Small Home Based Business Case Study

It Takes Money To Make Money?

Now that Michele has given us the insights on how to start your home based business, I would like share with you a recent experiment that I made three days ago of which I believe is a great complement to that of what she was saying in her post. This also proves a theory that “It Takes Money To Make Money” is not at all just a myth. In addition, this also may provide a point that if you are in doing things seriously, then “where there is a will”, “there is a way”.

Before I head over, I would like you to know that you should not necessarily need to invest a lot of money when starting your online business. In the long run, however, as you see your home based business growing, you will see that in a way, it is something that will be inevitable. So bear with me.

To get you started, you should have one thing in mind and that is to make a plan and believe in it. I say “believe” because you have to execute it accordingly. No sense in planning without taking action and if it succeeds, you are good, and if not, find out why it didn’t, and start again (trial and error). The idea is to make it a calculated risk, to minimize your $$ exposure.

So, here is what I did:

The Product: First and foremost is finding a product that you believe adds value and if possible that you have tried yourself. For me, this was no brainer as it was actually the easy part (not always like this – luck also played an important role).

Anyway, my good friend Hesham of famousbloggers.net told me about it and Dan Lew the owner of the product also told me about it here in a comment. Keyword Winner is the product that I am talking about. I am not going to extend myself here, and if you are interested in finding out more about it, just head over to the link under the domain section :). Direct Cost $0.

The Domain: Everyone says that you should try to get a domain name that matches your topic or product. This is absolutely true because it helps a lot for your SEO. The more “keywords” you get in there the better.

So after using one of my methods of finding keywords, I was able to register the domain name, keywordplugin.com. Not ideal, but it was good specially because it is a dot com and is related to the product. Direct Cost $10.

The Hosting: This is where it gets a little tricky as if you do not have one, you will either have to use a free hosting such as blogger.com or if you already have one like I do which is unlimited domains for one single account, then the cost should be very little to you.

I have two accounts with my hosting provider. I pay $6.95 a month for each of them and among other things, I get unlimited domains (that’s why I like them). In one of my accounts, I have over 15 domains running and with this addition, makes 16. If you do the math, each domain cost me roughly $0.43 per month. So this project’s hosting cost is just that, 43 cents. This is taking advantage of your hosting fees and spreading the cost via several domains. Anyway, and as I said, it could easily be done with blogger.com. Just remember to read, How To Become A Better Blogspot User, it helps.

The Marketing: Well part of it is to create a website for this, so this is what I did. I set up a website and created one “landing” page and a post. Nothing fancy but it should do the trick for the time being.

Then, I promoted it like crazy. Made some comments on commentluv enabled blogs, Tweeted, sent an email to my small list, splattered banners on several of my related websites and that’s about it. Remember, I only had three days to do this all.

The SEO: Keywords in the domain name, keyword product, keyword on title, keyword on… Well you get my drift. If you really want to know, here is a nice study of what are the most important factors for SEO.

The Sale: Note that this does not happen as fast as it is suppose to, and it might not be a lot to begin with. But what I wanted here is for you to get the idea and motivation to get things done. Anyway, after all this, I went to my ClickBank account and hold and behold, a sale. A big surprise! Got a commission of $21,24.

Conclusion: As you can see, experimenting sometimes is a good way to see how things can work for you and this is just proof of that. The principal idea though is that you have to plan on it and take action. It won’t work on its own.

Finally and just to let you know, I did purchase the product mentioned above, but that was because I wanted it for myself. The bottom line of this small venture, generated a profit of $10,81 (Sale-Domain Name-Less hosting Cost). The “project” in itself already generated a small profit and all it takes is two more (not difficult) for Dan to virtually giving me his product for free . Hopefully it will.

What do think of this example? Is there something I missed? Have you done something similar? Let me know.