Starting With Nothing

Sockmoney has a point -if you have the skills to make a living (eventually) online then leveraging those skills to have regular income (web development for example) is a good idea.

If, however, you are dead set on starting out with little or no cash then start with a blog, but sport for the cash to get your own domain and hosting. You should be able to do this for about 60 dollars for the year.

Turning a blog (or other site) into enough content to start getting natural traffic will take time. Don't give up.

Once you start earning on one web property start a second. Rinse and repeat.

 

First of all, I'd take a 2nd job if I had to in order to at least get enough cash to start a couple of sites with my own URLs on a shared server.

Second, I'd write one good page per site and try to include some "link bait" in the content so that other webmasters would want to link to the pages.

Third, I'd submit each of those pages to 25 free directories per day. This would guarantee fast inclusion in most search engines.

Fourth, I'd participate at forums that allow DOfollow signature links and include those two pages in my signatures.

Fifth, since there are only two pages to deal with at this point, I'd submit them to the DMOZ. You never know ... you might get lucky and a DMOZ listing would really help a new site.

Sixth, while continuing to submit to directories and forums, I'd write a half dozen or so more pages for each site.

Seventh, I'd try to get some more links at places like Yahoo! Answers, StumbleUpon, Social Networking sites, and blog comments.

At that point, hopefully, the sites would start picking up some links from webmasters who have found them from the links procured up to now so I'd write another half dozen or so pages for each site.

When the sites reached the point where there were a reasonable number of visitors per day, I'd add minimal advertising in order to generate income to pay for my current costs and enough for a couple of more sites.

I'd follow the same steps on the new sites plus I'd add links on the two original sites' index pages to the new sites. I'd also, of course, add the new sites' urls to my signatures (where that is allowed).

Then back to building and promoting all four sites, etc, etc, etc.