We are well past the days when Wordpress was only for blogs.  Now Wordpress is considered a full featured content management system (CMS).  And the beauty of it is, once set up, absolutely anyone with 15 or 20 minutes of training can go in and update and maintain the content.  It’s a simple matter of opening the site in the right place and inserting or updating whatever you want.  I have trained students and admin assistants who were able to master this in no time.  Of course, someone web savvy has to be available for the occassional question.

What I’ve found to be the trickiest part of creating websites for others is determining how much the site owner really wants to update their own system.  Some like to do it all, or have an intern or assistant who is happy to do it.  Other professionals don’t want to touch it with the proverbial 10 feet pole.  I’m not sure why that is.  I don’t know if they are tech phobic or are afraid of it or think their professional station puts them above that kind of work.  Although why some professionals are willing to pay webmasters to do clerical work is something I don’t quite understand particularly when I explain their assistant can probably do it, or they can pay someone $10 an hour to do it. But, be that as it may,  it’s the job of the service provider to keep the client happy, so if someone doesn’t want to update their own system, that’s fine.  But the fact is, anyone with 15 or 20 minutes training can update and maintain a Wordpress website.

WordPress  as  a Content Management System –  a state-of-the-art publishing platform which is  feature rich, continuously updated, with thousands of man hours in development time and a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

Features which extend the already deep functionality, include the following:

•    Plug ins which automate hundreds of the most useful tasks from SEO (search engine optimization, so your website can and will be found) to placing advertisements, should you want them, on every post. New plug ins are offered almost daily

•    Widgets, individual pieces of code which provide a single interaction to frequently used functions such as clocks, calendars, news aggregators. Widgets have the capability of automatically updating content areas of your website. For an example, a widget might be used to automatically update the navigation sidebar as new pages are added.

•    Themes control the look and feel of the website in this system.  The site owner has access to a choice of hundreds of themes, which are constantly updated and to which additional themes are added continuously.  A theme may be changed with a single click.

•    Support – Because of the popularity and widespread use of this platform, it is supported by extensive developer communities, experts, technicians and web hosts, so there is ample support for whatever your needs are or might become in the future. This eliminates the potential for a site owner to be marooned with obscure or little used software and platform and consequently face the difficult task of finding support to fix technical issues or adjust to changing needs.

Training, Continuous Updating and Maintenance

As web developer or webmaster, or if you hire someone to do this work, you may want to add the following services…. the first is a necessity but, as mentioned, usually only takes about 20 minutes.
•    Provide whatever training is needed to adjust to the new system.
•    Provide a monthly review and audit that both identifies trouble spots and recommends improvements and also assures continuous smooth operation of the site owner’s system
•    Upgrade the website’s software and plugins monthly, as needed or required

Trust me, this is easy. If you have any trouble or issues, give me a shout at gretchen@ggwebgroup.com. And…..good luck!

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Some time back, I wrote about Business On The Net: The Morphing Imperative and that set me to thinking about my own morphing on the Net . There is a saying “you make the path by walking on it.” Perhaps on the Net, you make the path by morphing on it. And I have certainly done that. For those of you who are interested, this is my story, so far, on the Net:

The Gold Rush To The Net

It was in December of 1994, that Netscape introduced the browser and the Net opened up the rush beyond the engineers, scientists and government workers who were on the Net before. Now the pioneers who saw the possibilities came, the entrepreneurs and techies and just plain people in remote places who longed for communication with the rest of the world.

At the same time,  in December of 1994, my inspiration for a website was a study I was asked to do for the University of Texas at San Antonio business department.  They had a lot of very rough, raw material ( like clippings or tear outs from newspapers) which suggested men make more money than women, even when women own their own business. The term “glass ceiling” had only recently become part of America’s vocabulary, when The Wall Street Journal’s “Corporate Woman” column identified “a puzzling new phenomenon. There seemed to be an invisible—but impenetrable—barrier between women and the executive suite, preventing them from reaching the highest levels of the business world regardless of their accomplishments and merits.”The Federal government’s Report on the Glass Ceiling Initiative in 1991 was still somewhat virgin territory for the public at large.  It certainly came as somewhat of a shock to me. I thought, Wow, this is pretty interesting stuff, I bet more people would like to know about it.

I spent 1995 learning more about the Glass Ceiling and the Net, as the two converged in my mind as an interesting topic and a new technology platform to present it. I had to learn HTML coding, as in those early days there was no “What you see is what you get ” software, much less content  management systems. It was challenging for many reasons and on many levels ( see Match Your Entrepreneur Story about one of the early Internet conferences in 1995 where I was one of 5 women and about 5,000 men).  When AdvancingWomen.com finally launched, we got about a million and a half page views in a month, melting down our server 3 times. ( But that’s another story).  Remember, back then, the Net was relatively small with little competition.  There were no large corporations.  No Hearst, no iVillage, although I later worked with both of them.

So, I got in on the ground floor with my niche, the first women’s website to focus on leveling the playing field for women, although we’ve continued to evolve and, as we’ve increased our offerings on business and technology we’ve also increased our male audience. Our concept morphed as well.  In the vein of “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness”, we decided, years ago, it was more effective to give both women and men the tools and strategies to succeed with pocket book and voting booth issues, the pivotal levers, than to keep noting the gap between genders. Consequently, as well as connecting with professional women and business owners, we are one of the leading websites among business men in China and Saudi Arabia, and business and technology experts in the U.S. and globally .We have built a diverse community of both women and businessmen on the web.  And we have moved on to produce other websites and  other business models.  But, back to the beginning:

First Revenue – From Advertising

The first revenue I remember having came from Doubleclick, which invented the targeted ad system. DoubleClick was founded in 1996.  My site, AdvancingWomen.com was selected for the initial women’s demographic and I went to their opening launch party in New York. It was a heady, champagne toasting  moment. I learned a lot about targeting my demographics and managing my website from DoubleClick until we went our separate ways. For one thing, despite the hype and the potential which always seemed just out of reach,  I never really made that much revenue from DoubleClick.  So , trading glamour and glory for actual revenue, I struck out on my own. In the beginning, without large competitive corporate websites, I would typically make $5,000 per month from each large corporation which wanted to advertise site wide with AdvancingWomen.com. This was when web sites were rising like hot air balloons.

About that time I was courted by a New York Stock Exchange company, led by a  rather ideosyncratic mogul, who wanted to create a web portal by pulling together about a dozen sites in different niches. He boasted he could beat Yahoo, the giant du jour, because they were doing everything wrong.  AdvancingWomen.com was selected as the women’s niche and it looked like we were headed for a very big pay day, while getting all the money we would ever need to operate and maintaining a lot of control on top of it.  For a moment or two it appeared Utopia was on the horizon.

Or, as the Cole Porter song goes, was it merely Asbury Park? Despite the mogul’s billions that vision evaporated in the dot com crash, as did the money I was making from syndicating AdvancingWomen’s content. Remember Isyndicate?  One month I was at a huge, plush and glamorous ISyndiate bash in Hollywood, mingling with tech celebs, sipping champagne and sorting through the lavish giveaways.  A month or so later they were toast. ( There’s a lesson in there someplace about applying the bootstrapping wisdom of using ingenuity and elbow grease instead of cash. Fortunately, I have always been into using elbow grease instead of cash so I survived, with the sure knowledge that we were still in the very beginning of the infancy of the Internet.  DoubleClick also survived the dot com crash, perhaps because of its market leading technology and constant adaptation to ever changing market conditions. It was formally acquired by Google in March 2008. )

The next big uptick came from the advent of Google adsense.

I can’t begin to tell you how many things I’ve tested.  I’ve tested travel, which I thought might be convenient for business customers: zero.  I’ve tested business ebooks: nothing ( although this could be the time for that tide to turn with the Kindle and ebooks apps on mobile devices).  I’ve tested many, many products, all of which came to nada, nothing. Even in  the two core revenue producers on the AdvancingWomen.com site, advertising and employment recruiting, I’ve been through a dozen morphing and transfiguration experiments, starting with Doubleclick Ads, from the day they were born, to some new European ad company that sweet talked me into believing they were going to take the Net by storm, but all they did was produce truly anemic revenues and give me one more learning experience.  All this was before I morphed my way into a successful combination of Google ads and ads sold from my site. I also made a decision to increasingly lessen dependence on ad revenue because of its extreme volatility. As hard as it may be to believe, I’ve had 2000% swings in ad revenue.  And that was not ok with me, even on the high side.  I’m a risk taker not a kamikaze pilot.  I needed to put a little dramamine into my site to calm the effects of the choppy waters in advertising.

One product which helped me do that was  a Job Board or the employment recruiting facet of our site at Careers.AdvancingWomen.com. From day one, recognizing job boards were an “evergreen” in the business, not subject to the cardiac arrest of a fad, I determined to have a job board.  I was a part of every one of what seemed like a half dozen permutations of what eventually became CareerBuilder.com. That was ok for pocket change. What I began to realize was that big job boards who wanted you as an affiliate wanted the demographic you had captured but in no way wanted to promote your site. Why should they, as they would be creating their own competition?  Basically they were getting the benefit of your traffic and assuring that you didn’t compete with them or join another competing job board like Monster.com. It worked pretty well  for them, but not necessarily so well for you. Ultimately, I was able to start Careers.AdvancingWomen.com , our own job board which guaranteed a.) I would be building my own brand and therefore an asset I could invest in and  b.) I would not be giving up 50% of the revenue up front.

It just took a lot of testing to arrive at a successful combination of revenue streams to support the business.

Time To Ramp Up and Scale Up: Next Step – GGwebGroup

Less than a year after I started I began helping other sites set up and ramp up on the Net.

Today I operate AdvancingWomen.com, Careers.AdvancingWomen.com, AW Career & Biz Blog, Advancing Women in Leadership Journal,
NewEnergyResearch.net, the first of several planned “green business” websites, and a number of diverse websites for clients.

I have recently formalized what I have been doing for some time now: consulting about, creating and overseeing websites for clients, particularly from a web business perspective.

Tina Forsyth crystalized this concept in her book, Becoming an Online Business Manager.

Tina describes a situation in which business owners “already have teams of virtual assistants, webmasters, designers and other contractors, but what they really need is someone to manage all of this; to play a bigger role in their business so that they can grow to the next level.”
Now, as online businesses have grown and increased in complexity, with more sophisticated online tools available, Tina says she is “seeing more business owners who are ready to hire at the management level.”

When I started reading Tina’s writing, it was with a mild shock of recognition I realized I had been doing what she described for a number of clients for some time. Since I had operated a major website since 1996, I had ample experience on the web, so a number of businesses and organizations I had come into the same orbit with had asked for me to help them set up shop online.  What happened, in every case, was that I was not just setting up or overseeing the set up of a website and collaborative and marketing tools, but helping them think through the business processes they would need to succeed and grow their businesses. It was a collaboration where I implemented their vision, more like a doctor collaborating with a patient, to diagnose the state of his or her health, determine the level he or she really aspired to reach, then prescribing a regimen for increased fitness to ultimately reach that goal.  The actual construction of the website was more like being the pharmacist dispensing the medicine. But, in every case, we’ve worked together to reach the right diagnosis, and we’ve constructed websites which support clients in reaching their goals.  Often I not only implement them, I continue to oversee them, so clients can focus on building their business or organization. As we’ve formalized this process we’ve given it it’s own website GGwebGroup and also formalized a team with differing specialties so we can help businesses not only focus, but ramp up fast to seize opportunities.

This is where we are today but the Net continues to morph and I’m sure we will too so………to be continued.  Sometime in the future.

Tags: AdSense, business, business models, DoubleClick, Google, morphing business modesl, New York Stock Exchange, Saudi Arabia, United States, Website, Yahoo

All of us online are not only in Web 2.0 but in the increasingly powerful social networking era.  Static information still has a place but the tsunami of web use is in the social networking space.  So not only should you incorporate the sharing tools in your new work on the web, but you have the opportunity to go back and add a snippet of code to your static product pages which will make it become alive and interactive and more appealing to your users.

Duct Tape Marketing tells us how in Enhancing Social Funtions on Web Sites. So here’s the game plan:

“The web has become a terribly social place and that raises the expectation of most web site visitors. The ability to add content, comment, rate, review, interact and share information found when surfing the web has become standard fare.

By adding a few simple scripts and widgets you can easily add tremendous social functionality to any web page or blog. Giving your visitors, prospects and customers ways to share and amplify their voice is a great way to enhance their experience of your business online.

JS Kits – This is one of the dead simple easiest ways to add rating, navigation, polling, chat, reviewing and commenting to any web page. You simply copy a line of code and you are in business. Getting customer reviews and reader comments on web page, usually a blog function is great for static product pages.

Social Ad Units – Popular Media recently introduced something they call Influencer Ads. These banner ad type units allow you to place ads that contain an entire social media follow-up system. When someone clicks on an ad for your webinar, they can automatically post it to Facebook or send it to a friend with personalized follow-up. This is a great tool for contests and registration incentive campaigns. (You can see this in action here)

Meebo Me – This simple IM widget can be embedded on your site to allow visitors to initiate an IM chat instantly when they visit your site. This can be a great way to add customer feedback, help and interaction functionality.

Add to Any – These widget allows visitors to easily subscribe to RSS content, share, bookmark or email content using many of the commonly used services.”

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The folks over at Mashable have developed an excellent list of free resources to help us all build websites.  Mashable is a bit more tech oriented though and many of the books have to do with accessible Flash design.  A lot of business people, bloggers and writers just want a good, solid website without all the bells and whistles, or if they do want them, they want a programmer to put them in so they can sleep easy at night.  So, I’ve taken the list from Mashable at 20 Free Ebooks and Whitepapers for Better Web Design and a pared it down to a manageable 12 for those of us who are not uber techies.

Aside from the basic web design books, if you’re just starting out, my favorites are the first two, because many of us need some coaching on how to sell a service and because insourcing vs. outsourcing is a fundamental decision that will affect how well your business operates.  So here goes, with the leaner, more basic list:

Creating a Web Site for Your Service Business from Entrepreneur Media
Selling products online might be easy, but selling services is a completely different ballgame. This whitepaper covers what you need to know to create the best website you can for your service business.

Managing Web Development: Insourcing vs. Outsourcing from Key Professional Media
If you’re trying to decide whether to hire an in-house web designer or outsource to a design agency (whether in this country or abroad), this whitepaper is a must-read.

Free Web Design Ebook
This ebook was written to help new internet marketers get through the basics of web design in relation to internet marketing purposes.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Obvious: Web Usability 101 from Squiz.co.uk
This online whitepaper covers everything you need to know about making usable websites from the ground up.

The Top 10 Web Site Design Do’s from ProfitJump.com
The tips covered in this ebook run the gamut from learning HTML coding skills to realizing that a website is never really “finished”.

Integrate Design to Create Brand Harmony from MarketingProfs
Incorporating your brand into your website design is very important, and this whitepaper explains the how and why of doing that.

10 Tips for Designing an Ecommerce Web Site from nightcats.com
This ebook has ten tips for creating a great ecommerce site and covers everything from designing for your target market to identifying your objectives.

KnockKnock from Seth Godin
This ebook from Seth Godin has all sorts of information about using online marketing tools to make your website work better.

Creating a Web Site for Your Service Business from Entrepreneur Media
Selling products online might be easy, but selling services is a completely different ballgame. This whitepaper covers what you need to know to create the best website you can for your service business.

5 Common E-Commerce Site Mistakes from Microsoft
If you run an ecommerce site but are unhappy with the results you’re getting, this ebook may shed some light on the subject and point our common mistakes you may be making.

Web Design Best Practice Guide from e-consultancy
This ebook is a regularly updated point of reference for best practice approaches for all the areas that anyone involved in web design needs to do an effective job.

“Mosaic Layouts”: How and Why to Avoid Creating Puzzle-Looking Websites from Software Talks
This whitepaper covers why properly using images and graphics in your website is so important.

10 Tips for Creating Your Web Site from Global Knowledge
This whitepaper offers 10 tips you can use to make sure your web site is effective from day one.

For the really techy stuff, particularly about how to do Flash design, go to 20 Free Ebooks and Whitepapers for Better Web Design.

Let us know how reading these books works for you.  What you’ve learned, new advice for the rest of us.  We’d like to hear from you.

Tags: marketing, Web design, Web development, Website

Image by vaXzine via Flickr

I mentioned in a previous post that one  of the holy grails of the Net is to manage to get user generated content.   In other words, you, the owner, are not having to produce the content or pay someone else or a team of people to produce the content.  Your users do it for you.  Squidoo was the model for that. The other  holy grail is having a transaction site where something….. goods or money, possibly information… is exchanged between users and you just provide the platform, stand in the middle, and collect on every transaction.  Ebay is a transaction site.  So is Paypal.  They are a great thing to have if you can figure out how to build on and get people to come.

If you already have a website, or a blog, then you might consider selling items from that same niche. Let’s say you have a website about antique dolls, you might also start an auction for trading antique dolls on your site.  Look for a niche that’s not overly crowded. eBay no longer allows its sellers to sell digital goods on their site. So,  a new site has sprung up as a marketplace to sell your digital goods:  DigitalBidz. Digital Point Forums, a very robust forum, has a lot of traffic on a portion of their site devoted to buying and selling websites. If you have a website that deals with technology, digital goods or the web, that niche might be a good fit for a website auction.

Here are some niche or specialty auction sites which appeal to a very select audience of collectors and enthusiasts.  Some of them probably have room for competition, so take a close look:

WineBid – for wines

Penbid.com – for antique pens, pencils and books about them

LabX – for lab equipment, medical equipment, analytical instruments

Just Beads! – for beads, jewelry, stones, beaded bags

Pottery Auction – for pottery

Sedo – for domain names

IronPlanet – for heavy machinery, asphalt, trucks

Playle – for vintage postcards

Bid4Assets – for high ticket items such as real estate, cars, jewelries

If you decide you’d like to implement your own auction site, you don’t have to pay $1,000 for the software. Go to The CGI Resource for scripts.  If you aren’t sure how to install it, get a virtual assistant to do it for you; it will still be a fraction of the cost of paying for the packaged software.

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Tags: Auction, niche markets, niche online auction websites, Website

Advice On Partnering With The Big and Powerful: Don’t.

Tags: business, jobs, partnering, partnering with giant companies, partners, Website

It’s easier now than it ever has been to get on the web and start a website or blog and make a profit at it. This didn’t happen overnight, however.

I started the process of getting on the Net in 1995 and finally launched AdvancingWomen in March of 1996.  Much has changed since then. Core concepts have not, but they’ve evolved.  I think my journey through the Net and now the blogosphere can offer useful lessons to those about to embark on this journey.

Someone once said ““Change is inevitable. Change is constant.” Since that is particularly true of the Net, you’d better get used it and prepare for it. Learn to be proactive when you see change coming, and failing that, be able to react in a lightening strike split second before change overwhelms you.

Here are a couple of changes I’ve seen over time:

Webhosts

When I first launched in 1995, web hosts were relatively expensive, about $200 a month

When AdvancingWomen.com finally launched, we got about a million and a half page views in a month, melting down our webhost’s server 3 times. This resulted in our web host calling me and giving me 24 hours to bring him $4,000 or have my website shut down. This was the wild and wooly frontier at the time without all the rules in place.  However,  I still considered this blackmail, which apparently it was, since I managed to switch the site to one in Colorado for about the same $200 price. (As for the sudden surge of traffic, remember, back then, the Net was relatively small with little competition.  There were no large corporations.  No Hearst, no IVillage, although I later worked with both of them.)

Web hosting prices went down to about $20.

Next, many good web hosts could be had for as little as $5 to $10. And still can be.

But that depends on the size of your website and your individual needs. Ultimately, I had a horrible experience with a web host who happened to be listed on Nasdaq.  There were sudden and frequent outages, sometimes lasting for days.  You could go for a week without getting service.  Only one person, a system administrator, seemed to know anything about what he was doing. The rest of the time their phone was answered by one of a gaggle of call center people in Manilla who barely spoke English and definitely couldn’t take a technical message.  Apparently, although the client list was long, the webhost staff was skeletal.

So the time had come for me to step up. And that’s what happens with growth.  As you grow your needs become greater and you can’t afford mistakes or downtime with other businesses and workers depending on you. It’s the wild west no longer. Now, “under the hood”, the tech underpinning of our site is maintained with 24/7 service by a dedicated team of high level techs. Our server is in Dallas; our tech admins are in Austin; our techs are in Austin, and London, to cover the evening and night time hours. Our  programming team is located in the San Antonio-Austin high tech corridor. And our job board is maintained by partner/developers in New London, Connecticut.

But you can start with a $5 to $10 a month host.  Why not?  Eventually you’ll probably outgrow your “cheap host”, but hey, you will have been pocketing some savings in the meantime.

Software

Some things have gotten simpler.  In the beginning, in order to produce web pages there was only html coding. The problem with html was that it didn’t do what you wanted it to do, it did what you told it to do and I sometimes didn’t know how to tell it to do the right thing.  Much of it was trial and error. Then Adobe, I believe, came out with the first “What you see is what you get” software to produce webpages.  It was clunky.  Then many other programming languages arrived. For me, Dreamweaver, by Macromedia, was a lifesaver, in no small part, at least in the beginning,  because I could get good techs helping me remotely from Silicon Valley.

Today there are hundreds of content management systems… here’s a list.…both free, opensource and proprietary that enable you to create just about anything you want on the web with relative ease.  I use Wordpress, but occasionally go for another system if a particular task is required by an organization or association I’m working with. But you should start with a simple system. Think Joomla or Wordpress as a content management system.

Techs

Suffice to say, when I started most of the techs I knew about worked for the government or huge corporations and weren’t available to help small, start up websites.  I was blessed when a Web Girl from Silicon Valley came on my site to help me with some gigantic tech problem for me…. ‘Oh, it’s nothing at all” issue for her.  She continued helping me for a long time and got other Silicon Valley tech women to help me as well.  That’s what networking was all about.

Now the software has advanced to a point that most don’t need any help with a small website or blog.  For larger sites or more expansive requirements, just Google.  There are experts for hire for any time of web work.  Or go to eLance.com and search the globe for someone who meets your requirements and fits your price range.

Revenues

Like much on the Net, revenues have been a roller coaster.  When I launched, commerce had yet to arrive to the Net.  Nor was there a way to exchange small sums on the Net.  Then the arrival of Paypal changed all that.

Ad Revenue

The first website revenue I remember came from Doubleclick, targeted ad system founded in 1996 and formerly listed as DCLK on the NASDAQ.  I was selected for the women’s demographic and went to their opening launch party in New York. It was a heady time. I learned a lot about targeting my demographics and managing my website from Doubleclick, until we went our separate ways. For one thing, I never really made  much revenue from Doubleclick so I struck out on my own. (Unlike many other dot-com companies, Doubleclick survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In March 2008, Google formally acquired Doubleclick.)

In the beginning, without large competitive corporate websites, I would typically make $5,000 from each large corporation which wanted to advertise site wide with AdvancingWomen.com.  That came crashing down in the dot com bust, as did the money I was making from syndicating our content when the syndication company went under.

The next big uptick came from the advent of Google Adsense.  And that was always a wild ride.  It would include what’s known as “The Google Dance”, where they change their algorithm and your revenues, which could spike to the stratosphere for a time, would plummet to earth overnight, leaving you wondering what happened to your revenue model. My advice:  Never depend on a single revenue model, particularly one which has its own best interests at  heart and they might not necessarily align perfectly with yours.

There are a lot of ad networks out there.  Try a broad range of them and see how they work for you. Keep Google in the mix as well.  If you can develop your own ad client base, so much the better. The extra 50% or more you get to keep is gravy.  Plus you can sell text links off a popular page for more than Google is likely to make for you off of dozens of pages.

Job Board Revenue ( which for your demographic might be something very different and specific to your demographic.)

In the meantime, I had always made a moderate income from a job board, and been a part of every morphing of CareerBuilder.com which changed hands or management many times.  I finally decided the real goal of job boards seeking to align themselves with your site was to keep you hidden and small so you wouldn’t grow up to compete with them.  I could be wrong about this, but I noticed when I started my own job board, our revenues increased 5 fold.  So it’s something to think about.  Whatever field you’re in, if you can avoid barnacle-ing on to the big boys forever , figure out a smaller, tighter niche and start your own, whatever it is; you’ll have more control, probably make more money and feel more fulfilled at the same time.

Products

There are many products to choose from out there, particularly  almost every product imaginable which you can sell through Amazon.com. You can also open your own storefront on Amazon.com.

I have read about a couple who made a killing selling auto rugs through eBay.  After trying to sell electronics and various products they discovered a warehouse full of auto rugs and evidently, using only a few unchanging photos and the occasional trip to the warehouse, they are able to make a killing.  But it is not something I would want to do.  But you might, and that’s ok too.

Find something you love that has synergy with your niche and sell it. If it doesn’t work….if, as they say in advertising, the dogs won’t eat the dog food, look for somthing else until you find the right thing that goes flying off the shelf with your demographic.

There’s never been a better time to start than now and it will never be sooner than today.  Good luck!

Let us hear from you what your experiences have been… what works and what doesn’t.

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Image by Angela Radulescu via Flickr

Starting Your Business: It All Boils Down To Making Money and Saving Money – Entrepreneurialism -  AdvancingWomen.com

Bootstrapping in the context of business start-ups refers to the use of creative financing approaches such as leveraging personal savings, credit-card debt, loans from friends and family, bartering, and other means to launch a business. Some business founders use bootstrapping because they have no other choice. Just about anyone who has approached a bank has learned that “only established businesses need apply.” Bankers typically look for cash flow, assets, an established customer base, and a successful track record on the part of the business that is seeking a start-up loan. Obviously, this is a short list that is impossible to fulfill when you are just getting started.

Bootstrappers develop their knowledge and personal skill-sets and use their abilities as a substitute for cash. There’s also a certain satisfaction that comes from becoming more self-sufficient. After being confronted with a contractor’s very expensive building renovation estimate to convert a retail space and make it suitable for a bookstore, one start-up entrepreneur and her husband reacted by visiting a local home improvement store. A few home improvement books, a sledge hammer, and a reciprocating saw allowed these nascent entrepreneurs to save thousands, and she said it was actually fun knocking down walls! “It’s a great stress reducer.”

The entrepreneurial couple also acquired a set of simple plans for bookcases, courtesy of the book distributor who would become the store’s supplier, and built 100 bookcases themselves in production-line fashion for $40.00 each, as compared to an original estimate of over $200.00 each. Then the book distributor stocked their store and provided generous repayment terms. The savings the couple amassed through techniques such as those above allowed them to whittle down what had been a two hundred thousand dollar start-up estimate to the cost of a typical mid-priced car, an amount they could afford as a result of several years of saving to start their business.

Simply put, there are only two basic methods employed by bootstrappers: 1) finding ways to gain control of resources, and 2) using what they can get their hands on effectively. In other words, it all boils down to making money and saving money (inflows and outflows). There are some important considerations in choosing a business model that is amenable to bootstrapping. Start-up entrepreneurs without capital should think seriously about selecting a business that entails compensation prior to the delivery of a product or service. For example, consulting, mail order, or a niche oriented Internet business; all of these examples do not require a significant infrastructure or capital outlay. Other options could be an agency or brokerage-type business: if you can connect a party who needs to sell, with a party who needs to buy, with a profit margin for you as a go-between, you just might have a viable business model.

By trading on skills, bootstrappers can also band together to stretch limited dollars. For example, cohabitation could create a very logical arrangement: a desktop publisher, a photographer, a publicist, and a small ad agency might do well by sharing an office space. The possibilities are virtually endless for a creative thinker.

Author, Dr. Robert Lahm is the founder of several businesses and Web sites, an entrepreneurship professor, a public speaker, and a writer EntrepreneurshipClearinghouse.com.

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Tags: business, Business model, entrepreneur, small business, Website

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Ok.  We get it. After posting Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, we learned a thing or two about your needs.  Although we know there are bloggers galore on every topic imaginable out there, there are also a number of you who are just stopped cold at the thought of starting a blog.  You might like to, but it seems too complex, too involved, too frustrating, too….whatever.

You’ve probably heard that saying: “To anyone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (Kind of like tunnel vision or having blinders on when it comes to others’ perspectives.)  To those of us who’ve already taken the high dive off the cliff and into the warm and welcoming waters of the blogosphere, the whole process seems rather user friendly and simple.  We perhaps forget where we started from.

I remember the first time I ever looked at a Wordpress page, with no training and no preparation.  I thought “What on earth is this and how am I supposed to learn it”?  ( I think mild panic sets in at the first glance of the unknown, particularly when we know we’re supposed to do something with it…….like produce a published page, but how do your do that?)

I know Arthur, one of our blog readers, commented that he liked the post, Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, and thought it was great to challenge women to make their own blog and create a community but regretted that the process was too complicated and long:

“I wonder if a step by step approach wouldn’t have been easier to follow…In a perfect world there will be some videos made from actions on both main platforms (Blogger and WordPress).”

Well, this post is an attempt to make the process easier for Arthur and all the hopeful bloggers, many of them women, for whom he speaks.  If any of you can add to this or enrich it with your own expertise or experience please do. For now, let’s see if we can break this down into bite size pieces:

1.  Free WP installation

There are sites out there which specialize in Wordpress and will install and set up or transfer your Wordpress site free.  One such site is SiteGround.com You have to get hosting with them at $5.95 a month. But you also get Free WordPress themes and WordPress tutorial. That sounds to me like a good way to get your feet wet.  They say they are the #1 WordPress Host, but there are probably others who offer the same services.

2. Gettting Started With WordPress tutorials

When you sit down, shake off that little twinge of “beginner’s anxiety”, and start to use it, WordPress has extremely intuitive administration: you will be able to compose a post and publish it on your website with just one click! The following are 2 different tutorials, both using screen shots, but the second is video, so also has a guide talking you through the process.

SiteGround.com offers an Easy Start tutorial with screen shots of every action telling you exactly where to go and what to click, step by step. It very clearly explains and shows a graphic of each of the following:

• Instructions on how to install WordPress via Fantastico tool or without it;
• How to get started with WordPress by writing posts, creating pages in WordPress, etc.;
• How to arrange your blog posts in categories;
• How to manage comments in WordPress;
• How to change the theme of your WordPress site;
• How to install WordPress plugins, such as images, Recent comments, Spelling checker, Google AdSense;
• How to create a backup of WordPress;
• How to upgrade the WordPress version.

If you prefer to learn using video goto Ithemes.com Tutorials

NEW! WORDPRESS 2.6 BASICS

• WordPress Overview
• How to login to WP Dashboard
  
• How to write a Post
• How to write a Page
• How to edit Posts/Pages
• How widgets work
• How to moderate comments
• WordPress Settings Overview
• How to Upgrade WordPress Using the Automatic Plugin
• How to Add new Users
• How to Change/Activate Themes

I was going to share with you how to start writing posts, the quickest and simplest way I know, again, just to get your feet wet.  But since I promised this would be in simple, bite size pieces, I’m going to save that for the next post : How Do I Do This Faster & Easier?  Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

I hope this post has helped Arthur and all of you get started with your own blog.  Write and let me know how it’s going and what your experiences have been.  If there’s something specific you want to know, just tell me.  Our goal is to get you up on the Net, blogging your heart out, sharing all your stories with us.  Just remember: You make the path by walking on it.

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Tags: Add new tag, blog, Blogger, Google, Search engine optimization, SEO, TypePad, Website, WordPress