I am. Totally mired. I’ve decided to start my own business, get off the corporate dole, take the red pill. But now I’m stuck. Lost. Mired in the miasma of the process.
So, I thought: Why not get it out of my head everyday, write it up, post it….if nothing else, I can let the bad stuff go. At very best, someone may read this and a comment may catapult me out of the mire. Can’t hurt to try. Besides, I need to get used to blogging anyway, as one of the components of the business includes a website with a blog, etc. And as I’m doing research on this, I’m not finding the information I need, so maybe this will help someone else who is in the same boat.
I started the process by taking a class which is aimed at entrepreneurs( http://www.weda-atlanta.org/) and it was a great class to get me started asking some of the questions that I needed to answer before I could truly move forward with this!
I have about 85% of a business plan pulled together and ready to go. Then I became stuck on one faction of the business, sourcing wholesale vendors for the retail store. I’m just not getting very far with this. How do I get the idea out of my head and find a vendor supplying the product I’ve decided to sell? Big problem there. So, I have a couple of emails out to people I’ve met, hoping to get some push from the outside. And I’ve moved onto another piece of the grand scheme.
The second component to the concept, which is also mired, is the website. Now, of course, being me I couldn’t just come up with a basic website. Oh no. This had to be a social portal, with so many different bits and pieces to it that it has taken me three months to figure out what I was actually getting myself into.
First of all, I met with a friend of mine who really wanted to do the site for me. Not a professional, but someone I thought might be able to put something good together for me. We had a meeting and gave him some scratchy drawings of what I envision to a web designer, then spoke with him at length, describing my grand vision. He took notes, and I walked away feeling pretty good about my descriptions, everything I had given him so far. However, over a month later, when I spoke to him again, expecting some sort of update, he hadn’t started it. Damn. I fired him in my mind and decided to submit the request to a local web designer used by my gym. Sent him the same sketches, spoke with him for about 20 minutes. Felt good about everything until I received the bid. I OBVIOUSLY had no idea what I was asking for, because I didn’t even recognize most of the stuff he bid!
So, I told him I needed to get some education before I actually bought his services and I started doing a lot of internet research, and I’ve learned a lot.
I learned the most from Yaro Starak at www.entrepreneurs-journey.com and Allen Gardyne at www.associateprograms.com . They both present a large amount of free educational columns along with links and downloads that have been very helpful to me in learning about monetizing the site. I probably know too much now.
Most of the information emphasized the fact that you aren’t going anywhere with a website until you have good content on it. Makes perfect sense. Absolutely. So now, it is obvious that I don’t have any need for a website until I get serious about writing my content. Damn.
I feel really self-conscious about my writing. It’s not funny. It’s not engaging. It’s not cool. I don’t feel right about putting it up on the web for all to see. So, I contacted a few people I know about ghost writing for me. A couple hundred bucks and I’d have at least some starter content, right? Wrong. I have not received any content from either of the people I contacted. Granted I was contacting people I know rather than the many links on the web, but I thought I would use local networking to get the work done. So maybe not a great idea.
So another month gone, and I’ve decided that I probably just need to bite the bullet and start writing. So I did. My first “article” was not as inspired as I had hoped, so I stopped in the middle. Maybe I’ll go back to it in a while, see if I can get more inspiration on it. The second article is better, still incomplete, but I feel better about it. Now I just need to get it off the handwritten page and onto a digital one (for some reason, I can’t write online, have to write it down by hand). So, there I am. Two (ish) articles and no place to put them. But I dont’ think I can put them anywhere until I have a lot more to add to it.
I get emails every day from so many sources of information, now I think I might have too much info, not enough substance.
Well, I’m off to read up on the latest bit of info: Article Marketing Automation http://www.articlemarketingautomation.com/
Tags: entrepreneur, Starting a business
