The best time to embark on your online entrepreneurial journey was yesterday – the second best time is today. You can get started on your next project RIGHT NOW with minimal investment…
There are many ways to kick off a brand new online business and many of them don't require as much investment as you might think.
Here are 5 ways to kickstart your online business RIGHT NOW for less than $100.
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While this is in no way a comprehensive list (there are an endless amount of ways to make money online for little to no startup cost), these are some of the best ways to get your business started almost immediately with almost no investment cost.
These business models were chosen for their low startup costs, relatively little time investment, and for their ability to reliably profit and scale with ease.
1. Print on Demand
While this business model is great for creatives, anybody can create a print-on-demand (POD) brand with little to no experience in design or marketing.
The POD model is simple: you create a business that sells merchandise with your designs on them. These designs can be printed on shirts, socks, stickers, pins, etc. The great thing about this business model is that there are almost no startup costs.
A third party print/fulfillment company does all of the printing, handling, and shipping for you. You don’t have to do any of the fulfillment, all you do is upload a design, market it to people, and when those people buy the print company does all of the fulfillment and you can just relax.
A traditional brand would have to design all of their merchandise, order it in volume, and sit on thousands of dollars of inventory hoping that they can sell it. There is enormous risk in this model.
But, with the POD model, you don’t need to risk thousands of dollars in buying inventory, the product is just shipped directly from their fulfillment center and you get to see the profit without ever seeing the shirt you just sold.
The beauty of the print-on-demand model is that you get to focus purely on the design and the marketing of your brand while leaving the fulfillment and the risk to those third party print companies.
This is great for creatives who can dedicate their time to creating beautiful designs and works of art for their merchandise.
Even if you’re not a creative, this is still an incredible deal for you. The free online graphic design website canva.com allows you to make beautiful designs for free, and the pro version is only $9.95 a month. It’s an incredibly easy website to use, you can get to creating beautiful designs in under 2 hours of learning.
If you don’t feel like doing any design work at all, then you’re still in luck. You can outsource your designs to the designers working on Fiverr. You can find designers willing to make you stunning works of art to sell on your POD store for as little as $5 per design.
The actual fulfillment services aren’t expensive either, some deals are actually free. Here are some of my favorite POD services that you can check out:
Bonfire – Free
Redbubble – Free
Printify – Great free version
Printful – Free to use, but you have to pay for each fulfillment before you get paid
Teespring – Free to use, but you have to pay for each fulfillment before you get paid
While these POD companies are my favorites, there are hundreds online that you can choose from with many specializing on specific products.
For example, there are POD companies that specialize just on socks. Some will do pins specifically, others will do art prints only and so on. The choice of who you work with is up to you depending on your specific business model.
2. Dropshipping
Just like the POD model, the dropshipping business model is very low risk and requires very little to kickstart.
Also just like POD, you never see the merchandise you sell and there is no need to spend thousands of dollars amassing a huge inventory to operate. In fact, POD is actually a subset of dropshipping.
What exactly is dropshipping?
It’s simple. Dropshipping is when you sell a product under your brand and have another entity ship that product to your customer. You only pay for the inventory every time a purchase is made, so that makes for a very low risk business model.
It’s a simple 3-step process:
The customer places an order for a marked up product on your store
You purchase that product from the supplier for less than what you’re selling it for
The supplier fulfills the order without you even seeing the product while you keep the profit
Doesn’t sound viable to you?
Well, almost a third of all internet sales are made through dropshipping.
That’s an enormous chunk of online sales and you can take a slice of that pie with a very small investment.
In order to find a good supplier, look at B2B and wholesale markets for your products.
You can find dropshippers on:
Alibaba
eBay
Buyer Zone
Once you find a viable supplier, make sure you reach out to them first and see if they are okay with establishing a dropshipping partnership.
When offering the product, make sure that dropshipping that particular product is within the terms of service of whatever platform you’re using. Many platforms have specific rules on dropshipping, just make sure to comply with them.
There are some specialized marketplaces where suppliers are looking for partners to dropship their products for them, though they cost money. Thankfully, there are a lot that are under our $100 benchmark, and the money you would spend on them would be well worth it.
Doba – $29/month
Oberlo – Free version, $29/month version, and $79/month version
Dropship Direct – Free version, $37/month version
Sunrise Wholesale – $29/month
Dropshipping is a great model to start with low cost because it handles the fulfillment aspect of the business so that you can focus on marketing and branding, just like the POD model.
3. Create a Course
Not all businesses sell physical products. Many sell intangible information products, like courses, music, ebooks, digital training, etc.
Many low-budget entrepreneurs like to sell information products because there is very little fulfillment work to be done. You create your info product, optimize it, market it, and continually optimize it as you scale.
The most effective way to run an information product business is through the creation and selling of a course.
Many people shy away from course creation because they think they need to be seasoned academics with years of history in a subject to create a course on it. That’s simply not true.
Hundreds of thousands of courses are being sold all over the internet from people of all different levels of knowledge. Just take a quick browse through Udemy to see all of the different kinds of courses being offered.
There are courses on entrepreneurship, coding, gardening, sports, fitness, and everything else under the sun.
If you have a decent level of understanding on a subject, you don’t need to do much research for your course. But, if you don’t feel confident enough in your knowledge on your subject of choice, then there are a few ways that you can still make a great course.
The first way is through PLR content, or private label rights content.
That is prewritten information that you can buy to use for your own purposes.
For example, if you want to start a course on gardening, buy some PLR guides on gardening and then use a version of that guide as your script and record a course based off of that script, then publish it to Udemy, Skillshare, or some of the other dozens of course marketplaces out there.
You can get cheap PLR (way under a $100 budget) at these places:
BuyqualityPLR
PLRProducts
ThePLRStore
And many other PLR marketplaces that you can find on Google with just a quick ‘plr’ search.
If you’re not comfortable with this method of course building, then you can partner up with more qualified leaders in your area to build a course. You can contact knowledgeable people in the area and ask to collaborate with them in exchange for a split of the course’s profits.
You can find experts through Quora, YouTube, blogs, and even in some social media circles. Facebook groups are an excellent place to find experts.
Most people will reject your offer (as most people will when you reach out for collaborators in any area), but if you reach out to enough experts then a few are bound to reciprocate.
4. Launch a Podcast
Many people are afraid to start podcasting because they think they need advanced equipment and a state of the art soundproof recording studio to launch one. And this misconception is just not true.
Many successful podcasts have been launched with nothing but a mobile device and a laptop. If you have these, then you’re ready to go.
The great thing about podcasts is that you don’t need to develop an incredibly detailed script, as a podcast is just a conversation.
As a good host you will need to direct that conversation and keep it on topic, but that is something we all do in our day to day lives.
Anchor is an iPhone app that you can use to record podcasts and post them on multiple platforms. There are many other apps you can use, but Anchor is my favorite.
Many platforms, like YouTube, have payment systems that reward creators for the views they get in the form of monetary compensation. Others rely on the podcaster to find other ways to make money. In that case, you find an affiliate offer that your audience would like and you promote that offer to them in your podcast, almost like a commercial.
5. Run a Fiverr Agency
There are many aspects to business and it’s simply not possible for any one person to be a pro at all of them, and not all businesses have a team that is equipped to handle all of these aspects. That’s where outsourcing comes in.
Many companies will go to Fiverr to find an agency to outsource some of their work to. Whether it’s video production, SEO, branding and design, social media advertising strategy, product photography and so on.
If you have any sort of technical skill that a company can use, then offer your services on Fiverr and help them outsource some of the functions of their business.
Not confident enough in any of your abilities to go and help somebody else with them? Not to worry, there’s plenty of affordable education online that will enable you to develop a skill and help others with them.
The course marketplaces discussed earlier, like Skillshare or Udemy, are great places to find courses for under $100 to polish a skill so that you can help people.
Now that you've read the article, I highly recommend that you register for this week's webinar, where we'll show you the easiest way to build a highly profitable email list: click here to register now.
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