I often meet new internet marketers on the net that aspire to earn the big bucks like some of the well-known personas out there.

All want to get started with “no money down”. Funny enough this reminds me of the real estate industry, more accurately property investing. And even funnier is that in actual fact it is easier to get started with an Internet Business than investing in real estate. As you know Web Investor Network is a sister site to Property Investor Network , so I should know a things of two about these subjects.

However, most of these new internet marketers have only the slightest ideas on where to get started, and a lot of them are not willing or able to invest a startup capital in their online business. However, it is almost impossible to start an Internet business without spending either massive amounts of time or alternately some money. One would need basic infrastructure such as web hosting, domain names and so on. Hence, here is a rough guide on how to build an Internet business starting with the famous “no money down”.

Before you read, please understand that a little bit of money is necessary, just like in real estate investing some capital is required, though far less than in real estate, which of course if the good news.

The bad news is that the less capital you have to invest, the more time you will have to invest and sometimes this also means it will go a bit slower than investing some money to take the faster lane. It is always faster to outsource some functions to be able to do more things in shorter space of time, it is slower to do everything yourself.

But don’t despair; just understand that it will require more effort on your side if you don’t have the money. As we say in real estate, you either have the time or you have the money.

Because internet business is a business the first thing you should do is have a stock take of your skills. List the thing you can do, list the thing you have been doing in your life since you started working.

These skills may include, knowledge about marketing, of maybe very good English and writing skills, or maybe you are extremely analytical (which by the way is a very good skill in an internet business), or maybe you know how to program and you are a technical person. Then maybe you have some skills from hobbies you had in your life. List those also. For example, you maybe love building remote controlled airplanes and have excellent writing skills. You may build your Internet business upon this: writing instructional manuals on building remote controlled airplanes, or maybe even building such planes and selling them online. Best of all, you do not need to spend money to acquire this knowledge: you already have it. The skills list will help you identify both what you can build your business upon online and things you will be doing in your business to get it off the ground while knowing which things you will need to outsource.

Now, because you will need a little bit of money to get started in essence you can use your skills as your first option to create a little bit of money to get started. You will be building a little capital maybe offline using this skill and the knowledge you have to get you started. You can build of few of these airplanes and sell them to people who love this hobby, or sell them to hobby shops that have already customers.

If English is your strong skills, maybe you can give English lessons to earn extra capital to start your Internet business, or maybe you can ghost write for some extra cash for people that need online content but are short in time and can pay you some cash. This is actually big business if you can write for the internet and even more in demand if you can write optimized content and pages.

Now let’s say that you can’t possibly find any skill or existing knowledge that can help you right now. Okay, fair enough, then you should start thinking creatively on how you can barter. This will require very creative thinking. You should then find a business mode and focus on that. With this business model in mind start thinking of ways to barter what you need. Almost everything in life can be bartered, but you have to be creative. Revenue sharing is part of bartering for example. You may need someone to build your website and you may ask them to build it in return for profit sharing until the get paid their fees, same thing with copywriting and just about everything else. You may have to do without some services that you can’t barter for the beginning, but if you can start making money, slowly you build up. When you think of your business model you can think for example that affiliate marketing as an internet business model with release you from having to process payments. That is just an example; you will have to explore all your options.

Then there is always some simple job online that people don't want to do, and you can do that for those people in exchange for things you need. You just need to ask for it!

In short if you don’t have money to start with, don’t let that stop you. Think creatively everything is achievable for those that dare.

Internet business is a blessing for many because it really doesn’t need the capital outlay that an offline business needs. A lot of internet marketers know this, it is also the reason they why they choose to do an online business. They know that the possibilities are endless and only limited to their imagination, that is also what makes them so excited about the internet.

So, can you start an internet business with “no money down”? Of course you can, either by creating the money you don’t through the skills you do have or bartering your way to success until you have income to pay for services.