It’s a vicious circle, you look online to find out how to make money but everything costs money, you wouldn’t be looking if you had money to spare right?

You also don’t know what to do but everyone wants your money to show you how to do it! Again you don’t have spare money right?

Well it’s time to see how badly you want to make it!

You could make a start today! At a cost of ZERO!

I spent nearly a year hunting around the web trying to figure out how people were making money. I found a lot of people who wanted my money to show me how but I did eventually start on my own at a cost of Zero.

  • I set-up a website
  • I found a free autoresponder
  • I found some great free ways to get traffic to my website
  • I started to build a list (that would later become customers)
  • I found products to sell

    • Note that “I found products to sell” is not top of the list, it’s not even 2nd or 3rd! A lot of people (myself included) look for the product first and get bogged down looking for that killer product to make them their fortunes. My advice (for now) is forget the product! In fact if you take action and do steps 1-4 I’ll give you some products to sell for FREE!

    So now I’ll explain how you can do those first steps for FREE but more importantly why you should do them and why in this order.

    A Website – We are talking here about internet marketing, so selling anything online you obviously need a website. I’m sure some product vendors will try and say you don’t, they’ll tell you they supply a website to send traffic to, which is true but if you do that you are only going to build their list and not make much money. WHY? Well you could find some affiliate products and send traffic to their website, any sales would track to you but the reality is people don’t buy a product the first time they see it. “The money is in the list” we all know that (if you didn’t that’s lesson 1!). You need to capture peoples name and email, you need to give them value to build trust, then, and only then, will they consider purchasing anything from you. Without a website you can’t capture their details, without an autoresponder you can’t either but we’ll leave that until step 2.

    So hopefully by now you agree you need a website. I said I’d show you how to do this completely free, which I will, but I also want to tell you my recommended way which can be low cost.

    Low Cost (but preference if you can afford it)
    A wordpress blog hosted on your own domain is what I would recommend. WordPress is free but would require you to buy a domain name like www.yourname.com and also pay for hosting check out www.Godaddy.com where you can pick up a domain name with hosting for as little as $45 / £28 for a year! If you go down this route this article will take you through how to set-up wordpress on your Godaddy domain once you’ve bought it http://help.godaddy.com/article/834

    FREE (very good for starting out and learning the ropes)
    www.weebly.com is really easy to use, choose a style layout then drag and drop titles, pictures or text to build up your site visually in front of you. Watch the video on the home page to see how it’s done.

    Whichever you choose your next question is probably what are you going to put on this website right?

    Well remember when marketing anything online YOU are the brand that you want people to trust, if you buy a TV you buy a particular brand because it’s well know and people trust it. You want to become the brand that people trust. In time people will buy things from you just because YOU said it’s cool!

    Make the website about you, what you did before you discovered Internet marketing and what made you choose to turn to the Internet, it could be the crazy hours you were working and you wanted a way out of the rat race. Whatever it is you want people to relate to you as a human being, pictures are great too let people see you are real. In time you will build the site up but an about you page is a great start.

    Next pick a niche that you would like to be involved in, ideally something where you have some knowledge but remember you only have to know a little more than someone else to be able to offer valuable information. When I created my first website and started building a list I created a newsletter about Internet marketing. I hadn’t ever sold a thing online but I had been researching it for a year so I was able to explain a lot of the buzz words associated with Internet marketing and pass on some of things I’d learnt from my hours of searching the web. You could do this too! In fact you could even regurgitate this post in to 3 – 4 different emails if you pad it out. There will always be people looking online that very first time who really don’t have a clue! You might have a tried a million diets in your life so could offer a newsletter about healthy eating and diets that work, build a list of people interested in this and I can show you a lot of places you will be able to find e-products to market to that list.

    Don’t spend too long on choosing this, the key is to get something started!! It all becomes a lot clearer when you stop reading and start doing. One of my favorite quotes is…

    “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it started.”

    Great, you’ve got a website and you’ve chosen a niche. Next you need an autoresponder, if you’ve no idea what one is check out this previous post What is an Autoresponder

    Now I use www.aweber.com it does have a $1 trial but you will pay more after the first month. It is my recommendation but I said we were doing this all for free so if you can’t afford that then I have a couple of options for you

    1. Mail Chimp
    2. Ezinedirector

    User interfaces vary but essentially with an autoresponder you create a list, give it a name, then create what’s called a “web form” these come in different shapes and sizes but are just those sections you see on websites asking for your name and email. When you create your web form the autoresponder will give you the HTML code to copy and paste to your website, it looks complicated but you don’t have to worry, they do the clever stuff, all you have to do is copy and paste it. If you are using weebly you just drag and drop the “custom HTML” box into your site then paste the code in there.

    The cool thing with autoresponders is the “auto” automatic bit that means you do the work once and it happens again and again regardless of what you are doing. So next you need to create your newsletter in whatever niche you’ve chosen. If it’s Internet marketing you could be explaining what an autoresponder is, how to create simple websites etc. These are created in your autoresponder as follow up messages, these follow up automatically. You set the number of days after the last mail you want to send the next and it just happens. So for example on your website you could have promised to clear up all that Internet marketing confusion, explain all those buzz words like autoresponder and squeeze page and written about this in your follow up messages. Now when someone on your site enters their name and email they will automatically receive day one of the newsletter and they will receive the next email a number of days later (whatever you set it up to be).

    Now your all set up, your website is live and you have your newsletter waiting to start building your list. This is all pretty useless though if no one knows your website is there. It’s time to get some traffic (traffic means getting people to view your website).

    My absolute favorite free method of traffic generation is twitter, twitter is a social networking site where people give short (140 character) updates about what they are up to. You can set up an account for free at Twitter.com

    The concept is around following people. If you follow someone then you will see their “tweets” so you want as many people following you as possible so if you write a tweet including a link to your website you have the potential that lots of people will see it and click through to your site. Ideally you want the people following you to have an interest in what you market. So if you’ve chosen to get into the niche of weight loss and fitness you want people following that are interested in that because if you have lots of followers that are interested in gardening and you tweet a link to your weight loss website then chances are they are not going to click!!

    There are ways to do this, you can search on twitter for people that are tweeting about your chosen niche. When you find them, follow them in the hope that they follow you back.

    At the time of writing this post I have 20,838 followers on my main twitter account twitter.com/stevemales this is a great position to be in as every time I tweet anything I have the potential that 20,838 people could see my tweet. If I have a link to a website in my tweet a percentage of these people will click too getting me lots of traffic.

    I have other twitter accounts in different niches too, as soon as you crack one niche I recommend you replicate what you did to another. The automation of lots of the stages makes this possible. 20,838 followers doesn’t come overnight but their are tools to help. My favorite recommendation to you is www.tweetspinner.com you can set up keywords to search for and automatically follow people that tweet those keywords. Twitter has some unwritten rules about not letting you follow too many people related to your own number of followers and tweetspinner keeps you on the right side of these rules too.

    That should give you lots to go at for now, feel free to ask any questions in the comments of this post and I’ll be sure to respond. If you know anyone else that could benefit from this post hit the share buttons below

    Good luck!
    Steve.