Money Monday - Training

So far, I've went over the cost of setting up my website. It was two parts: domain costs and hosting/building website. 

The next cost I incurred was for some training on creating an online class. Currently, I teach as an adjunct instructor at our local community college. One of the classes I regularly teach is an online class, so I'm familiar with the format, but wanted just a little more training on how to create a course outside of the college's Blackboard Learning system. Plus I knew that teaching for college credit versus personal development/learning would be different, and I wanted some training from someone with experience. 

I found my training with Amy Porterfield's class "Courses that Convert". I first heard of Amy Porterfield on a Entrepreneur on Fire podcast. I found great value in the interview, so I started listening to her podcast. Excellent, excellent podcast. Stuffed to the brim with practical, actionable content. I enjoyed Amy's teaching style, so it was pretty obvious when her course became available that I should take it. So that's what I did. 

This is my largest expense so far coming in at $99 each month for 12 months. I could've saved a little by paying it all up front for $997, but I was still nervous about taking the course and just wasn't ready to commit to that large of a chunk right now. I could swallow the smaller amount for a longer time period as illogical as that may sound. 

Income Statement

Revenues: $0

Expenses: $20.15

-Website Domain Purchase: $20.15

-Website Building/Hosting: $194.40

-Training: $1,188

P.S.

If you'd like to check out Amy Porterfield --> www.amyporterfield.com

If you'd like to check out John Lee Dumas of EoFire --> www.eofire.com

Both Podcasts are fantastic!

Money Monday except it's Tuesday

Money Monday

This will be a new weekly blog post covering topics of business finances. I had the idea when I was trying to figure out how much other people had put into their business to get it going and how quickly and how much of a profit they began seeing.

To start, I want to go over what I've done so far for my business. For me, just starting out, I've been very cost conscious. I don't have a business loan or a chunk of savings that can be thrown into a business start up.

For some business start ups, you just can't get around some major start up investments, but for most, I believe there are ways to start your business without losing your life savings. For me, this was very important. I wanted to start my own business, but I didn't want to financially drain my family's finances to build my dream.

So after assessing what I have and where I wanted to go, I settled on a must have cost ... a website.

I don't have a brick and mortar building, and I didn't think a Facebook business page or any other social media platform fit what I wanted. Plus, I was leery of using anyone else's sandbox. What happens if the sandbox owner completely changes the rules, and I can't operate my business the same way? Or what if they delete my information or don't show it in the way I want it shown? So bottom line, I wanted my own sandbox.

To have a website, you must have a name,

So I looked into a name.

This took longer than I hoped. I had a good case of analysis paralysis. I couldn't settle on what I wanted. Until I finally kicked myself and just picked.

I want to rabbit trail here for a minute and mention an awesome podcast I've gleaned a lot of information from lately. The podcast is by John Lee Dumas and called Entrepreneur on Fire or EOFire. It's a great source of information, inspiration, and motivation for anyone considering entrepreneurship. Anyway, one of themes I picked up while listening to several episodes was to just do it.

Don't wait until it's perfect. Do it wrong, but just get out there and just do it. So I did I picked a name and just went with it! It was such a relief to just decide...do...move on.

After the name, the rest was pretty easy. A trick I did learn while doing this was that not all domain dealers sell domains for the same price, and you also don't have to purchase them all from one site. For example, I purchased a .com and a .net from iPage and a .org from GoDaddy. So check a few different domain sites out. Some may offer your .com cheaper than others. It's worth the small amount of time investment. My total domain name investment was $20.15.

And with that I was officially off to the races!

Income Statement

Revenues: $0

Expenses: $20.15

-Website Domain Purchase: $20.15