How I Started An Online Business For Free
How often is something available free of charge?
The answer is very rarely.
Yet few people realize, how easy it is to start an online business with absolutely no money and no product.
In this blog, I will share with you, how I started and the training course I created so you can do the same thing.
Table of Contents
- Why I started an Online Business
- Which Type of Business
- Start An Affiliate Marketing Business with No Cash
- Get the Right Coaching for Where You Are Now
- Getting Started Online
- Multiple Income Streams
Why I started an Online Business
I have a background in the financial industry. I use financial loosely.
I started work, straight from school, with Inland Revenue. I found I liked numbers and quickly moved to the self-employed department where reading and understanding balance sheets and profit/loss statements became a fascination.
I moved overseas and started working in a bank. I loved this job and quickly got several promotions and worked in several departments.
A serious car crash brought everything tumbling down and I soon found myself unable to cope with the pressures of working in the finance industry and had to quit my job.
Fast forward, I have now been an entrepreneur for 30 years. Love the flexibility to do what I want to do when I want to do it.
Online businesses very quickly became a source of income for me.
Which Type of Business
I started studying the wealthiest people in the world and discovered they had one thing in common – Multiple Income Streams.
It was a concept I hadn’t come across before but soon realize the terminology was used out of context by people trying to sell their products and services.
The more I delved into Multiple Income Streams, the more I realized, that I didn’t need to become an expert at just one thing. I could turn hobbies and interests into mini businesses.
Affiliate Marketing became a model that allowed me to thrive.
I developed 3 main strategies and now teach those in my course Affiliate Marketing, Success Guide for Beginners
Start An Affiliate Marketing Business with No Cash
When starting an Affiliate Marketing Business, there are plenty of people who will teach you that you need this platform, you need that platform, advertising, and a budget between $5k – $10k.
I know from experience, that kind of money is difficult to come by. I also know it is not necessary.
You CAN start a successful online business with no cash and no product.
The hardest part about having an online business is not knowing what you don’t know. Little did I realize all the free resources available for blogging, creating videos, marketing, having an online presence, building an email list and advertising products.
I often found myself thinking, I wish I’d known about that before. Could have saved me a lot of cash and a lot of failures. I was spending so much money on this and that as it was supposed to be the next best thing.
The reality was, that you don’t need to spend money on resources. Learn to make money first and then upgrade your resources when you know they work and when you’ve made some money so can afford to pay for more for them.
Get the Right Coaching for Where You Are Now
Education and Coaching for me are key to my success. However, one of the biggest mistakes was paying for high-value coaching, thinking it would accelerate my success when I wasn’t ready for that level of learning.
It’s like the old adage, learn to walk before you run.
Coaching is the same.
I have paid a lot of money for coaching only to find the coach expects me to spend $100 a day on advertising when I didn’t have money to advertise.
I have been on training sessions where the resources were going to cost $1000 a month and I didn’t have $1000 to spend.
The best results were when I stepped back, started at the beginning and learned the skills of affiliate marketing from the ground upwards. Only adding the paid-for resources and pending the money on advertising once I started making money.
With over 20 years of experience in the affiliate marketing industry the best advice I can give, is, to start at the bottom and be prepared to work your way to the top as you prove you can make money from this industry.
Start with beginner training and work your way up.
Getting Started Online
When you start an online business, start with something you know. This can be something you are experienced in or something you have learned.
I often tell my clients, to become an affiliate for this course. You are on the course, other people are on the course, so there must be a demand for it.
And once you’ve done the training you understand the benefits of the course. Benefits sell not the bells and whistles of the course.
What courses have you been on lately?
Do they offer affiliate marketing opportunities?
There are a few tools you will need to get started once you have a product –
- A blogging site – there are free ones available
- A video site – again free ones are available
- A place to advertise your product – Free
- An email management system – Free
- A bank account for receiving your commissions – Free
You can set up the whole infrastructure of your online business for free.
The skill to becoming a successful affiliate marketer is what you do with the tools and resources.
Multiple Income Streams
When I started learning the skills of being an online business owner, I soon discovered, that the more income streams I could create the wealthier I became.
This led one day to a guy stopping me in the street. He had one of my books in his hand (one of my income streams) and asked me to coach him.
I started a coaching business which today is a successful online business.
It is one of 6 different business models I use to generate multiple income streams online. Affiliate Marketing is one of them and is still an important part of generating income.