No Excuses

People ask me if they can make a great living online like my wife and I do, and then as I explain how they start picking apart everything I say to "prove" that they can't do it. If you want to prove you can't do something, go ahead. You'll be right - and still be right where you are.

This business may not be right for you - we are all different. But there is a difference between not wanting to do something and just being afraid to try. With that in mind I have a story that will how to start online business with no investment and from the worst circumstances. The story is fictional, but the techniques are all real.

Jack lived on a piece of cardboard under a tree in Tucson, Arizona, in Reid Park, near the corner of East 22nd Street and South Country Club Road. His last job had ended months before. He ate at soup kitchens and occasionally collected an orange or two from trees that hung over the walls of nearby homes. During the day he often went downtown to the main library, or to one of the other branches of the public library.

Libraries have become home for many people who live on the street. For most it is a place to get out of the cold (or out of the heat of Tucson summers). For Jack it was also a place to get online using one of the computers provided. If he was quiet he could usually sneak in an extra hour after his first allotment was up. He was looking for a way off the street and decided that he might be able to make some money online.

After some research he went to blogger.com and started a free blog. It was about traveling cheap, something he had some experience with. He posted something new several times weekly. To promote it, he wrote short articles and distributed them through article directories. When people read them they sometimes clicked through to his blog using the link at the bottom, in the "about the author" section. If he wrote on a topic he didn't know well, he just did fifteen minutes of research online and summarized what he learned in an interesting way.

To make money from visitors he looked for appropriate affiliate programs that would pay him a commission when he referred a customer. For example, he went to the MyHelpHub Affiliate Program and found among their products a short course/ebook that they sold for $47, called Travel Writing Secrets. He signed up for free as an affiliate and linked to this from his blog. Each time a visitor clicked on the link and decided to buy the book he would get 40% of the sale amount, or $18.80. A month after he started he had sold one book, as well as one sale of luggage that made him a $12 commission.

For most people, making only $30 that first month might be discouraging, but to Jack it meant his plan was working. He just had to get more visitors to his blog. He wrote and distributed more articles, listed his blog in free directories and found every free way he could use to promote it. To keep track of his articles and notes and other things important to his business, he just emailed everything to himself at his free Hotmail account and saved them to different files. In this way everything was stored for free and available from any computer with internet access.

The second month he made several sales of affiliate products for a profit of $74. He opened a free PayPal account online because MyHelpHub and some others paid their affiliates that way. So far he had spent nothing at all to start or run his new business. But he did need to open a bank account to get his money from PayPal. He hit the streets and collected aluminum cans to sell to the metal recycling operator in town. It took him several days to make $32 in this way, and he used $25 of it to open an account at the local credit union.

The third month he made $189. He also transferred $100 from his PayPal account to his credit union account - the first profits he actually had access to since getting online. He rewarded himself with a nice dinner and a night in a cheap motel. He had still made less than $300 in the first three months, but he could see that his income would grow. In fact, in the fourth month the search engines finally gave his blog more exposure and he made $410.

Jack created a free PDF ebook of travel tips to give away, using a free trial of an online conversion service. In the ebook he recommended and linked to travel-related products that he could make a commission on. Now, at the end of the articles he wrote and distributed, he put, "Visit my blog to get your free copy of "Cheap Travel Tips." That increased the number of readers who clicked through, and some readers of the ebook bought the products recommended. Jack made $513 his fifth month in business.

He found an efficiency apartment that rented for $380 monthly with all utilities, and had just enough for the first month's rent and deposit. Starting without a penny and without knowing anything about internet marketing, he had created a small online business that got him off the street. He could only work at his business about 15 hours weekly because his time on the library computers was limited.

He made $605 his sixth month, and his income continued to grow each month thereafter. The best part was that the money came in day and night, even when he was sick and unable to get to the library. Eventually he bought a computer and got his own internet connection. His friends that camped out on cardboard boxes in Reid Park had told him he couldn't do it, but they didn't know Jack.

Our Own Story

My wife Ana and I started online around the end of August 2004. We had a $100 used computer and a tediously slow telephone-based internet service that cost $5 monthly. We knew absolutely nothing about HTML or online marketing, but we knew that we wanted a business we could operate from anywhere. We moved from Michigan to Tucson that winter, into an efficiency apartment that cost - you guessed it - $380 per month (that's how I know Tucson, though we now live in Colorado).

That's about the point where I discovered the value of using short articles to promote our websites. In the summer of 2005 we had our first thousand-dollar-month. By the following year we were doing two thousand dollars per month. At that point we discovered how to center our pages on the screen. Seriously, we had our pages stuck off to the left for the first year and a half. What we lacked in technical skills, though, we made up in commitment to learning how to make money. Ugly websites can make a lot of money. (Fortunately Ana has a lot more patience than I for the technical side of the business, and so she got our sites looking good.)

It would have been easy to give up after making practically nothing in the first three months. We could have decided that informational websites just don't make money, or that it was "too late" to get into internet marketing. Of course, excuses provide comfort, but not income. As it is, and despite our slow start, we now make five times as much money as either of us had made at any of the dozens of jobs we've had.

No excuses!

I am not suggesting you stick with methods that don't work. Giving up on the means doesn't mean giving up on the goal. Learn from your failed efforts and try new ways. Every year I try many new techniques to increase our online income, and guess what? Most of them fail! That's just the way it is (at least for me). But the ones that work make up for the others.

Note:

The "free blog" approach is just one way to make money online with no investment and no website. Lesson 21 of my ebook/course You Can Make Money Writing has five more explained in detail. Of course there is a lot more to this than the simple story above can cover, so if you're considering an online business, click on the banner at the bottom of this page to go buy my book or to sign up for a free short course.

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