Set Your Budget for One Simple Reason: C.R.E.A.M.

Setting a Budget for your online business can be tough, but as the Wu Tang Clan said: C.R.E.A.M! (cash rules everything around me). I started making money with 0$ dollars. I didn’t even buy an e-book! Granted, I was spending 9-10 hours a day learning what I was doing, and then, through trial and error I managed to figure out something that works.

“But I don’t have that kind of time!” you say. In that case, you’ll definitely want to set a budget for yourself. In internet marketing, bigger is better! The bigger your budget the more you can outsource your work to experts and the faster you’ll be able to learn new methods and become an expert yourself. The reason hiring experts is so important is because of an economic concept called specialization.

Specialization allows you to get the most out of your time, money, and hard work. This is because you’ll never waste your time doing something that you are not very good at, you won’t make mistakes, and you’ll have fun doing what you’re doing.

Let’s examine some real life scenarios. You are working in all areas of your business; your service, web design, coding, writing ads, accounting etc.You probably suck at at least one of those things. Even if you manage to get that task accomplished, you might make mistakes and it will take you 2 or 3 days to finish. Now if you got some one who specializes in that task they would do it right and get it done in 2 or 3 hours. You might save some money if you do it yourself, but in the long run you just won’t be as productive as your competition. Consider this illustration: You go to the doctor and he say’s you need open heart surgery. He gives you the option of reading up on how to do open heart surgery yourself for free, and sending you home with a “get well soon” card, or referring you to an experienced surgeon with a good track record. The choice is obvious.

If you want to make a real living off of the internet you will need a minimum budget for basic Web Hosting (affiliate link)and Domains(affiliate link). If you clicked the links you would see that its very inexpensive. (I use 1&1 hosting and I’m pretty happy with them, but I would recommend name cheap for domains.)

Then aside from that I also recommend that you have at least a $100 monthly budget to hire virtual assistants to do some SEO and other technical stuff. Anything left over after you hire them you can experiment with advertising.

That’s also assuming that you know what to do and who to hire, so having 50-100 budget for education is important too. Buying a few information products every month and then studying them works very well. A book that helped me was The 4-Hour Workweek(affiliate link)
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Having an extra budget set aside exclusively for advertising would be great if you can manage it. This will allow you to start seeing results ASAP (see my article on Advertising HERE*). A warning about advertising, it’s easy to spend $150 a day with certain kinds of advertising, so you want to learn how to use your weapon before jumping onto the battlefield.

If you can spare $300-400 a month that is plenty of cash to start up your online business. But even if you have only 50$ to spend you can still run a profitable, successful website. For example, last month, I spent around $10 to keep one of my sites running and that site made over $1,000.

Aside from money It’s also important to budget your time! Don’t forget to spend time with yourself, or else you might quite or loose focus. Read my article on how to keep focus.

Instead of spending money on setting up a website maybe you should consider buying an already successful website HERE* ! That’s a whole different story… see you next time.

Summary:

You must set a budget of at least $5-10 a month, but bigger is better. Around $100 per month for outsourcing, around $100 per month for education, and around $300 for advertising is a good place to start for a budget. Total: $500-$600 (but you can make it by on less).

*Sometimes when I am writing an article I get an idea that needs more detail so I put the placeholder “HERE*” where I’ll put a link to an article that I have yet to write about the subject.

The Kalki

The Kalki (a.k.a. Kalki Gillespie) is an expert internet marketing guy. He knows a TON but is still by no means a guru. Since 2008 he has been slowly but surely figuring out how to make money online for him, his wife & son.