Many online business ideas require some level of financial investment to get them started. When you are short on cash you must do the legwork and the promotion for yourself – in the beginning anyway! At least you know it will be done right.

There are however several affordable online success methods and techniques that can be started on a shoe string budget. Imagine that you have a budget of $100 (£50) to start your first online business. How would you use your grand budget of $100?

I’ve been running my own websites since 1995 and blogs since 2006 and I’ve barely put any money into them other than the cost of domains and hosting.  You really don’t have to spend much money to have online success if you are willing to work hard at promoting your sites and networking with other bloggers/ site owners.

So how can you have online affordable success?

You first need to research a theme or niche that your website will focus on. You can use a number of tools online and many of them have free versions. Wordtracker is the best trial software to use to complete your keyword research. So do your research to find a niche that has people looking for answers. Try to find keywords for your niche (usually three word (long tail keywords) are best) that have less than 50,000 competing pages. You will have more success if there’s less competition out there on your chosen keywords.

You’ll also need to find a good and relevant item to sell from your webpage, whether it’s an affiliate product that complements your site or a product that you’ve created on your own. Actually, the cheapest thing to do is make up your own product and the easiest product to create is an e-book. If you do create an e-book with information about your chosen niche, you should convert it to PDF.  You can convert a word document to a pdf using one of the many free PDF converters available.

Having written or sourced your product, you now need to work on a sales page that will convert website visitors into customers. The hosting and website can easily be taken care of in the beginning by creating a blog on blogger.com.  The sites are easy to manage and you can set it up in minutes, plus it’s free so you can spend your funds elsewhere or save your money for future projects.

To take payments you can use a Buy Now button from Paypal. The Buy Now buttons are quite simple to set up on your page. IF and when you begin to make sales of your product, Paypal will charge a small processing fee on a business account.  You now have your own internet business. It’s not that hard, really.

So, just to recap, in order to have affordable online success you can use free keyword tools to help you discover a niche that you will be successful in, you can set up a blog on blogger thus eliminating hosting and domain costs in the beginning and you can create or find a product to sell. The only problem is that you still haven’t spent your budget of $100. What to do eh? that’s what I call affordable online success.

You could of course spend some of your budget on low cost advertising to help get visitors to your site, but there are many ways to do that for free as well. I’ll discuss how to get free traffic to your site in a future post. Watch for it!