How to Bootstrap your list

Hello fellow entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs, and friends

In this post I want to cover how to effectively bootstrap your business ideas, both online and off.

First off - What is BootStrapping?

BootStrapping is when you control how you spend your time and money, focusing on the initial key activities necessary to get your startup/online business off the ground and hopefully profitable. By growing your business "lean" you reduce the risk of financial problems should you have trouble getting the necessary cash flow to sustain your venture.

Bootstrapping is not a strategy exclusive to business - for example you have a job and you are funding your college education out of pocket. To be able to afford tuition and associated costs you would likely have to cut back on unnecessary expenditures in order to improve you earning ability in the future.

For those who are new to internet marketing, bootstrapping your side projects reduces the pain you might feel if one happens to fail (likely).

So here are the general guidelines to Boot Strapping -

1. Understand your necessary expenses - depending on the sort of business you are starting this could vary but the start up costs for most websites are usually-
- a domain and hosting
- 3rd party email marketing/management software (aweber)
If your going for a content based business this will get you plenty far. Your focus should be on what needs to be bought, and knowing what you yourself can do to avoid paying for extras.

Example - instead of purchasing solo ads or some sort of advertisement to begin getting people to your list, try going on forums where your target market frequents and begin helping others with useful content and answering their questions in threads. Also browsing groups on facebook and google who might be interested in the content your are writing.

I understand this method will not work for all business models but you can see how this can make your attempts to validate whether on not you have a viable business cheaper.

2. The second part of BootStrapping is understanding what are the key activities which grow your business, and making it a point to do those every day. As your business grows the activities required to sustain growth might change.

To continue with the example of someone trying to build a list, the main activities you would focus on would be:
-creating as valuable as content possible for your subscribers
-promoting the list (via forums, youtube, article directories, Facebook,Google groups, etc... for free)
-finding a relevant and valuable product to promote as an affiliate through your list(this should only be done once you have an audience interested in what you have to say, and once you have some sort of trust established).

3. always practice good time management: commit to a master to-do list which includes everything from your regular day to day activities, as well as those key marketing activities that will get your business up and going.

Seth Godin said : "There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you've built a mountain."


This post was rather rushed, but I hope it helps people none the less. Thanks