If you are looking to start a business without any money, expect to put a lot of time in to make a little.  Most methods require a lot of writing.  Bum marketing, or article marketing, is probably the most popular.  This is using the existing article directories and free websites to promote affiliate products.  You can also put up content on sites that share revenue with you.  Some of these sites include Squidoo, Xomba, and Hubpages.

If you’re not into writing, your options are limited for making money without spending anything.  You have surveys, which don’t pay much.  One company is Pinecone Research.  They pay $3 a survey.  You also have paid to read emails.  One company I like is Inbox Dollars.  You get $5 for signing up, $1 for a survey and cash on a number of offers.  However, you have to have $30 in your account before you can cash out, and that takes a while.

If you have a little money to spend, your opportunities to make money online grow a lot larger.  Owning your own website is one way to go.  It only costs $10 for a domain name, and then $10/month for hosting.  At first, all the technical information can be overwhelming, but it’s not that difficult once you get into it.  Wordpress is relatively easy to use.

There are even more opportunities if you have more to spend.  A lot of people make good money from advertising, although this takes some practice to master.

But back to the original question – do you need to spend money to make money online?  No, but be prepared to put in a good amount of work before you start earning.

We took our first family vacation this year.  All of our past vacations have been to visit family, but this year we decided to do an actual vacation.  We didn’t want to go all out in our spending, so we took a few precautions.

First, we stayed in state.  We live in Michigan, and have never been up north.  We decided to make the drive to Mackinaw city, which was a lovely place to visit.

Second, we rented a cabin.  It would have been cheaper to do a tent, but we decided with three children, we were going to stay in a cabin with its own bathroom and kitchenette.  This allowed us to cook almost all of our meals at the cabin, saving on eating out costs.

Third, we chose inexpensive activities while we were there.  This was helped by our children being so young – most museums and tours would have bored them.  Even Mackinaw Island would have be difficult with all the walking.  Instead, we visited local beaches and state parks.  We managed to all turn a glorious shade of lobster red at the beach, and saw quite a bit of the local wildlife!  Also, there were many small children at our campground that our kids loved playing with.

So our first vacation was a success!  We came in under $500 for the week, including gas, lodging, food, and activities.  Not too bad for a week long trip for five people!

Thanks for reading!