Let’s say you’ve decided to start a home based business providing lawn care services. Things are going okay, but then one day you see some business advertising landscaping services and think “hey, I can do that”.  While that might be true, you would be wise to stop and think about it.  If you’ve firmly established your lawn care business then expanding to landscaping might be a good idea.  However, if you are still working on getting lawn care off the ground then the last thing you should be doing it thinking about expanding.  You need to stay focused on the task at hand — getting your lawn care business off the ground and stable.

For me, I’m trying to get a home business off the ground that is all about developing products that help Internet marketers.  I confess to being easily distracted by other potential business opportunities.  Since I’m developing software I also get distracted by thinking about all of the cool new technology and features I could add to my products.  While some of those features might add value, many others just add “coolness”.  By allowing myself to be distracted I delay getting my product to market and that ultimately costs me money.

Time is money, and every minute you spend on something other than your primary objective is taking money out of your pocket.  So STAY FOCUSED!

I’ve decided to go down the path of creating an Internet based business. That means I have no physical store-front. I can do everything out of my home, but don’t need to deal with having customers come into my home. This is attractive to me for various reasons, but one of the downsides of having an Internet business is that the Internet is open 7×24x365.  That can be rather taxing on a person, so it clearly isn’t for everyone.  The other issue with running a business on the Internet is that you either need to have the skills necessary to create and manage a web site, or you need to pay money to someone else for that (which is going to eat into YOUR profits).

Once you decided on your business you need to get it kicked off. That usually means some form of advertising is required. For a local business you would advertise in the local paper, billboards, phone book, etc.  For an Internet based business you have lots of options - Pay-per-click (PPC) like Google Adwords, Affiliate programs, banner ads, and so on.  Some of these directly cost you money (PPC) and others (affiliate programs) don’t.  In many cases you’ll want to do a combination and keep tweaking to find the most cost effective combination.

The new site is coming together quite nicely and next weekend is the tentative launch date. I need to get a new hosting account because I decide to build the new site using Microsoft technology (and my current hosting accounts are LAMP based). Once I have the new hosting account in place and upload the site I will get a press release published and announce the new site is open for business. 

Stay tuned.  I’ll let you know when the new site officially launches.  I’ll also put together some information about how I went about creating the new site. It’s a bit technical, but some of you may find it helpful and interesting.

This was a pretty painless process overall and only took about two weeks.  That’s pretty impressive.  Now for the hard part — making money!

I will continue to keep my “day job”, but will create a formal business entity that my domains, web sites, etc. will be owned by.  I even plan on having my wife get involved to help, and at some point I will probably get my kids involved (the oldest is already learning how to program!).

I decided to establish this web site and add relevant content to it as I begin my journey of creating a new business.