Are you a great cook? Love to fix cars? Can make spectacular home-made jewelry? Are you good at photographing people, places and events? Are you a graphics guru? Then it’s time to make those loves and hobbies make money for you. All for under $100.
Because of the Internet, entrepreneurship is no longer the exclusive domain of aristocrats or those with powerful connections. Anderson, the owner of Financial Life Connections (www.financiallifeconnections.com or www.clydethinks.com), says we must begin to leverage the high-tech advances that lay before us and use it develop additional streams of revenue.
“The whole idea is this: we don’t embrace technology. It doesn’t take a lot to start a business,” says Anderson, author of What Had Happened Was ... “There are a lot of tools and resources out here that a lot of us use and play with every day, but we don’t use them to earn income and to make money for ourselves.”
Anderson, who is coming out with a book in December called 21 Days to Liberation, says “there are several components to creating a business. And one of them is creating a business model and saying ‘what it is that I’m selling, how much am I selling it for and then how much is it going to cost me to sell that product.’ Once you figure that out you can find ways to get the product together and build it and market it.”
Here are 10 tips Anderson offers to help get the aspiring entrepreneur started:
Find what it is that you love to do and figure ways to make money doing it.
Get on the Internet and create a page for yourself that you can steer people to. “On the [World Wide] Web, you can create a blog for free,” Anderson advises.
You can create e-commmerce through PayPal for free.
Market the product for free: “When it comes to marketing the product, you have social media. You have LinkedIn, you have Twitter, you have Facebook that you can create a page for, all for free. And you can create links to direct all the people to these sites and your blog.”
Place your blog or business website on other sites to increase traffic to your brand. “You have a thing that’s called affiliated marketing where you can pay someone to put your link on their blogs or sites. And someone clicks on it and can buy it and you get paid,” Anderson advises.
Get media exposure for yourself and your business that will enhance your brand and make you more marketable. “There’s a site out there called ‘HARO’ — Help a Reporter Out. And HARO enables you to get queries everyday from media outlets from around the world who are looking for experts in different fields every day.”
Get expert help at creating a sound business plan: At “SBA.gov. there is a template for a business plan. I think that’s the thing that hems a lot of people up. SBA.gov has a model to see if your business plan is even profitable. You can find out how much it’s going to cost to market it, get it done and get it to the market it and how much are you going to sell it for. At SBA.gov, all you have to do is fill in the blanks and it spits out a business plan on sba.gov.”
Get business cards, for free: “Go to vistaprint.com and get free business cards, as long as you allow them to put their logo at the bottom. The only thing you have to pay is shipping and you got business cards.”
It costs $100 to incorporate your business in the state of Georgia. “It takes 15 minutes and you can incorporate your business right there and have your articles of corporation or articles of organization. Even if you do the business with the secretary of state website, you’ve only spent $130 dollars with the advertising fee.”
There is a site that will allow you to create a video for free and create your own marketing video and create your own commercials for free. “You tell them what you want to do, you pick your own pictures and they create a 30-second video for you and you use that to spread that out through your social media contacts.”
In short, the ordinary citizen doesn’t or can’t fathom that the thing they love doing more than anything else could be bringing in additional streams of revenue into the household. It could lead to a profitable side gig that you operate at nights or weekends. Or it could eventually become an enterprise that you begin to do full time. That, Anderson says, is the very definition of the American Dream.
“People don’t realize that they are experts in something,” Anderson says. “We all know more of something than other people do. You just have to figure out what that is. There is a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Tipping Point. And he says it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. It takes about five years. We don’t take advantage of what we know. Since I do have that mindset, I can leverage that product knowledge and market it and make money off of it.” –terry shropshire
