5 low-cost business start-up ideas
In this article, we're going to show you five low-cost business ideas that we hope will show you that money isn't everything when starting out in Entrepreneurship on the Web.
All you need is your passion and creativity.
1. Freelancing/consulting as a low-cost activity
If you think about it carefully, you've probably spent most of your life studying. In elementary school, high school, college, the first 20 or 30 years of your life were probably spent learning skills.
Some of these skills that you have developed over the years can be used to generate profits. This is the whole point of a freelance or consulting activity:
Use your knowledge and talents to solve other people's problems: your customers.
READ MORE: How to define the problem of your customers?
With this idea of starting a low-cost business, your only investment is your time and you have the option of spending a bit of money to create a website if you wish.
Freelancing has never been so important and growing nowadays in the world of entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately, many people who decide to become self-employed end up realizing the harsh reality of the era of globalization: you will have to face competition from cheap labor from countries where the cost of living is cheaper.
If you try to compete with these people by undertrading, you will lose. If you want to earn a five- or six-figure salary with your freelance work, you need to think strategically, as if you were running a business. You should charge what you are worth.
You will have to abandon unproductive and unprofitable customers. By focusing on the customers who bring in the most money, you'll be able to earn more in the same amount of time.
You'll also need to build a reputation by regularly advertising your services in a variety of mediums and publishing customer testimonials and success stories. This will eventually allow you to charge higher rates for your freelance/consulting services.
READ MORE: The best freelance platforms to find jobs
If you want to succeed in Entrepreneurship as a freelancer, you also need to learn how to sell yourself.
As a freelancer or consultant, you will have several options to make yourself known:
- Network with other freelancers and potential customers on social media.
- Ask current customers and friends to recommend you.
- Show ads on Facebook, Google, and other ad networks
- Pitch potential customers
- Write guest articles in relevant and authoritative blogs.
- Speak at events attended by potential customers
Among all these strategies, the one that consists of obtaining references is the most used by freelancers.
READ MORE: The complete guide to getting clients for your consulting business
2. Launch a digital product
In the world of entrepreneurs, providing services can be very lucrative. But another equally cost-effective and inexpensive way to provide a solution is to offer a digital product using your skills.
Whether it's an ebook, a course, an article, a template, or any other document, you can help people by digitizing your knowledge.
READ MORE: The 3 best inexpensive businesses to create with €1000 or less (or even €0!)
Unlike traditional methods of teaching and sharing knowledge such as seminars, books, or consulting, digital products allow you to help people on a large scale. That means you create the product once and then sell it as many times as you want, with virtually no recurring costs.
Turn your skills into a digital product and start earning money right away.
Among the costs associated with launching a digital product are the fees of the payment intermediary (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) and the platform where you sell your products (LearnWorlds, Podia, Teachable, etc.), which generally takes a small portion of your monthly turnover.
If you add up these costs, you can expect up to 5% of your total sales to go to the fixed costs of running your business. Of course, we don't count the marketing, operations, and development costs of your product. All of this, of course, depends on your offer.
You can spend $5 to design an Ebook cover on Fiverr and start selling your product using only your personal Instagram if that's what you want.
3. Social media marketing
You probably think of social media as a fun way to kill time, but today, you can't deny the power and influence it has on our daily lives.
For an inexpensive business idea, it's a way to take advantage of one's influence to make money for “almost” nothing.
Businesses know this all too well and are willing to pay dearly to get others to promote their own offerings. That's the whole business model of the “influencer”. They are the people who amass loyal armies of followers with whom they develop strong relationships.
If you can build an audience on any reputable social media platform like Instagram, you can make money from it.
The key to monetizing an Instagram account is not to make it grow as big as possible, but to build a loyal group of followers.
Furthermore, micro-influencers, i.e. people with an audience between 1,000 and 50,000 followers, are just as capable of creating value for their business partners as influencers with a larger audience.
Apart from your time, the costs associated with growing an Instagram account (or Tik Tok, Twitter, etc.) are negligible. All you need is a phone (maybe a camera), editing software, and your creativity.
There are no direct costs associated with starting your Instagram following. All you need is to post the right content for your audience and have a bit of patience.
When you start growing your audience, you need to think about monetizing them. To do this, you have various options:
- Publish sponsored posts on behalf of brands
- Become an affiliate of other businesses (check out the best affiliate programs)
- Selling your own products (physical or digital)
- Selling a service
- A mixture of all of the above
The amount of money you can expect to make will depend on your space, engagement rate, audience size, and offer. Gaining followers on Instagram or any other social media platform can take time, but with the right tools and strategy, you can see real results.
4. Create a YouTube channel
With over 30 million daily active users, youtube is one of the most popular websites in the world. It serves not only as an entertainment site, but also as an educational site.
Over the past ten years, thousands of independent channels have been started by ordinary people became successful entrepreneurs who only had a camera and a computer. And the results have often been spectacular.
Many YouTubers have earned thousands, if not millions, of euros through a mixture of advertising, sponsored videos, affiliate marketing, and selling their own products.
Just like on Instagram, the goal is to have a loyal audience that trusts your brand, regardless of size. In this case, as in many other cases in life, quality trumps quantity.
To start a channel youtube, all you need is a camera and editing software. The camera doesn't have to be that of a pro, the camera on your phone is enough to get you started.
What's really important is that you think about the long term. It will take time for you to develop an audience, to understand theYoutube algorithm, use Youtube SEO tools, publish regularly every week, and keep looking for news marketing content ideas that arouse the interest of your audience and get them to buy in.
5. Create a blog
Millions of people share a passion for writing. It allows us to break free from our daily routine and to express our thoughts and feelings.
Blogging has been a popular way to build an audience since the late 1990s. Shortly after their generalization, people began to Becoming true entrepreneurs by earning money through this medium.
READ MORE: How do I create and earn money with a blog?
Blogging as a profession comes with many challenges. You'll need to do a lot of research and write content that resonates with your audience. You will need to promote your content. You will need to adapt and innovate.
The same revenue streams mentioned in the ideas above apply to bloggers, the most popular in this case being affiliate marketing.
Thanks to affiliate programs, a blogger can generate revenue (what some call “passive income”) without having to spend money beyond the costs of creating original content.
The costs you will need to incur to get started as a blogger are as follows:
- Lodging : Cheap and reliable hosting companies, like Bluehost and GoDaddy, offer accommodations starting at 2.75 euros per month.
- Domaine : A.com domain costs 12 euros per year, while others vary between 1 euro for a.live TLD (top level domain) and 14 euros for a.org.
- Design : The themes WordPress Premium can start at around €30 and exceed €100.
Blogging is one of best business ideas under 100 euros.
However, because it's a low-cost startup idea, it's accessible to most people and the competition can be tough, especially for those exploring the right ones. niches like health or marketing for example.
Much of the work involved in attracting traffic to a site requires finding a unique angle, creating highly useful content, and promoting it to the right audience. But if you manage to develop a blog successfully, it can become very lucrative.
READ MORE: Why should every business have a blog?
