Although you don’t have to spend money to make money with affiliate marketing, you do have to spend some money if you want to make a lot of money quickly right out of the gate. It’s just cold hard math. Unless you’re willing to take a long-term approach, starting an affiliate business or site for free can be an exhausting, frustrating experience. It can take weeks or months of consistent effort to see real traffic and stable earnings. Top affiliates, in contrast, tend to spend a little bit on tools and software that give them an edge like good affordable web hosting, a custom web design, advertising and a great keyword tool. You don’t need to break the bank to really hit the ground running, though. You can launch and market a really kick ass blog or site that generates tons of cash quickly for just a few hundred dollars. Here are some creative ways that you can raise funds for your first little startup.

Sell Your Books on Amazon

Are you going to read all those books in your bookshelf multiple times? I doubt it. If you’re anything like me, your book budget doesn’t match your appetite. So why hold on to them when you can turn them into cash? Amazon.com has a great built-in feature where you can sell your used books online (how to do you think their inventory of used books is so huge?!) Amazon walks you through the process of posting your used books for sale in their market place - and it’s really easy. You simply enter the ISDN number and information about the condition of the book and you get access to the market place. What’s great about Amazon’s book selling feature is that they give you access to see all the prices of the same book currently being sold by others in real time, so all you have to do is post your book for a cent less than the lowest price offer and your book will get sold in a matter of days. All you need is an Amazon account, and sign up for that is free.

This is an especially great method for raising cash quickly for those or you out there who are in college and grad school and have expensive text books to get rid of. In most cases you can get almost 100% of your money back from the purchase of a new textbook within a few days by selling it yourself, which really beats selling your books back at the University store for a fraction of what you paid.

Sell Your Stuff On eBay or Craigslist

Do you have stuff lying around the house that you bought or got as gifts and never used? We all do. Even if it’s something you used to use a lot and just don’t anymore, ask yourself if you really need it. If the answer is no, sell it and use the cash for something useful. Craigslist** and eBay are great FREE ways to connect with buyers who are looking for used goods at a price point. If you’re not using it, it’s wasting space. Raising cash by selling stuff you’ve already got is the best way to start a bootstrapped business.

**For those of you not familiar with using Craigslist, all you need is a valid email address to post an item to sell. A bit of advice - try to sell to someone in your local area and read the Craigslist user guidelines carefully so you can be aware of how to use the site safely and avoid scams.

Hold a Yard Sale

Don’t feel like using the Internet? Do it old school. Clean out your basement and your attic and advertise in your local area about the sale - Sunday mornings are the best times to have a yard sale - that’s when the bargain hunters are out driving around looking. Make sure to advertise! Put up brightly colored, clearly legible signs a few days in advance in your local area with arrows leading people who are out in their cars straight to where you’re selling your stuff. I’d even recommend writing a post about the yard sale with your address on Craigslist - they have a section specifically devoted to it. It’s a great way to advertise to a large targeted local audience for free.

Have A Car Wash

It might take you a few days of being out in the sun and getting down in the muck to raise the cash you need, but this could be a really fun way to get your friends and family involved in your business. Pick a sunny day when people are out, advertise in a road-accessible spot with lots of traffic. Bring some tunes, some beers and have some fun.

Final Thoughts

One of the best things about starting your first business on the web is that it doesn’t take a huge upfront investment. Once it gets going, it’s largely self sustaining once you start to see consistent traffic and earnings. Raising a few hundred dollars can buy you everything you need really perform at a high level. At minimum, you’ll need a good hosting package, a domain name, and a great keyword tool. They are the foundation of success in this business. Here’s the stuff I use and highly recommend:

Finding Good, Affordable Hosting: I use Blue Host. It’s the biggest bang for your buck. You can host unlimited domain names on one account, you get the most bandwidth and storage for the prince, and I think their customer service is excellent. Other great advantages are that the Blue Host control panel is really easy to use, so setting up things like email addresses and auto responders is easy and automated - you don’t need to be a techie. They even have automatic set up for shopping cart features and taking credit cards on your website. They also have a feature that allows you to automatically install and set up Wordpress, the content management system I use on this site, which is really useful. You also get a bunch of freebies like $50 to spend on both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing ($100 total) to start driving traffic to your sites on day 1. The best part is that each hosting package comes with a free domain name - so you’ve got almost everything you need to build and market your first site for $6.95 a month. That’s a complete set of tools for under a hundred bucks for a full year.

Investing In a Great Keyword Tool - This is not an investment that you have to make in your business, but understand that keyword strategy is the foundation of your success as an affiliate marketer. Although it’s not something you need to buy to get started, investing in a great keyword tool can make such a difference to your performance that once you have one and learn how to use it, you’ll wonder how you would have managed without it. I use and would recommend Wordtracker for all my keyword advertising and site design. It’s an industry standard and it’s really powerful. If you want to try it out for free for a month, they have a free trial - so give it a shot at no risk.

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