subject: No Money? No Problem. Here Are 8 Free Resources To Help You Become A Stealth Entrepreneur! [print this page] Out of all the excuses I hear about why people can't make money online by far the biggest one is "I have no money to get started".
I can tell you as a FACT, that's right not speculation but a flat-out proven fact, that not don't you need a lot of money to get started it can actually hurt your business.
When you don't have thousands of dollars to fund your business, you are lean and hungry. You find every possible way to cut expenses and become profitable. You will work your ass off to get free traffic. To barter for web design. To negotiate the best rates.
You won't believe how hard to I worked to find ways to keep my costs down when I first started. How hard I hustled to make deals and get free traffic.
But when you suddenly have money flowing in, you get careless. You made stupid decisions. Don't think it won't happen to you.. it will.
I can't tell you how much money I've wasted over the years. If I had to guess, it would be in the neighborhood of $250,000. I spent it on everything from a $10,000 online shopping cart (which I never used) to spending thousands of dollars on premium domain names (which I never even activated and let expire).
I'm talking really dumb stuff. Rookie mistakes. And if I can make those mistakes (being the super-frugal guy that I am), believe me, it can happen to you.
Ask anyone who started with nothing and they'll all tell you how much money they've wasted in their business.
The web is littered with marketing "gurus" who started to make money and immediately hired dozens of employees. Now, they have a big-ass payroll and 4,000 square feet of expensive office filled with overpriced furniture. Then, when the money stops flowing so freely, they are in deep shit.
When the money is flowing in is when you start hiring expensive $10K per month PR firms that never do a thing for you. Or some fancy video guy who charges $5K for a video that doesn't make one sale.
KEEPIN' IT FREE
Ok, enough of the rant.
Here are some great resources that will help you build, grow and manage your business that I personally still use in my business and they are 100% FREE!
1. GOOGLE DOCS: Create documents, spreadsheets and even online surveys. I use this to share documents with my team and other freelancers.
2. DROPBOX: Forget flash drives. I store all of my documents virtually so it's easy to access from any computer. Plus, you can share the files with other people too. You get up to 2GB of storage for free.
3. JING: A free screencapture software program that lets you create both online videos and images. It sits on your desktop and stores the files online which makes it easy to share.
4. MAILCHIMP: Although I don't use this service, they do offer a free basic email newsletter service for up to 2,000 subscribers. The free service doesn't include autoresponders but it's still a good option for someone with a zero budget!
5. WORDPRESS: That's right, good ol' wordpress is FREE. Granted, you need a web hosting account but it's still the most robust publishing platfrom on the web and it's what I use to build all my sites.
6. FACEBOOK FAN PAGE: There are over 700 million people on Facebook. If you don't have a fan page for your business you are missing out on a lot of potential subscribers and viral traffic.
7. PICRESIZE: I love this tool. It lets you resize, crop and even save images as different formats. It's all online and yes.. free.
8. GOOGLE ALERTS: Find out anytime your niche keywords are featured online on blogs, news sites, forums and the web. It's a great way to keep your fingers on the pulse of your market.
