5000th Post: Start Your Online Business with No Money

23 replies
My 5000th post so I thought I would help people starting out without a lot of disposable income to get their business started with little or no money.

But, remember this, you will need money to run your business. So while working on the following steps you need to earn some money, even if you have to take a job you do not like, or take a second job. Do whatever but be advised you will need at least $100.00 to get going.

Learn to use google. What I mean is learn to ask the right questions. "How do I make money online?" while it might be what you are looking for the question is too vague you need to be asking questions like "What are the steps to creat a successful online business?" or "What are the elements of a successful sales funnel?" THis has no cost to you.

Niche Research. One of the first things to do is determine what niche you want to get into, there are literally hundreds if not thousands. According to many the following list are the most profitable, some will have differing opinions but for the sake of this conversation they are:

1. Fitness, Diet, Weightloss
2. Health
3. Dating and Relationships
4. Pets
5. Self Improvement
6. Wealth and Investing
7. Make Money Online
8. Beauty and Anti Aging
9. Gadgets and Technology
10 Gaming
11 Personal Finance
12 Prepping

Within all these niches there are many, many sub niches. Use sites like "Nichehacks" and "Affilorama" for loads of done for your niche research. They both offer free memberships.Brainstorm all the niches above, add new ones that you think of, look into all the different sub niche possibilites.

Example: Dating and Relationships> Senior Dating, alternative dating, get your ex back, same sex dating, pick up artist, hook ups, etc. etc.

Niche Research costs you nothing

Domain: Once you have decided on your niche it is time to find your domain. You want a .com you want it to be simple, short, memorable, and brandable. While the amount of available .com domains shrink daily there are still some good ones to be had. If you use "Dotster" to search they have a good suggestions if the one you think of is not available.
There are also free tools for finding a good domain just use google to find them. People still seem to be hooked on the idea of exact match domains or keyword rich domains, do not fall into this trap just find something easy to remember and brandable.

Once you find your domain it will cost you about $15.00

Foundation: Set up your foundation. FIrst and foremost get yourself a new Gmail account to use for your business. With that you will now be able to also set up a youtube channel, adwords account (so you can use keyword planner) google analytics, and any other free tool google offers.

Set up a folder on your computer: I use windows, I am not sure how to do this on Apple computers. But, I set up a folder for my business i.e. "Dating Site" within that folder I have sub folders for "Images" "Articles" "Tweets" "FB posts" "Videos" etc etc. That way when I find a image I want I save to my images folder, then when I finish editing I will save the edited to a folder for where I am going to use it. Example would be "Instagram" then when I post to instagram I have another sub folder within instagram that is labled "Posted" So I will not re-post but I still have the image to use on another social such as pinterest. Set this up and manage the way you feel is easiest and most efficient for you


Bookmarks Folders: I use chrome and firefox and when I set up a niche site I set up folders on my Search engine bookmarks. I would start with a main folder "Dating" then withi that folder I would set up sub folders such as "Forums" "Blogs" "Images" "Affiliate Programs" "Facebook" "Twitter" etc. etc.

Your socials: FB, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, youtube channel. Set up your accounts with all these socials and any others you may want to use. use your business domain as your username with all these, you want to start branding don't you. Use youtube to find tutorials on how to customize these pages.

You can connect your website to these pages later. But for now you can learn the proper way to be social. There are many tutorials to be had on the net on how to properly build your following and be a valuable resourse on all these platforms.

Find forums: Search for forums in your niche and join a few of them and start participating. When I search I usually use this search string. "niche forum powered by vbulletin" You can search without the "powered by vbulletin" part of the search string. I just like to use vbulletin because of it's ease of use. What I do when I find a forum is first, go to the main page and see how many threads and views there are. Second I see if they accept signatures. if there are lots of posts/threads and they accept signatures then I join and start posting,

Find Blogs: Blogs can be a great source for content ideas as well as commenting. Find some blogs in your niche that accept comments. read some of the comments, if the comments are mostly spam then the blog owner is basically absent or does not care, you want to see quality comments, start commenting, make sure your comments provide a valuable contribution to the post and post converstation.

All through the process of setting up your business foundation you should be bookmarking sites, Social profiles, resources, etc.

All this is free


Find products and Networks: Find Affiliate Networks and Products to promote. you will not be able to join most affiliate networks until you have your site up and running but you can research them all for products you want to promote. I would start with Cllickbank and Amazon to find products, there are many others such as share-a-sale clixgalore, commission junction, warriorplus, jvzoo the list goes on. Most have a marketplace so you can search the products and companies available. Put the ones you are interested in into your bookmarks. I would also read and understand all the different TOS for each network.

This cost nothing

Email Marketing: One thing you will learn, if nothing else, from this forum and anyplace else that provides information on internet marketing is "Email Marketing Rules" So for this I want you to use Aweber. Why? because of their knowledge base. You do not need to sign up for Aweber to use this free info. They have a large number of videos from basic setup to andvanced email techniques. Go there and start watching.

Your email sequence. You will want an autoresponder sequence of emails. A mix of value and promotional emails. Do your research and decide on the mix you want. Some people do 100% promotional while others to 50/50 70/30 You decide, whatever you are comfortable with.

Start writing emails. I would want at least 30 to get started. Sent every other day that is approx 2 months worth of emails. If you are promoting affiliate products many vendors provide email swipes. you can use these and re-write them in your own voice. You might have to wait until you have your site up and running before you can access these affiliate pages, but some are available to all. You can also email the vendor and explain you are setting up your business and do not have your site open yet but would like to access the affiliate page. they will probably send you the info you need.

These steps cost you nothing.

Video: With programs like Camstudio and shotcut you can start learning and creating videos. You can even start poplulating your YT channel. Both are free and have tutorials available.

This is Free

Images: You can find images and create images with captions "Memes' with free online resources such as canva and morguefiles. there are many other free image resources, just use google and remember to view and understand the license for images you download. Use quote sites to help create these images.

No cost to you

Logo:
As mentioned above use canva for editing and any of the free image resources you find to create your business logo. Then create the header and profile images for your socials. just google for the sizes you will need for these. Canva has a FB header image tool.

Again this was free to do.


Content: you can research and write articles for your site, tweets, and Facebook page. if you have about 20 articles ready for your site, open the site with 3-5 of the articles then schendule the rest to go live every other day.

this did not cost you anything.

Learn Wordpress: or whatever platform you plan on using for your site. Just do not go the free route. You have your domain so use your own hosting solution for your site. Youtube is a virtual treasure trove of free tutorials for setting up a WP site to customizing. You do not have to worry about paying for a theme you can just use one of the free themes that comes with it and then go to youtube and learn how to customize that theme.

This is Free

Get a paypal account: there are some that can not get a paypal account due to the country you live in or other factors, you will need to research and come up with an alternative. I have not researched them but they are out there. Paypal will be one of your most important tools, some will disagree, sobeit. Once you have your account accepted make sure you take the extra 2 minutes and upgrade to a business account. Most people that get in trouble with paypal are useually conducting business on a personal account.

There are probably other things you can be doing that cost nothing and maybe people reading this can add to it. Other than setting up your folder on your computer, bookmarks, and google account, you can do all the other things in any order you wish. Just doing the things listed here will probably take you the better part of a month, which is plenty of time to earn some money you will need to spend.

Hosting for a year $100.00
Autoresponder service $20.00 per month.
paid plugins, you will probably want a plugin to create squeeze pages and sales pages, look at spending at least $60.00 up to around $200.00
You will probably want to budget for outsourcing such as voiceover, article writing, tweet writing etc. figure around $100.00 to start.

Thanks for listening

al
#5th #business #money #online #post #start
Avatar of Unregistered
  • Profile picture of the author teddyjames
    Al I LOVE YOU! Thanks for this! Especially the niche finder, I've been looking for this!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347666].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by agmccall View Post

    Niche Research. One of the first things to do is determine what niche you want to get into, there are literally hundreds if not thousands. According to many the following list are the most profitable, some will have differing opinions but for the sake of this conversation they are:

    1. Fitness, Diet, Weightloss
    2. Health
    3. Dating and Relationships
    4. Pets
    5. Self Improvement
    6. Wealth and Investing
    7. Make Money Online
    8. Beauty and Anti Aging
    9. Gadgets and Technology
    10 Gaming
    11 Personal Finance
    12 Prepping



    While these are profitable niches, folks shouldn't assume they're by any means the most profitable for each individual person that actually has to run the business.

    To be honest, this is mostly an IMers point of view list which leaves out thousands of other possibilities that can turn a higher profit, again, based on who's running the business.

    I think it's better to have each individual evaluate their own personal wants/needs/likes, this way folks can build a business based on them and not chasing dollar signs.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347679].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author agmccall
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      While these are profitable niches, folks shouldn't assume they're by any means the most profitable for each individual person that actually has to run the business.

      To be honest, this is mostly an IMers point of view list which leaves out thousands of other possibilities that can turn a higher profit, again, based on who's running the business.

      I think it's better to have each individual evaluate their own personal wants/needs/likes, this way folks can build a business based on them and not chasing dollar signs.
      I agree totally with this. But, the post was not about niche selection, The section on niches was more about finding your niche that is why I mentioned nichehacks and affilorama as starting points. Those sites did research on niches not listed. I could have easily listed 10 more niches even more, but like I said, that is not the point of the thread.

      I think it's better to have each individual evaluate their own personal wants/needs/likes
      What you wrote there is really what the thread is about

      al
      Signature

      "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison

      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347749].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author SiteNameSales
    This is a great article. Maybe I'm biased as this, after much trial and error is how I got started. The only thing I would add is that whatever niche you choose, be sure to consider a path to a high ticket item at the end of the sales funnel rainbow if you wish to make a decent profit. While the price of many marketing strategies have risen, affiliate commissions remain pretty much the same over the years. Just something to keep in mind...
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347684].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author DWolfe
    Originally Posted by agmccall View Post

    . Do whatever but be advised you will need at least $100.00 to get going.


    Once you find your domain it will cost you about $15.00


    Hosting for a year $100.00
    Autoresponder service $20.00 per month.
    paid plugins, you will probably want a plugin to create squeeze pages and sales pages, look at spending at least $60.00 up to around $200.00
    You will probably want to budget for outsourcing such as voiceover, article writing, tweet writing etc. figure around $100.00 to start.

    Thanks for listening

    al
    Few things off your point was excellent, but the first $100.00 to start is not set in stone.

    Namecheap - .com cost $10.00 not $15.00 ....If you live in Australia for example and only plan on targetting or marketing there a .au domain maybe all you need.

    Hosting - Hostgator & Stablehost do not require a year payment in advance. You can get by with a basic monthly plan .

    Paid plugins, is not required to get started. Some of the other things can be done in a trade off in personal time instead of money if someone is starting out on a tight budget. But they will have to work hard to get around that! Plus you may want to spend some money on paid traffic.

    All in all a nice 5000 post you contributed a lot of good information in this post. Thank you for taking the time to put this up here on the forum.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347711].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author savidge4
      @agmccall 5000 is a pretty big deal CONGRATULATIONS! Over the years you have given a lot.. and the overall scope of this post in particular shows that. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with the rest of community.

      Trying not to jack the thread.. but this comment I think needs a bit of added...
      Originally Posted by DWolfe View Post

      Namecheap - .com cost $10.00 not $15.00 ....If you live in Australia for example and only plan on targetting or marketing there a .au domain maybe all you need.
      in late October last year ( 2017 ) there was a quiet little change that google made that is pretty unknown to many. Google localized most of its search world wide. If you were to follow the links below and search for something such as " Dentist " you will see YOUR local results will pull up... and NOT results from the prospective countries.

      https://www.google.com ( Google USA )
      https://www.google.de/ ( Google Germany )
      https://www.google.com.au/ ( Google Australia )

      Im not about to say that global reach can not be obtained... but it has been made slightly more difficult. So for those of us in the states.. its not such a big deal.. but to others around the world it can be.

      Look at a country such as Germany as an example... it is surrounded by 9 countries? ( i think ) your possible reach is greatly reduced when borders are now considered in serving results.
      Signature
      Success is an ACT not an idea
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347766].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author savidge4
        Originally Posted by palanquin View Post

        https://www.google.ca/ ( Google Australia )!!!!!!!!!!

        Hmmmm Try .com.au ( Google Australia )
        Australia.. Canada.. they are all common wealth countries.. my bad! LOL
        Signature
        Success is an ACT not an idea
        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348520].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author smartadset
    This, Wish someone pointed me and shared some valuable information when I started. I really believe this post will help a lot of people just starting out.

    I personally think there are few things on your post that can be skipped ot got by lower cost. Dwolf has pointed some and I'd like to add more if possible.

    1- The hosting fees are a bit higher in your description, some of hosting providers charge less than $30 a year for a host with one single domain, I know the quality isn't the highest one but still, something you can start with and pay less. If we want to be honest , Hostgator is one of the creppiest companies regarding support.

    2- Wordpress offers a few built-in solutions so you don't even have to use an autoresponder. A couple of plugins I've used in the past were very great while sending some emails campaigns. You just have to find a good SMTP provider.

    3- Dwolf talked about the domain price , $10 is sure a good start since you get a 1 Year Free Whois Guard from Namecheap, But 1and beat that with their $1-$5 .com domain. I know it's just for the first year and that the reg fees can be higher but still, great as a start.

    4- Another great thing to add is a proper SSL ( I personally don't see the use of it since your payment is handled by 3th parties, but today having it is important), so again with Cloudflare you can get one for free through their Flexible plan.

    Now, all what I've pointed is the way people can get their assets & tools for a lower price. Having a strategy with a marketing plan is the second and PRIME step and even with the most advanced tools you can't get your business to improve if you don't know where you're going or what you're doing ( this includes having a global understanding of your niche and getting to know who you're customers/visitors are.)


    Thanks OP for the great share. In my perspective I really liked the way you put things together very organized and surely helpful.

    Cheers
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347744].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author agmccall
    @DWolfe and @smartadset I agree 100% with your analysis on costs I used slightly higher estimates based on what I pay. I use namecheap and my domains are $13.00 with whois guard. As well the hosting I currently have is the middle for Wordpress hosting While you can pay monthly at other hosts I think it is important for someone starting out to have a decent budget. So the more you save the more you have for other things. I would rather see people budget high rather than budget for the cheapest.

    Just my opinion and Both your opinions are just as valuable Thanks

    al
    Signature

    "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison

    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11347746].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author palanquin
    "Dotster" to search they have a good suggestions,................

    Brilliant! You have no idea how much time and drama that saved me. Seven domains later I'll finish reading your post! Thankyou.

    https://www.google.ca/ ( Google Australia )!!!!!!!!!!

    Hmmmm Try .com.au ( Google Australia )
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348038].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author JohnVianny
    Very interesting tutorial indeed.

    Althought i think that for a totally newbie it's better focusing on delivering traffic to the opt in page and build a list using all these streams, concentrating all the efforts in collecting emails.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348439].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author ryanbiddulph
    Hi Al,

    Excellent post.

    We can do most of these things without dropping a dime. The chief investment is time and energy, spent over years, to make things pop over the long haul.

    Many folks have a tough time getting started due to having low funds. You prove how this should never be a stumbling block.

    Well done dude.

    Ryan
    Signature
    Ryan Biddulph helps you to be a successful blogger with his courses, manuals and blog at Blogging From Paradise
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348525].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author cearionmarie
    This is a gold mine! Thanks for sharing this one. This one certainly opened new ideas for me.
    Signature

    Cearion Uy - Marketing Advisor
    www.influencerauditor.com

    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348723].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author scorpio9
    Great article, and all good sensible steps to get going and later master, but what about traffic, I did not see any specific mention of this in the article. I think this is probably where most people fail, if you don't get traffic all of the other stuff is just going to waste.

    Lee
    Signature
    BeaconSites - Websites Designed For Lead Generation & Conversions
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348907].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Steve B
    Congratulations Al,

    5K posts is a whole lot of effort for probably not a lot of monetary return.

    I hope the members here realize your kindness and effort in answering thousands of posts over the years. I have noticed you usually cut right to the chase without a lot of pretense or fluff ... a good thing for busy people.

    Thank you for your years of effort. I have always enjoyed hearing from you when you post. Keep it going ...

    Steve
    Signature

    Steve Browne, online business strategies, tips, guidance, and resources
    SteveBrowneDirect

    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11348946].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Nottyqueen
    Really Helpful Articles!!!
    Signature
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11349173].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author BrilliantGG
    Congratulation 5000 posts! Thank for sharing Very helpfull Good post!!!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11351813].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author kate50
    You can start your business online with no money with just these simple steps. You should build a business model and plan. Choose some products to see online. Build an Ecommerce website within 5 minutes. Upload your products and start selling.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11352255].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author radu
    Originally Posted by agmccall View Post

    Niche Research. One of the first things to do is determine what niche you want to get into, there are literally hundreds if not thousands. According to many the following list are the most profitable, some will have differing opinions but for the sake of this conversation they are:

    1. Fitness, Diet, Weightloss
    2. Health
    3. Dating and Relationships
    4. Pets
    5. Self Improvement
    6. Wealth and Investing
    7. Make Money Online
    8. Beauty and Anti Aging
    9. Gadgets and Technology
    10 Gaming
    11 Personal Finance
    12 Prepping
    Great advice..thanks for sharing..It's good to be aware of the top 10 most profitable niches online ..however there is one piece of advice missing here..

    For being able to stay motivated and overcome all the problems/obstacles in this journey you need to choose a niche you feel it gives you energy and you're enthusiastic about.. otherwise it's gonna be difficult to stick with it in the long term...I know this from personal experience..and probably there are a lot of internet marketers on this forum that know what it means to create content in a niche you don't give a s#%t but you still force yourself to do it anyway...

    A great example is how most of the successful bloggers are building a great site leading later to launching their own products based on what their followers want to know more and so on.. They don't do any niche research before starting their blog...they just start writing about what they like, about what they feel they can contribute with real insights, with a lot of value for the online community,...they don't care about money at first...or about ohh .."maybe I should go into fitness/health niche because there is loads money to be made?!"
    They simply provide value on a consistent basis..we all read these blogs with maximum pleasure because they're sharing real stuff..real stories and authenticity..I'm pretty sure we are all sick and tired of all the sites that create boring articles and try to sell all kind of stuff (more or less valuable) not only on Google but on email and social media as well...
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11357923].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author mmlux
    Thank you much acmccall for your very informative post on how to start an online business!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11363702].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author mostCPA
    An awesome quick start guide.
    remember, whatever business you decide to start you must have a passion for what you are doing. Without enthusiasm and excitement, you'll become bored and unmotivated, and ultimately it will fail. Don't just follow the money, remember to follow your heart.

    Thank YOU!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11363773].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author DURABLEOILCOM
    Originally Posted by agmccall View Post

    My 5000th post so I thought I would help people starting out without a lot of disposable income to get their business started with little or no money.

    But, remember this, you will need money to run your business. So while working on the following steps you need to earn some money, even if you have to take a job you do not like, or take a second job. Do whatever but be advised you will need at least $100.00 to get going.

    Learn to use google. What I mean is learn to ask the right questions. "How do I make money online?" while it might be what you are looking for the question is too vague you need to be asking questions like "What are the steps to creat a successful online business?" or "What are the elements of a successful sales funnel?" THis has no cost to you.

    Niche Research. One of the first things to do is determine what niche you want to get into, there are literally hundreds if not thousands. According to many the following list are the most profitable, some will have differing opinions but for the sake of this conversation they are:

    1. Fitness, Diet, Weightloss
    2. Health
    3. Dating and Relationships
    4. Pets
    5. Self Improvement
    6. Wealth and Investing
    7. Make Money Online
    8. Beauty and Anti Aging
    9. Gadgets and Technology
    10 Gaming
    11 Personal Finance
    12 Prepping

    Within all these niches there are many, many sub niches. Use sites like "Nichehacks" and "Affilorama" for loads of done for your niche research. They both offer free memberships.Brainstorm all the niches above, add new ones that you think of, look into all the different sub niche possibilites.

    Example: Dating and Relationships> Senior Dating, alternative dating, get your ex back, same sex dating, pick up artist, hook ups, etc. etc.

    Niche Research costs you nothing

    Domain: Once you have decided on your niche it is time to find your domain. You want a .com you want it to be simple, short, memorable, and brandable. While the amount of available .com domains shrink daily there are still some good ones to be had. If you use "Dotster" to search they have a good suggestions if the one you think of is not available.
    There are also free tools for finding a good domain just use google to find them. People still seem to be hooked on the idea of exact match domains or keyword rich domains, do not fall into this trap just find something easy to remember and brandable.

    Once you find your domain it will cost you about $15.00

    Foundation: Set up your foundation. FIrst and foremost get yourself a new Gmail account to use for your business. With that you will now be able to also set up a youtube channel, adwords account (so you can use keyword planner) google analytics, and any other free tool google offers.

    Set up a folder on your computer: I use windows, I am not sure how to do this on Apple computers. But, I set up a folder for my business i.e. "Dating Site" within that folder I have sub folders for "Images" "Articles" "Tweets" "FB posts" "Videos" etc etc. That way when I find a image I want I save to my images folder, then when I finish editing I will save the edited to a folder for where I am going to use it. Example would be "Instagram" then when I post to instagram I have another sub folder within instagram that is labled "Posted" So I will not re-post but I still have the image to use on another social such as pinterest. Set this up and manage the way you feel is easiest and most efficient for you


    Bookmarks Folders: I use chrome and firefox and when I set up a niche site I set up folders on my Search engine bookmarks. I would start with a main folder "Dating" then withi that folder I would set up sub folders such as "Forums" "Blogs" "Images" "Affiliate Programs" "Facebook" "Twitter" etc. etc.

    Your socials: FB, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, youtube channel. Set up your accounts with all these socials and any others you may want to use. use your business domain as your username with all these, you want to start branding don't you. Use youtube to find tutorials on how to customize these pages.

    You can connect your website to these pages later. But for now you can learn the proper way to be social. There are many tutorials to be had on the net on how to properly build your following and be a valuable resourse on all these platforms.

    Find forums: Search for forums in your niche and join a few of them and start participating. When I search I usually use this search string. "niche forum powered by vbulletin" You can search without the "powered by vbulletin" part of the search string. I just like to use vbulletin because of it's ease of use. What I do when I find a forum is first, go to the main page and see how many threads and views there are. Second I see if they accept signatures. if there are lots of posts/threads and they accept signatures then I join and start posting,

    Find Blogs: Blogs can be a great source for content ideas as well as commenting. Find some blogs in your niche that accept comments. read some of the comments, if the comments are mostly spam then the blog owner is basically absent or does not care, you want to see quality comments, start commenting, make sure your comments provide a valuable contribution to the post and post converstation.

    All through the process of setting up your business foundation you should be bookmarking sites, Social profiles, resources, etc.

    All this is free


    Find products and Networks: Find Affiliate Networks and Products to promote. you will not be able to join most affiliate networks until you have your site up and running but you can research them all for products you want to promote. I would start with Cllickbank and Amazon to find products, there are many others such as share-a-sale clixgalore, commission junction, warriorplus, jvzoo the list goes on. Most have a marketplace so you can search the products and companies available. Put the ones you are interested in into your bookmarks. I would also read and understand all the different TOS for each network.

    This cost nothing

    Email Marketing: One thing you will learn, if nothing else, from this forum and anyplace else that provides information on internet marketing is "Email Marketing Rules" So for this I want you to use Aweber. Why? because of their knowledge base. You do not need to sign up for Aweber to use this free info. They have a large number of videos from basic setup to andvanced email techniques. Go there and start watching.

    Your email sequence. You will want an autoresponder sequence of emails. A mix of value and promotional emails. Do your research and decide on the mix you want. Some people do 100% promotional while others to 50/50 70/30 You decide, whatever you are comfortable with.

    Start writing emails. I would want at least 30 to get started. Sent every other day that is approx 2 months worth of emails. If you are promoting affiliate products many vendors provide email swipes. you can use these and re-write them in your own voice. You might have to wait until you have your site up and running before you can access these affiliate pages, but some are available to all. You can also email the vendor and explain you are setting up your business and do not have your site open yet but would like to access the affiliate page. they will probably send you the info you need.

    These steps cost you nothing.

    Video: With programs like Camstudio and shotcut you can start learning and creating videos. You can even start poplulating your YT channel. Both are free and have tutorials available.

    This is Free

    Images: You can find images and create images with captions "Memes' with free online resources such as canva and morguefiles. there are many other free image resources, just use google and remember to view and understand the license for images you download. Use quote sites to help create these images.

    No cost to you

    Logo:
    As mentioned above use canva for editing and any of the free image resources you find to create your business logo. Then create the header and profile images for your socials. just google for the sizes you will need for these. Canva has a FB header image tool.

    Again this was free to do.


    Content: you can research and write articles for your site, tweets, and Facebook page. if you have about 20 articles ready for your site, open the site with 3-5 of the articles then schendule the rest to go live every other day.

    this did not cost you anything.

    Learn Wordpress: or whatever platform you plan on using for your site. Just do not go the free route. You have your domain so use your own hosting solution for your site. Youtube is a virtual treasure trove of free tutorials for setting up a WP site to customizing. You do not have to worry about paying for a theme you can just use one of the free themes that comes with it and then go to youtube and learn how to customize that theme.

    This is Free

    Get a paypal account: there are some that can not get a paypal account due to the country you live in or other factors, you will need to research and come up with an alternative. I have not researched them but they are out there. Paypal will be one of your most important tools, some will disagree, sobeit. Once you have your account accepted make sure you take the extra 2 minutes and upgrade to a business account. Most people that get in trouble with paypal are useually conducting business on a personal account.

    There are probably other things you can be doing that cost nothing and maybe people reading this can add to it. Other than setting up your folder on your computer, bookmarks, and google account, you can do all the other things in any order you wish. Just doing the things listed here will probably take you the better part of a month, which is plenty of time to earn some money you will need to spend.

    Hosting for a year $100.00
    Autoresponder service $20.00 per month.
    paid plugins, you will probably want a plugin to create squeeze pages and sales pages, look at spending at least $60.00 up to around $200.00
    You will probably want to budget for outsourcing such as voiceover, article writing, tweet writing etc. figure around $100.00 to start.

    Thanks for listening

    al
    This is excellent advice. The easiest free way to start making money is to become an Ebay and Amazon seller. You can easily sell your unwanted items or better yet go to garage sales and find low cost items to resell.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11363988].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Nicholas Ngechu
    Thank you, this is a very helpful information.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11364082].message }}
  • [DELETED]
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[11426483].message }}
Avatar of Unregistered

Trending Topics