How much money do you need to start an online business?
In this article I’ll talk about what you need to start your own online business
and the costs involved.
The best ways to start making money online with no money
We aren’t all fortunate enough to start off with a bag of money for an online venture.
If you don’t have money to invest in paid marketing or build a brand
(think ecommerce store, mobile app, or SaaS), then your options will be limited
to:
1. creating content, and
2. hiring out your services.
Creating content – There’s a huge demand for content. Whether you spend time on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, reading blogs, or listening to podcasts, these are all forms of content creation.
You make money through content by putting ads on your site, affiliate marketing, or as a medium to rent out your services.
You could start a YouTube channel on how to paint fences, fix cell phones, or teach others how to use an Excel spreadsheet. You could start a blog about any niche topic, with hosting costing around $15 per year.
Becoming a creator of content is all about finding your niche and building your audience. But that’s easier said than done, of course.
If you’re going to go down this content creation route, you need to be an expert in whatever content you’re creating. Some people are talented at putting on make-up and show others how to do it by uploading tutorials on YouTube, and they get millions of views.
Others are good at saving money, so they start financial blogs to help others.
Find your niche and decide the best content format.
Services – When you have limited capital, your other option is to hire out your services over the Internet for a fee. This may be writing, design, web development, SEO, marketing, translation, or script writing – it can be just about anything with sites like Upwork and Freelancer helping you to find clients.
Again, to hire out your services, you’re going to need to have some skills to offer to clients. The quality of your skills will decide the price they pay.
Got no skills? It doesn’t take more than a few weeks of studying to learn the basics of SEO, how to write articles, how to set up Facebook posts, or how to use WordPress.
You don’t just make money online out of thin air; you need to provide value.
Ways to make money if you already have money
Creating content or offering a service is the quickest and easiest way to make money online and is what most people do.
If you have money to spend on building a business, now you’ve got more options.
You can consider drop-shipping or starting your own product line or SaaS tool, or you can fast-track your services by running paid ads.
If you have money to invest in an online business, your money will usually go to one of three places:
- Improving your product or website platform
- Hiring staff
- Paid marketing
Having money opens avenues.
You can now hire staff to do tasks you’re unable to do yourself, like creating video content or designing websites, or to find you leads!
One of the most important things that money buys you is traffic. You can now pay someone to send people to your website.
80% of the battle with an online business is to get targeted traffic to your site.
Finally, money lets you improve your product or website in order to improve sales.
How much money do you need? Well, that really depends, as you can run ads on Facebook for as little as $1 per day. The more money you have, the faster you’ll see results and the more money you’ll make.
Having a marketing budget of $10,000 is going to get you more sales than if you have a marketing budget of $100.
Time and money
Not everyone has money, but we all have the same amount of time: 24 hours each day.
Money just gives you a head start for your business, but the time you invest will be the most important thing.
If you cannot afford to pay for traffic, then use organic methods like forum posts and SEO to drive traffic to your site for free. These methods require more time to implement them compared to paying for traffic, which is normally instant, but you can still get there with hard work.
I hope this articles helps some of the newbies out there who are looking to get started online but aren’t quite sure where to start because they are low on starting capital.
