How Much Money Do You Need to Start an EBusiness?

There is this perception that starting a business is a very involved process that will take weeks and probably months before going live. Strangely, that perception also exists when talking about online businesses.

If everyone knew just how easy it was to create their own online business, incorporate it to protect themselves and get up and running within a day or so – I think more people would start businesses and some of them would make it and some of them would thrive online.

Here’s an idea what it will take (moneywise) to get started with your online business. Let’s say you were going to sell an illustrated 70 page ebook you created in a week that was focused on how to create your own pesticide free garden.

1. $195 – Register corporation with Colorado state. Let’s say it’s an LLC.

2. $ 75 – Choose a domain name and a year of hosting for your site at Godaddy.com.

3. $100 to 200 – Pay someone to teach you the basics of WordPress sites – and set up your first web site for you, especially showing you how to add pages, posts, links, photos, and videos.

4. Free – setup Paypal account to take orders.

5. $20/mth – Setup Aweber.com to create a mailing list of leads of people that come to your site and are interested in your products and newsletter.

That’s basically it. $400 to $500 to get started the first month and $20 monthly thereafter.

Is that outrageously expensive and going to prohibit you from starting your online business? Nope.

Yes, this was a simple example. It’s very possible that you can do it for under $2,000 USD – whatever your online business is. In fact, I can’t remember in the last 12 years ever spending more than $400 to setup any of my online businesses. Seriously, it can be very inexpensive and quite rewarding.

If you have any questions please contact us at the phone or email in the right column.

Making Money with Affiliates

Affiliates are one of the most powerful tools online businesses can make use of.

In the past, with traditional brick and mortar businesses finding affiliates to sell your products was quite a bit more difficult to do. First you had to find them. Then you had to convince them to meet with you. Then you had to convince them it was worth the effort to get started. Then you had to continually deal with issues of trust…

Today we have online affiliates and affiliate networks. Affiliate networks like Clickbank connect those with high-traffic websites and those that have products to sell. As a business with a product to sell you can put it on Clickbank and offer it to their affiliates who can sign up and have your product on their website in about 5 minutes if they choose.

That’s not bad turnaround time, yes?!

Trust? Not a big issue anymore. You have access to statistics that tell all you’d want to know.

Payment? Automatic. Each affiliate site has their own terms and conditions but they’re usually quite similar. You can get paid monthly or bi-monthly as long as your balance is over some minimum – usually about $100.

Affiliate programs are really great ways to increase the range of your sales… you can go international if your product fits a need in another country.

Some top affiliate program: Clickbank & Commission Junction.

Good luck!

Dean Harrington, Owner

How Much Money Should Incorporation Cost?

Here’s a question that we’ve been asking ourselves for the last decade.

What we’ve done for our incorporation price points is take a look at other incorporation services and see what they’re charging.

We choose a price that is lower than 80-90% of the programs out there – and see if we can live with it. That has honestly been our method for pricing incorporations since day 1 and it’s worked for us.

We find that if we can stay below 80-90% of all services then at least incorporators are looking at us and we’re in the running. From there we know that all we offer for free – and what other companies charge extra for will probably be the deciding vote.

We’ve helped to incorporate over 9,000 companies and that number is growing fast. We don’t have a whole salesteam of people paid on commission so we’re not going to sell you something you don’t need if you call to ask some simple questions about the incorporation process and how to go about it.

Incorporation in Colorado should cost:

$195 for Profit Corporations

$195 for LLC’s

$195 for Nonprofit corporations

Why?

Because it seems fair. It seems like the perfect price point from both the customer’s perspective and ours, and the market is showing that at this price we are WELL below the vast majority of incorporation sites – and, we offer more value and a better customer experience and followup.