Are you dreaming to be an entrepreneur and owning your own online business? Follow these 7 steps to start your own online business for free.
Thanks to internet anyone can start a money-making online business from home. Anyway, not all people are willing to invest their time and put in the necessary efforts to make it happen.
No business or marketing experience is required. You can set your own schedule and work as much as you want, depending on how fast you want to grow your business.
As I mentioned in the title of this post, you can start for free and then invest in your business, once you’re ready.
Let’s discover what are the steps to start your own online business for free.
How To Start Your Own Online Business?
There are different ways to start an online business as there are many niches where you could make profits, but generally there are common rules to follow.
I’ll explain them below, meanwhile you can take a look at my video:
1. Figure Out The Product That You Want To Sell
This is the hardest decision at the beginning, as you might fell overwhelmed in choosing what to sell online.
Moreover you never did it before, so you really fell stacked and don’t know where to start.
When starting out with your own online business, try to be as basic as possible. For instance you could start selling your skills as a freelancer on platform such as Fiverr.com, one of the biggest marketplaces where people offer their services to other business owners.
Or maybe you already have an idea but don’t know how to proceed, then you can hire someone on Fiverr.com and let him/her do some tasks for you for a little as $5.
There are tons of possibilities, such as open a blog for a specific niche, if you like to write and you are passionate about a topic, but don’t want to show your face.
You might want to create an online store and start selling your own products, if you already have a physical store, or just start selling in dropshipping, products of other people.
2. Don’t Hire A Developer Straight Away To Build A Landing Page
You don’t need to have a super professional website or well looking landing page to start making money online.
Of course it’s desirable to hire a pro developer and build a new website but you can spend much less or even doing it for free at the beginning.
What is important is to have a clear offer with a clear message for the audience that we want to sell to.
You even don’t need a website but just a Facebook Page or a YouTube Channel where you start building up your audience and present what you have to offer.
That being said, I strongly recommend you to anyway build a basic landing page, because you want to re-direct the people interested to a specific sales page, where you can track their behaviour and collect data for future promotions using Facebook or Google Ads.
3. Start Collecting People’s Email
This is exactly what I meant before. You want to make sure that your efforts start to pay off almost immediately.
It’s very important to send people to a specific landing page where you can collect their emails in exchange of a free report, video or guide that they might be interested in.
By collecting people’s email you have the possibility to send them more targeted offers and try make more sales over the time.
Once you have your user’s emails, you need to have an email marketing software to email them regularly.
To create an opt-in page or box and start collect emails there are several options but here I want to give you my two recommendations.
OptimizePress
It is a WordPress plugin designed to improve the graphics of your blog and your landing pages, in order to get more sales or leads. It’s a website builder that allows you to create sales pages, up-sell pages and even a full membership site, if you would like to sell an online course.
The main features are:
- Ease of use: very good user experience
- Templates: about 60 different templates to use
- Page In-Line editor: easier experience for newbies
- Page Customization: really professional design
- Fast Page Load Times
- Membership sites
- Mobile Optimization
In order to use OptimizePress, you must have a WordPress site and sign up for one of their plans.
Essential plan starts at only $79/year (30 day money back guarantee). Learn more about OptimizePress here.
ClickFunnels
The main difference with OptimizePress is that with ClickFunnels you don’t need to have your hosting and domain. You can start building your landing page directly on the platform and having it ready in minutes.
It costs more than OptimizePress ($97/month), but you can start to use ClickFunnels for free (14 day trial) and then decide if it fits your needs or not.
If you want to build a landing page or sales page from scratch because you have already a product or service to sell, I would recommend choosing ClickFunnels, otherwise go for OptimizePress. Learn more about ClickFunnels here.
4. Promote Your Business
In the meantime that your email list is growing, you need to promote your business out there, otherwise only few people will see what you are doing.
You can choose between free or paid methods to get traffic to your website or landing page.
If you have no budget to start, please keep in mind that you need to put in a lot of efforts in order to grow your social media presence.
For instance start by uploading videos regularly on your YouTube channel. Then post at least once a day on your business profiles on Facebook and Instagram.
Try to collaborate with other people in your niche that are on your same level. In this way you have higher chances to increase the number of interested followers in your work.
If you can spend some money from the very beginning, take advantage of the power of Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
Invest at least $5 a day to start collecting interested leads to your business and create amazing offers to attract them to your sales page.
If you wish to know more on how to create compelling sales offers and direct your visitors to specific landing pages, have a look a this paid advertising traffic course.
5. Select A Payment Processor
This is the foundation in order to get sales online. If you don’t have a payment processor you cannot collect money from your customers or visitors.
There are many payment processors nowadays and, depending on where you live, you can have several options to choose from.
I would recommend you to choose one between PayPal or Stripe, the two most common payment processor available on the market.
People trust them and they are most probably already using one of the two to pay or shop online.
6. Pricing Your Product Or Service
This is a tricky part, as no one really knows at the beginning how to value himself or how to price a product.
What I can recommend here is to shape the structure of your competitors and see what they are already doing.
What kind of prices they have for similar products or services?
Based on that, try to be reasonable when pricing your product, because the price will certainly influence your market positioning. It depends on how you want your customers to perceive you.
Try collecting emails by offering a free item in exchange and once you establish a relationship with your followers, then offer them your main product or service at the right price.
7. Trust Yourself
This step isn’t technical nor marketing but it can be the most important when you want to start your own online business.
Yes, because at the beginning you will practically work for free and if you are not used to it, might seems to you crazy or even stupid.
Owning a business is totally opposite than working for money. When you get a job you trade your time for money. When you start a business you invest time and money, not knowing when you will see a return on your investment.
Having the right mindset will make all the difference. Be ready to fail and to learn from your mistakes.
Remember, once you have failed, you will understand what works and what not. Only then, therefore, you will be on your path to success.
Trust yourself, no one will give you credit until they see you succeed, keep going everyday and never give up.
Are you ready for this? If yes, I want to show you the best way you can choose to start your own online business for free, even today.
#1 Recommended Resource To Start Your Own Online Business For Free
The best business model to use when starting your own online business for free is without doubt affiliate marketing.
There are tons of ways to make money with affiliate marketing. You can sell your affiliate products via email, solo ads, pay per click, social media or sales funnels.
But what we focus on today is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You basically create content, focusing on specific keywords, that then will be indexed by search engines. Therefore your website could be found by people when searching for specific topics online.
Your goal is to open one or multiple sites around specific topics. After that, create blog posts in which you present a list of products or services in which users might be interested in.
If they will buy those products through your affiliate links, you’ll get a commission (usually between 30% to 50% of the price).
Are you not familiar with all of this? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.
I want to introduce you to Wealthy Affiliate, the most active and helpful online community to help beginners set up their first niche websites and start earning money online from scratch.
Wealthy Affiliate (WA) offers you:
- Step-by-step training: how to setup your website from scratch and build a profitable business
- All-in-One Platform: all essential tools & resources for your online business (e.g. website builder, web hosting, keyword research tool…)
- Comprehensive Support System: get help 24/7
- Amazingly Active & Helpful Community
You can learn more about Wealthy Affiliate here, otherwise sign up for your free account below:
Wealthy Affiliate Free Membership
What you get if you join WA with a free membership:
- 10 basics lessons about online business (niche selection, website building SEO, content marketing, etc.)
- Jaaxy, a fantastic keyword tool (30 searches for free)
- SiteRubix platform (possibility to build 2 free websites)
- Free support from the community
Really for free, no credit card required.
At the same time, if you're serious about starting an online business you should consider investing some money. First in yourself and then into your business.
Apart from the free training, you'll get the most out of Wealthy Affiliate if you will decide then to upgrade to premium membership.
If you upgrade within the first week you can pay $19 for the first month, otherwise later $49/month or $359/year.
What you'll get if you become a premium member?
- One Click WordPress builder for your website
- SiteContent tool to improve your contents
- Platform to get comments and feedback for your website
- Unlimited researches using the keyword research tool
- Up to 50 websites hosted (25 with your domain & 25 with a subdomain)
On top of these you'll get my full 1-to-1 support as I'm part of the community too.
Do have any questions regarding how to start your own online business for free or anything related to Wealthy Affiliate?
Please leave them in the comments below and I'll try respond to all your doubts.
Are you serious about starting your own online business? Don't wait any longer, sign up today and see you inside!
