Top 3 Low Capital Online Money Makers

Let’s get straight into the thick of things.

I’ll be starting with as little capital as possible and while that is a pretty big disadvantage it’s not insurmountable. My budget for my early sites is going to be about $500 and this includes web hosting, advertising and any other expenses. The great thing about the internet is so many things are free!

Here’s the area’s I’m looking to start earning money in. Sort of in order, subject to change of course, any good entrepreneur should be ready to adapt to the markets. This will be a quick top 3 overview, I’m looking to get more in-depth with future posts and hopefully provide some real examples of my own sites. As always, please let me know your comments on this.

The W3-E Low Capital Internet Money Makers Top 3

3. Blogs

I’ve put blogging last for the moment, I’m not planning to make vast amounts of cash from W3 Entrepreneur but looking to use it more as an informational and marketing tool. Obviously as you can see I’ve made an effort to monetise the site, the 125×125 buttons are becoming pretty popular on blogs these days and a little bit of Adsense never hurt anyone’s wallet

Now pro-blogging is a pretty hot topic at the moment and certainly people are making allot of money from it. Many of them are supremely dedicated to their chosen topic and I really admire that, the effort required to keep fresh and up to date content on a popular blog must be great indeed.

For any of you who are either talented or keen writers (or both is great advantage of course) it can be a great way of earning money while talking about the things you love. Assuming you produce good quality and enjoyable posts you will reap the rewards of the huge blogging community, your posts will “go viral” and spread themselves.

• Website Cost: None – Free hosts are numerous, blogger.com, wordpress.org and many more.
• Traffic Cost: None/Very Low – Viral articles, social networking, link exchanges all help blogs get fantastic free traffic.
• Time: High – It’s a simple equation. The more posts you make, the higher the quality of those posts and the bigger your readership then the more money you make.

2. Made for Adsense Sites

Number 2 for our low capital list are “Made for Adsense” or “MFA” sites as they are known. Now these can be a little controversial since Google are known for banning this sort of site, only the major offenders usually but it’s widely known that they don’t really like this type of site. It’s not all bad though, they can be a very good money maker for a budding entrepreneur.

Niche content is the key here, find a focused niche and work on the SEO (Search Engine optimisation) so your site appears at least in the top 20 on Google. The focus is to get the biggest blocks of Adsense onto prominent places on the page and get as many clicks as possible. These days is common for the website owner to purchase many PLR (Private Label Rights) articles as they can afford and use them to provide content for the site, of course there is nothing stopping you writing your own articles.

• Website Cost: None/Very Low – Free webhosts such as squidoo.com (probably a topic for another post), weebly.com or any other free host. Takes no more than 5 minutes to build a basic MFA site.
• Traffic Cost: Very Low/High – A good niche and good SEO can make for cheap traffic however these sorts of sites earn mainly through volume of traffic. Getting enough traffic to make the site earn $1000+ per month means a big spend on advertising.
• Time: None – These sites make very little maintenance and mostly run on autopilot.

1. Affiliate Sites

OK, this is a huge topic but I’ll try to keep this short. Affiliate sites can range from “affiliate arbitrage” sites to fully blown e-commerce sites.

Affiliate arbitrage is the practice of buying traffic using low cost keywords and redirecting them to high cost affiliate offers. Sometimes you may not even see the affiliates site, you click on an ad and the affiliates page will redirect you straight to the product. It’s a good system and can work well although you have to be very careful that your own advertising spend is less than your sales.

Affiliate marketing is for all you door to door salesmen out there. You can pick a product and set about creating a fantastic marketing site, sell it to the best of your abilities and watch the sales roll in. Many affiliate programs can be very lucrative, most clickbank.com sales are 50%+ commission and the likes of ebay, Amazon, lovefilm.co.uk (I love lovefilm! Up to £17/$34 per signup).

Affiliate e-commerce. You can run a fully blow e-commerce site, for example a shareware software store, and get all the products from affiliate marketplaces like clickbank.com. I’ve never tried this personally.

• Website Cost: None/High – The sites can be as beautiful or basic as you like.
• Traffic cost: Low/Very High – Depending on the site and niche you may have to spend a large amount on getting traffic.
• Time: None/Medium – Most of these types will run on autopilot with only a small amount of time spent of advertising.

There’s your top 3, great area for all entrepreneurs with low capital to get started with making money online. Now I’ve been very vague on purpose because the topics are so huge they really deserve a post on their own, I’m hoping I should have some great posts with examples to show you soon!

There are also plenty of types of sites that don’t fall into these categories and i’ve missed them out due to the large startup costs, either in time or cash.

I’m persoally quite fond of Java/Flash arcade games sides, they can have a great income but do require constant advertising and unique addictive games can cost >$5000 to buy for your site.

Many news or magazine style sites are fantasic money makers but require a huge investment into writing the content, this can be either “free” using your own time or outsourcing it. Social bookmarking features can greatly improve the workload however.

“Premium” themes or scripts are also a good idea. The internets no longer exlusivley full of geeks and people don’t have the time or knowledge to hand code all their websites. A few good scripts and themes can be very good recurring revenue. Outsource your coding and then take the profits.