In times of economic turmoil, more and more people turn to the internet for home based business opportunities, hoping to put their last $500 to good use, only to find that amount only covers the initial membership fee and some undisclosed, yet important, setup costs such as domain setup, merchant account, auto-responder setup, and so on.  By the time their “system” is all set up and their sponsor or coach tells them they are ready for a direct mail campaign, phone blast campaign, or Google AdWords campaign, they have no money left. What is worse, most lose confidence in the system and quit.

Before you start thinking about packing it in, there is good news.  There are steps you can take for building your online business on a budget. Though there are more than 3 to become super successful, I chose to limit this article to 3 steps to building an online business on a budget so you can retain the information better and can start to act.  Remember, without action, you just purchased an expensive hobby, not a successful business.

1.  Google AdWords setup. Wait!!!  Don’t get scared away yet.  You are not actually turning your campaign on at the moment. When creating your Google AdWords campaign, turn it off.  There are 2 reasons for creating a Google AdWords campaign as your first step.  One reason is that Google AdWords is your ultimate goal as it will be the greatest source by far for lead generation.  This action keeps that goal close to you and keeps you fired up.

The other reason is that you want to start thinking about your business in terms of “keywords”.  Forget the Spanish or other foreign language you always wanted to learn.  When running an online business, you have to know where your leads are coming from and how to get close to cornering that market, niche or demographic.  Thinking in terms of keywords will help you design better landing pages, write better articles and blogs, make tweets that give you an avalanche of Twitter followers, and make better videos. Knowing the keywords you will eventually use to market your business with Google AdWords will also help you write better ads for free classifieds, the same ads that will become your AdWords ads.  Get Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide to Google AdWords” eBook to learn from one of the best.

2.  Twitter setup for business. Now that you have a grasp of the keywords that best define your business, you are ready to tweet meaningful content.  Set up one main hub account, preferably your first and last name or the name of your business.  Do not advertise here until you acquire 2000 followers.  Any earlier and you will grow your followers much slower as people will brand you as a spammer. Just stick to famous quotes, news article feeds, and other tweets based on keyword searches, as well as your personal content (including your opinions about daily events).  Your landing page link will be in your profile and you will get some leads, but you want to wait until the 2000 follower mark before sending ads with a direct link to your landing page.

How do you get to that 2000 mark? Simply provide good content and follow those in your niche.  Most will follow you back.  Golden rule to building a large following:  Select 3 leaders in your niche with over 5000 followers.  Go through the first 5 pages (100 tweeple total) and follow them.  You should be following 150-300 Twitter accounts after that when you consider the accounts you purposely avoid, such as accounts with no picture, name ends in a number, related to an adult service, or looks like an obvious spamming account with nothing but ad links and no content.  Again, most will follow you back.  You only want active followers, so after 24 hours, go through your “Following” list and unfollow all accounts that did not follow you.

How can you tell if an account is following you? You can only send a Direct Message to an account that is following you back.  If you do not see an option to send a direct message, then unfollow them, since they do not want to establish a mutual relationship and won’t be interested in your message once you begin advertising.  Within 2 weeks, you should reach 2000 followers.  I did it in 8 days.

When you are ready to advertise, be sure to limit it to 4-8 messages per day that contain shortened links (check out bit.ly for this service) to your landing page.  these messages are best sent in the evening about 30 minutes to 1 hour apart.  Be sure to send content tweets inbetween advertising tweets.  Automation tools really make this process easy and effortless.

If you really want to test some ads immediately before the 2000 follower mark, then create another Twitter account and use that solely for ads.  Tools like TweetLater, HootSuite, and TwitterFeed will help you automate this, sending random ads at chosen intervals to your followers.  “Twixplode” by Sean Malarkey is a great resource for building a following fast.

3.  Articles, Blogs and Videos. People buy from those they know, like, and/or trust.  Build up all three for free by writing articles, posting blogs, and producing video content.  Take the 90 articles in 90 days challenge and watch your profits soar as more and more people see you as an expert in your field. Maintain strong relevant keywords in all your articles, blogs and videos (refer to step 1).  After you post a blog, distribute an article, or upload a video with descriptive content, tweet your followers with link to the content (refer to step 2).  You will find a ton of readers, not to mention added followers to your main Twitter account.

Here’s a nice trick.  After you write your article, paraphrase it for a blog post, then script it for a video.  Once the video is done, embed it in your article and blog post.

These steps are just the beginning but will generate leads and sales for free.  Once you are making sales, take that money and turn on your Google AdWords campaign.  After 90 articles, blog posts and videos, you can take a long break from that stuff and let your AdWords crank.  People will see you as an expert as they research you and success is yours.  Building an online business on a budget takes a lot of effort, but it pays off tremendously.  Cheers to your success!