When you set out on the journey to build an online business that sells some form of knowledge (like an online program) and help (like coaching), it can be easy to think that you can do everything needed to build, run, and grow your business. And actually, you can, but…and this is a big qualification…it is very, very hard to do everything alone.

When we start something new like this, we often just don’t know what we don’t know. One of the biggest things that we don’t know is how many skill sets are needed to build and run an online business. [Read more…]

I’ve bought and been through a lot of online marketing training programs and there’s something that I’ve never seen discussed before: the fact that creating online programs and launching them takes an unbelievable amount of work…and a lot of it is hard work.

That’s not to say that it’s not fun and enjoyable, but there’s a lot of hard work involved. Because of the complexity of that work, and of pulling off a successful launch of an online information product, there are many things that can go wrong.

When things go wrong in a launch, the stress levels can be extremely high because it usually means that you’re going to lose money, or at least not make as much as you could have if things had gone smoothly.

In this post I’ll share with you a handful of tips that will help your next launch go much more smoothly. Pretty much every single one of these tips made it to this list because at some point I made a mistake in one of my launches, then figured out how to do it better the next time. [Read more…]

When you’re new to creating WordPress sites on your own, shopping for a premium theme for your businesses website can be time consuming and frustrating.

You can easily spend days going through the live demos of premium themes on sites like Elegant Themes, StudioPress, Woo Themes, or Theme Forest, just to name a few of the top WordPress theme providers, and still not know which theme would work best for you. Yee gads!

While you’re trying to gather a collection of themes you like, and that could work well for the look and feel you’d like to have for your website, it can be confusing to understand what’s possible with the theme in terms of the colors, or the layout of content blocks on the homepage, or what you can put in sidebars.

Since I often hear from folks about the frustration of finding the perfect WordPress theme, I’d like to share a few things that should help you with the process, if you are, or will be, in a situation where you need to find a theme for your businesses site. [Read more…]

If you spend a good amount of time online, and if you have a business that is partially or wholly based online, you likely have a need to use dozens and dozens of websites or web apps that require you to login in order to use them.

If you’re like most people, you probably use the same password everywhere, for every site you need to login to, including the admin side of your own website.

That one password that you’re probably using is also probably short and easy to remember, which, unfortunately, also makes it very easy for hackers (or their password cracking programs) to figure out.

If you use the same simple, easy-to-remember password everywhere you go on the web, you’re putting yourself, and all of your private, personal data, in a very risky situation. [Read more…]

If you’re starting or running an online business, you will inherently have hundreds of to dos, discussions, files and deadlines to manage. It can quickly get overwhelming and make you feel pulled in a hundred different directions.

You can go old school and try to manage your to dos with pen and paper, and have discussions with your team members or people you’ve hired via email, but you’ll most likely get loopy trying to manage everything that way.

At the very least, you’ll be wasting a lot of time that you could be spending doing other things to grow your business.

There’s a kind of web tool called project management software that can make things sooooo much easier for you. This kind of software gives you tools like to do lists, discussion areas for you and your team, file storage, calendars, and more.

[Read more…]