Entretool 4: www.Webs.com

As promised, we proceed with our entretools section. These are essential tools to help you get your entrepreneurial dreams off the ground. We have moved through two great books, The Dip & The Four Hour Work Week and a great podcast called Internet Business Mastery. If you haven't checked them out by now, I strongly advise you do so.

For this posting, we will move into one of my favorite online tools, webs.com. As we discussed in several past postings, every business endeavor, regardless of the field, must have a web presence, and webs.com is without a doubt the easiest way to get that web presence in place, RIGHT NOW.

The site starts with an easy user interface that anyone can use. It also eliminates the hassle of registering a domain name and paying for hosting. Webs.com handles all of these tasks for you. The true beauty of this site is that it can serve as the ultimate spring board to your success. While many of us struggle to get started for a variety of reasons, a few minutes setting up a website can make you realize that the road ahead of you isn't nearly as challenging as you once thought.

So what can you do on the site? Well it starts with an incredible array of clean and classy templates. They look far more professional than other free templates you would find in programs like Microsoft Publisher. Pick a template that fits your theme and get rolling. From there, you can set up your home page, info pages, forums, a blog, merchandise order pages, and a huge variety of other pages to meet all of your customer needs. If you are just getting started, focus your efforts on a professional looking homepage. Review your competitor's pages for ideas. At a bare minimum, you will want a brief description of your company and some great looking graphics.

Once your site is up and running, you can continue to add pages that fit your company's needs. I would highly recommend a blog to update your customers with your latest products or offerings and for many businesses, a forum is also a great way to encourage repeat visitors. Finally, most businesses will eventually add a product sales page to distribute your products to your customers.

It's that easy. With less than a half hour of work, you can have a high quality, professional site up and running. Webs.com can allow you to establish a presence online and start you down your path to entrepreneurial success.

Good Luck!
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Sidebar 7: Lots of Ideas Leads to Great Ideas

Did you know that Thomas Edison's name is listed on 1,093 United States patents? And how many of those great inventions can you name? The phonograph? The lightbulb? (kind of...) Let me tell you something, a good portion of those other thousand ideas were not so meaningful. You can read about all of the inventions here, but I wouldn't waste your time.

So what is the lesson of the story? Not every idea is a home run, but the more you have, the more likely you will find a winner. As an aspiring entrepreneur, you simply can't afford to ignore interesting ideas that pop into your head.

Your lesson for today is to pick out a small pocket size notebook and take it with you EVERYWHERE! You will be amazed how many ideas pop into your head throughout the course of a day that you simply ignore. This notebook is used to record every these ideas and give you the chance to filter through them later, when you are in an entrepreneurial mood.

I want to give you one more tidbit of motivation. Have you ever heard the name Charles Goodyear? I am guessing that at least the second part of his name sounds familiar. That's right, he founded Goodyear Rubber Company and is credited with inventing the vulcanization process that makes rubber usable. Goodyear was actually a bit nutty. He spent a good portion of his adult life obsessing over rubber and ways to improve it. You see, the problem with rubber in its natural state is that it is extremely temperature sensitive. As the heat rises, rubber changes from its useful, springy state into a globby, sticky mess. This makes it useless for most applications. Goodyear tried every additive he could think of to improve rubber's characteristics, to no avail. Luckily enough for him, he left a small piece of his rubber sitting next to the stove one day. As the material cooked, it's properties amazingly changed, and the vulcanization process was discovered. While the invention was a bit lucky, Goodyear was observant enough to notice the change, and capitalized on it.

How many times have you stumbled upon a great idea and simply let it pass? Well not any more. Starting today, you can document these ideas and eventually, you will find your home run, and once you do, head over to our Inventing and Reinventing posts to find out how to bring your idea to life.

Good Luck!

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