Resources to Begin Building an Online Enterprise With

There are scads of resources avail­able to any­one who is look­ing to build an online busi­ness. You just need to browse through Amazon.com, or through any local book­store to see masses of “Build it and they will come” books on becom­ing a vir­tual entrepreneur.

And then there’s the Inter­net – there’s a new expert being born every day, with most promis­ing untold riches for lit­tle or no effort.

For­tu­nately, mixed in with this lot are some really knowl­edge­able experts and some really great books.

But how can you tell if the mate­r­ial is worth even the cost of the paper needed to print it out, or the effort required to go to the book­store to buy the book??

Well, in most cases, you can’t tell if the mate­r­ial is any good just by look­ing at it, or by read­ing a sum­mary of it. But there is a way to help reduce your choice, with a result­ing increase in your chances of find­ing mate­ri­als that right for you and for what you want to accom­plish.

For me, I am start­ing an online busi­ness from scratch, and am at the very begin­ning of the process.  The objec­tive of my busi­ness is to sell edu­ca­tional infor­ma­tion prod­ucts and per­haps offer a bit of coach­ing. My tar­get audi­ence is basi­cally any indi­vid­ual that is inter­ested in design­ing a lifestyle that is sup­ported by a vir­tual, or online, enter­prise. How­ever, because of the unique issues and sit­u­a­tions that baby boomers face, spe­cial focus will be given to this niche audience.

What I have decided to do is to focus on resources that were being cre­ated by, cre­ated for, or exten­sively used by entre­pre­neurs with sim­i­lar goals and objec­tives. How­ever, because I will also be giv­ing spe­cial atten­tion to baby boomers, its unlikely that I will be able to find many resources for this spe­cific audi­ence, so I will be look­ing at the loca­tion inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sional lifestyle in gen­eral. As a result, I have cho­sen to focus on the fol­low­ing resources that should be able to help me get started devel­op­ing the skills I need for this endeavor to be a success.

By focus­ing on mate­ri­als pro­duced by some­one in the field you intend to set up your enter­prise in, you should be able to find at least some use­ful infor­ma­tion. You can always refo­cus the mate­r­ial to suit spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics that your tar­get audi­ence has.

The first skill I want to develop is to gain an under­stand­ing of how I want to mon­e­tize my web­site. There are at least a cou­ple of mod­els that can be fol­lowed, for exam­ple, you can go after joint ven­tures (you sell some­one else’s prod­uct, and they sell yours); you can build a strong affiliate-based busi­ness; or you can sell prod­ucts through drop-shipping; etc.

The mon­e­ti­za­tion model I have cho­sen to fol­low is the one used by Chris Guille­beau. Chris is a writer, blog­ger and world trav­eler, and sup­ports his lifestyle through sell­ing infor­ma­tion prod­ucts from his blog, and through free­lance writ­ing.  Chris’ excel­lent “How-to” guides are avail­able from his “The Art Of Non-Conformity” blog, located on the  http://www.chrisguillebeau.com website/blog.

The sec­ond skill I need to work on is to learn how to build and develop a really good blog/website. There are a cou­ple of resources that I will be using for this:
1.    ProBlog­gers: Dar­ren Rowse and Chris Gar­rett have pub­lished sev­eral excel­lent and pop­u­lar resources that I will be using. The first is their book: Problog­ger: Secrets for Blog­ging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (who could resist a book with a title like this ☺). Their sec­ond resource is an email pro­gram they devel­oped recently, 31 Days to Build a Bet­ter Blog (they have recently expanded this pro­gram into an ebook and offer it for sale on their web­site). Their third resource is their website/email posts that are avail­able at http://www.problogger.net.
2.    In addi­tion to the ProBlog­ger infor­ma­tion, I will be also be using two pro­grams that I pur­chased from the Amer­i­can Writ­ers and Artists Insti­tute (AWAI), located online at http://www.awaionline.com:

a.) SEO Copy­writ­ing Suc­cess
b.) How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites

My game plan is to fol­low the ProBlog­gers book and the 31-day Build a Bet­ter Blog pro­gram to begin with, using infor­ma­tion from the two AWAI pro­grams as needed.

I will let you know in my next post, which will be posted Mon­day June 22, how things are going.

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