Your one time costs to start up?

Hey Jason ...

The only real tools you need to start is hosting, a domain and an autoresponder.

The rest of the stuff is nice to have , but not a must

Shawn

I've never used any of these things (or their equivalents).

Almost nothing. I bought a couple of domain-names and hosting, and an initial free (or $1) month with an autoresponder. That's all.

I don't (and wouldn't) pay money for anything to do with SEO. (I have done sometimes in the past, and it was among my many mistakes). I don't believe in it. I'd advise you not to put time and effort - let alone money - into trying to attract "organic SERP's" traffic, for two main reasons: first, it's very precarious and makes your business Google-dependent, and any business that's Google-dependent is no more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident (or even a potential disaster), as so many Warriors have been finding out over the last year or two, some of them to their very great cost; secondly, for me, search engine traffic has been uniformly the worst-converting traffic out of everything I've ever tried in 8 entirely different niches over the whole of the last 4 years - search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. I admit I do get tons of search engine traffic to all my main sites (because high rankings for multiple keywords happen to be a minor side-benefit of the main targeted traffic-generation method I use to build my business) but I'd certainly hate to have to make a living just from that traffic.

I think that starting an IM business with the assumption that you're going to need to buy, or use, "SEO tools" is probably a mistake.

I have to agree with Alexa here.

The one thing I learned over the years is that when you think that you can get on page 1 or 2 of Google just because you paid some "professional" to get your site ranked high, you are going to learn very fast that this strategy is pertty much useless.

You are just going to waste your time and most of, your money.

On another note, if you are thinking that you can just pay for something once and then make money online each and every month, then you are wrong my friend.

It takes some money to invest into your business. Whether it is an auto-responder, your website hosting, self development tools, or anything else. You need to invest in something to move forward.

Market Samurai and a forum license, just started a discussion forum, see how it goes.

Guys, what good is it to discuss costs when we don't even know what the OP's business model is?

There are a LOT of different "internet marketing" business models out there... some can be implemented for free, and others can be very expensive to implement. It just depends.

So Jason... if you let us know which business model you're interested in, we can give you some answers that are much more relevant to your specific goals.

- Market Samurai
- A few domains and small hosting packages
- A couple paid themes
- A Wacom Bamboo tablet (so that I can do Khan Academy-style videos)
- A logo/header/website designer

Altogether I probably spent about $500, but it's definitely possible to do it more cheaply than I did.

Here's what i think you need to get started:

1) Website
2) Autoresponder

That's it. For products, go to clickbank or some other affiliate program service. Combined that's around $30 a month. Depending on your niche and the price of your product... one sale a month will cover these costs.