The beauty of creating an online business is that you can start with a very low budget or no budget at all. So at that time, the answer to the question: do you have to spend money to make money online? is not. However, if you don’t have start-up cash, you’ll have to put in a lot of time to get your business off the ground. Below I am going to share with you how you can start from scratch and generate some startup capital that you can then invest to create a successful online business for yourself.
How to generate start-up capital
I call this seed money seed money because this money will not be for your personal use, but to invest/seed into your online business so that you can earn a more profitable reward later on. The fact is, you want to run a successful online business, but you don’t have money to invest. So you need to get this money from somewhere.
To earn some start-up capital, I recommend doing some freelance work. Things you can do include: writing content, graphic design, coding, customer service, data entry, voiceover, or video. You can sign up on websites like iwriter.com, rentacoder.com, fiverr.com, odesk.com, and elance.com for free and bid on jobs. In the early stages, you may need to offer some free services to get some reviews of your work. Once you have great reviews, you will get many more jobs that will allow you to grow your startup capital.
Invest your startup capital to grow a successful online business
Once you have some start-up capital, you can start running a business where you no longer have to trade time for money. Doing freelance work can pay a good amount of money, but it’s pretty much the same as an offline job where you get paid every time you work. Worse still, you have to meet strict deadlines or else you will have some unhappy customers who will leave some negative reviews about your services.
Therefore, it is paramount to invest your startup capital to create a more automated and hands-off business. First, you will need to choose a market to enter. You can do the research yourself, or you can pay someone to do it with your seed money. When you find a profit, great profit potential, your next investment will be a domain name and hosting.
If you are new to marketing, you can also outsource the creation of your website and sales funnel. Once all of that is in place, you can start driving traffic to your funnel, testing and tweaking as you go. This is how you build a successful internet marketing business from scratch, even if you don’t have money to start.