Don't worry!
Having no budget hasn't prevented online entrepreneurs from making money.
It's not the money that you have in your pocket that is the most important factor.
Instead, pay attention to how much time you're willing to invest.
You see, there is an inverse correlation between the amount of time you have to invest and the amount of money you have.
If you don't have much starting capital, you better have a lot of time.
If you don't have much time but you have some money, then you're still okay because you can hire other people for their time.
Do you get where I'm coming from?
If you have some time and you want to rank fairly quickly or at least start your website targeting keywords that have a higher chance of ranking, then I suggest that you reverse-engineer your competition.
The first step is to be clear on what your sub-niche is.
You already said that you're looking to target the personal finance niche.
That's a big niche!
Drill down to a sub-niche.
Are you talking about personal finance for kids, millennials, or baby boomers?
And even within those sub-niches, drill down even more.
The key here is to come up with a website that is an inch wide but miles deep.
That's how you become an authority.
Because if you're going to come up with a site that targets personal finance or senior finance, those are still too big.
It's still too easy to get clobbered because people have already published sites way ahead of you.
They're already getting a lot of love from Google.
Focus on the right sub-niche.
Now that you got that out of the way, look for existing sites in those sub-niches.
In this context, it's not bad news that people have already beaten you to the punch.
It is not bad news that they already have websites that target the sub-niche that you want to dominate.
In fact, it's good news.
Why?
By reverse-engineering them, they ended up doing your homework for you.
You don't have to make wild guesses as to the type of content or topics that you should target.
All of these have been figured out for you.
They paid the price.
Whatever you see that is ranking, that's been tried and tested.
You don't see the post that failed.
You don't see the post that got rejected and is gathering digital dust somewhere.
This is great news!
So get all their domains, and enter them into paid SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
Find their easiest to rank keywords, analyze those keywords, and make sure that they are solidly within your sub-niche.
Filter these keywords further based on their monthly search volume.
At the end of this process, you should have the right keywords.
And then, the next step is to use content optimization tools like Postpace or Frase to get a contextual look at what your competitors are doing.
In other words, it's not enough to target these keywords and write content that delivers on the search intent of your keywords.
They also have to mention contextual keywords that your competitors are using.
This puts you within striking distance of stuff that ranks.
It's not guaranteed, mind you.
But it's definitely a whole lot better than taking random shots in the dark and hoping that you hit something.
I've laid out the framework for you.
You just need to implement these point by point and tweak them based on the results you get.
Remember, at the end of the day, it's all about the results.
So focus on building the system and then invest the time to fine-tune your content.
For your site to be successful, you basically have to go through each and every piece of content you publish and optimize them to bring out its full potential.
It is not a "one and done" type of game.
Instead, it's a marathon.