Showing posts with label entrepreneur. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entrepreneur. Show all posts
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As always, I've been using and testing numerous tools that are essential, and not so essential but 'nice to haves', to develop business ideas for small business enterprising activities. Most recently, as an aspiring entrepreneur myself I've been utilising much talked about 'wordpress'. Wordpress is an open source content management system (CMS) often used to publish blogs, or business websites. Many of the worlds largest or most well known websites use the MYSQL and PHP back end that is Wordpress, 12% of the top 1,000,000 websites to be accurate.
Wordpress Formats - pros and cons?
Wordpress comes in two formats, wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The first, wordpress.com is free to use and you can customise your domain name (addyourwebsitename.com). It's easy to set up and hosting is free from Wordpress. There are certain disadvantages of this however for a beginner or non-technical curious, this option is fantastic for getting accustomed with blogging or basic web development. Spamming is taken care of as is set-up, upgrades and back-ups. I've recently used this to start a basic help and advice site for CV making - Visit how to Make a CV to track my progress so far (this website is less than a week old and is very much a work in progress). The disadvantages are that wordpress.com cannot be monetised as easily as other providers such as Google's Blogger or wordpress.org. Supposedly when your traffic gets to over 25,000 hits per month you can monetise the site and split the earnings 50/50 with Wordpress, however this isn't very good business in the long term. There is option to negotiate this I'm sure if you have massive traffic volume which would give you better negotiating standing. This factor isn't so important if you're just starting out as all of the content that is published on your website belongs to you and as such you can export the content to another website, along with your domain name at a later date, should your business website be lucrative in traffic volume.
Wordpress.org is a little more technie. It enables you to have full control of the PHP back end and integrate one of the many useful plug-ins that have been designed to improve and increase functionality which is very useful for a small business website. With wordpress.com, there are widgets available to improve functionality, as well as numerous fancy templates, but these are very limited in their use. Spamming and back-ups are not handled by Wordpress.org, you'll also need some more technical knowledge in how to set websites up, as well as having to pay for hosting (which isn't too expensive really anyway, I recommend Godaddy who are an excellent provider of domains and web hosting). I haven't fully tested wordpress.org as I wanted to get familiar with wordpress.com first, although I will be testing out wordpress.org in the near future to expand my learning and employ one of my business ideas. I'll report back my findings and in due course.
Summary
So far I've found Wordpress a very pleasant tool to use. I can see that it's got better applications for business because of how many widgets and plugins you can use. Also from my knowledge there are many more actively profitable users of wordpress than other free CMS providers. It's very popular within the geek community and there are endless tutorials available on how to set up, layout and make the most of your wordpress blog or wordpress CMS websites. The dashboard / admin section of the website is very easy to use indeed although the statistics that are available to your wordpress.com website are not as detailed or useful as google analytics, you can add Google Analytics to wordpress.org so at least there is this facility available within the products counterpart. I'll likely publish another article later on in my research to report more findings as at the moment this is just initial use and research. I can see that using wordpress.com is going to take a lot of the pain out of the publishing your content in a tidy, well presented manner, however the problem with monetising the blog / website concerns me - something that is satisfied by the fact that I know I can export my content at anytime to a more money friendly CMS, free or paid.
I'd recommend anyone learning to give this a go, although I'd also certainly recommend anyone looking to consider the 'best' option for their content purpose to consider other options also.
OK I've never been a big reader. I'm more of a film goer! I've literally read around 15 books in my lifetime, and half of those have been biographies or autobiographies, which is nothing to brag about. But of the few books that I have read I can highly recommend Ben Mezrich who is the author of the book behind the hit film 21 and the book that formed the basis for the more recent The Social Network.
Again to emphasis the entrepreneur factor, the books are always circled around aspiring success wanting entrepreneurs and risk taking personalities, never focusing on more than just the one person. If you watched The Social Network or 21 and enjoyed them, go out an buy the accompanying books from Ben Mezrich because you will not regret it. Better still, order through Amazon using the book links below, because this means I'll take a minor cut from Amazon (Stick it to the maaaaaaan!). I'm actually going to visit my own blog and buy a book from my own affiliate link because my copies of his books were borrowed! Final thing really, if you ever feel de-motivated about things, or just have a business or enterprising streak in you, I urge you to take my advice here! Read a Ben Mezrich book and enjoy. Peace
Email daena.hayhurst@gmail.com for enquiries, ideas, opinions and proposals. Don't forget to follow me and tell you friends about me. MachineDaena
Hi, I thought I'd start this blog by introducing myself and take it from there. Well the dude on the right is me, Daena Hayhurst (MachineDaena or Pokergeezer7) with a bit of an old school hero of mine Sonic the Hedgehog or to put it another way, a random fancy dresser from a recent night out (legend).
I'm currently 24 and have been educated at Manchester Met uni with a degree in Business Enterprise. I've got experience as a recruitment consultant but more recently have been looking to online initiatives to make me money. My ambitions are to start and run my own business and to inevitably get rich in the process. I fancy myself as a bit of an entrepreneur but have yet to prove this really! I'm quite into gaming, sports, keeping fit and learning new things. I also socialise way too much as I have a habit of not being able to say not to people. My good points are honesty and integrity, as well as just being a genuine kind fella. My vices are tendencies to drink plenty and gambling. I guess for now the aim of my blog is to let people know who I am and what my aims are and as things progress I'm sure I'll post about things that annoy me, do it for me, rage me or just things that I believe people may want to hear my opinions on. For now I'll say nice to meet you and take it easy :D
