So your New Year’s Resolution was to get your amazing idea off the ground. This is the year you’re going to get your first paying customer! That’s a great idea! Here’s how to start a business for FREE!
For the sake of this post, to start a business means that your idea has been validated enough to start acquiring users. A common misconception is that an idea is so great that it should be developed from A to Z immediately. That is typically a one way ticket to failure.
In order to show you how to start a business we will need the following:
- Some keyword research
- A landing page or pages explaining idea
- Populate an email list of interested users
Keyword Research
Google’s own keyword planner is pretty great at determining the phrases that are searched for most and how competitive they are. You’ll want to find a phrase that gets a good number of searches, but have low to medium competition.
In the example above, you can see that targeting “mobile dog wash” instead of “mobile pet wash” would give better results.
There is also a free chrome extension called Keyword Surfer that will give information related to Google searches. Using this tool, you can compare your target search terms to other search terms and adjust your strategy as needed.
Create Landing Pages & Acquire Users
You know what people are looking for, now it’s time to put your idea out there. There are quite a few landing page tools out there. Most offer free trials for a limited amount of time. For our target price point (free), we want to find tools that are free indefinitely until we outgrow them.
These tools should give you the ability to create a landing page using some sort of web editor and give you a link that is not only shareable, but indexable by search engines.
Additionally, these tools allow you to acquire users using the built-in email capture tools.
Once you have these tools implemented, you are on your way! Additionally, you could hook up Google Analytics and Search Console and see how your landing pages perform. If they aren’t doing do well, refine your keywords and see what sticks. Good luck!