With many years background in programming and accounting, I blithely imagined it would be simple to run my small business online.
How wrong could I be? Here are a few of the skills I had no idea about five years ago.
- Domain names
- Hosting a website
- Website design
- Learning WordPress – after initially picking the WRONG blog platform:-(
- Choosing low competition keywords
- Blogging, and choosing the best available platform – free or paid
- Losing websites because some moron thought it would be fun to “hack” them
- Graphics design
- Copy-writing
- Video production and marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation (NOT to be confused with website design!)
- Email marketing /Autoresponders – Take a $1 trial of Aweber, the industry standard
- Social networkng (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus are just the tip of the iceberg)
..and by the time you read this there may be some “new kid on the block” that an online business needs to tame.
Being a self-confessed workaholic, I set out to master them all! Five years on, I have developed several skills and made more than my fair share of mistakes, but at what cost?
Would I have been better “employed” spending my time finding more paying clients, or even just chilling out with my family? Who knows? And what's done is done. I learned a lot, met some great people, survived the disasters, and – overall – enjoyed the rocky ride.
Too late I realized that I could have avoided all the hassle with a ready made viral blog, that would just let me concentrate on adding good content and building my list. I learned about this from Host Then Profit, a service that provides you with a blog and autoresponder for a very affordable $9.97 per month.
So you CAN avoid the mistakes I made, and the time I wasted when you “fast-track” your ambition to run a small business online. If you'd like to talk it over, contact me. I can recommend many great resources – some of which I'll include here over time – as during my 5 years of trial and error I have made the mistakes you don't need to make.
