Entrepreneur, Start Your Business

[This is part of the What is an Entre­pre­neur series. For the rest of the series click here.]

So you can define entre­pre­neur , you want to go from employed to entre­pre­neur , and you know that starting a business is cheaper and easier than ever , but what do you need to do to start one?

Credit: jake­an­dlindsay via flickr

Start a Blog – Build a business

The first step is blogging.

Most start-ups will benefit greatly from blogging. People don’t want to just buy a product anymore, they want to be part of a community. Whether you’re selling business tips, marriage coun­seling, car parts, or jeans there are millions of people out there who love what you’re selling and want to interact with you about it. With the internet, it’s possible to bring all these people togeter and give them the oppor­tu­nity to interact with you and your product. Making them part of the process (even if it’s only symbolic) will do wonders for your business.

3 Steps to a New Blog

There are three steps to get a website up and running. Take the time to do these three things and you can have your business’ site up and running in no time.

1. Write Down The Vision

What is your business’ vision? My vision is to help people of all ages leave unful­filling jobs and embrace self-employment and entre­pre­neur­ship. My friend Eric, dreams of selling high-end, America made jeans to men. He created Detroit Denim and is seeing the dream happen.

Your vision might be different. Whatever it is, you need to write it down. I don’t know why this is so important, but for some reason, writing down the vision makes it more permanent and easier to accom­plish. Skip this step and the others will fail.

2. Start a website

There are two ways to start a website: paid and free. Both have pros and cons.

Free

• Easy to create
• great for learning
• $0 start-up costs
• Less customiza­tion
• Barriers to profits

Free is a great place to start if you want to learn the ropes of online marketing, get your name out there, and build a community. Websites like wordpress.com, blogger, and tumblr allow you to create a free blogging website. They will host it and every­thing. All you have to do is go to one of those sites, follow their easy sign-up process and begin writing!

Unfor­tu­nately, these websites put limits on making money. Some ban adver­tising all together. WordPress will close your site if you make money at all while hosted on their server.

Free sites also limit your ability to customize. This is a pain because you are unlikely to find the perfect look for your site and the extras you can add to a paid site are worth far more than the hosting will cost.

Paid

• Slightly harder to create, but not much
• Good for learners, great for the moder­ately experienced
• Start-up for as little as $100 or as much as a few thousand
• Full customiza­tion
• No barriers to profit

Paid’s biggest advantage is customiza­tion and profit. If you are planning on your website growing into a business (why have you read this far if that’s not the case?), I encourage you go paid. If you do it the way I did, you will have a great website for less than $200 bucks!

There are four things you need to set up a paid website:

• Hosting: A host is a company that stores your website on their internet. I use InMotion Hosting. Their biggest advantage is 24/7 customer service. I never have problems, but when I need help with something they’re just a phone call away. A business account (which I use) costs $7 dollars a month ($84/year) and their regular account costs $3/month ($36/year).
• Domain: A domain is the link to your website. entreprelife.com is my website’s domain. You have the option to buy a domain from your host, but I don’t recommend this. I use Godaddy for all my domain names. Some people don’t like GoDaddy, but I have never had any issues with them. A .com domain costs $12 dollars a year.
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  Image via Wikipedia

  WordPress.org: You don’t have to use wordpress, but I highly recommend you go with this. It is by far the best blogging software out there. It is free to download at www.wordpres.org (different from wordpress.com) and it’s super easy to add it to InMotion’s server. It took me about 45 minutes to download and install wordpress to my InMotion hosting site (no time at all!). WordPress is a free download so the cost is $0.

• Theme: A theme is what your blog looks like. You can download a free theme from the web, but I highly recommend getting a paid theme. Paid themes are coded better (which makes a differ­ence) and usually come with support. Support is a big deal to me because I mess up all the time and having someone to call or email is invalu­able. I use Standard Theme and I recommend it to you. It’s an amazing theme, very customiz­able, and it runs smoother than any other theme out there. The Cost is $49 without support and $99 with it. It’s much better to get support. I went without at first and I regretted it.

3. Write, promote, sell

Once you have a clear vision for what your business is, and you’ve set up your website and blog it is time to start writing regularly, promoting your content, and selling your products. This is the hard part and everyone does this a little differ­ently depending on your clients and your niche. If you have any questions about how you should market a partic­ular niche email me and I’ll give you some ideas.

It is not important to have every­thing figured out in the beginning, the important part is starting. Will you fail? Probably a few times, but if you don’t start all you’ll have are regrets.

What website do you want to create? If you already have one, what is your vision?