In this article you'll see how you can start an online business for as little as $0.00 with a monthly cost of $0.00. Furthermore you also have the option of designing and developing your own business website or alternatively not even bothering with setting up a site of your own. However, please don't forget that the success of your online business has little bearing on cost but rather on many other factors including the products and/or services that it promotes and how well it is managed and marketed. (A) Setting up your own Website Firstly, let's examine the costs involved in getting your business up and running with your own website. ? Domain Name & Web Hosting Yahoo, for example, offers domain names at ridiculously low prices in the region of $2.99 and web hosting for less than $10.00 a month. However by doing a search for domain names and hosting you'll get an overwhelming amount of options to choose from. Just be sure to choose a memorable domain name, preferably appropriately descriptive of your product or service, and a reliable web hosting company ? Website If you do not have Dreamweaver or Frontpage or a similar web design software package, the best option would be to download a free HTML Editor from the internet by doing a search for free HTML editor. Furthermore if your web design skills are not very advanced, download one of the many web design tutorials that exist on the net, e.g. Killersites offer a decent design 'do it yourself design' tutorial. Don't forget there are masses of free website templates, some better than others, that you can download and customize for your own business, e.g. from Template Monster. ? FTP Program You will need one of these to be able to upload your web site files to your web host's server so that your site is 'live' on the internet. Once again, the news is good as you will be able to pick up one of these for free, e.g. FTP Commander Pro ? Products and Services If you don't have your own product to sell there are many companies that you can sign up with for free as an affiliate to promote the many products they have to sell. For instance Clickbank and Commission Junction are two popular ones that you can join for free. They both offer many products on behalf of their merchants that you can promote and sell for a commission from your website. Alternatively you can target an individual organization's product that fits with your website's business theme. ? Website Traffic Register your site with the main search engines and directories, set up an RSS feed (also free with Feedburner). I hope you enjoy writing because the best traffic generator of all is to write articles related to your business. You then submit your articles to article directories like Ezine Articles, once again for free, and let them work at generating traffic and interest in the website through the link in your resource box at the bottom of your article. (B) Without setting up your own Website As I promised at the beginning of this article, it is totally possible to have an online business without really bothering with designing your own website. ? Purchase a ready made Site A typical site would be ready made to sell products and services all encoded with your affiliate tracking code to ensure you receive the commission for each sale. CBmall is one such program that is also one of the top Clickbank sellers and can be purchased for $47.00 ? Blogging For exactly $0.00 you can set up your very own blog at Blogger. What's more is that the domain name and hosting for your blog is also $0.00. More good news is that your blog can be customized to your business' theme and used to promote products and services just as you would on a 'normal' website. You would also apply all the normal traffic generating techniques as outlined above in addition to submitting your blog's feed (which blogger will generate for you) to feedreaders and so on. Therefore, in conclusion you can see that whichever option you choose to start your own online business, that has every chance of success, the cost can range from as little as $0.00, (i.e. for free) to $47.00 for a ready made money pulling website. |
