How To Budget For Your Business When You Have No Money

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When you are first getting started building a business it can be scary to spend money on something that is not bringing you any return on your work. 

But I will encourage you to learn to loosen those purse strings even for a small amount. Every time I invest in my business it grows so much faster than the times when I try to do things the freeway or go without learning how.

Starting with free tools is completely fine and I encourage you to do that ( more on why later) but sometimes the paid less expensive tools are worth their price in gold to save us time, stress, and even give you a leg up. 

This post may contain affiliate links. If you chose to purchase a recommended product I will receive a small percentage at no extra cost to you. This helps me bring you great content every week and you can build a business and life you love.

Start Free Then Upgrade

Some people start with the tools that their favorite coach is using or influencers they follow talks about. When you have a bigger budget then, by all means, use the tools that you are drooling over. But until you have a steady flow of income I highly recommend you start with free-to-lowcost tools first. It saves you the stress of having to make money now in order to pay for the tools you are using.

There is nothing like using a paid tool to set up automation, courses, and products in the system then have to go to a different tool because you can’t pay for the tool. So you have to move all of the products, emails, or copy to another tool. This will cost you a ton of time and effort.

You might also get into a tool and find out it just does not flow the way you want or something just does not mesh with how your business is set up. 

An email service I tried had a big problem I did not find out until I was inside the tool using it. The forms they gave for people to opt-in to receive your emails would not update with any changes you made after it was embedded into a post. So if I wanted to change the color or text I had to manually go in and replace the old code with the new. That would just not work for as a blogger you have to continually tweak things to see what works. 

But I jumped right in and had all of my email automatons set up within a few days of long hard work and within a month I found a different provider that fixed everything I didn’t like.

That was a lot of time wasted if I would have just played around in the tool first I would not have had to take another few days to change services again.

Ask For Tools As Gifts

Now, this can be a hard one because we are often afraid to tell family and friends what we are doing until it becomes a success because we don’t want to disappoint them or have the feeling of them doubting our efforts.

Be brave and ask for site hosting or your social media scheduling tool for your birthday or Christmas gift. More and more people are just giving cash because it is easier and people can buy what they want. 

Courses are another thing that people can buy you as a gift.

Make Your Wish List

It can be easy to spend that few dollars on something you have been dreaming of but it not really move your business to the next level or help you take more effort off your plate. 

… cough cough … Lightroom presets….. cough cough.

Make a list of every tool, product, or course you want to buy and why. Put reason beside that wished-for and what it will do for you. Will it make your life easier, will it help you grow, or is it just something you want to try?

Also, put the price next to it so you know how much you need to have on hand before you jump into paying for a tool. I would recommend having at least 3-6 months of expenses on hand before you sign up for a monthly fee. 

Look For Deals

If you decide to jump into using a paid tool, check to see if they have an annual plan where you can get a discount if you pay for the year in full. Many tools will give you a nice discount if you pay for the year.

The tool I use for scheduling Instagram and Pinterest (Planoly- try them free for 30 days here.)gives me a $4 per month discount if I pay for the year in advance. That saves $48 over a year.

So always check for discounts. 

What You Need When You First Get Started

Above all else, you need somewhere to show your expertise and build trust with your audience. A place you own not a social platform where you are at the mercy of the algorithm. 

Start with a website and growing an email list. I know hosting can feel expensive when you add up the total but it is one of the lowest monthly costs of any part of your business. Using justhost I paid for 3 years of hosting for a little over $100. Unless you are planning on building a blog that gets thousands of visitors a day you don’t need extremely expensive hosting.

If you are needing a free emailing tool I would start with MailerLite. They are free and have an insane amount of features and you get to use all of them up to 1000 subscribers.

My favorite emailing tool is flodesk. They are creating an amazing platform and they only charge you 1 price for LIFE so if you start with 10 subscribers and you grow your account to 100k subscribers you still pay the same amount you sign up for.

for RIGHT NOW I can get you in with my affiliate link for only $19 a month which is AMAZING. If you want to take a look at flodesk you can try them free for 30 days here or read my blog post about flodesk here.

Education

Education is going to help you grow your business faster then you realize. I know that is going to be one of the hardest things to swallow but I promise you that the more you learn the more you will see results in your business.

My favorite way to get education at a discount is through Ultimate bundles Genius bloggers tool kit which you can go here and get on the waiting list and I will let you know when it comes available. You are able to get thousands of dollars of education for only $97. I have gotten the bundle several years in a row and never been disappointed.

Order in which I would invest in new business as it was growing.

• Site hosting
• Email service provider
• Scheduler for Pinterest

If you want to see a full list of schedulers I recommend you can see that here on my resources page.

Like I said before make sure that tool or thing you want to purchase will make a difference in your business. When you are first starting out there is little money (sometimes no money) to go around and you have to be very intentional with where you use what you have and that’s ok. 

Tools Mentioned In The Post

MailerLite – Email Provider

Flodesk – My favorite paid email service try them free for 30 days

Planoly – for Pinterest and Instagram

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