By Pam Lawhorne

Want to start a business without investing more than $300 in cash?

Starting a business is one of the best ways for moms to earn extra income.

It allows you to set your own schedule and still put your kids first, while creating a profitable career out of thin air.

Here are a four low-cost small business opportunities you can try that cost less than $300 to get started.

Become A Freelancer

Sign up on sites like Elance.com, oDesk.com or Guru.com.

Browse through the sites and get a sense for the kind of client base each site has and how their system works.

Pick one skill to start with. For example, writing.

Take the test(s) necessary on the system and create a few samples if you don’t have them already.

Then, start bidding on projects. In the beginning, you probably won’t earn more than $15 an hour.

In time, however, you’ll build a solid reputation and client base and steadily be able to command more earning power.

Getting started as a freelancer should cost you no more than $50.

SEO Affiliate Marketer

As an SEO affiliate marketer, your job is to create websites that get ranked in search engines. Then, you’ll make money by selling other people’s products.

The beauty of this approach is that you never have to create any products of your own.

You just bring in the traffic and let other people do the hard work.

Getting started as an SEO affiliate marketer will cost about $50 to $100, depending on what tactics you’re using.

Primarily this will be costs in domain and hosting, possible a few other small expenses.

Tutoring

If you’re good with English, math or any other major academic subject, or you have other marketable skills like playing guitar or graphic design, you can earn pretty good money by tutoring.

Browse Craigslist to see what other tutors are charging for similar services.

Then, set up your own ad with a bit of detail about you and your background.

Set a rate that’s at or slightly below market rate.

For most skills, you should be able to earn $20 to $40 an hour tutoring.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping allows you to create a store on eBay, or an all-inclusive service like a Yahoo!

Store and ship products all without having to hold any inventory yourself.

This means you can launch a full-fledged ecommerce business while putting up very little money yourself.

Your primary expenses will come from needing to incorporate your business into an LLC and getting a Federal Tax ID number in order to work with wholesalers.

The whole process should cost you less than $200 if you do it on your own.

These are four completely different small businesses that you can launch from your home for less than $300.

Some will see an immediately revenue quickly (tutoring, freelancing) while others have higher earning potential but take longer to realize (dropshipping, SEO affiliate marketing).

I hope that this information has been helpful to you and if so I’d love to hear about it!

Please leave me a comment letting me know at least one tip that you plan to use immediately because you’re know it will make a difference in your business.

By Scott Schreiber

While ins the real world there are numerous facts behind the reasons that entrepreneurs fall short. The three I have listed here have a lot to do with it and frankly the third one encompasses the initial two.

What I find fascinating is that I see inventors and business people who would like to be entrepreneurs start with an concept that hasn’t been tested or proven out at any level in the market before they charge off and spends thousands of dollars to develop the next great solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Sadly, they do not know whether they have a large enough marketplace to maintain the cost of developing that product and bringing it to market, let alone just how much competition they have or what the particulars need to be to satisfy industry needs.

With numerous straightforward tools to work with and available today. it is senseless to not perform at the very least some basic homework to better know you marketplace before you invest capital into an idea that may only accomplish one thing, Making You Broke! If all you did was take a look at Google’s keyword tool, you would be able to see how many individuals are looking for a specific keyword (or set of words), and how much competition exists for that keyword. That’s information that a great many marketers in the 70′s and 80′s paid a lot of money to uncover and you can acquire it at no cost in approximately five minutes.

If you do this, some simple arithmetic will tell you pretty fast if you have a shot. If there are 300 people searching for the key terms associated with your product and you take a look at other web sites and see competitive products selling at $4.00 each and you already know it’s going to cost you $3.95 to manufacture your product, it could be time to go back to the drawing board.

No Planning

OK, so let’s say you find that there’s a marketplace for your product, you see that 10,000 people are clicking on a set of key phrases, the competition isn’t too bad, you feel you’ll be able to validate that your product is unique enough to make a difference and you are feeling you’ll be able to manufacture it at a profit. That’s a good foundation (I would still advocate a bunch more research, but that’s just me).

Now you need to be able to determine how to get your product made, where to get your product made, the amount it will cost, how you will market it, how many you think that you can sell with your advertising and marketing program, why you think you’ll sell that many with the competition breathing down your throat. And Last but not least, how much revenue you will make if you hit your goals.

Lack of doing this kind of exercise will move your company from the skill based business to a business driven by luck. With only 1 out of 5 business’s surviving the first year a lack of a very good plan almost seems like you are taking your company on a suicide run. For those investing your hard earned cash, and aren’t willing to take some time to plan, my suggestion would be to offer it to me. I’ll benefit from using it so you’ll get some satisfaction, rather then watching the daily surprises of business take you down.

One additional point on this, lack of planning deals with too little success and too much success as well, either way can damage your business. A restaurant with a fantastic review, gets a lot more customers, but when they get too many and aren’t ready for it, their product quality and service will suffer, making it a not so great restaurant.

No Money

Thinking of trying to build your company on a shoestring, not such a good idea. This is considered probably the most common reasons that companies fall short. When you do create a plan you have to add in a minimum 20% for stuff you didn’t think about. Believe me, you will find out soon enough what that stuff is. It is going to show up on your doorstep about a day after you officially establish your business and will keep coming. As you gain knowledge of and understand your business, you will require less capital to deal with surprises, but in the early days, expect them to show up a lot.

You also should have enough money to deal with errors and bad decision. By the way, in case you are wondering, you will make a few bad decisions, every business owner does, no matter how good they seem to be. The truth is the really smart ones are usually so smart because they learned from their mistakes. The ones that aren’t so swift are the ones that like to repeat the identical mistakes over and over.

But insufficient funds will take you down hard and fast, when your out of money or low on money, you waste more time on#trying to cover your bills then on building your company. Generally it will result in poor decision making. In some cases it leads to unethical practices, which will (and should) lead to the demise of an organization. It is extremely hard to recover and compete when you’re low on cash, and once it’s gone, well the dance is over.

So if you are serious about this entrepreneur thing, make sure you have adequate funds available based on a first rate plan developed around a solid knowledge that there is a marketplace for your product.