Starting a Free Online Business – How To Do It

Starting a Free Online business is the topic I’m quizzed about on a daily basis.  Friends, neighbours and casual acquaintances seem fascinated by my lifestyle on how I can earn a really good income working from home.

One of my neighbours told me he had originally thought I was come sort of crime boss because I had nice house and cars yet never seemed to work.  He soon learned I made my money from internet marketing so I did not have to “go to work”.

I’m about to give you the same insight I give my family and friends when it comes to getting started with a free online business.

Before I do that let me get something straight… you don’t have to be a computer whiz kid to make money online.  Before I started in this business I could send emails, type letters and use a spreadsheet.  Even today I’m far from a technical whizz.

Making Money Online From Home

There are dozens and dozens of ways to make money from home with an internet business.  You can sell physical products that other people stock and deliver for you, sell DVD’s or books, sell online information, offer services, sell advertising on your site, have membership sites or do affiliate marketing.

The problem is when you get started there are too many choices.  You don’t have enough knowledge about each model to make a good choice and this leads people to bounce from one idea to the next.  As you get more experienced and your income grows you may cover all of these models, I personally make money from all of them with the exception of the advertising idea.

So where do you start for the lowest possible cost?

Affiliate Marketing is where I started and I think it’s the perfect low cost way to get your online business started.  As an affiliate marketer you sell someone else’s product for a share of the profit.  One of my early affiliate sites promoted a dog guide that was a digital download for the customer. For every customer that I sent to the guide that bought I got $15 commission.

When you are starting a free online business affiliate marketing has lots of advantages:

• You don’t have to create a product

• You don’t have to sell anything, just recommend a product by directing them to the product owner’s site, your visitor is tracked and if they buy you get paid.

• You can start affiliate marketing at no cost

• It’s a hands off business as you have no customers to deal with (they are the product owners responsibility)

• There are tens of thousands of affiliate products to choose from

So you can see why many people love affiliate marketing, in fact many of the top affiliate marketers make millions of dollars a year from this system.

Reality Check

Affiliate marketing is a fairly passive business, it can make you money month after month without you doing anything.  But you do have to do the work at the beginning, anyone who promises you an out of the box easy system is a BS’er I’m afraid.

At the beginning of your project there will be work to be done and the amount of work depends on the project.  And although affiliate marketing can be a free online business I suggest you make a small investment of around $9 a month to own your own website.

I still think that’s a great deal, how many businesses can you start for $9 a month.

So the idea is to set up a site, drive traffic to it and then recommend your affiliate offer to your visitors.  They go to the product owner’s site, a proportion of those visitors buy the offer and you make commission.

So How Do You Start This Online Business?

The first step is to decide what market to target, we usually call this your niche market.  Whatever niche you choose your website will be about that topic and your affiliate offer will also be in that market.  The niche you choose can be a specific product (this often works very well) or about a specific topic.

For example your niche may be “curing baldness” and you could either have a site dedicated to that topic or have a site dedicated to a particular product in that market.

You need to be sure that the niche you choose has people who are looking online for solutions.  It’s also important that these searchers are not freebie seekers, you want to target people who have buying intent.

There are free tools that show you exactly how many people are searching for particular topics (the term they search for is called a “keyword”).  I will post a tutorial on keyword research shortly.

Once you have completed your keyword research you will need a site name (known as a domain name) and hosting for the site.  You hosting account is your place in the internet that holds your site and allows other people to access it.

I use Godaddy.com to buy my sites and HostGator to host them

So now that you have a niche, a domain and hosting you’re ready to build a website.  Building a site can be very scary when you first start out.  But let me tell you right now it’s not that hard, especially for affiliate sites that can be quite basic.

Don’t go out and spend hundreds of dollars on getting a site designed, I suggest you use a free tool called WordPress to build your sites, it’s is available inside your hosting account.  Nearly all my sites are built using this free tool, including this one.  The great thing about WordPress is it’s so simple to use.

If you really want some individual design get someone to design you a custom header and footer which you can get done really cheaply.

I can’t cover all the steps involved here but if you fill in the quick form on the top right I’ll rush over some free internet marketing strategies videos which explain it all in greater detail.

Best of luck with your home business, hopefully you will love it as much as I do!