Starting an Online Business in Wisconsin

Starting a new online business is probably the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to get started with your own business in Wisconsin.

What are the essentials for an online business?

• a product or service to sell
• a website (domain) or web page
• a hosting account (a computer server where your website resides)
• online marketing knowledge.
• traffic to your website (visitors)

There are many places you can go to get help for this list of things you need to do.

The product or service you’ll have to choose. Digital products are easy to sell online because you don’t have to worry about shipping and handling. Ebooks, mp3 audio files, music recordings, audio books, digital photographs, reports, and other things are easy to create and distribute online. But, it’s not difficult at all to sell something you have to mail out. One of the first ways I made money online was by creating ads on EBay for nutritional supplements for weight lifters and other health-conscious people. I did well with it but found that mailing out large quantities of supplements every day was not where my heart is. You might find it’s right up your alley.

Nobody can choose the right online business for you. You’ll need to assessyour skills in all areas of your life – where do you excel? If you create products or services within an area of life that you excel – you’ll have a better chance of success and sticking with it – through the hump – the period of non-profitability that occurs with nearly all newly created businesses.

Websites are getting easier to build on your own. Perhaps the easiest way to get a good looking website is to go with a blog from WordPress.com. Go there and sign up and see how easy it is to create your own site. Sign up with PayPal.com to be able to create order buttons on your site and sell your products and services.

If you decide to have your own domain and hosting account you can go to Godaddy.com where you can have a domain and 1 year of hosting for something like $55. The prices are ridiculously cheap right now…they’ve decreased over the years to the point they’re at today – dirt cheap.

Online marketing knowledge can be acquired over a long time of study or you could join a course that teaches you what you need to know. We’ll be releasing our eBusiness PRIMER 34 course in a matter of 2-3 months. This course will take you from little knowledge to everything you need to know to start your new online business and get it running strongly. The site where we’ll be releasing this is, www.IncAnswers.com but you’ll get special deep discounts and free training if you sign up for the newsletter here on this site. You’ll receive a free course or two when we do start releasing them – so you can see if the training format fits you.

The idea of this business training course is that we teach you everything you need to get started with your online ebusiness. Once you learn how to get started you can use that experience and skill to generalize into other areas you want to get into at a later time. Here’s a complete list of what we’ll cover in the eBusiness PRIMER 34 Course Outline.

If you have any questions about starting your new Wisconsin business – whether it’s online or traditional offline, please give us a call or write us using the contact information found in the upper right-hand side of all pages of Start Wisconsin Business (.com).

Starting a Wisconsin Business

As our country goes through this extended period of economic difficulty individuals around the USA are asking themselves how they can avoid personal hardship in the future.

You know, there are millions of people living in the USA that haven’t been critically affected by this economic downturn. There are people that right now are taking vacations to Hawaii, to Asia and Europe… relatively unaffected by all the events going on.

Who are these people? They’re entrepreneurs who have started their own business. They’re not affected by layoffs, getting fired, unemployment, and the rest of it. They put a lot of work into their own businesses. They focused 100% on getting something they’ll have for the future – regardless of what the economy does in the short-term. They built businesses that can keep going even through downturns.

Are these business entrepreneurs smarter than you?

No. They are just people that prefer being charge of their time. They enjoy making all the decisions about their lives. They realized before they started that they weren’t meant to work for someone else. It wasn’t a good fit for them. They realized that they wanted to be in control of how much work they do, when they do it and they wanted their income to be tied to that.

The phrase, “what you put into it – you get out of it” is not at all true while working for someone else.

As you read this article here at Start Wisconsin Business (.com) you might be coming to the same conclusion that millions before you have. It’s time to start your own business.

Personally, I believe there is nothing better an individual can do – to jump start their life full of happiness than starting their own business.

The longest journey begins with one step in the right direction. Today you have that possibility in front of you. You probably have an idea what business you want to start. You might be afraid to get started. You might fear failure. You might fear the responsibility.

But, don’t you fear what the rest of your life will look like while working for someone else and making some fraction of what you could make working on your own in your own business?

Are you afraid you don’t have a business degree from a university and so you don’t think you could be successful? The internet has provided an open university for anyone with the motivation to search for the answers. All the answers are online. Nobody needs a business degree anymore. Many of the people I know starting online businesses have no college at all. Many business owners I know have no business degree.

Start your new Wisconsin business today. Start working for yourself today. Start building a shelter from bad times that might await ahead. Be smart. Be fair. Work hard until you have something. In five years I think you’re going to be a lot happier in regards to your employment situation and career.

Is it Smart to Hire My Relatives When Starting My New Business?

Here’s a question that will get you all kinds of responses. We can’t let this question go by because we hear it a lot.

There are some differences between hiring family and hiring strangers in your new business.

Here are some differences:

• Family takes things personally. Emotion enters into the picture a lot more than when working with strangers.
• Family expects things to be laid back, easier, or to receive some special treatment more so than strangers would beginning to work for your new business.
• Hours (including shifts), sick leave, vacation time, flex-time, maternity leave, 3 day weekends, holidays will all be taken quite seriously by the family members who expect you to realize that family is very important – after all, you’re part of that family.
• Pay rate. Family members might feel like they should get paid a higher weage for doing the same things others in your company are doing. In sales for instance, the member of your family that is selling for you might think he should get a little higher commission than the other salespeople in your office. If that happens you’ll have a lot of resentment from your other sales people.

Those are some of the obvious issues you’ll face when hiring family members to join your new business.

Some people might feel pressured to hire family members because the person needs a job. You might want to help out.

Should you hire someone in that case?

You have to remember… your new business is in a fragile state when first starting out. Before you start your new business you might have the patience of “Job” but you’ll soon find that patience tested by hiring family members doubling as employees. Especially family employees that can’t do the job satisfactorily and go “beyond the call of duty”.

A good policy to have is separating business from family. Personally I couldn’t imagine working with one of my close family members. A distant cousin, maybe!

Choose employees based on what they can add to your new business. Startup is a critical time where you need to be laser focused on the business – not emotional squabbles. The best business plan might be to put off hiring close family members until later when you know the business will be a success.