InfoHubSo, you are planning for a startup; but, you don’t have a big budget or good business ideas that can be profitable, right?
Worry not! I have 100+ low investment business plans that can be a good source of passive income for you. You just need the dedication to fill up the gap of low-fund with hard work. Are you ready? If yes, this post is for you.
Do These Ideas Work At All?
Yes, definitely! And my businesses are the best evidences. I earn more than forty thousand per month just through blogging and that too without spending more than 2 hours per day. And if you want some other evidence, you can simply read the inspirational success story of Nisha Madhulika who earned crores through YouTube.
Doesn’t sound trustable? Looking for a proven method? Take admission in MBA in any reputed college and spend 10 lakh and 2 years to learn the fundamentals of starting and running a business successfully and then start your own business.
For those who doesn’t have that much time or budget, I have another cheaper alternative! I’ll share my personal experience of setting up my first online business, failure stories, reasons of failure, and how I overcame and achieved success. You can learn from this real experiences – totally for free. Choice is yours.
If you still have any doubt, I would suggest to stop reading any further. Others, proceed.
Who Can Plan to Start These Business?
Literally anyone – a person who is doing a 9-6 job, a housewife, a retired person, a physically challenged person or a youth who has just completed his college. It is all about your aspiration to be your own boss and right motivation to stick to it, even though the early months don’t yield much or any.
So, Will It Take Long Time to Start Earning Money?
It depends on several factors! While some business can give you result within a couple of months, some may take a year to generate a good income. As per my experience it takes six months to one year for a business to come to a stable condition to generate desired amount of money.
You spent all your childhood, adolescence and a major part of adulthood in school and colleges. And now spend all your day and mental energy in your office job to earn a salary that doesn’t stay up to the end of the month, isn’t it? So, I don’t think one year is a too long time to invest on your own business that can give you double or even more than your full-time job.
I Have a Full-Time Job; How Can I Manage Time for This?
Most of the low investment business plans that I am going to describe here aren’t full-fledged business actually. Rather, they are suitable as part time jobs from home without investment. So, they mostly don’t demand a whole day. Just a couple of hours of work every day in regular basis would be enough to keep it growing in a slow but steady manner. As you get success and confidence on your business, you can allot more time for it.
How Much Do I Need to Invest?
In this post I have described various types of business – while some can be started totally for free (hard work is always there), others need some investment. Don’t worry, none of these businesses need more than Rs.5000 to start. However, in some cases, little more could give you a better result.
How Much Can I Earn?
As I said, these are good source of passive income. So, they can give you an earning of 10-50 thousand on an average. But, if you do your own research, diagnose the flaws, take corrective measures and implement your experience-earned strategies, you can take it to the next level easily.
So, What’s the First Step to Plan a Startup?
The first thing should be selecting your domain/industry of business. Not all are for you and selecting the wrong domain would make your business flop.
There are some factors that would help you finalise your domain and the first thing among them is obviously your passion. Don’t select a domain just because it seems more profitable. Remember, your knowledge and passion is the only fuel that will keep your business moving.
What Businesses Should I choose?
Well, mainstream online businesses are of two types – product selling and service selling. But, they require a full-fledged website with complex functionalities, even if we ignore the requirement of infrastructure and workforce. You cannot develop such businesses websites with a low budget. So, we’ll give you some alternative and low cost ideas. The primary businesses that we’ll discuss here are:
- Home-Made Product Selling
- Freelancing
- Earning Through Ads
- Providing Online Service
What Domain Would Be Profitable for Me?
Let me clear it first. If you focus on profit, surely you will make loss. You just find the domain that you are strong in. It must match your interest area, knowledge, skill and experience. Scan your present and past and may be you find out the right niche for you. However, reading further would give you some more guidance on this matter. So, if you are confused right now, don’t be upset.
You may like to read, Best Investment Plans for Middle-Class People to Grow Your Money
So, How Much Do I Need to Invest?
Depending upon your business type, you would require different online tools. But, in this post, we are going to explain you some low investment business plans and so you don’t need to worry about money.
Now Tell Me about the Methods
I know you can’t wait anymore! But, all the above points are important to give you a realistic guidance. Anyway, below are some of the simplest and proven methods to plan your startup. To give you a better guidance, I have mentioned the approximate investment requirement as well as expected income. Do note that, these amounts are just indicative and may vary depending on your business type, your performance and market demand of the product or service as well as some other factors.
Product Selling
Investment Requirement: Rs.5,000 onward
Expected Income: Rs.20,000 onward per month
Those who want to sell their handmade products online would require a website where they can showcase all the items. It can be handcrafts, handmade designer bags, art-work, dolls, custom clocks, custom jewelleries or anything like that.
The website should have a simple navigation system where visitors can check the product images and get details like description, price, discount, and purchase option. You have to integrate online payment modes to receive the payment. You also have to create a marketing channel to promote your products at a cheaper cost without competing with the giant brands of the web like Flipkart, Amazon etc.
How to develop such a website at low cost? Don’t hurry! I’ll publish another post very soon on how to develop free website for startups without pro help. Till then do homework on your startup so that you can act quickly as soon as I publish that. Just revisit within a few days or subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll send you alert to your mail.
Freelancing (Service Selling)
Investment Requirement: Zero
Expected Income: Rs.10,000 onward per month
It’s a great way to monetise your skills. If you have the required skill on your domain, just find out a trustworthy job provider and work for them from home and get paid a respectable amount. You can start as a freelance content writer in Kolkata. I always suggest not to work on the low-paid jobs. It will dispirit you very soon. If you have the desired skill, you deserve the right pay and there are hundreds who are ready to pay you the right amount.
Where to get a reliable and high-paid freelance job provider? There are several popular websites for freelancers. Read my post on ways to earn money online without investment and you’ll get detailed guidance on that.
Educational Service Selling
Investment Requirement: Zero
Expected Income: Rs.10,000 onward per month
Do you have in-depth knowledge on a particular subject? Then you have good earning opportunities through providing online tutorial utilising several established channels.
Just make an account with such websites, and students will find you out. These websites provide simple audio-visual ways to impart online tuition. You can set your profile as well as fees yourself and so no more low-paid tutorial.
Don’t you like teaching those naughty kids? Looking for some service for the matured people? You can earn as a consultant through registering with similar websites and can earn huge from home.
But, in both cases check the commission they charge on your income and other terms before you proceed. Also check their review on different portals about their payment method and other issues to be on safe side.
Earning Through Ad
Investment Requirement: Zero
Expected Income: Rs.5,000 onward per month
Internet provides lucrative options to earn through ads and affiliate marketing. While affiliate marketing needs advanced guidance, in this blog I am going to guide you on ad. Again, you have multiple options to earn through ads and here are some options:
YouTube Videos
Investment Requirement: Zero
Expected Income: Rs.5,000 onward per month
Are you a good comedian? Are you a dance teacher? Are you popular among your relatives for your outstanding mehendi designs? Simply record videos, do minor editing to add details as required and upload on your YouTube account.
You can create a free account in YouTube using your Gmail and upload directly. However, a free account has some limitations and so when you start earning, you can plan to upgrade on a paid one.
How it would generate money? If people like your video and it gets viral, YouTube will contact for your permission to include some advertisement before your video starts. Now, whenever someone plays your video, you’ll get a little amount of money. So, more viewer means more money.
Of course, you won’t get thousands of viewers from the very next day you post a video. So, you need to promote it properly. How? I’ll discuss about it on the later part; just keep reading or jump to ‘promotion and marketing’ section.
Are you a housewife and can cook very well? Do you create awesome dresses, DIY handcrafts or have an odd skill? Do you want to earn money online utilising these skills but, don’t have the budget to develop a website? Worry not! You can create videos of your works and upload on to YouTube as free tutorial. Thousands of like-minded people watch these type of ‘how to’ videos every day and that’s your opportunity.
Blogging
Investment Requirement: Rs.5000 onward
Expected Income: Rs.30,000 onward per month
Do you spend time writing on Facebook which get viral easily? Do you think you have the right skill to express your thoughts in a way that people love to read? Do you have knowledge on a particular domain? You can monetise this skill.
Just start a blog-site and post valuable content on a regular basis. Keep it limited to a particular niche in which you are most strong and write it for a particular audience group. Don’t target all the domains, or else it won’t get traffic in any and would become flop soon.
While there are some free blogging platforms like Blogger, Tumbler etc., I recommend to investing Rs.3,000 to Rs.5,000 and develop a website on your own. You can read my post on how to develop a website within 10 minutes.
The rule of thumb here is, keep posting on a regular basis – no matter what the frequency is. If you post one blog in a month, don’t suddenly post three blogs in the month or skip any month.
Before you start writing, make a good keyword research and use it in your content tactfully to make sure you get good traffic. It can take three months to one year to get a remarkable amount of visitor.
Once you achieve success pulling traffic and engaging them in your website, you can tie-up with Google AdSense or other advertising agencies to monetise the traffic.
That’s not the only way to generate money from your blog. Other websites also would request you to post their blogs on your high-traffic site to get backlink. And this can give you double benefit – 1. you can now get writer-ups for your blog for free and 2. You will earn money every time a website is posting a blog in your site. Make sure they are providing you content as per your website’s quality standard.
Now, Tell Me How to Promote
So, now this is the million dollar question! Don’t get scared. There is no rocket science here, at least for this kind of low-end online businesses. Any person with minimum guidance and personal experiments can do it.
The first thing you need to know here is, it’s simple, but time taking. I can provide you a detailed step-by-step guidance on how to get traffic on your blog on my next post. Till then, here is an overview.
Social Medial
As full-fledged marketing can be a costly process and needs some training, the best thing is to start with one of the most effective free tools – social media.
Create a Business Page under your profile and give full details of your business there along with contact number (if it is required for your business). Include all the popular social media like, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, LinkedIn and so on.
Now, create eye-catchy and influencing posts and publish them in social media regarding your products or services.
The rule is, one post in a day. Too many would distract people. Well, you can add several images of the category of products, say hand-made bags, in a single post and any people who loves any, would contact you.
Social Bookmarking
Though the name is similar to the above one, it’s a bit different. There are hundreds of social bookmarking websites where you can share your page link with a brief and you can get good number of visitors from there. Make sure, they have a high page rank.
Classified Ads
It can be highly useful to generate good amount of genuine traffic. There are several websites where you can create an account and post classified ads for free. Write a catchy title with an influencing description and backup it with a relevant image.
Off-Page Posting
Don’t go after the name. It’s a bit technical; but, I would try to give you a simpler explanation. It is one of the advanced and most efficient ways to get visitors. However, you need to invest enough time on writing quality content, at least 300 words and post them in popular article publishing sites to get the right value.
Use relevant keywords and link them back to your target page. If it gets approved, you are going to get long term value for it. However, to learn the right method of off-page content writing you need to gather some knowledge.
Conclusion
I could have described 100 low investment business plans in this blog. But, it is not possible to give you a detailed guidance on those hundred ideas.
Just keep in mind that patience is the most important thing in online business, especially when you don’t have a good budget. And the second most important thing after patience is QUALITY. Whether you are posting YouTube video or writing blog, make sure they are engaging and truly useful.
You may like to read, Best Tips on How to Save Money and Become Rich with Low Salary
Didn’t find any business of ‘your type’? Have any better business plan, but you don’t know how to start? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment; I’ll definitely guide you accordingly.
