance niche.

My name is Chelsea Rhoads and I am the CEO/Co-Founder of pup-eeze, the smartest device on four legs. pup-eeze is a wellness tracker for dogs that tracks activity, monitors location and automates our dog’s lives by connecting them with hundreds of smart home devices giving ourselves and our dogs the ability to monitor, maintain and change the environment of the home if we’re concerned about separation anxiety or well-being.

We’ve had great success speaking with and testing the wellness tracker among those who love their dogs and love technology. We thought, “we bring our dogs on every other journey with us, why not include them in the technology journey as well?” With the overwhelming support from the technology community we were able to strategically partner with an emerging leader in the IoT enterprise solution field; Fathym.

Hey everyone! My name is Tim Bennetto and I’m the founder of Pallyy, a social media scheduling platform built for social media agencies and managers.

Only i­n the recent months did Pallyy start to gain some traction, with almost 100% growth happening in just the last 3 months.

My name is Nicholas Daniel-Richards, and I co-founded ShipHero in 2013, along with my partner Aaron Rubin.

We also provide outsourced eCommerce fulfillment for stores that want us to handle their warehousing and shipment of orders through our in-house network of owned warehouses. In the seven years since our founding, we bootstrapped the business and grew revenues from zero to $30 million annually, with only $435,000 in outside capital investment (no VC money raised to date). We process over $5 billion of e-commerce gross merchandise volume (GMV) annually, which is more than Shopify at the time of its IPO.

Hello! I am Mark Thomas, the managing director of the Thomas Hemingway Group of companies and CEO of EventBookings, which I founded in 2017.

Fast forward to today, we are now running the business with 25 employees and are currently on track to reach our next revenue target of $1M.

Hi! I’m Jordhy Ledesma, founder, and CEO of Bitfari. We are creating the largest advertising network in the world and have bootstrapped the business to a 70M fully diluted market cap valuation in less than six months using the latest technologies, crowdfunding, and cryptocurrencies.

Our customers are advertisers, billboard operators, and mall shoppers. We provide something of value for each. In most cases, this is saving and for this purpose, we cut out multiple middlemen and keep no commissions on most transactions.

My name is David Tile. I own and operate a Content Writing Service, under the banner Article-Writing.co.

We don’t consider ourselves a content marketing firm. But a firm dedicated to the business of writing. Project management offers most often attached to marketing agencies. We work against marketing briefs delivering content on time and under budget.

Hey! I’m Brice Gump, the founder, and CEO of Major Impact Media, a hybrid agency/education company.

We’ve worked with dozens of companies over the years – from business coaches to international personal development gurus – to implement traffic systems that have acquired thousands of customers and generated over $5,800,000 in online sales for their businesses.

Hey there! I’m Jeremy Enns, the founder and Storyteller In Chief at Counterweight Creative, a podcast production and strategy agency.

I started the company 3 years ago, in 2016 with one client, making $15/hour and have grown into a team of 10 contractors producing more than 30 shows per week with revenue of over $10K/mo.

Hi! I’m Suan, Co-Founder of Porterhouse. Porterhouse is a mass-texting service that lets you text large groups from your cellphone number with a single click. After about 1.5 years in business, Porterhouse brings in $2,400 in monthly revenue.

What makes Porterhouse different from other mass-texting services is that we send authentic blue iMessages to iOS recipients instead of green SMS, and texts come from your cell phone number instead of a different provided number.

Hi there, my name is Robb Fahrion and I am the Co-Founder and Partner of Flying V Group, a digital marketing and advertising company located. We service clients all across the globe and help them grow their business through the power of the internet. My passion is for business and there is nothing more rewarding than helping others grow their businesses and share in their successes.

Today, Flying V Group employs 12 people, has worked with over 300 clients, operates internationally, and is on pace to double revenue for the second year in a row. Crazy to think about being here when my brother and I both got up and quit our corporate jobs and put $5k into the project to get us started!

I’m the Founder & CEO of MonetizeMore. I started MonetizeMore in 2010 with the goal to build a bootstrapped business that would dramatically increase ad revenues for publishers.

I am a pioneer in ad optimization covering areas like AdSense / Ad Exchange (AdX), Google Ad Manager (GAM), header bidding and ad network optimization. I have always believed in empowering publishers to increase their ad revenues more efficiently and effectively via articles, videos and technology.

My name is Matthew Roberts, and with the help of co-founder Nathan Anderson and our great friend Benjamin White, we started our company PEAR and launched our first product: PEAR Cards.

We are based in Chico, CA and are currently awaiting our first order of PEAR Cards. They should be here sometime in the January - February time frame, and we are so excited to finally hold them in our hands & share them with the rest of the world!

My name is David Tile. I own and operate a Content Writing Service, under the banner Article-Writing.co.

We don’t consider ourselves a content marketing firm. But a firm dedicated to the business of writing. Project management offers most often attached to marketing agencies. We work against marketing briefs delivering content on time and under budget.

Hello there! My name is Hope Horner, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Lemonlight, an on-demand video production company that offers brands and agencies access to high-quality affordable video content nationwide.

We’ve built Lemonlight as an entirely self-funded business. We haven’t taken any outside capital since we launched the business in 2014. We’re on track to hit 6M in sales this year and we’ve grown the team to 45 full-time employees. We’ve been recognized in dozens of major publications, and we were awarded in Inc 5000 and Entrepreneur 360 for three years in a row.