 How much do you need to invest for a successful online business? Fifty dollars. That's it. Video's over. Now, you don't believe that, do you? You know. You know there's more to it than that. Matter of fact, it could be thousands or it could be hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. But the real question is how much do you need to invest up front to get started? That's the real question. Last week, I invested money in my business and it was way more than $50. It was way more. Matter of fact, I started my business in 2009 with $100, but that was on a credit card. So I really didn't have the money. It was on a credit card. And you probably want to know how to just get started. What are the bare essentials? And in this video, that's what I'm going to share with you. So let's get started. Now, the truth is that your business is never going to be ending as far as investing money in it. You're always going to have to invest money in it. But in the beginning, you want to start making money as soon as you possibly can without investing a ton of money because you probably don't have it. Most people don't. The first thing I'm going to tell you if you're going to invest money in a business is get training. Get training. Too many people will sink a lot of money in a business trying to figure things out. And here's the truth, guys. Things have already been figured out. Okay. There's already people who make money. They're going to have courses on how to make money online. And I'm not saying you can't just watch my free stuff. You certainly can. But if you want to jump ahead and you don't want to waste money on advertising, on doing dumb things and things that don't work, buy one of my courses. Yeah, I literally said that. Buy one of my courses. If you don't want to buy one of my courses, at least buy somebody else's course. Because if there's somebody out there that's already made money online and they figured it out, why wouldn't you want to know what they did? The thing about this is you want to check them out. Okay. Do they really make money online? I've been selling survival food online for going on 11 years now, 10 years now. And I've made a lot of money. I've made millions of dollars. You can search the terms, survival, cave, food. You'll get millions of results for it. You'll see my products out there. And since I've done that and made money, I now share those techniques with other people through this video channel and, of course, through my courses. But let's look at all the different parts because you may not be aware of all the different parts. I'm going to go through those with you. The bare essentials you're going to need are going to be a domain name. Now, do you have to have a website? No, you don't have to have a website. But I recommend it. I think it's the good way to go. You're going to have to have hosting for that website. What that means is you're going to have to pay to put that website somewhere. It's got to reside somewhere. You're going to need inventory if you invest in inventory. But you don't even need that if you're going to be doing dropshipping. And you're going to need some form of payment processing. But the payment processing actually goes into effect every time you charge a card. So you're actually taking money in. It's not like you got to invest hundreds in payment processing up front. You don't. Now, the other things that are nice to have are email marketing software. Now, I wholeheartedly recommend Cartra. There's a link below. You're going to want to get a Cartra account. A Cartra account, I think, is around $99 now. I haven't looked lately. But if you want to get a free trial, you can go down and use my link below. For $1, you can get a free trial and try it out and make sure it's the best thing for you. Now, if you want to start spending bigger money, you may want to go hire a web designer. I did not. I did my own in the beginning. There were terrible websites. And I know that. And I do have web designers now. But the point was I didn't have the money, so I had to do it on my own. If you're going to incorporate your business, that's going to cost you more. I would say start as a sole proprietorship. That's how most businesses start. You're going to need that business license, of course. Logos. You're pretty simple nowadays. You know, there's a lot of logo designer softwares that are free and get your own logo by doing that. But you can certainly pay somebody if you want. You're going to need to do some type of marketing. If you have money and you have a budget for marketing, you can certainly do that. I wouldn't do that without taking a course on how to market first. I have a course on Facebook ads. It's down in the description. You could look that up if you want. If you have products, you're going to have to put them somewhere. You're either going to put them in your house. You're going to put them in a warehouse. That's going to cost you money. You're going to have to have your product photos. If you're doing drop shipping, you can get most of those photos from the drop shipper. However, it's always best to take your own so they look a little bit more original. They don't look as stock as other things. And you're going to need whatever apps and plugins that you plan on using. Now, those are the bare essentials that I've just gone over. And let's look at some of the cost of some of these things. A domain name. What's that going to cost you? It can cost you anywhere from a dollar to $15 a year. So that's not a lot of money. The other thing is hosting. What's hosting going to cost you? I looked that up, and it can cost you anywhere from $3.50 a month on up to $250 a month. The average is probably around $29, and it's dependent upon how much bandwidth and what type of hosting and everything you have. In addition to that, some of the pricing I looked up was Shopify. It starts at $29 a month. Big commerce is another one out there. It starts at $29.95 a month. So that, yeah, around $30 a month is what you're going to be looking for. Now, inventory, like I said, that can be zero if you're dropshipping. If you're not, it's really about how much inventory you want to stock. I think this is a very dangerous thing. I know in the beginning, when I started selling online, I had a lot of products. I sold camping products and all these camping tools and stuff, and some of the products would sell better than others. So obviously, I had inventory that was sitting there. Before I even got into that, I sold cell phone cases. And I had a lot of money invested in cell phone cases, and I never did make money on cell phone cases. I will tell you that. I started selling out of my inventory just to get rid of it. But I didn't consider that a failure because it taught me how to sell stuff online. And understand you're going to have some failures. It's just going to happen. The only way to really shorten the number of failures or reduce the number of failures is to get some training. And I mentioned that in the beginning, get some training. If you don't want to buy one of my courses or somebody else's, watch a whole bunch of videos on my channel. Watch 50 or 100 videos, and that'll get you started, too. So the drop shipping model I want to talk about real quick and how that works, because this can save you a lot of money. If you get a Shopify store, you can integrate it with AliExpress with a software called Oberlo. And what that does is it helps you find the products on AliExpress. It will actually import them into your store, and it imports all the data, the pictures, and everything, so that all you've got to do is kind of brush it up. And I would recommend brushing it up, because a lot of times the English, when the descriptions is not good and it's not really as in depth as you need to go, but you can do that. So that's the drop shipping model. And basically what happens is you're going to put this product on your site, the visitor is going to come to your site, they're going to pay you for the product. Once they pay you for the product, you send that order to AliExpress. AliExpress is going to trigger that vendor, and they're going to say, this vendor, you need to ship this product out, and you're going to change the ship to address to that customer's address so that the manufacturer or distributor is actually shipping it out to them. So the cool thing about the drop shipping model is that you didn't have to buy any product. The downside is you don't have any control over the product. If they run out of product, if they take too long to ship, if it gets damaged, anything, these things can happen, but it saves you the big investment in buying a bunch of inventory. Next up is going to be payment processing. And that payment processing can be about 2% to 3% of the sale, there may be some minimums, there may be a monthly charge there too, you got to check all that out. So if you look at the total required cost here, if you're going to have inventory, let's say you're going to spend $1,000 on inventory, you could spend anywhere from $140 to $1,040. I don't know. With drop shipping, you could get by with as little as $40 if you wanted to and getting your actual store started and actually selling products. Now, that's basically all you need to get started. I'll tell you that I started pretty basic when I started out. I didn't even have a website when I started out. I was just selling on eBay and then I got a website and that added a little bit more cost. But what you want to do is whatever money you make, you don't spend, okay, because you can't grow your business. If you don't reinvest in that business, if you don't reinvest in your products, in your marketing, in your websites, you can't grow the business, okay? So you're never going to get to a million-dollar business if you only invest $50 in the business and every time you make a sale, you take the profit out. You can't grow the business that way. It's not going to work that way. I see that happen a lot. People say, well, gee, I made $10,000 this month, so I can spend $10,000. No, you can't because next month may not be as good or you may need that money to grow your business. I know every month we have more and more expenses. It seems like sometimes we try to cut expenses, but I've got employees I have to pay now and I have several websites I've got to pay all the money out to those providers and hosting companies and all that. That's necessary to keep running my business and I have a digital product business and I have a physical product business. So my physical product business, I have to buy inventory. I have to have warehousing. I have to have employees to ship that stuff out. There's postage costs, so there's a lot of cost involved there. So if I said to you, you know, how much did it cost to start my survival food business? Well, it was probably a few hundred bucks to start it. If I were to sell it to you now, it would be millions of dollars because of all the money I've invested into it and all the inventory that's sitting there and all the, you know, vendors I've got and all the good will I've got, that's all value now, but had I have spent all the money every time it came in, I wouldn't have that business. It wouldn't be there. So that's how you got to think, especially if you're an employee, because I know as an employee, most people who have jobs, they get their paycheck and they go, well, that's what I've got to spend this month. They don't ever think I'm going to keep 20% of it aside and build it up and invest it in something. Some of you do, most of you don't, okay? And that's how you have to think. You've got to think differently as a business owner. Now, to end this, I want you to think about time value. And what I mean by time value is as you go along, you should learn how to do all these things to run your business. You should, you should learn it. But I wouldn't tell you to continue doing it all. Does it need to get done? Yes. Of course it needs to get done. But what I mean is if you're working on, let's say, I don't know, optimizing your web page and that particular skill you can hire out for, you know, $5 an hour or $10 an hour in another country. And you know how to do it and you can check it. I would suggest you farming that out because your skills and coming up with more products and doing marketing would be better suited to doing that and just paying somebody to do some of those daily tasks. That's where I see a lot of people mess up. They mess up in both directions. The other direction they mess up is in the very beginning. They don't learn how to do these skills. They go out and hire people to do SEO and build websites and do all these things. And they don't know anything about it themselves. And they get ripped off and they don't get a good product. And they can't fix it themselves because somebody else built it. That's the worst way because you're just going to blow a lot of money. You've got to learn it first. But then once they learn it, a lot of people will feel like, well, you know, I'm the only one that knows how to do this. And I'm the only one that knows how to do it right. And I've got to be in control of this. And then they take their skills that could be applied in another area to make so much more money. And they waste it on mundane daily tasks. Don't do that. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it gives you some insight. Remember, I started with 100 bucks. You could start with 40 or 50. And you could get a business going. Watch some of my videos. They're free. You want more training, which is what I told you in the very beginning. Get more training. Look down below. And I've got a $97 course. You can get absolutely free. Go ahead and start with that. And then buy one of my other courses if you want to get more training or buy one from somebody else. That will be really helpful to you. Thank you so much for watching this video. Put your comments below. Have you tried to start a online business already? What did you spend? What did you get ripped off on? What did you think was a good investment? Put that in the comments below. It will help everybody out so much if you do that. I would really appreciate it. And you can continue the conversation with me if you have a question. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there and ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so that you will be notified every single time I do a video. Or if I go live, I can actually talk to you live. Thank you so much for listening to this video. Give me a thumbs up and I'll see you in the next one.