How to Start a Small Business as a Teenager with NO Money ~ tips, advice + ideas

social media has officially changed the game it gives you the opportunity to turn your hobby into a business and over the past few months that's exactly what i did i grew my online business with nothing from nothing when i left school at 18 years old and this is how i did it i present to you my ultimate guide on how i started a small business at the age of 18. i almost forgot how old i was i feel like i'm about 30 with how much this has aged me honestly but today i'm going to be letting you know all about my different income streams my best tips and advice so you don't have to age 30 years as well so i started with no money no knowledge of business and honestly no intentions to make this a business but now i earn enough money to live off so if you guys want to know how to do that as well then stick along stick along why do i keep saying that in my videos what does stick along mean can someone please tell me i'm by no means an expert i just think i found something that worked for me and i'm going to stop giving disclaimers right now so let's get on with the video let's get on with the video lads why did i say it like that all right so probably the best advice that i ever heard was put strategy first and investment second you always hear about people saying that equipment doesn't matter and i know when you're starting out just do it now i know when you're starting out it might seem that of course equipment matters but my best advice would be don't put all of your money into your business at the start because once you get going and once you know what your strategy is and what you're selling then you'll know what's actually worth putting your money into so i started out by selling wood burning arts so if i'd started off my business by buying really expensive wood and a really expensive pyrography pen i'd be broke and i probably wouldn't have made any money but i found a really cheap alternative that lasted me the whole time so i didn't need to buy an expensive one and instead i managed to build up my skill with a more simpler tool that did the same job and i focused more on my business taking good photos setting up an instagram doing these youtube videos making a tutorial but don't be making big investments before you know what to invest in the best things that you can do is to use cheap or free alternatives which i will be talking about that in part five so make sure you stick around for them so the first thing that you need to do is good research if you have good research for your business that will be the solid ground for the rest of your business don't be starting out with something that you don't know if there's a market for it unless you really enjoy making it then i mean sure go ahead i'm not telling you what to do with your life start out by finding out if there's an interest in the product that you want to sell so honestly the best way of doing that is to pretend that you are someone who wants to buy your product how would you search for that where would you go what shops would you go to i did this with my vinyls i found that most of them are being sold on etsy however i definitely wouldn't just copy whatever's out there because you need yours to stand out somehow so you could do that by merging two different niches i guess that's what i did so i took the idea of painting on vinyls and i merged it with portraits so i'd paint characters portraits on vinyls and i knew that there was a market for that because obviously fandoms are a thing people really like tv shows and stuff so if you already have a niche no matter what that is say that's astrology people who like tarot cards or van life people who live in vans or dogs whatever it is make sure you know who you're selling to so once you've done your research you can fill out this short few questions that i have over here for you to find out who is your audience who you're selling to and how you can reach them okay so once you've figured out what you're gonna sell step number three is postage i've talked a lot about postage because it's something that i took a long time to wrap my head around and how to do it right people really appreciate nicely packaged items however there is a fine line because you need to make sure that your packaging and stuff is affordable because people don't like to pay a lot for postage but my best advice to posting things the right way is to know your weight limits and your size limits for wherever you're posting to you can find out all of this on the royal mail website which is really useful another big tip is to order your labels online you can do that through royal mail or whichever website that you're selling with so whether that's depop or etsy i would definitely recommend doing this because not only is it cheaper but it also means that you could drop off your parcels in delivery offices rather than post offices post offices there's always a queues outside and it's always very busy and honestly the people who work at the post office i'm not about it people at delivery offices know what is up that might just be my experience but i think delivery offices are so underrated people hardly go there and they're great for sending off lots of things in bulk okay step number four is build a following lordy lordy this is hard but it's worth your effort because once you get it going once you've got the ball rolling maybe you saw it but what really does help is having an instagram business account where you can tap things and link right to your shop which you can do that um to your etsy shop that took me such a long time to figure out if you go on facebook go to your catalogue and when you link the product make sure that it's got your url first so it's not etsy it says your url first another great thing is tick tock i honestly attribute all my success to tic toc i had a video that got a few hundred thousand views and that was basically me sorted for the next three months the best thing about that is if you use the right hashtags so something that people will keep looking back to your video will keep on being viewed by people and it'll be a more consistent amount of orders rather than just a huge spike of orders the main tip that i have for people who want to boost their sales for their small business on instagram is definitely using instagram reels so once you've made that tick tock move over to instagram reels post it there and you can link it to your shop so as soon as someone taps it they can see the product that you're selling and then go straight to it and buy it another great thing is through pinterest i've only recently started doing this because i'm a bit stupid i'm a bit slow i only just realized how useful it was so i posted this pin a few weeks ago i think it's like three months ago and at first it was only getting like a thousand impressions a day so basically a thousand views a day and i was like ah this isn't really doing much for my business i'm not going to post any more but then it sort of like snowballs so the more that people add pins to their board the more people see it and so on so some pins will just take off so now it's more like 5 000 views a day which is great it tells you exactly how many clicks to your website that you've had from there which is very interesting so i'm gonna be adding more pins to my pinterest because apparently it works who would have thought so from this promotion you should always be linking people back to your shop which i would definitely recommend using xyro which is the sponsor for this video so xyro is a really user friendly website builder which i've been using for the past few days to build my website for my t-shirts that i'm going to start selling so xyro has been by far the easiest way to create a website for me so whether you want to add images pngs buttons it's so user-friendly it's also been really great for customer support so i've been talking to real people rather than robots which have been really great when i've been stuck on something or not known how to do something so i'm currently using the e-commerce feature where i've set up a shop on here and it honestly runs everything for you it has pretty much every feature that you could want as an online business and the best thing about xyro is that it's the most affordable option on the market so the pricing starts at less than three dollars a month which i was absolutely blown away by using the code headglow you guys can get 10 off and three extra months free with any yearly plan i hope you guys can have as much fun with xyro as i have to get any of these benefits you guys can use my code or click the link in the description that takes me on to my next point which is free alternative so i know i said before that i started this business with zero money and i mean literally zero so of course when you're starting a business you're going to need to use photoshop it's pretty much a given you'll need to edit your photos once you take them to put on your website or to put on your instagram page a really great alternative to photoshop is canva or pixar i'm not sponsored by either of those people they're just great if you want to start making any kinds of social media material they're great for that also if you don't have a printer that's no problem i'd suggest using a library printer and if you don't have a camera to take photos of your products use a phone i still use my phone to take photos i would recommend also taking photos not only of your product but of you working on the product and creating it you might want someone else to take photos of that so i would use family members instead of a professional photographer also if you want to improve your skills on freelancing i would definitely recommend checking out skillshare courses this video isn't sponsored by them but i definitely recommend it i can give you one month free if you click the link in the description below another great way to reduce your initial costs is to bring in other people and get other services so say you're starting an embroidery business you can get other people to digitize the designs meaning that you don't have to actually pay for the software you can also get people who already send you screens already screen printed if you don't want to make the initial investment into that and i'm sure that works for any other business that you want to get into whether that's photography equipment you can always hire cameras so whatever you can do initially to save yourself that money will save you so much in the long run it means that you will be able to get more gains out of it and realize what you need before you actually make the purchases so i would definitely recommend doing that so i really hope you found this video useful i hope you enjoyed seeing all the stages of my small business if you want to look back through other studio vlogs that i did to see the actual process of things i do every day then go ahead and check out those videos they're all on my small business and like this video to let me know if you want another video like this that is all i have for you guys today so adios i usually run up and grab the camera but i'm a bit far away you

Channel: HEGLA

Views: 852,653

Keywords: Hegla, how to start a small business, How to start a small business as a teenager, how to start a business as a teenager, tips to start a small business, how to start a small online business, how to start a business as a teenager with no money, how to start a small business with no money, small business ideas for teenagers, how I started a business at 18, how I started a successful business at 18, how to start a small biz, small business ideas, best small biz ideas, small biz ideas

Id: p5MeYMJ-Zsk

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021