Starting, growing, and running a business for free? Sounds like a crazy idea, but these days it’s more possible than ever. If you want to learn how to start an online business for free, then you’re in the right place: you’re going to discover all the ways that anyone can get started online with little capital, no credit card, and restrictions of any kind.
Starting a business online doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars, and it doesn’t have to take months to complete. In fact, if you follow these easy steps you can start your own business online in minutes!
Benefits of Online business
Saving money: One of the key benefits of operating your business online is that you can save a lot of money. This includes saving on business premises and the various bills that come with renting or buying premises. In addition, you make savings in areas such as travel costs. You can cut many of the costs of starting up a business if you decide to set up online. For those starting a business on a limited budget, this is the ideal solution.
Great for niche products: If you sell niche products, operating online is ideal. People looking for a certain type of product can easily find and access your services, which means that you can benefit from more customers compared to a bricks-and-mortar set-up, where you would only be accessible to a limited range of people. Companies such as Bikerringshop sell specialist products like skull jewelry and skull rings. By operating online, they can reach a global audience for their niche products.
Social media: Social media is a great way to promote your business. It is fast, simple, can be highly effective, and costs little or nothing. You can market your business through engaging posts, build up a rapport with your audience, promote yourself with special offers to social media followers, and much more. If your posts get shared, you can benefit from even greater exposure.
Email newsletters: Another very cost-effective means of marketing your business is through email marketing. Sending out email newsletters is a great way to keep people up to date when it comes to your products and services. You can also use these newsletters to promote certain events or special offers. Again, your emails may be forwarded to others by the recipients, which can help to increase exposure.
Don’t Start Building Yet
When looking to set up a company online, it can be tempting to jump into action.
So, if you’re feeling the urge to build a website, choose a business name, or create a logo, hold off for now.
If you want to start a successful online business, first, you need a strategy. And steps two, three, and four of this article will show you how to create your online business strategy.
Choose a Business Model
When learning how to build an online business from scratch, it helps to know about some tried-and-tested online business models.
Here are six types of online businesses to consider:
- Affiliate Marketing: Promote other business’s products and services online, and receive a commission for each sale you make with this passive income idea.
- Freelancing: Provide a service to other individuals and businesses using a skill that you have, such as advertising, writing, designing, or programming.
- Coaching and Consulting: Become a coach or a consultant and sell your expertise, advice, and guidance.
- Information Products: Package and sell your expertise in ebooks, worksheets, templates, and online courses.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Create a piece of software or application, and charge users a recurring subscription fee.
- Ecommerce: Use a service like Shopify to set up a website and sell physical products online.
Identify Your Target Market
Next, you need to get clear on your target market. In other words, who are you going to serve?
This step is absolutely vital.
As the marketer Philip Kotler once said, “There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.”
Here’s the trick: Make sure you are part of your target audience.
Think about it. If you’ve been camping your entire life, you’ll understand the problems, desires, and language of other campers. As a result, it’d be much easier to sell camping products online.
Plus, your marketing will be more successful because you’ll have a better understanding of how to communicate with other campers.
On the other hand, if you’ve never been camping in your life, you’d probably struggle – a lot – to sell camping products online.
So, when choosing a target audience, ask yourself:
- What are my hobbies and interests?
- Is there anything that I know a lot about?
- What do I spend most of my time thinking, talking, and reading about?
Business Ideas:
Blogging
While not a new concept, monetized blogging is always a popular option for an essentially no-cost business.
There are tons of options when it comes to making money from your blog, such as affiliate partnerships, producing ebooks, offering online courses and webinars. Some of these work better than others, as and certain blog niches will be more popular and easy to monetize than others. For instance, beauty, food, and parenting blogs are some of the most popular niches, and will, therefore, be easier to monetize (though you’ll also face stiffer competition).
It’s worth mentioning, however, that monetizing your blog will work best when you choose a subject that you are actually passionate about and personally invested in to blog about. So, this route works best if you’re thinking, “Yeah! I’ve always really wanted to start a blog about my love of handcrafted artisan chocolates!” (or whatever else gets you going). Merely wanting to make money isn’t enough.
Start your own clothing line
If you have some designs in mind and a little bit of time on your hands, you can get your clothing company off the ground.
If you already own a Shopify store, you can set up your own clothing line using Oberlo, Printify, Printful, or a similar product-sourcing app. Each automatically links your store to apparel printers and clothing manufacturers. They also handle every step of the retail fulfillment process for you, giving you the freedom to design and ship a wide range of pieces right out of the gate.
Why start a clothing line?
- There’s nothing more satisfying than creating products that people will use every day.
- As soon as you build your Shopify store, you’ll be able to start selling instantly. Thanks to print-on-demand apps, the process of designing and delivering your own custom-made clothing has been streamlined and simplified.
- You’ll love the feeling of seeing your designs come to life by transforming your creativity into something real and profitable.
Freelance writing
Are you a strong writer? This one is a no-brainer. If you have solid writing skills, consider starting a business as a freelance writer.
To build up your portfolio and client base, you may want to start with a site like Upwork (and check out my article on using Upwork to find great freelancers—it’ll give you insight into what to do, and what not to do!).
Launch a dropshipping store
Think you need a warehouse full of inventory to run your own business? Think again! Dropshipping is one of the best online startup ideas for entrepreneurs on a budget. You can hit the ground running by sourcing a pre-existing product from a supplier and having them take care of things like packaging and fulfillment.
This process lets you skip over a lot of obstacles that might be standing in the way of you starting your own business. More importantly, it eliminates the risk of finding out there’s no market for your product after placing a huge order with a manufacturer or supplier.
Why choose dropshipping?
- You don’t need to stock products in a physical location, meaning that your cash flow won’t get tied up in inventory. There’s less of an upfront cash risk.
- Whenever a purchase is made, you place an order with a third party and they handle the rest of the process for you. Since you don’t have to deal with things like tracking inventory or mailing packages, dropshipping eliminates a lot of potential headaches for budding entrepreneurs.
- No warehouse means you can run your business from anywhere. Whether it’s your living room or the café down the street, you decide where you want to work from.
If you’re interested in dropshipping, read our Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping to help you get started.
If you don’t have any online store ideas, here are some strategies for narrowing down the perfect product:
- Find products to sell on Oberlo.
- Read our guide Find a Product to Sell: 12 Strategies for Finding Your First Profitable Product.
- Check out these 17 places ecommerce entrepreneurs go to find product ideas.
- Find out how we made more than $2,000 in five weeks with imported gaming glasses.
Conclusion:
With the advancement of technology and the advent of social media, you can literally start and run an online business from anywhere. This has led to a massive influx of internet entrepreneurs, but the question remains: what do you teach them all? Subscribing to blogs is one approach, but it’s too time-consuming. And with the proliferation of new bloggers, it’s difficult to sort through all the garbage down in the comments section. As a solution, let’s take a look at some of the best business books that can help you get going.