6 Ways To Save Money When Start­ing Your In­ter­net Business

When you’re start­ing an in­ter­net busi­ness it’s easy to suf­fer from „shiny ob­ject syn­drome” and to rapidly find your­self spend­ing more and more money on tools and train­ing be­fore you ac­tu­ally start to make any real money.

Of course, the gu­rus will tell you that you can start your own on­line busi­ness for the price of a do­main and host­ing ac­count. Yet as soon as you’ve joined their mail­ing list they’ll start rec­om­mend­ing one „es­sen­tial” tool af­ter another.

The fact is that you’re start­ing an on­line busi­ness with one pri­mary goal in mind; to make a profit on­line. Sure, build­ing an in­ter­net busi­ness can be fun, sat­is­fy­ing and has the very real po­ten­tial to free you from your day job - but there won’t be any sig­nif­i­cant changes to your lifestyle un­til you’re ac­tu­ally pulling in a healthy profit.

For­tu­nately there are a host of ways that you can build your busi­ness while spend­ing very lit­tle money at all, if you know where to look.

Fo­rums

There are nu­mer­ous in­ter­net mar­ket­ing fo­rums on­line and they can be a great place to fur­ther your ed­u­ca­tion and un­der­stand­ing of the in­ter­net mar­ket­ing world with­out need­ing to spend money on ebooks and courses. Pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tions in­clude the War­rior Fo­rum, Site­point fo­rums and Dig­i­tal Point, not to men­tion niche fo­rums like A Best Web and As­so­ciate Pro­grams for af­fil­i­ate mar­ket­ing advice.

Take the time to join these fo­rums and comb through the past dis­cus­sions. You’ll quickly find all sorts of golden nuggets that you can ap­ply to your own busi­ness and of course if you have a ques­tion that has­n’t been an­swered you’ll have thou­sands of ex­pe­ri­enced in­di­vid­u­als who can ad­vise you.

Prod­uct Launches

The prod­uct launch mar­ket gen­er­ates mil­lion of dol­lars each year and one of the strate­gies that these mar­keters use to draw in re­spects and build trust with them is by giv­ing away free train­ing and tools be­fore their prod­uct even launches. The the­ory is that by the time they ac­tu­ally re­lease their lat­est prod­uct, you’ll be so caught-up in their sales cy­cle that you’ll end up spend­ing some money with them. Of course, if you can main­tain your self dis­ci­pline then get­ting in­volved with prod­uct launches can be an­other way to get pre­mium train­ing with­out the cost.

Try sub­scrib­ing to some of the gu­rus mail­ing lists and you’ll soon find that you’re be­ing of­fered free ebooks, videos and some­times even soft­ware tools as part of the lat­est prod­uct launch. So long as you go into it with your eyes open - and don’t get sucked in by their mar­ket­ing - you’ll be able to learn an aw­ful lot with­out hav­ing to spend a penny.

Free Tri­als

Nu­mer­ous pieces of soft­ware and train­ing courses try to draw in new cus­tomers ei­ther by of­fer­ing a free or very low cost trial. Now, I’m not sug­gest­ing you aim to „rip peo­ple off” by just sub­scrib­ing for free, down­load­ing every­thing and then can­celling again (bad karma!) but these free tri­als can be a great way to test out var­i­ous prod­ucts and ser­vices to find those that can gen­uinely be use­ful for your business.

As an ex­am­ple, Kristi Hines re­cently pub­lished an ar­ti­cle that out­lines 10 dif­fer­ent SEO prod­ucts that you can try out for free. Sud­denly you can gain ac­cess to hun­dreds of dol­lars worth of tools used by some of the most suc­cess­ful SEOs in the world - with­out need­ing to risk any of your own money.

Rent Rather Than Buy­ing Outright

There is a con­cept known as „soft­ware as a ser­vice” (or SAAS for short) where rather than buy­ing a piece of soft­ware out­right you in­stead pay a smaller sum to use it on a monthly or an­nual ba­sis. The jury is out on which of the two pric­ing struc­tures is the more cost-ef­fec­­tive over the long term, but when you’re just get­ting started these SAAS tools can be a cheap and sim­ple way to gain ac­cess to pre­mium tools with­out hav­ing to stump up a se­ri­ous amount of cash.

Ex­am­ples of some ser­vices that of­fer low monthly pay­ments rather than gi­ant one-off fees can in­clude web host­ing, stor­age and backup so­lu­tions, pro­fes­sional so­cial me­dia ap­pli­ca­tions and au­tore­spon­ders. Just re­mem­ber to shop around if this idea ap­peals to you and en­sure the ser­vice you sign up for charges on a monthly ba­sis rather than hav­ing a one-off payment.

Free Al­ter­na­tives

If you’re will­ing to do some re­search you can of­ten find free al­ter­na­tives to ex­pen­sive pieces of soft­ware. For ex­am­ple you can use Open Of­fice in­stead of Mi­crosoft Of­fice and save your­self hun­dreds of dol­lars. You’ll find free SEO plu­g­ins like Yoast SEO. You’ll un­cover free au­tore­spon­ders like MailChimp. And of course soft­ware like Joomla!, Ma­gento and Word­Press are all open-source ways to build a web­site, not to men­tion all the free themes avail­able to cus­tomize your site.

Coupons & Vouchers

One fi­nal tip worth con­sid­er­ing is the num­ber of busi­­ness-build­ing ser­vices that reg­u­larly of­fer pro­mo­tions on their prod­ucts. Be­fore you con­sider buy­ing web host­ing, do­main names and such­like, spend a few min­utes on Google search­ing for coupons. You might not al­ways find one, but when you do it’s pos­si­ble to save con­sid­er­able amounts of money on a pur­chase you were go­ing to make anyway.