Online marketing experts often say, invest money to make money. There really are many useful tools in order to start an online business from home; advertising services, premium webinars and publications, there are also many gurus who can personally examine your website and give you tips and advices.
You do a research to see what you need to spend for and how much. You’re horrified to discover how much you may have to fork out, and on top of that, you’ll have to learn how to use these tools.
That should never be the case! Those paid resources will help you make more money, but may not be worth paying for while you’re not earning anything or very little.
Do You Need Money To Make Money?
I’ve previously said you could potentially work from home for free (“Can I Make Money From Home?“). So the short answer to this question is No. But experts say “Invest money to make money“. If you have some spare cash then, use it to get richer.
“Invest”.
Means spend money now in order to receive some kind of benefit in the future…hopefully, right?
There’s no guarantee in any investments. It’s just your best bet. So what should be the “best bet” online business resources when you have little to spend?
The Essential: Web Hosting & Domain Name
Free website platforms don’t allow you to put third-party advertising such as AdSense and TestLinkAds in your blog, so you really need to have your own website set up and hosted by a server. The cost can be as low as $5 per month but you should always go for a reputable hosting company.
Bluehost is good (I’ve used it for many years and found it reliable), $5.25 per month for unlimited number of websites with unlimited storage space. It allows you to have one domain name for free which is an excellent bonus.
Domain name is another thing – it’s best to have your own, like this site www.cybercashworldwide.com. It costs you around $10 per year. Otherwise you can have a sub-domain, for example www.cybercashworldwide.bluehost.com (just an example – there’s a server company’s name in the middle) for free. Nothing’s wrong with that except it’s generally seen as a sub/secondary site. You want to show your online business is a serious one, so you really want to purchase a domain name.
Namecheap is good (I’ve been using it for years too!), charges you around $10 per year, but as I said if you have your website hosted by Bluehost, you can have one domain name free.
Keyword Search
It’s essential for you to use the right keywords for the product or service you’re promoting in your website post. So that your page will be ranked in Google, Yahoo and Bing and people will find it. And the keyword research really is a painful process.
There are free services such as keyword.io or Übersuggest. I’ve been using Jaaxy for a long time – it doesn’t come cheap – it’s $19 per month. I personally find it extremely useful and find it much, much more time saving. Sign up and try 30 keyword search for free, and see how you feel.
Advertising
When you’ve created a page – or a few pages – that you’re confident of, and feel ready to sell, you may want to think about using a paid advertisement service.
Google Adwords is a great place to place an ad, as you can set up a budget per day for CPC (cost-per-click, you’ll only be charged when someone clicks your ad). However you’re strongly advised to monitor your spend on Adwords advertisement on a daily basis. The charge will accumulate and, your credit bill will come as a shock otherwise!
Facebook Business and Twitter Advertising offer paid advertisement service respectively. These are something you can consider along the way. But I suggest that you try to have some followers organically first, without spending money.
Push notifications that I mentioned yesterday is free for the first 500 subscribers. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t prioritise and take advantage of every free opportunity first, is there?
What Not To Spend For
You shouldn’t spend anything to begin with.
Really, you should not spend anything at all to begin with!
Use whatever’s there for free first and see if it works. Be it a design tool, useful plugin, advertisement… Free resource can look shabby, can be sluggish, may not provide as great result as paid services do. When you feel that way, you can start thinking about going for premium tools.
Google Adwords ad is worth spending for, because Google search is global, the most used online search engine, and it’s affordable as long as you’re careful. You’ll get a valuable return that you can’t get from free services.
WordPress themes. There are thousands of free themes available to start with. Once you’re confident that none of the free themes can give you what you need, then you can consider buying premium themes.
Online Business Training is another one that you should be looking around for free resources. My recommendation is Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll receive everything you need to get your online business started for absolutely free. Again when you’re confident enough to carry on, you can decide to join a premium or stay as a free member. You’ll be able to create up to 2 x websites and your own subdomain names absolutely FREE. Try Wealthy Affiliate and see how much you can learn!
So here’s a conclusion – invest money to make money. But wisely.
Hi Ray, I was always cautious about investing money. But I see that some investments on the internet marketing can be affordable, and effective when invested wisely.
You suggest great keyword tools and some well-known hosting providers. Bluehost sounds like a very handy option to take.
I will go with your suggestion and I will put some notifications. Hopefully, I will increase my traffic.
In terms of WordPress themes, at what kind of circumstances that you want to buy premium themes?
Thanks for the advice!
Thanks for your comment. Yes Bluehost is reliable – before I joined Wealthy Affiliate, my hosting service had always been with Bluehost and not once did I have a problem with them such as downtime. Reputable WordPress premium themes tend to be more responsive (= fast loading speed) and look more stylish. And often come with extra features that are not usually available with a free theme such as fancy menu options or extra layout options. Thrive Themes for example. It’s worth spending money when you are ready.
Hey, I like that. Invest money to make more money. This can have a ripple effect. Although it is easy to find free stuff out there but usually it comes with a trial period or most of time these free stuff will not give you the full learning resources that you need. Agree with you that we have to be wise to invest money to make money.
Hi Wesley, thanks for your comment, yes you’re right, free stuff are all good but a lot of them don’t give you the full access – after all that’s how they bate customers and make money.
But I find a lot of them secure now. To sign up you have to register your email address. That used to be tricky because your mail address would likely to be sold to third parties and your inbox would soon be filled with spam emails. That’s unlikely the case nowadays, all you have to do is to unsubscribe from the newsletter. So I take advantage of free trials as much as I can.
Thanks again for your opinion.