Category — Business Startups

What is the one common hurdle that often stops a would-be entrepreneur from starting up? Lack of funds and thus lack of resources. However, starting a business no longer has to be limited by your resources in the offline world nor by lack of funds. In fact, there are successful businesses that are entirely run online, and were started with minimal capital. You don’t even need to wait until you graduate from business school to start.

Of course, not all businesses can be run that way, but if yours can, you still need to draw targeted web traffic to your site. There are many ways to do that:

1. Traditional advertising. Buy print or other traditional media ads.
2. Online ad(vertorial)s.
   • Buy online banner ads. These can be costly, depending on site, and effectiveness varies.
   • Buy online text link ads. (Frowned upon some search engines such as Google.)
   • Buy online “reviews” of your site, products or services. While these might look like articles, they straddle the line between reviews and advertorials. It depends on whether you use a web service that allows you to indicate to potential reviewers whether or not the review should be “positive” in tone.
3. Build content. Write/buy and post fresh, relevant article content regularly and promote the articles at social media sites. You can package this either as a set of articles or as a blog, but it depends on tone of voice in the writing as well as frequency and expected interaction.
4. Build links. This, in a nutshell, includes commenting on related sites/ blogs and/or forums, guest posting on other sites in your niche, using social media sites and loosely-related services such as Twitter for promotion, buying listings in web directories, etc. Building links does not require that you also build content, but both activities together are usually more effective.

If you need/want to keep startup costs down and thus choose to go the bootstrapping route, you’ll have to do a lot of the work yourself. You need to decide on the following:
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