Building Your Business When You're on a Budget

Most “How to Start an Internet Business” guru’s will tell you that it takes time to build a business. That you shouldn’t expect to make any profit from your business for the first year or two.

That sucks. Who wants to slave away at their day job and then come how tired and drained and spend a few more hours building a business that won’t make them any money for a long, long time? I wouldn’t have started an online business if that was the case. That’s way too long to work on something without any kind of reward or return.

When I started my very first internet based business I had positive cash flow within a few months, not years! In fact I pulled out cash from my internet business not long after I started it.

I didn’t have a huge budget or tons of cash on hand to do pull off that feat either. I had a small amount of money I invested in the business to get it going.

So how did I do this when every other guru out there says that it can’t be done?

It’s not difficult to set up a website, phone line, hosting, email system and all the other resources you need to start a new business.  Even if you don’t have any products or services of your own to sell, that shouldn’t hold you back from getting up and running since there are so many quality affiliate programs out there now. In the beginning your biggest hurdle will be finding and then convincing people to buy what you have. It will be what the majority of your budget (or should) goes towards.

Other internet business guru’s can’t seem to overcome this hurdle in any kind of timely fashion. It’s why they say you shouldn’t expect to turn a profit for years.

Like I said before I didn’t have this problem. I was able to take cash out of my business early on because I was able to find customers quite easily. Best of all I did it with only a small budget.

How did I do this ?

First thing I did was create content. I wrote articles, news journals, reports, created audio recordings, etc. And I wrote it about a topic I loved and knew well-making money on the internet. It was the “theme” of my website and backbone of my business. My goal in each piece was to teach a lesson all while establishing myself as an expert in the field. Then I posted the information to every media outlet I could find—for free! I didn’t ask for a dime in return for my free content.

I even gave the content away to my competitors! I actually encouraged them to post my articles and reports on their website. At this point in the game it’s more important to establish yourself as an authority figure in your field than it is to dominate your competitors.

The thing I did to make sure this strategy would generate customers for me was to put a link somewhere in the content or at the end of the article that directed the customer to my website. You see after reading an insightful article that demonstrates command of a subject, people naturally want to hear more of what you have to say on the topic. Those visitors viewed me as an expert and naturally came to my site for more advice and to buy products from me on the subject.

I told you earlier that I put all of the content I generated on my own site as well as other sites. I put an ad for the most interesting report I wrote on the homepage of my site. I offered to email it to anyone for free. This allowed me to collect email addresses and build a list. Since I was drawing people in from all my competitors with my free articles I knew they were interested in learning more about my website’s USP, making money online. I also knew that they were most likely buyers of products that taught them how to do just that. So now I had a continually growing email list of people who I knew were interested in what I was selling. It was perfect.

In a very quick amount of time I had a sizeable email list which played a huge part in generating cash for my growing business.  So I went back to my competitors who I had given away the free content to and asked to do a swap with them. In the internet marketing arena a swap is when two companies run ads to each other’s email lists without paying for them. See when you want to run an ad to a competitors email list you have to buy their list and this can cost big bucks. The genius of the ad swap is that you get to do that for free. Any sales you make off their list, you keep the money without giving the other company a cut of. The same goes for them, any money they make off running the ad to your list they keep without giving you a cut. It’s a win-win situation.

Another strategy that got me some free traffic was ranking in the search engines. To do this you’ve got to do some SEO, or search engine optimization. Now don’t freak out at that technical sounding term. It’s not as difficult to do as most internet guru’s will have you believe.

If you’ve got a big marketing budget, say several thousand dollars, then just go ahead and buy pay per click search ads. You’ll save yourself a bit of time. But if your budget is a bit more modest then keep on reading to find out how to do it the organic way.

If you want to optimize your website so that it ranks well you need to find out what keywords are the most searched for in your field.  Download Google’s free Keyword Tool by signing up for Google Adwords. Don’t worry you don’t have to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money with them when you set up an account. Once you figure out what keywords people are searching for relating to your field you can then tag them (read: optimize) on your site. This will help you jump to the top of the search results page. For example if you have a website that sells boats and yachts you should be tagging those words plus your location. That way anytime someone searches for ‘boats for sale in Miami, Florida’ your site will potentially be one of the first results listed in the results. The higher you rank on the results page, the more customers will visit your site and the more chances you have of making a sale.

You should also be keyword tagging your content to improve your SEO results. Search engines love sites that post fresh content frequently. And they show their appreciation by ranking you highly. In fact search engines naturally (read: that means you don’t pay for the high ranking status) rate sites that post new information frequently higher on their results pages than sites that don’t update their sites on a frequent and regular basis.

The next time you see some “expert” or guru telling you that it will take years to build a profitable business call Bullshit! It can be done so much quicker than any of them ever say. They want to keep you from making any kind of profit with your own business so you’ll keep coming back to them to buy more products about how to make money online. Stop by here next Monday to find out another way to be successful online. Who knows you could be the next internet millionaire!

Enjoy!

Ethan Warrick


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