46 Ways to Start a Business With No Money

 

Most people who want to start their own business don’t have a ton of money laying around and it’s probably one the most common questions I get emailed about: How can I get started without a lot of cash?
Well I’ve put together a list below of the best ideas I’ve heard and personally used. I hope you find it useful!
The three basic strategies to starting a business without much money are:

• Delay the normal “business starting” activities like incorporating, hiring, renting office or retail space, etc until AFTER your business has started earning money. This is known as bootstrapping.
• Doing everything yourself and spending your personal time instead of hiring an expert. (Takes longer but costs less.)
• Using some neat tricks and little known deals below.

Start With The Easy Stuff: Eliminate Expenses

1. Don’t rent an office! - work from home. Or better yet work from the best free office with locations everywhere: Starbucks. If you need to meet with a client and are worried about seeming small time without an office, don’t be. Just meet them at a restaurant for a lunch meeting. This is what people with the nicest offices do anyway.
2. Don’t hire any employees! - do it all yourself until you have some $ coming in the door.
3. Don’t hire lawyers, technical people, graphic designers, or assistants (see below)

Legal Stuff and Incorporating

1. Get a free lawyer and legal advice from the mentors at Score.org
2. Find a website with a similar legal document and modify it to your needs
3. An LLC is probably the best business structure, but don’t worry about incorporating until you’re earning money, just do a sole proprietorship, you can always incorporate later (you can get it setup with the IRS in just a few minutes by calling them at 800-829-4933)
4. Learn how to do your own financial statements for your business in Excel instead of hiring a CPA or bookkeeper (again you can do this after you’re making money)
5. Take a Quickbooks class at your local community college

Make a website for your business

1. Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left
2. Test out your ideas by writing to a blog, you’ll get feedback on what people like and don’t like
3. Get a free business website at www.wordpress.com or tumblr.com. It won’t be your own domain (it will be something like yourbusiness.wordpress.com) but…
4. When you’re ready to have your own domain, register it at domain.com and add this as a custom domain to your Wordpress or Tumblr site.
5. Get a professional website design for free with a wordpress theme that you can install with a few clicks (no programming knowledge needed)

Getting a Logo

1. Don’t hire a fancy graphic designer. At least not yet. Use LogoYes to create your own logo (or at least get ideas that you can recreate on your own for free)

Accepting Credit Cards

1. Don’t bother with a full merchant account to start off with, they are complicated, come with monthly feeds, and require programming expertise. Instead try a simpler (and much cheaper) solution like Google Checkout or Paypal
2. For a more professional look and a complete shopping cart for only $5/month use E-Junkie, its great and I use it on this site
3. If you have lots of physical products, try a Yahoo Store

Starting a service business where you consult, coach, teach, etc

1. Create several pages on your wordpress site: one for your experience, testimonials, rates, availability, etc
2. Pick a domain name with your #1 keyword in it! (Assuming it isn’t a very competitive keyword you’ll rank on the first page of google within a month or two for that keyword which means customers!) here’s some more info and an example

Creating Info Products

1. Use an ebook template like these from Eben Pagan
2. For print books, self publish it at www.lulu.com and use print on demand (they don’t print a single book until someone buys it which means you have zero up front cost for inventory!)
3. Use a $20 webcam or digital camera to create educational video products
4. Use camtasia ( $200 for PC) or iShowU ($20 for Mac) to record your screen and make great videos like this one. Or record powerpoints and do the voiceover to make great educational products. Update: even cheaper use ScreenToaster.
5. Use a mac to edit your videos (iMovie is free) and you can even produce DVD’s

Before investing in a retail location…

1. Go to a local fair or festival and rent a booth to see if anyone buys your product. Talk to potential customers and get feedback.
2. Try selling it on ebay

Always be learning about business

1. Go to a meetup.com groups in your city related to business/entrepreneurship
2. Read all the best business books by getting them from the library
3. Get 3 of the top 10 books on building wealth for free in PDF
4. Make friends with other entrepreneurs and share material
5. Install the stumble upon toolbar and choose business/entrepreneurship as one of your interests to find all the best videos and talks out there (this is literally like going to a free semester of business school, you get to see all the best speakers and thinkers of our time, and those of the past)
6. Read blogs like this one in google reader

Marketing, free website traffic, and getting your first customer

1. Get 250 full-color business cards for free to hand out to people you meet
2. Post an offer on craigslist
3. Post videos on youtube with links to your website
4. Post the same video to all video sharing sites (Google Video, Yahoo Video, MySpace, Revver, etc) at once with TubeMogul (this is some of the best free marketing you can do)
5. Generate leads by offering an incentive on your website for people to give you their contact info (some incentives that work well: Top 10 reports like the top 10 myths about…the top 10 thing you should know before…etc, videos, audio interviews, one page cheat sheets, free ebooks)
6. Write a good article and send it to more popular websites (include your byline at the bottom). This is also known as doing guest posts and is the #1 thing I used to grow this blog when it first started out.
7. Learn how to use google adwords and spend $10 and see if it brings in at least $10 (if so keep going!)
8. If you can’t afford to get links from expensive directories like Yahoo ($299) use Directory Submitter to get links from hundreds of smaller directories for free
9. Pick a good domain name with your keywords in the domain (use hyphens if necessary). This will help you rank in Google for that keyword and get visitors to your website.
10. Do some basic on page SEO
11. Research what keywords will bring you the most traffic (and are least competitive) with keyword discovery, Wordtracker’s Free Service, and (probably the best option) WordTrackers free trial of their full service (just have to remember to cancel within 7 days to not get charged!)
12. See which keywords are likely to bring buyers (instead of tire kickers)
13. Get more incoming links to your site by creating a Squidoo page (these rank very high in the search engines for some reason!)
14. Send an email to everyone in your email program’s contact list with a short friendly note letting them know you are starting a business and ask if they could forward it to just one or two people who might be interested. Offer something free for the first 10 people. This has an exponential effect because it not only reaches who you know, but everyone who knows who you know (an order of magnitude bigger group of people.)

What did I miss? Please make a comment below.
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Best of luck! Brian Armstrong

Establishing a blog is large effort for anyone.

Establishing a blog is large effort for anyone. Corporate blogs are especially challenging given multiple contributors and groups participating. Whether you’re an individual starting a blog, a start-up, mid-size company or large corporation the steps to promote follow the same path. Promotions for blogging and how you treat the blog are woven together. I’ll outline overarching promotions tactics you can employ to promote your blog and gain wider visibility.
Create topically connected content – The most important part of your blog is the content. Write for the audience you want to target and create content relevant to them not you. David Mercer’s article in Social Media Today, “ Altruism makes cold hard business sense when it comes to social media” is great reference.
Frequency of Content – Frequency is important. There is no magic number here but, I would suggest 3 – 5 times per week is a good place to start. Do not overwhelm yourself. Start with 3 times a week and build up to a higher frequency. Remember, you are not a news provider. No one is expecting you to blog multiple times per day.
Employ SEO - SEO is extremely important and cannot be covered in this post. Make sure you have the basics covered: load time for your site, meaningful file names, mobile version, site navigation, titles to your pages and quality outbound links.
Quality inbound links to your site - Quality inbound links provide the “link juice” to get traffic. Cultivating links is the backbone of SEO. Inbound links, also known as backlinks, which are more significant contributor to SEO since search engines consider them a signal to relevance, Inbound links are hosted by other websites pointing to yours, which makes them hard to create and control. PageRank (PR) is a signal of authority exclusive to Google, is shared with outbound links. If a site with high PR links to your’s, some of that authority is inherited by association.
Social Media – Use social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest to promote your content. Grow and nurture your communities. Posting your blog links to Twitter only isn’t going to garner a lot of interest. Be diverse and part of the communities you decide to participate in.
Submit your posts to blogger sites – Check sites like Technaroti, Mashable, Alltop and others that are relevant to your industry and audience. Remember if your audience is individual investors or financial advisors Mashable isn’t going to work.
Email your posts – This seems redundant but you need to get your content in front of people. They aren’t going to always visit your blog — take the content to them. Make sure you employ a strong email service and be consistent. For example, if you choose Tuesdays as the day to email content and Friday as a roundup of the week stick to it. People will start to expect to see your content. MailChimp, Vertical Response and Emma all have reasonable inexpensive plans.
Press Releases - Use press releases to spread the word about your product and services. Many people wrongly assume that there isn’t much newsworthy happenings at their company, but there are always events that are a gold mine for information such as: new products, completions of projects, announcements of contracts, new partnerships, new personal, awards, industry whitepapers and interviews with company personnel.
Syndication - Syndication is under utilized and I’ll write a follow up post that focuses just on syndication. Find the top ten publishers in your industry that focus on your audience. Rank by site traffic and contact offline to find out how you can establish a relationship for your content to be featured.
Influencer Outreach - This is probably the most important part of your promotions efforts: targeting influencers in your industry. Establish a relationship, find out how you can help them, comment on their blogs and then ask if they would be interested in guest blogging for you. Remember, to do something for them first and ask second.

In one of my next posts I’ll dive deeper into syndication, how to establish and how you can potentially have larger sites feature your content.

Other references you may like:

• Promote Your Blog
• How to Write a Press Release
• 18 Ways to Promote Your Blog Offline
• B2B Blogging – 8 Ways To Promote Your Blog

Increase Traffic in Two Minutes Without Paying a Cent

Increase Traffic in Two Minutes Without Paying a Cent

December 21, 2012 by Johann Beishline

1

Believe it or not there’s a formula that you can use every time to increase the amount of traffic your blog posts get. No, I am not trying to sell you a two thousand dollar Internet success package, but maybe I should be. The formula involves the most read part of your post. You know what that is?[read more]

Believe it or not there’s a formula that you can use every time to increase the amount of traffic your blog posts get. No, I am not trying to sell you a two thousand dollar Internet success package, but maybe I should be. The formula involves the most read part of your post. You know what that is? The headline. On average 8 out of 10 people read the headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of the post. The headline is your chance to leave an impression and make the reader anxious to read more. The formula, taken from Dane Maxwell, should contain three things: The End Result the Customer Wants A Specific Period of Time Address The Reader’s Objections 1. The End Result the Customer Wants Marketers constantly discuss the differences between features and benefits. In your headline it’s especially important to note the distinction. Consider the two following hypothetical ads for a convenience store: Open until 1 a.m. Midnight snack cravings? We’re open. The difference between the two messages is stark. Being open until 1 a.m. is a feature; it simply describes the product or service. While the second ad hints at the feature (being open late), it also describes the benefit that late service has…mainly that you can pick up a bag of crunchy chips at 12 a.m. It’s important to craft your headlines around benefits. What key piece of information will the reader glean from the article and how will it affect their lives? How will it help them be more successful business owners, moms, students, & more? If you can answers these questions in your 100 character headline, you are already hitting it out of the ballpark. 2) A Specific Period of Time If you want to create even more compelling headlines, throw in a deadline. Hot fresh pizza in 30 minutes or less or it’s free. That is the promise that Domino’s built its multi-billion dollar empire on. Why does the statement work? Because it hacks away at uncertainty. Have you ever considered ordering pizza but thought, “oh it will take too long to get here”? Domino’s catch phrase removes that doubt by concretely defining how long it will take for the pizza to reach you. You can increase trust and pique reader interest by acting similarly. Try to incorporate a deadline in your blog post titles. 3) Address The Reader’s Objections Guess what? The reason you are reading this very sentence was probably because of the headline. I made an outrageous statement. I said you could increase your website traffic in two minutes. Your immediate response was probably a sarcastic, “yeah sure” followed by “maybe if I spent a few thousand on ads first.” By anticipating your reaction I was able to remove skepticism by adding in the line “without paying a single penny." By addressing reader objections you can increase the number of people who click on your link as it travels through cold Twitter streams. Following a proven formula will help you consistently create eye-catching headlines. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and blow up your traffic.

Posting your content on our site helps you gain increased visibility

Post Here

Posting your content on our site helps you gain increased visibility, increased promotion, and a larger audience than you might be able to reach on your own. We help our bloggers by providing a community that appreciates great content and access to larger promotional channels, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Our Content is contributed by professionals like you!

The content on this site is contributed by the members of our community and all of it is moderated. That means that nothing submitted is published until it has been reviewed and approved by our editors.
There are two ways to submit your work. The first way is to create posts directly on this site to be published here exclusively. Exclusive posts that meet our standard of quality get preferential treatment in terms of promotion and page position. Alternatively, you can set up your account to take in posts from the RSS feed of your own blog. Whichever method you choose, please review the terms of use for contributed content.

Step 1: Sign up and Login to our site

In order to publish posts on our site, you'll need to have an active account here. User accounts on this site are shared with our sister sites (you can find a list of these on the bottom right of this page). If you have an account on this site or a sister site, login here. If not, sign up here. Once you're complete, you'll be redirected back to this page.

Step 2: Fill out your profile

We like our posts to have a name and a face behind them so we ask that you fill out your profile a bit before we publish your posts.

1. Once you're logged in, click on My Profile on the top right of the page.
2. Now click Edit Profile in the light grey user menu.
3. In order to be published, you need to have a first name, last name, and avatar image. If you're having trouble adding an image, please read our Help page entry on avatars.
4. If you'd like to have information about yourself appear at the end of the post, make sure you fill out the Bio field. Users wishing to connect with you also find it helpful if you add your Website and Twitter handle.
5. Once you've entered all your information, scroll down and click the big, green Save button to make the changes live. Now you're ready to add content!

Step 3: Add content to the site

There are two ways to submit your content to our site: automatically through a valid RSS or Atom blog feed or manually on the site.

Step 3a: Add your existing blog feed

The main benefit to adding your content to our site via a feed is that it each post automatically comes into our system to be reviewed by our editorial team. A few things to keep in mind before you add your feed:

• Your feed needs to provide the complete text of your blog posts in order to be published. Summary feeds will be removed from the system (we will try to notify you of this if it occurs). For more information on setting your feed to full, see our Help page entry on feed settings.
• Incoming feeds can only be attributed to one author. If your feed is a group feed or will have guest posts, they will all be attributed to the user account that added the feed. Consider splitting your feed using Yahoo Pipes or a similar service.
• Incoming posts from feeds are not published automatically, only added to our moderation queue. Feeds that continually provide off-topic posts will be removed without notice.

Step 3b: Add posts to our system manually

We love to partner with bloggers who provide exclusive content to us by posting directly on our site. The benefits for bloggers include:

• Access to our large audience
• Increased visibility and recognition
• Promotion through our network
• Preferential page position

Be aware that material posted directly to our site is moderated for quality just like all the submissions we receive. We encourage anyone interested in posting directly on our site to contact our editorial team to show samples of your past work and let us know the topics of your planned posts. That way we can let you know whether we are likely to publish your work before you've gone through the trouble of creating it. We ask that all posts created directly on our site (if they were created specifically for us) be provided to us on an exclusive basis for a minimum of 14 days after the post is completed, and that authors honor this exclusive time frame even if we do not publish your post immediately.
If you're logged in (do you see your user name on the top right of this page?) and ready to add your proof-read, on-topic post,

Learn How You Can Make Money Promoting Your Squidoo Lenses

Learn How You Can Make Money Promoting Your Squidoo Lenses

It's true! You really can make money promoting your Squidoo lenses and websites if you know the right places. The thing is you have probably seen or heard of these places before, but probably used them for different reasons.

On this lens I'm going to talk about these place and some you may not have heard of. I'm also going to tell you how to use them for not only promoting and backlinking to your Squidoo lenses, but also for making money while doing it.

Lets face it promoting our lenses is a necessary evil if we want to get visitors to them and earn some cash. So it's something you're probably already doing. If you can make money while doing it, wouldn't that make it more fun?

You bet your boots it would.

And by the way, all of the site mentioned on this lens are free to join.

I will mostly be mentioning Squidoo here when talking about promoting and making money, but keep in mind this also goes for any online property.

Contents at a Glance

1. Zujava
2. Wizzley
3. Best Reviewer
4. She Told Me
5. RedGage
6. TipDrop
7. Article Marketing
8. Do You Know Other Ways To Make Money Pro...

Zujava

The Other Squidoo

Zujava is a site that is modeled after Squidoo. Just like Squidoo you can make pages on different subjects or products and make some dough. On Zujava however these pages are called leaves not lenses.

Just like Squidoo, Zujava has modules you can use to create your pages. They don't have quite as many modules, but enough.

Zujava has a ranking system they call buckets, which is like Squidoo's tier system in which the leaves in top three buckets make money from ad revenue.

Right now Amazon is the only affiliate they have. You can add Amazon product sections to your leaf and they have two kinds. There's a group product section where you can add up to five products. Then there's the Amazon product section where you feature just one product.

You can also make money by getting new members to join, which I hope you will do through my link.

This is a fairly new site, but I think it's going to be big and you can get in on the ground floor right now.

So How Do You Promote Your Lens?

So now that you know how you can make money on Zujava, lets talk about promoting your lenses and other web properties.

It's really very simple. You just create a leaf that's related to the lens or site you want to promote. Talk a little about it and add a link to it.

Now you have a leaf that can make you some money and a backlink to your lens.

Click here to join Zujava

powered by Youtube

Wizzley

Yet Another Squidoo Like Site

Wizzley is another Squidoo clone. It is a little older then Zujava so is a bit more established. They also work with more affiliates so you have more ways to make money with them.

Along with Amazon they also work with Google Adsense, Chitika, Zazzle, AllPosters, eBay and VigLink (We'll talk about this in a second). Like Zujava you also make money for bringing in new members.

Wizzley also has more modules to work with then Zujava so it allows you to be more creative. They don't have any fancy name for the pages you create, they just call them what they are, pages

For promoting your lenses just do the same as mentioned for Zujava.

What Is VigLink?

Viglink lets you become an affiliate of some of the biggest online merchants on the web all in one place with just one affiliate link ID. I'm talking merchants like Wal-Mart, Barnes and Nobles, Zappos, Best Buy, TicketMaster and a whole bunch more.

This gives you a wide range of products and services you can promote and make money from.

Click here to join Wizzley.

powered by Youtube

Best Reviewer

One Of The Best Revenue Sharing Sites Around

Best Reviewer is not just a site where you can make money through their Adsense revenue sharing program, you can use their "Tops" format to list affiliate products that you can make money from.

Let me explain just how Best Reviewer works.

It is based on making Tops Lists. So say you want to make a list of the "Top 5" grills. You would write your title, say, "Outdoor Cooking Grills". You don't write the "Top 5", Best Reviewer will add that. So your title will end up looking like this "Top 5 Outdoor Cooking Grills".

You would than write an introduction and an ending and then proceed to list the 5 grills and use your affiliate link to each product in the URL sections.

Okay, now lets say you have a lens on a specific outdoor grill. You can list 4 affiliate grills and use the fifth for a link to your lens.

Once your Top List is published if you're a member of "She Told Me" you can click over and get a link to your new Top List there.

Click here to join Best Reviewer

powered by Youtube

She Told Me

By The Owner Of Best Reviewer

She Told Me, is owned by the same guy that owns Best Reviewer, but they are completely different. She Told Me is more like a social bookmarking site where you write a little snippet related to the page you are linking to.

However, just like Best Reviewer, She Told Me is also a revenue sharing site where you can make money from the Adsense ads shown with your link.

This is an easy backlink to your lenses and an easy way to add to your Adsense revenue.
Click here to join She Told Me

RedGage

Backlinks, Performance Revenue And Bonuses Oh My

What makes RedGage so great is the many ways you can use it to make money and get backlinks.

The way you make money here is through the performance of your content (how many views it gets) and bonuses that are given out to content that they feature. I don't know how they pick content to feature, but I have made a nice amount of money from bonuses. As a matter of fact one of my videos was featured several times.

That leads to the different kinds of content you can upload to RedGage. You can upload videos, pictures, documents, create blog posts or you can just add links.

The cool thing is you can use any of your content from anywhere you have it on the Internet and link back to the original or elsewhere.

I really like RedGage as a backlink source and a way to make money because it's such a nice surprise when I get bonus money. It's like out of the blue, BAM, there it is.

From what I can tell bonuses can vary from $2 to $5. Not to bad.

Click here to join RedGage

This is the video I made that mentioned I got several bonuses for. I made this video when I first joined RedGage.

powered by Youtube

TipDrop

A Twitter Like Microblogging Platform With Revenue Sharing

TipDrop may not be as popular as Twitter, but the one thing that it does that Twitter doesn't that you just might like is, it shares it's ad revenue with it's members. Plus the links you leave there are DoFollow.

Like Twitter you have a limited amount of characters you can write. I don't know how many, but I do believe it's more than Twitter.

Just write a little something about the online property you're linking to and leave your link. Done!

Click here to join TipDrop

Article Marketing

Make Money Promoting On Revenue Sharing Article Directories

Article marketing is one of the ways a lot of us use for backlinking and promoting our lenses. A lot of folks, including myself, use article directories like Ezine Articles and Article Base for article marketing.

These directories offer us quality backlinks and a chance of getting more links from publishers using our articles, with our links, on their sites.

The one thing these directories don't offer is a chance to make money from our articles. Even though they make money from our hard work they don't share that revenue.

Well, below is a list of Article directories that do share the revenue they make with us.

Triond

Triond really has two ways of making money from their site. The Adsense revenue sharing of course and their performance bonuses where you make money for the amount of page views your articles get.

Click here to join Triond

InfoBarrel

Not much to say about InfoBarrel. You write articles, add your link, get published and make some Adsense revenue.

If you don't have a Google Adsense account, once you're a member of InfoBarrel you can signup for one at Google and use your InfoBarrel profile URL as your website.

Oh, and you can also make money from referrals.

Click here to join InfoBarrel

Wikinut

Wikinut has three ways you can earn money from them. Write articles and receive 50% of the ad revenue, get other people to join through your referral link and last, you can get paid to review other people's articles.

Click here to join Wikinut

Excerptz

Excerptz doesn't have a referral program, you simply earn through sharing the Adsense revenue, which is a generous 80%. Not to bad.

Click here to join Excerptz.

TRCB

TRCB stands for "The Red Carpet Broadcast". This site is more like the traditional article directories where you have a resource box at the end of your article where you can add your link.

You make money here through their revenue sharing program. There is no referral program however.

Click here to join TRCB

Squeezing breasts could prevent cancer, best study ever says

Squeezing breasts could prevent cancer, best study ever says

Getting to second base, the holy grail for hormonal boys, is now science: New research has shown that squeezing breasts could prevent malignant breast cells from causing cancer. This doesn’t give pervy dudes license to grope you on the subway, ladies, but it does mean boob-grabbing should be a regular part of your self-care routine (yes, absolutely try it DIY-style). Experiments found that physical pressure led cells back to normal growth patterns, and that even after compression was no longer applied, the malignant cells stopped growing. Spread the word, boob-lovers of the world. [Source]

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