There are many ways to start with no money and will tell you some of the best today. The big thing is that when you invest you tend to stay with what not working, in order to try to salvage your investment.
With little or no money invested in something you can send several ships out and go only with what works, not tying up your time beating a dead horse that is not coming back to life.
So not having any money to invest in getting a business started is an advantage, because you are married to nothing, you go immediately totally with what works.
My favorite story I have related on this site is the guy who took small printed signs some 1 x 2 stakes he made and posted signs on every vacant lot in town.
The sign said,
Will Build A New Home
For You On This Lot
Jones Construction
945-4567
He got several calls a week, when someone was interested in the lot he took their number, turned it over to a real estate person who offered him a commission on sales, who contacted the owner and often worked out a sale.
Sure, sometimes the lot was not for sale but many times the owner got interested in selling since here was a genuine prospect. No problem, he had nothing invested, but some did work but he did no work, he merely turned over the lead.
They were interested in the lot and building on it, he contacted both a real estate person and a builder who also paid him a percentage on every deal that worked.
To make a long story short, he became a millionaire, and that is how he started the whole thing with no money.
He took a little abuse for putting signs on some owner's lots they did not like but they just removed the signs. My experience with this type of thing is never ask. When they don't like it they just throw your small investment away.
What you need is to figure out an update. He probably invested under $5. To a $100 over time and a week or two locating all vacant lots.
The updated version, is that you can do something similar offering something you do not own (like the lot) and offer some service you do not do, (like building a home) and when you get bona fide lead you farm it out for a percentage of any revenue they generate. You are in the "generate leads" business.
Do this on Craigslist, and if you do not know about Craigslist learn quick.
Craigslist is totally free, and gets way more results then the best classified in your daily paper. You can often list something at 4 pm have ten calls and have it sold by 9pm, without a dime invested.
Will do an article on Craigslist, but just let me say there are hundreds of free sites to advertise on, but if you used Craigslist and ALL the other free sites on the same ad you would get more response from the one ad on Craigs then you would on all the others combined.
You can advertise any service free but you have to know how to do this right to make it work. My current rental business, we use Craigslist to bail us out of slow times. We even have overseas people do some of our postings for $3 an hour. (You have to know how to work this, will tell you when get to doing Craigslist article,) drop me an email if need to know something have not had time to do article on.
Will give you one more story of related thing I did when I started in Television renting and selling business when there was only one station in town (1950)
When things got slow in the summer season and I had two stores and was in trouble, here is what I did.
Ran a classified newspaper ad that said:
Want responsible party to take over payments on 17 inch RCA TV. Free equity. phone number....
Had an answering service take the calls and got name and phone number saying they did not know whether he had found somebody to take over the payments or not, but if not would contact them.
We let the leads sit a week so not associated any more with the ad and then called them, and said, we had a friend say that you might be in the market for a TV, We have deal going right now on .....Whatever it was, repossession etc and maybe you would like to take a look at it. The payments are xyz...
we sold about 20% a TV, during the slow summer when a full page ad in the daily newspaper did not get a single inquiry.
In the summer, distributors gave us about 20 to 30% more discount on TV sets than normal. We had good margin and could really deal.
That little classified ad litterly got us over the slow summer season that killed some of my competitors businesses off.
If you use your head you can get a dozen of this type of "no money invested" business going with no start up cost, and I will not go into it here but this is how you can tie in with a web site (you make for free) and get everything off the ground.
Next tip, when get to it, will be on how to use Google adsense. Normal ad, we used to pay out big bucks and gamble whether get any leads etc. It took a week to find out... With Google adsense, if you know what you are doing, you can be getting a lead in 15 minutes and pay ONLY for the leads, no leads, no pay. Craigslist is free but you have to learn how to handle the competition.
Adsense costs. If you get leads for 50 cents each and you sell one out every twenty, the sale cost you $10.00
Precise cost can be worked out. If your margin on the sale is $20. You can do this all day long. If you are generating leads for someone else, a sale may pay you $2,000 commission on something, so you have to think all this thru, what works, all this with no investment.
When you learn how to get all the customers you would need you might want to go in that business. Most doing this finally figure out, really, who needs the hassle and risk... This is easy and I can duplicate this many times with other types of businesses.
The detail businesses tie you and your money down... This leaves you free to move with every opportunity as they arise.
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