You’ve heard the saying that if you want to make money, you have to spend money. It is true. But the real key is not actually that you have to spend money, but that you have to acquire the skills, time, and technology to please your customers and sometimes that means spending money. But in reality, you only need to spend smart to grow big.

It’s easy to quantify this when you have physical inventory. If you sell widgets for 20 dollars profit each, you can easily do the math to determine out how many widgets you need to sell to make the kind of money you need and want to make. This math can also help you determine if you need more products, higher priced products, to build a bigger audience, or something more to build the type of business you want to build based on the monetary goal you just set.

Sometimes when someone has a digital product, they forget that the math is still the same. Profit = Revenue – Expenses. Once you know how to generate sales then you should...

Creating a new business from scratch online is not expensive. Almost anyone can start a blogging business, for example, with about 150 bucks – depending on whether you need a business license or not. But the blog site will cost you about 20 bucks for hosting plus the domain name to get started. That’s really nothing in the scheme of things if you think about it. That’s why most people who start an online business bootstrap it.

Bootstrapping a business means that you don’t get a loan and just use some extra money out of pocket to get the business started. As soon as possible, you use only the money you’re bringing in from the business to run the business. It’s a great way to start an online business. But, it’s easy to get into a rut of not investing enough money in your business when you are bootstrapping it.

The best thing you can do though, especially when bootstrapping, is to put all the money back into your business as soon as possible....