How Much Money Do you need to start an Online Business?

Let’s breakdown the financial requirements

1. Domain name ($10 per year)
2. Web Hosting ( $0.99 for first year with free domain name)

In order to have an online business, you will need to have a website or a blog. In order to have a website, you need two (2) things. You need a domain name and you need hosting. A domain name means the url that people have to key-in to find your website. For example my domain name is makemoneyonline.com.ng and that is the url I have registered. To register a domain name, it cost about $10 or less per year. You can register at Namecheap.com.

The second thing is a hosting. You need a hosting because your website need an online server to store your information. Hosting will give you the access of server space. Hosting will cost about $100 per year or less. For web hosting, I recommend three hosting companies – these are 1and1, Bluehost, Dreamhost or Godaddy .

3. Web Development:

Now that you know the price for domain name and hosting, the next thing is the web design. There are two ways to create your website.

• You can learn and do it yourself, which is not that difficult especially with the introduction of WordPress. You can use WordPress to create website without learning programming.
• You can ask someone to do it for you. So depending on your category or your criteria, it may cost from $500 to $5,000 depending on your requirement.
• Product Development: If you are selling a physical product, you have to calculate how much the cost to manufacture the product is. If you buy the product from somewhere and resell it at a higher price, then you need to find out the price that you will pay for the product that you are selling. It’s more costly if selling a physical product. For affiliate marketing, there is no product development fee involved. So if you are starting an online business based on affiliate marketing, then you do not need to budget for the product development fee
• Email Service Provider : Many people have not included this into their startup cost. These email service provider is a software that help you maintain communication with your subscribers, or your customers no matter how large is your customer base. For example if you have 50,000 customers, autoresponder can help you to maintain communication though email with these clients. There are many autoresponders you can use. Most popular one is GetResponse, I pay about $20-$30 per month to have GetResnponse auto-responder services. Getresponse is good because you can send bulk emails at once. If you are using your gmail, yahoo or Hotmail, you will not be allowed to many emails in one time. That’s why you need email service provider so that you can mass send emails to your customers whenever you have offers, promotions, and you can nurture your subscribers in the list using the outoresponse feature.