Introduction: Exploring Business Opportunities for 2024
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 or 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 0 to $10,000 per month. So let’s go ahead and get into it.
Business Opportunity 1: Digital Marketing Agency
A portion of this video is sponsored by HubSpot, but more on that later. 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. There are so many different routes you can take with 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 $0. You don’t have to pay for any courses, you don’t have to pay for physical products upfront like what you would have to do with maybe Shopify or Amazon businesses. So, this is a really great one that you can bootstrap starting with absolutely nothing.
Starting a Digital Marketing Agency: Step-by-Step Guide
Let me explain just quickly how I would go about doing this and building a digital marketing agency. There are 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 running their TikTok, their Instagram accounts, or their Facebook. Or you can do something that I think is actually even better, which is running Google ads, TikTok ads, or Facebook ads for businesses. I’m sure that you know business owners somewhere; maybe it’s your uncle, maybe it’s your neighbor. But there are people who own businesses all over the country. There are tens of millions of business owners in the US, so I think you can find some.
Strategy for Getting Started: Offering Free Services
The way to do this, the way that Mike and I started our marketing agency almost 7 years ago now, is to get clients. You might be sitting here thinking, “Well, I don’t know how to do marketing. How am I going to 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. This is what we did when we started. We approached some people and said, “Hey, look, 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 pay for the actual ad spend, and you’re not charging for your labor.” So that’s how you 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. Working for free upfront is a really great way to get started with a digital marketing agency.
Leveraging Free Online Resources and HubSpot
Like I said, I have a full video on that showing you how to build an agency and scale that up to $10,000 a month or more. It really is possible, and we don’t have any courses or anything to sell you. The beauty of being in 2024 is that you can learn so many things for free on the internet. We have videos on this channel showing you how to run Google ads, how to run TikTok ads, how to run Facebook ads. We have all those videos showing you how to set all of these things up, and they’re totally free on our channel if you’re subscribed, and you already know that. 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.
Business Tool Recommendation: Utilizing HubSpot CRM
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. 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 generation, and email marketing. HubSpot really is the go-to for managing your business operations. There are dozens of different features. I’ll just throw some of my favorites up on the screen here for you to see. But if I could go back in time and change something, I’d 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. This software is going to be crucial for the operations of your business, especially if you’re running something like a marketing agency where you’re handling multiple clients and dealing with quite a few moving parts.
Business Opportunity 2: Media Newsletter Business
I kind of view CRM software as 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. As I mentioned earlier, CRM software offered by HubSpot is totally free. So go ahead, sign up for it using the link below in the description. There are so many features that are offered by this company 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.
Starting a Media Newsletter Business: Zero-Cost Startup
The next one is really truly one of my favorites, and it’s building a media newsletter business. 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, 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 5 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.
Success Stories and Tips for Media Newsletter Businesses
There are 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. Another example of this is The Hustle, which was owned by Sam Parr, which he sold for somewhere in the tens of millions range of dollars for his newsletter. It’s an email newsletter. 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 we run ads on them. It’s a great thing to do. I personally am subscribed to a bunch of different newsletters.
Leveraging HubSpot for Email Marketing
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.
Business Opportunity 3: Affiliate Marketing Business
And then the third business that 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. Every time you market someone’s product and someone ends up buying a product because you marketed it, you make money.
Exploring Affiliate Marketing: Profitable Website Building
Here’s a great example of this: I own part of a farming blog. 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. We make money every time someone signs up for one of those farmland investing platforms. We make a couple of 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.
Relevance and Potential of Website-Building in 2024
Affiliate marketing is really great because you can start this with $0. 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. 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. Hundreds of millions of people are searching for things. 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.
Success Stories and Encouragement for Website Entrepreneurs
I’ve met some people who have sold their blogs for $100 plus million. For example, Kyle Taylor, he started The Penny Hoarder, and he sold this a couple of years ago for $102.5 million. This is a finance blog that, you know, everyone… I feel like most people are like, “Oh, a blog, you know, that’s like a fun little hobby.” But no, he sold it for $102 million. He had, 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 going to be a little cost like maybe $5 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 would be involved with that.
Conclusion: Choosing and Committing to a Business Path
But regardless of which business you decide to start in 2024, just remember, you don’t have to pay for a lot of these scammy courses that people are selling. We don’t have any courses to sell you. I don’t think you need to buy any of those. There’s so much free information out there on the internet. Those are the businesses that I think everyone should consider starting in 2024.
What I suggest to you is pick one and stick with it. Don’t jump around to a bunch of different businesses. Pick one, stick with it, focus on it for the entire year of 2024, and see what happens in 12 months. I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised, or at least some people will. Obviously, I can’t make promises to everyone.
Thanks for reading the article. Don’t forget to check out HubSpot. It’s really a great tool for scaling your business, truly. So thanks for reading, and I’ll see everybody sometime in a future article..
