How do I make money online without spending money?
To make money online, you essentially need time and money. If you don’t have time, you need to spend money to buy services from others. If you don’t have money, you need to commit time and effort to learn new things, trying out new ideas, and ruthlessly implementing your chosen strategy and plan.
Time and money are two trade-offs that you must balance and manage in order to make money online.
Without any money to start off with when trying to make money online, there are a number of limitations that you must know.
Given that you don’t own or control any platform or website, you must use existing FREE platforms and systems like WordPress.com, eBay, Amazon, Fiverr, etc.
The good thing about these established platforms is that you have lots of willing buyers already searching for products and services to buy within the platform itself. You don’t need to drive Internet traffic to the website.
The downside is that information about and pricing of your products and services will be transparent for everyone to see and challenge. Price and product comparisons are made so easy with their comparison functions. This will attract copycats who will be your competitors, thus reducing your profit margins.
Some may even sabotage your sales by buying up your entire inventory during a holiday sales season and returning them after.
With the Internet, the entry barriers are so low that anyone without money can try to make money online. With that, comes increased competition. The marketplace has become so crowded and competitive that you need to create your own unique voice in order to make decent amounts of money,
Another downside is that all these existing platforms use some kind of customer voting systems. You are subjected to the games people play with satisfaction ranking scores.
You may even be adversely impacted if there are non-genuine negative feedbacks. Customers these days are so difficult to please that you must manage customer expectations.
Be aware that while these platforms are ‘free’, you are limited and controlled by their terms of use and operational fancies. You are also subjected to their indiscriminate policy changes.
The bottom line is that you are at their mercy!
I had my free account terminated by an established platform provider because I violated their “policy” as determined by their automated screening process!
They generally use keywords to track your activities. If you unintentionally use one or more of these prohibited keywords on their platform, their system algorithms will immediately assume that you intentionally violated their terms of use. Your account will be immediately terminated or suspended. The beauty part is that you are presumed guilty without any likelihood of an appeal.
Here’s the key problem.
If your entire business model and income source are totally reliant or dependent on this one FREE platform, then your income will immediately disappear or be wiped out overnight if you unintentionally violated their policies.
That’s why it is advisable for you to spend a bit of money to get your own website or platform up and running as quickly as possible when you have made some profits so that you have total control over it without the need to look at over your shoulders.
From a paid advertising perspective, you may need to set aside some initial advertising dollars to promote and sell your products on platforms like Facebook.
Depending on what you do online, you may require some paid advertisements to get you started. Once you have generated sufficient online income from your products or services, you can reinvest some of your initial profits back into your business.
While you can start making money online without spending any money, once you have generated some income for yourself, you must immediately spend money to build your own platform so that you can have total control over your business and income streams.
Here are a couple of potential strategies you can adopt when starting out making money online without any money.
If you like selling things online, then you could find some hot-selling products to sell from direct wholesale sites like AliExpress, advertise these products on eBay or Amazon at a higher price, collect money from your customer when a product is purchased, place your order on AliExpress for the product to be shipped directly to your customer without any physical handling by you, pay AliExpress for the product you bought on behalf of your customer, and keep the profit for yourself. This is an arbitraged or drop-ship strategy.
You could also sell other people’s products or services as an affiliate. You can email your unique affiliate ID to your friends or advertise this unique affiliate ID on your own webpage created on free blogging sites like WordPress.com, on your Facebook timeline, or on your Pinterest board. You could also do guest postings or write on Quora to promote this unique ID. This is the affiliate marketing strategy.
If you have your own services that people are willing and able to pay for, then you could use established platforms like Fiverr or UpWork to sell your services. You may have the skills and experience that sells.
To be successful in the long run for making money online, you need to establish a list of your own customers to up-sell products and services to them at a later date. Having free platforms may not allow you to capture your own customer’s email addresses for further upsells.
There are so many no-money strategies that you can employ to make money online. As you do not have control over these free popular platforms to make money from, you are totally subjected to the unpredictable application of their constantly changing terms of use. This could totally wipe out your only source of income instantly.