5000th Post: Start Your Online Business with No Money

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