Starting Your Business from Scratch
In a favorite book of mine, Hagbard Celine begins a lifestyle ‘demonstration’ by emptying his personal coffers, giving away his possessions and setting all his attention on accomplishing one singular mission. Part of his demonstration was to show that anything is possible regardless of what you start with.
The launch of SpiralEntrepreneurs.com is similar. While I can’t lose the connections I have already, this is a new site. It has no search engine relevance. It has no connections. It has no actual pull in the world. The term ‘Spiral Entrepreneur’ is relatively unheard of. In fact, it’s a word that my decade+ friend, mentor and colleague, the good Doctor Joseph Riggio came up with just a week ago. And I ran with it.
The intention of this demonstration is that intelligent revolution is possible. That capitalism is perhaps the most powerful engine for uplifting humanity we’ve yet discovered. And that when you tap into your Passion and your Purpose – anything is possible – even starting from scratch.
I began putting this website up six days ago.
Here’s how:
1. I started with a topic that fired me up. In this case, Spiral Entrepreneurs. Passion is critical when building a business worthy of your most precious asset – time. It’s also important because passion is where your best stuff comes from and if you’re going to engage people do it from the heart.
2. I made sure that I had ideas for generating revenue. That’s another important thing when building your business from scratch. The key to all successful business is cashflow. Make sure you know where yours is coming from. I’ll do an entire post on this soon.
3. I set up a simple blog at www.wordpress.com
4. I bought the domain for my site at GoDaddy.com
5. I put my new Wordpress site on my domain so now it shows up at SpiralEntrepreneurs.com instead of spiralentrepreneurs.wordpress.com (which allows for a lot more flexibility for marketing add-ons.
6. I picked a theme (Magazine Basic) that allowed me to showcase the important stuff on my site in a way that pleases me and shows people what i want them to see every time they come to the site
7. I wrote the pages telling people what this site is about.
8. I put up buttons for an RSS feed and Twitter follow.
9. I put up a name capture for people that want the blog delivered to their email. You can do this at www.feedburner.com
10. I added Disqus
11. I created a video so people don’t have to read all the text on my Pages describing what this site is about. (Find your best medium and work with it).
12. I gave credit to the primary people who inspired the site: Joseph Riggio, Howard Bloom, Chris Brogan.
13. I added ShareThis
14. I turned on Akismet on my blog (that’s a spam blocker for wordpress – it works great)
15. I added the Tweetmeme plugin through wordpress
16. I set up Google Analytics
17. I wrote this first post.
What about you? What did you do? What would you add to the list? What would you take away? What would you change?
