My Entrepreneurial Journal

 W04 Reflection - Site Builder and Host To be completely honest, this week's focus on choosing a site builder and a host challenged me quite a bit. I came into this week not even knowing the difference between a site builder and a host.  My experience and understanding of websites in general is extremely limited.  I paid to have a website built for me back in March and until recently I didn't do anything with it other than provide information to the web developer to add or update.   As we compared different site builders and hosts to choose from this week, I have truly learned a lot.  Who knew there were so many options?  I honestly do not know how anyone chooses which one to use.  I am working on learning and understanding all the necessities that are associated and necessary for a website - such as storage, bandwidth, Google ads, analytics, pricing, and contracting to name a few.   While this topic is still a reach for me, I learned that my own ...

W03 Reflection:  Drop shipping vs Affiliate Marketing…   As we continue to explore business ideas and business models, our attention this week was directed to exploring the advantages and disadvantages of drop shipping and affiliate marketing.  I actually really enjoyed learning about both methods and to be completely honest, struggle to know which of the two would best fit my business idea.     Affiliate Marketing seems to be the easier method with perhaps fewer potential headaches.  Affiliate marketing has a low startup cost and takes care of shipping and returns themselves; freeing a business owner of that duty.  In addition, they handle all customer service and complaints.  This model is simple in that you just add their link to your website and your customers order directly through them.  In return, you get a commission for each sale.     Some disadvantages include directing your customer...

Brainstorming business ideas... As I prepare myself to create and run a successful business, I find myself experiencing a series of emotions.  Some of those emotions are excitement and eagerness, while other emotions include feeling overwhelmed and worried. The idea of opening and running another business sounds amazing and is something I truly want and look forward to doing.  I have a goal to run several businesses and look forward to learning how. I am, however, juggling an intense schedule that offers little to no time to invest into anything new so this will be an exciting yet challenge task ahead of me.     This week in my Web Business Creation class, we are brainstorming busines ideas.  We were to choose 20 different business ideas to run some numbers on, such as demand, potential clicks, how many clicks our budget would support, and competition level, etc. I learned a new tool called Key Word Search on Google Ads that has been very hel...