If you’ve been trying to make money online before you know that it demands more than only a computer and an internet connection. It requires time, knowledge, learning by doing (which also takes time), and in many cases significant financial investments.
I have built up a great follower base over the time I’ve been active in the internet marketing space and found that many people are not in a situation where they can financially invest in order to get started. People often ask me;
Can I earn money online without investment?
Well, the answer to that question is yes, IF you have time and don’t need a website. However, it’s extremely difficult to make money online without a website of some kind. To run a website you need a domain name and a hosting service, which requires a small amount of financial investment. We’re talking around $10 a year for the domain name and about $3/mo for the hosting service. (often charged annually).
In this post Im going to show you everything you need in order to make money online, keeping it all to an absolute minimum in regards to financial investments up front, and how you can set it up so that you’ll at least break even once up and running.
Domain and Hosting
You have to get yourself a domain name and a hosting service. For the domain name I’m personally using Namecheap.com. Another great domain name service is GoDaddy.com
I would make the domain name relevant to what’s on the page to look more professional. You’re going to offer a free gift on the webpage hosted at this domain name, so make it relevant to the free gift. This page is by the way going to be your squeeze page.
For the hosting service, I usually recommend hostgator. That’s what I’ve been using and have great experiences with.
Once you have a domain name and a hosting service in place, you should also get yourself an autoresponder for easy delivery of your free gift, and also for smoothly following up with your prospects and customers once in your funnel.
The Autoresponder
For those of you who don’t know what an autoresponder is, it’s a service for managing contacts by email. It allows you to create automatic follow up sequences of emails, sending out email broadcasts to your whole email list at once and even segment your contacts by separate email lists.This is great for managing prospects vs. buying customers.
Prospects and buyers should be treated differently in your business, giving a higher kind of priority to your buyers. That’s a totally different topic which deserves it’s own blog post.
Anyway..
I recommend Aweber for the autoresponder service. They’re reliable, got good deliverability and have great customer support. You also get your fist month for only $1, which makes it great for testing and plenty of time to get rolling with this and make your cash back.
You can easily create the actual sign-up forms people use to give you their email address inside of aweber, so it’s really making things alot easier for you.
If you want more information about aweber, what it does and how it’s working, you can check it out here
The Free Gift
Before creating the squeeze-page, you should have a clear idea of what free gift you want to offer. The best way is to put in the work to create the free gift yourself, or use some content you already have. Maybe you have a blog and can compile some blogposts on the same topic into an subscriber exclusive ebook? It can also be a short cheat sheet of some kind. As long as the free gift brings value, go for it!
If you don’t feel like making the free gift yourself, there are another way which might get you just as many subscribers if done right. The easiest way to get your hands on a good free gift without creating it, is to find a quality PLR product with giveaway rights, rebrand it and give it away for free on your squeezepage. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, and gives you the right to use the product as your own.
Here a good site I often recommend for finding such products:
Here’s a “hack” for building better relationships with your prospects from day 1, and to make them better remember you;
- Create or find a PLR video series or a PLR ebook you can break up into 5-7 pieces and market your free gift as a 5-7 day “free email course”. For eBooks, just deliver one or two chapters a day, and make it make sense. You don’t want to deliver the last chapter first for instace if it’s a non-fiction book training them to do something specific.
- Set your autoresponder up to deliver one part every day for 5-7 days. This boosts your open rates and click through rates. You are also training your subscribers to open your emails from day 1, and it creates a higher percieved value because you’re giving without asking for anything in return for 5-7 straight days in a row.
Another benefit is that it will be more “natural” to send out a recomendation or offer a paid product, to your list after the free email course is delivered. This is part of your automatic email sequence that goes out after someone subscribes.
- Set your autoresponder to wait for 2-3 days before sending the email with the recomendation for the paid product. This should be mixed with some kind of content of relevance to your offer, either within the same email, or in a “content email going out before the promotion.
You now have an automatic sequence that builds a relationship with your peeps, AND makes you money from the paid offer you’re offering at the end. I’ve had great success with this kind of sequence, getting feedback from subscribers telling me how awesome my stuff is, along with generating buying customers that are important to my business to this day.
Rebranding a PLR product
The rebranding part is easily done by putting your name on the product, and getting a new product cover for it. This can be done in Photoshop or GIMP if you enjoy using those kinds of programs. to save time you can get free cover templates over at psdcovers.com.
To make the rebranding even easier, you can outsource the cover creation at Fiverr. People will make beautiful cover designs for you for only $5. An image of your product cover is not necessary, but it is recommended to give your visitors a better experience on your squeeze page, thus a higher conversion rate, as pictures appeal more to people than just plain text.
The Squeeze Page
There’s really not that much to a squeeze page. It should be as simple and specific as possible. It’s just a one page website that’s designed to squeeze emails out of as many people as possible.
I’ve found that this “recipe” works pretty well;
- A catchy and appealing headline that grabs your visitors attention immediately.
- Here’s a great resource I use all the time to come up with good headlines;
The 100 Greatest Headlines Ever Written
- A good sub-headline to support your headline.
- 2-4 Bullet points explaining the key benefits of your free gift in a short and consise manner
- A clear call to action which prompt them to enter their email in the signup form.
- And of course the actual signup form that you created in your autoresponder service.
There you have it. This is really all you need to make money online without significant investment. Remember to sustain communication with your list, sending them quality content mixed with some paid offers, and people will buy from you over and over again.
The purpose of this post was not only to give you a framework that has worked for me and many other marketers aswell, but to also give you a clear picture of what making money online without significant investment requires. I say get to work and implement.
For more specific instructions on how to actually set it all up, I want to give you an excerpt of my book “The Ultimate income Blueprint”
It’s three chapters teaching you the whole process from getting a domain name to having a squeezepage and an autoresponder ready to produce results for you like clockwork. All technical aspects are covered in great detail. Simply follow along just like you do in a user manual.
Go here to sign up for your free three chapters
To end with, I want to talk a little about a small trick I used to make it even easier to break even both with your small investments up front and if investing in paid traffic afterwards through solo ads for example.
The paid offer
Once people opt in to receive your free gift, they’ve just taken action and are as hot as they ever will be. They should receive a paid offer with a decent price.
This can be a small product relevant to your free gift or something else of the same type of material. If your free gift is an email course on Kindle Publishing for example, your paid offer could be another ebook or a video course teaching peple how to outsource significant amounts of the work needed from a blank sheet of paper to a published book.
Remember the paid offer at the end of your email follow-up series I talked about earlier? That’s a great place for you to sell the same paid offer they got after signing up.
A good price point (depends on value and quality) for these types of offer, I’ve found to be around $7.
You should be able to make a profit, or at least break even on all your tiny investments doing this within a short amount of time. After that, your machinery just keeps running. All you need to do now is keep communicating with your list, and drive traffic to your squeeze page. Everything from here on is pure profit.
I hope you enjoyed my post, and learned something from it. If you want to know more about how to actually set it all up, just download the free chapters of my book here.
What do you think? Would you do things differently? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks and good luck,
René Frydson
