Posts Tagged start your own business

How One Guy Made It Big Doing What He Loves

This is the beginning of another series. It is all about real people who have, for one reason or another, changed their lives by doing what they love. And come out doing okay. Some doing very, very okay.

Meet Glen Halliday of Kids Crooked House (You may have seen some of his great work on Jon & Kate Plus Eight)

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How long have you been doing this?

If the question refers to being an entrepreneur, I’d say my entire life. Raking leaves, shoveling a walkway for $1.00 were all jobs I started when I was 9 years old. I was always my dream to be my own boss. Later in life, after getting a degree in visual communications (a fancy name for a graphic designer), I would freelance for various companies under the name “Glen Halliday Design” designing logos, collateral, websites, and so on. My current company, Kids Crooked House,  is a great mix of everything I love. I get to be very creative, work with my hands and build, but also surround myself with people I enjoy working with.

How did you get the idea to do it?

Like most success stories, Kids Crooked House happened Read the rest of this entry »

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How to Start an Online Business-Part 2

In Part 1 of this series we discussed finding the right idea.

In Part 2 we will explore:
▲finding the right domain name.

Finding the right domain name
…can be very difficult for two reasons. First, lots and lots of good names are already taken, and second, you must have a name that is easy to spell and easy to remember. Hint: Always look at your potential name in all lower case to make sure it doesn’t spell out something bizarre or obscene. For example:

A manufacturer’s (Dickson) website, is misread as DicksOnWeb.com
A CAD software company called Via Grafix is misread as ViagraFix.com
A teacher’s community group, Teachers Talk, is misread as TeacherStalk.com.

You get the idea. I encourage you to use as many hard consonants as you can since a string of vowels (e.g. oiaarea.com would be difficult to translate into Oia–a region in Italy–Area. OiaStreet or OiaRegion would be easier.)

Coming up with a name can be tricky. I discourage strange spellings, like KupKache.com (people will never get it right), anything you have to explain, anything hyphenated or with an underscore. A name that’s too long is hard to remember, and an odd name that is non-descriptive will take marketing dollars. Two websites I found helpful with finding a name are: WhoIs.net and The Site Wizard.com.

Here are some common questions about domain names:
Should I use .com or are other endings such as .mo or .net okay?
►.com is the easiest for people to remember, however, .net has become very popular.

Should I use my own name?bigstockphoto_dude_3384511 Read the rest of this entry »

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How to Start an Online Business: Part 1-The Idea

IT’S NOT LIKE THE INFOMERCIALS

When you start a real online business no one throws you a beautiful pool-side party, complete with beautiful pool-side people. If someone sells you a packaged deal (whether it is a wholesale products company or a website design company) you must realize that they are slipping you a very limited asset. And they are giving the same information and opportunities to thousands of others. It is, frankly, like a feather in the wind: so much fluff that you will become exhausted and discouraged chasing it.
Read the rest of this entry »

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