5 Reasons to Consider an Online Business

How to Start and Grow Your Internet Business With Minimal Investment
By Louis Allport

The cost of developing an internet business can fluctuate wildly depending on your goals, how fast you would like the business to grow, and what type of business it is. Let's list some of those costs, your options for each, and how in fact you can cover many of these costs even if you're on a shoestring budget:

Creating your website -- You can do this yourself of course for free using software like NVU or Mozilla Composer. However, if like me, website design is not your strong point, you can get very good work done inexpensively. For example - I was looking for a website design created, and the quotes I received ranged from $200 to $5,000! So you can in fact get surprisingly good work done inexpensively, but it's important you know what you want in a website, so get clear on that by visiting other websites and using those as examples of what you're looking for when dealing with the website designer you've chosen.

Web hosting -- Unless your website is going to be incredibly high trafficked right from the start, you can start with an inexpensive web hosting set up, and then upgrade from there. However, do choose your web host carefully - you really are spoilt for choice here, but quality of service can wildly fluctuate. Unbiased personal recommendations from others can help you make the right decision here.

Email list management -- Your options are either installing email list management software on your site (like Dada Mail) or using a service. Since email can be a minefield if you manage your list the wrong way, I always prefer using a service, many of which start at $20 a month if not less.

Domains -- Many, if not most domain registrars now offer domains at less than $10 a year so this really is a minimal expense these days.

Payment processing -- You can start for free by using PayPal. Get set up inexpensively with 2CheckOut or ClickBank. Or maybe get set up with a merchant account gateway. It's great to offer PayPal as many customers are comfortable paying that way, but I also recommend offering a second option, since in my opinion just offering PayPal looks unprofessional. Just my opinion though... I nearly always offer PayPal and also a pure credit/debit card processor like 2CheckOut as a second payment option.

Advertising -- Advertising costs money of course, and any time you do advertise, you can't be sure you'll get that money back from product sales. I would suggest that if/when you have money to spare, carefully test advertising sources and see what happens by measuring your Return On Investment at every stage.

Web Traffic -- There's a lot of ways to get web traffic that don't really cost money, just take time and effort. These include writing articles, creating viral eBooks, adding lots of quality content to your site so it gets links and search engine traffic, becoming a guest author on other sites... but as mentioned, these take time and effort, but long term the results can be fantastic (my sites get hundreds of visitors every day from viral eBooks I wrote years ago).

Audio and Video -- Whether you're creating audio and video content to sell, or just to fill out your site with more content, you can do this very inexpensively. For recording audio - if you're recording just your own voice, Audacity is free software that does this. For recording an interview - use Skype along with Skype recording software, which can be purchased for less than $20. And for recording videos, I do use Camtasia sometimes but that sells for around $300. More and more these days though I use the GoToMeeting service for creating video content as I find it works fantastically for creating content quickly as you're sitting there talking to someone, rather than just sitting in your office talking into a microphone by yourself