Starting Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

About 10 years ago it was expensive to start a business – any business. Marketing meant you had to print something and probably also buy space in printed publications. The cheapest marketing you could do by yourself probably involved printing business cards and flyers and handing them out to everyone you came in contact with. Decent business cards and flyers cost a lot of money for a one-person business trying to get off the ground.

Now marketing alternatives for your business abound. There are many ways to market your business online and reach hundreds, thousands of people easily, effectively, and cheaply. I’m big on Pay Per Click advertising to bring quality traffic to your website. For as little as a few cents you can bring someone to your website that may well buy something.

Here are some of the ways you can cut down your spending when starting a new business.

1. Pay Per Click – as I said, this is one of the most amazing ways to market your products and services for companies of any size. You can have a small account and spend $10 per day if you want. Or $2. Up to you. If you can make $30 per day as a direct result of your $10/day PPC spending you can call it a success on some level. Or, you might ramp up and be spending a couple thousand dollars per day to make $10,000 or more. Pay Per Click is something every business should become educated about. We have an online training program in PPC for you if you want to learn more.

2. Do your own marketing. Marketing is a major percentage of any new business’ costs. We will have a number of marketing courses to help you learn how to go about doing everything you can do and save yourself money. Even if you end up outsourcing the job later – at least you’ll learn what there is to it – and be able to better manage those you’ve trusted to do it for you.

3. Learn the basics about everything you have to do. Graphics, SEO, Marketing, copyrighting, lead generation and growing your business. If you’re not already up to speed on these things it will pay you both figuratively and, over time – literally to learn the basics of everything involved in getting your business ramped up. Again, we’ll offer many training programs here to help you out – some will be free and some paid. Take advantage of them!

4. Work in the cloud. Google applications mimic Microsoft’s Office suite of software and yet there are a couple of distinctions. They’re free. They’re in the cloud and accessible from anywhere you can login. There’s no need to take files with you on memory stick or send files via email – just send links to where to find them online.

Starting a business need not involve a lot of expenses that most business owners take for granted. Go out of your way to learn pieces of the puzzle so you can either do them yourself or better manage others that will do them for you. Training yourself now will save you considerable money down the road!