The Bootstrapper’s Guide to Starting an Online Business

Just because you have a tight budget doesn’t mean you can’t start an online business. Thanks to the Internet, bootstrapping is easier than ever.

If you have a business idea but don’t have the money and the know-how to make it work, here are a few tips to help you out.

Validate Your Idea

The one thing you have to do before investing your time, money, and effort into your business is to validate your business idea. Testing it out allows you to gauge its potential without putting you in financial risk. If you know who your market is, test your product out with a pre-sales strategy that involves using a landing page. This way, you can check and analyze how many people are interested in your product.

Take Advantage of Free Online Tools

Since bootstrapping has no financial aid involved, it is best to get all the free help you can get. Outsourcing services add up and can turn out to be quite expensive. Thankfully, free online tools exist and can be utilized to build or improve your store.  

• Shopify – This is an e-commerce platform that can give you the foundation to build your site. It has everything you need to sell online, on social media, or even in person.
• MailChimp – This is an email tool that provides marketing automation for your business. It sends attractive emails, connects your store, advertises, and builds your brand.
• Mint – Mint is a web-based personal financial management service. It helps you manage your money, pay bills, and keep track of your credit score.
• Google Analytics – Understanding the traffic going to your website is essential, and Google Analytics is a service that can be used to do that. It tracks and reports website traffic, giving you insight as to what changes should be made.
• Trello – This is a project management service that has a kanban board system that will make it easier for you to capture ideas and organize tasks.

Utilize Free Marketing

There are plenty of free marketing options that can help put your name out there. Exposure is important and you should be using these services to your benefit. Gaining a bigger online presence will give you a better flow of customers coming to your store. Here are some strategies that you should take advantage of.

• PR Outreach – Being mentioned in the press can cause a huge influx of traffic to your site if the story your business in is compelling. There are also sites where you can post your press releases for free.
• Social Media – Popular social media sites have the biggest user databases. If you market yourself well enough, you can turn social media users into potential customers.
• Blog Partnerships – Teaming up with bloggers is another way of getting exposure. Reach out to them about working together on product reviews, sponsored posts or giveaways.