The Secret To A Thriving Business On a Shoestring

When you're first venturing out into your own business online, you're going to fall into one of two categories, either you have a budget for advertising and product development or you do not.

If you have a budget, you invest in online tools and learn how to develop your own product, you advertise and are hopefully making money in a short period of time. This is the advantage you have of starting out with a budget.

If on the other hand you are starting your online career on a shoestring, it may feel like you're chasing your tail before you really start to see any kind of profit. For the rest of this article I'll show you exactly how to get started online with nothing more than a shoestring budget and how to see a profit from it.

Something to remember when starting out on a shoestring is that you cannot draw any earnings for personal use. Any earnings should be reinvested immediately back into your business.

I'll illustrate a series of steps to take that involve free advertising, free products and tools, and free methods of traffic generation. Online you have to remember that although they don't cost any money, they will cost time, so when first starting out you will have to be willing to spend a considerable amount of time online at first. Once you begin to earn money as result of the time you're investing, you need to reinvest the money into paid versions of the services you use. If you don't, you will burn yourself on the sheer amount of time you've dedicated and you will never really get ahead.

Before you get started, the first thing you need to do is determine what kind of an online business you want to create. Although your long term goal should be to create your own online products, when you're first starting out I recommend you promote someone else's product by becoming an affiliate. This gives you experience in the field you eventually wish to venture into and gives you an advantage when creating and marketing your own products.

The next step is to create a web site. There are many free web site hosting companies that include free built-in site builder software. Perform a quick search for the phrase "free web hosting" into a search engine and you will have lots of choices. The only downside to the free hosting is not only will you have limited space but the site will also have advertising on it to support the company, this is the trade off for starting on a shoestring. However because you're starting out you should not need a lot of space and once you start making some money you can afford to upgrade to the paid version.

The next step is to get an auto responder in order to keep in touch with your client list. There are several free versions of paid auto responder services available. Just do a search for "free auto responder" and again you should have some choices to start out with. Like with the free hosting they will be limited and have advertising, but again, once you are making money, you can upgrade.

Once the web site and auto responder service are set up, you need to drive traffic to your site. Expect to spend most of your time doing this. The best form of free marketing is article writing and submission.

With article writing and submission, you create articles that are related to the product you are selling or promoting, and then submit them to the various article directories. With anything in life, you will get out what you put into it. The key success to building a thriving, flourishing business with articles is to write good quality material and to write everyday. Don't worry, the more you do this, the better you get at it. The potential traffic from articles is mind boggling. The beauty with articles is that they can go viral indefinitely still continuing to generate sales and exposure for years to come. Their potential is almost exponential, remembering that you garner traffic not only from the new articles you write and release but from previous articles, their impact is like a ripple effect, one article receiving an ever increasing amount of traffic over time.

So get to it and start writing those articles and like anything in life, you get good at what you practice.

Here's to your article writing and online business success.