In this article, I’m going to share three businesses that you can start for $0 in 2024. You have a lot of different opportunities going into 2024 in terms of what type of business you can build. And I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people who maybe are just kind of stuck between a couple of different ideas.
They’re not really sure which one they should go with. These are ones that I think have the absolute best potential this year. And I want to share some of the details, things that I would do personally to scale these from zero to $10,000 per month. So let’s go ahead and get into it.
Let’s start off with the first business opportunity that I think really is the one that I would do to start with no money. And that is a digital marketing agency. And so there’s so many different routes you can take on this. I actually have a full hour long video sharing exactly how to launch an agency.
But I think this is a great opportunity because first of all, you can start this for zero dollars. You don’t have to pay for any courses. You don’t have to pay for like physical products up front, like what you would have to do with maybe like Shopify or Amazon businesses. So this is a really great one that you can bootstrap starting with absolutely nothing. So let me explain just quickly how I would go about doing this and building a digital marketing agency.
There’s a lot of different routes you can take with this. You can do things like social media marketing for businesses in your local area, whether this is like running their TikTok or their Instagram accounts or their Facebook, or you can do something that I think is actually even better, which is like running Google ads or TikTok ads or Facebook ads for businesses.
And I’m sure that you know business owners somewhere, you know, maybe it’s your school, maybe it’s your neighbor, but there’s people who own businesses all over the country. There’s tens of millions of business owners in the US.
So I think you can find some. And the way to do this, the way that Mike and I started our marketing agency, I guess it’s been almost seven years now where we started this, is the way to get clients, because you might be sitting here thinking, well, I don’t know how to do marketing.
How am I going to just start this company from scratch? The way to do it is to offer your services for free for your first handful of customers. work for free. And this is what we did when we started. We approached some people and said, hey, look, you know, I’m not the best at running ads on Google, but I want to learn how to do it and I’ll do it for you for free.
All the business owner has to do is just, you know, pay for the actual ad spend and you’re not charging for your labor. So that’s how you get in, kind of get your foot in the door. Once you get results for them and you learn the ropes, then you can start charging people money for that.
So working for free up front is a really great way to get started with a digital marketing agency. Like I said, I have a full video on that showing you how to build an agency and scale that up to ten thousand dollars a month or more. It really is possible.
And you know, we don’t have any courses or anything to sell you. And the beauty of being in 2024 is that you can learn so many things for free on the internet. You know, we have an article on this website showing you how to run Google ads, how to run TikTok ads, how to run Facebook ads.
So you can go check those out and learn how to do this and then bring it to businesses and offer those services to businesses. While building your business, whatever it is, any one of these three, you’re going to need some tools that are going to help you scale. So one of the biggest breakthroughs that we’ve had in our business that really took it to the next level was utilizing software to help streamline our business operations.
So regardless of which business you decide to launch in 2024, I highly recommend using HubSpot’s free CRM software. This is going to help you organize everything in your business from task management to meeting scheduling, lead general and email marketing.
HubSpot really is the go-to for managing your business operations. There’s dozens of different features. I’ll just throw some of my favorites up on the screen here for you to see. But if I can go back in time and change something, it would be to start using HubSpot sooner because for the longest time, we were running our business with pen and paper and Google Docs and whiteboards. And let me just tell you, it was a total mess to manage all of that.
And so this software is going to be crucial for operations of your business, especially if you’re running something like a marketing agency where you’re handling multiple clients. and you’re dealing with quite a few moving parts. I kind of view like CRM software as like an extension of my brain.
You can really only remember so many names and details about specific marketing campaigns. You’re going to need a hub to store all these details and trust me, this is the solution. So as I mentioned earlier, CRM software offered by HubSpot, it’s totally free. So go ahead and sign up for it using the link below in the description.
There’s so many features that are offered by this company so that you can explore as your business grows. Some of the largest companies in the world use HubSpot, we use HubSpot and I think you should use it as well. So go ahead and check them out down below in the description where you can get started with their free CRM software.
2. Building a media newsletter business
And so this is something that you can start, once again, with $0. You don’t have to pay upfront fees or pay for a lot of different products, especially physical products. It’s like a big issue for people. With a media newsletter business, I’ll give you a couple of examples of someone who did this really well.
Think of something like Morning Brew, which started off as a finance kind of business email newsletter about five years ago. They actually just sold Morning Brew for, I think it was 70 or $75 million to Business Insider. They had a really great exit. I mean, you know, that’s a lot of money for an email newsletter.
But this is something that you can start today. There’s a lot of different platforms that you can launch us on. We have a video showing you how to build an email newsletter business. So I’ll leave a link to that below as well if you want to check that out.
But, you know, another example of this is The Hustle, which was owned by Sam Park, which he sold for, you know, somewhere in the tens of millions range of dollars for his business. newsletters, an email newsletter.
You know, Mike and I own email newsletters that we have where we basically grow those newsletters through Twitter and TikTok and other platforms. We promote those newsletters and then You know, we run ads on them. So it’s a great thing to do.
I personally am subscribed to a bunch of different newsletters. I open them every morning. I read them, whether it’s financial news or it’s like tech news or anything else related to that. It’s one that you can start, especially if you’re a good writer.
But even if you’re not like, you know, for example, we have a tech newsletter. We pay someone, you know, a couple hundred dollars per article that they write on the newsletter and then they send it out. It’s pretty much automated.
We make money every day. time a newsletter goes out because we have sponsors in that newsletter. And the more it grows, the more you can make from it. So if you have an email newsletter that has 10,000 or 20,000 readers on it, and you know, it has an open rate of 50% every week, well, that’s pretty good.
That’s 5,000 people per week that are reading your newsletter. You have those eyeballs on your newsletter. You can promote things and make quite a bit of money.
I have friends who are making millions of dollars with their email newsletters, pretty much fully automated. It starts small. You know, you can start this on your own personal Twitter, Instagram, you know, kind of promote it through whichever means necessary, collaborate with other newsletters and scale it.
It’s really fun. It truly is. HubSpot also has some email marketing tools that you can use that can help you kind of launch your newsletter. So you can check that out if you want to. So that’s one that I really absolutely would start in 2024 is kind of a media newsletter business. All right.
3. Affiliate marketing business
I think everyone should consider starting in 2024 is an affiliate marketing business where you are building websites and scaling them to promote products for other companies. If you don’t understand what affiliate marketing is, you’re marketing other people’s products. And so every time you market someone’s product and someone ends up buying a product because you marketed it, you make money.
Here’s a great example of this. I own part of a farming blog. And every time, and this sounds crazy, but this farming blog makes thousands of dollars. I get checks, quarterly in the mail because of my ownership of this blog. And we basically promote farm investing platforms and we make money every time someone signs up for one of those farmland investing platforms.
We make a couple hundred bucks. It’s a long process to fully understand affiliate marketing. Luckily, we do have videos showing you how to build an affiliate marketing business. I’ll leave a link to that below as well. But affiliate marketing is really great because you can start this with zero dollars.
You can build a website and, you know, It shocks me to see how many people will think, oh, you know, 2024 websites, they’re not really relevant. Who’s building a blog in 2024? I’m telling you right now, I own blogs that are cash flowing thousands of dollars that pay me and I don’t really do much.
You know, they’re pretty much automated. We have articles. I have some writers who write those and it works really well.
Even in 2024, people are searching on Google every day. know hundreds of millions of people are searching for things. And if you can rank in one of those top results for something like best investing apps and you are promoting a bunch of different investing apps on that blog article, I mean, that one blog article alone could be worth 10 or 20 or 30 000 per month. And I’ve met some people who have sold their blogs for a hundred plus million dollars.
For example, uh, Kyle Taylor, he, he started the penny hoarder and he sold this a couple years ago for 102.5 million dollars. This is a finance blog that, you know, everyone, like, I feel like most people are like, ah, blog, you know, that’s like, that’s like a fun little hobby.
But no, he sold it for $102 million. He had like, I think $50 million per year of revenue from this finance blog. So it’s still very relevant in 2024. You can start this by just building a website on WordPress or on Squarespace. We have videos on those, so you can go check that out and you can start it all for free. Or, you know, maybe there’s gonna be a little cost, like maybe like five or $10 a month you get to pay to have this website up and running. And after that, it’s, you know, that’s pretty much the only cost that will be involved with that. But regardless of which business you decide to start in 2024, just remember, you don’t have to pay for like a lot of these scammy courses that people are selling. Thanks for reading this!
