Back in 2006 I started my journey looking for a way to make money online without investment. It wasn’t because I was broke or something, but I couldn’t risk my family savings without knowing what I am doing. It would be kind of gambling and I don’t gamble. So I kept searching on forums and blogs, that turned out to be mostly biased due to a commission promise from some guru.
Anyway, long story short, I had to spend some money and time learning until I had a system. It was not a no cost system or anything. I had to invest in tracking software and paid advertising to make the kind of money I wished for. It was really nice while it lasted.
And like all good things that come to an end, Google closed my Adwords account, and a few months later they closed my Adsense account as well. Here goes at least $3000 of my monthly income. Other things also happened at the same time like losing my father and other family issues that led to me ending up broke and with $24,000 debt. So to come back I needed to figure out how to make money without investment for real this time.
I did one week marketing. At the time it was working well. A few squidoo lenses were responsible for around $1000 of my income that year. I also did forum marketing, door to door sales, and to pay the rent I had to do some one-on-one tutoring for some of my friends’ kids. But still I wasn’t able to pay that growing debt and the longer it took to pay it the more the interest accumulated.
A breakthrough happened when I started selling my own products online, and I discovered how I was being ripped off as an affiliate. Only then I started to pay my debt and restore my life back.
Since I don’t need those methods anymore I will share one of them in this post. So if you are interested in learning how to make money online without investment keep reading. This one method that works like charm and have been working for me for the last 8 years.
It’s one form of affiliate marketing that requires $0 investment, but in return you’ll have to invest a lot of working hours in the preparation and the actual marketing efforts.
In this method I do the following:
1. Find a hungry crowd
This “hungry crowd” term I learned from Travis Sago, the author of “Bum Marketing”. A hungry crowd is a group of people who have a real problem that’s urgent enough for them to be willing to pay any amount of money to get it solved.
I’ll give you an example that’s not necessarily a good one for marketing, just to let you know what I mean with a hungry crowd.
Imagine that your smoke detector is peeping all night. What’s the first thing you’ll do in the morning? You might take the day off just to fix this annoying thing. Right?
Or if you wake up in the morning with full bladder but unable to pee. Are you going to ignore this problem and go to work or you’ll rush to the emergency room?
You got the idea of the urgency and being willing to do anything to get it fixed. Now let’s move on.
2. Find a solution
Your second step is to find a solution that can fix this problem and at the same time pays you commission per sale. To simplify this post I will stick to the best affiliate network out there, which is ClickBank. I have my reasons to believe so, but that’s a story for another post.
In ClickBank’s market place you can search for products by keyword. So if you have the problem already from step 1 search for the same term in ClickBank’s market place search engine. If you find results check their sales pages to make sure they are still current and are functional. Then contact the vendors for a review copy.
After the new changes in the marketplace it’s the vendors’ best interest to give you the review copy instead of letting you buy it and refunding your purchase the next day. Compare the products to make sure that you have a real solution to reduce the refund rate. After all the work you’ll put in this method you don’t want to end up with all your sales refunded because the vendor is selling a crappy product that doesn’t work.
Also use those review copies to educate yourself about the problem and the solution. You will need that for the promotion part.
3. Be the expert
Go to the forums where you found your hungry crowd and sign up for an account. Start participating and giving advice based on the knowledge you gained from your research and the reviews you did in step 2.
Some will advice you to start new threads, my advice would be not to. Just answer the questions the other members have. Keep building your reputation as the expert in this problem until you have enough posts to get you ranked in the forum (some forums have ranking for the members, if not don’t worry about it).
4. Build your site
You can build a free blog on wordpress.com, weebly.com, but my preferred platform is Google’s blogger. Again I have my reasons but for now just trust me on it. You will need to stay away from anything that looks, feels, or even smells spammy.
First post about yourself and your life briefly. Then start picking up questions from the forums you participated in and answer them on your blog.
Now go back to your forums accounts and add a signature that includes a link to your blog.
5. Get your affiliate link
Go to ClickBank and get your affiliate link to the product you think is the best in terms of solving the problem. Add this link to the end of your blog posts when appropriate (like when you answer a question related to the problem at the end link to the product using the short link and instruct your visitors to click it for more information on how to deal with this issue).
6. Keep promoting
Your participation in the forums is already doing some marketing for you. Every time someone searches for the answer of one of the questions you answered they’ll find your answer and a link to your blog in your signature. A percentage of those will visit your link to get more of your wisdom.
But this is not going to be enough. So you’ll continue participating in those forums and building reputation, and joining new forums and helping people with their problem.
And from the questions you answered you can start writing articles and publishing them on article directories like ezinearticles.com and link to your blog in your bio section.
7. Socialize
The most important social medium to use in your promotions is not Facebook, although it’s the biggest. Your time is more well spent on google +. I’ll leave the details out because this post is getting really long, just trust me on that. Make sure your google + profile includes links to where you are participating (forums, articles, blog … etc) and a nice face picture of you.
8. Expand
After you start seeing sales start investing in your real estate and build your own website on your own domain. The cheapest is Web Hosting by iPage – $1.99/month only. Don’t copy your old posts from your old blog yet. Start with new posts and newly written material, and link to them from your old blog.
If something goes wrong with the free blog (like if out of the blues Google decides to delete it for you) start moving your posts to the new blog, then go to the articles you published on article directories and change the link to your new blog.
That will be the first step on expanding.
The second step of expanding your source of income is to use the knowledge and the experience you gained from your engagement with your market to build your own product that solves the problem and start selling it on ClickBank. You already have a website to sell it on, and the authority that you’ve built over the time helping people find the solution to their urgent problem.
I hope you can make money without investment using this method. If you think it’s a good one wait until you see the other 5 no cost income systems I prepared for you.