Step 2 – Register Your Business and Make Your Dreams Really Real
Creating a business is so easy these days.
Sure, you’re thinking, easy for you… you’re a fucking IT genius and the envy of men all of Chicago.
True, I am those things (and more) but seriously, step 2 is really damn easy.
Back in the day you needed letterhead, an office, desks, biz cards, logos, lawyers and host of other physical material that you would take with you to prove that you were a real business.
Looks Mister, I have business cards and office…. I’m a real business I swear!!!
Luckily for you, some people still think they need all that crap to get started.
Skip that junk for now and create your business the easy way.
Go to Namecheap.com and buy a domain name.
Jons-IT-Consulting.com is $11 a year, DONE!
Purchase a hosting plan with Siteground.com, the GrowBig plan is $70/year, DONE!
Buy an SSL certificate at Namecheap for $20/year and BOOM, you have everything you need to start.
Find a guy on Craigslist, tell him you want a 1-page website and that you will spend $250-$500 and that you want to see the site fully live and uploaded to Siteground before you will pay him/her for it.
The site should be up in a week or 2.
Make sure you get the login data for the site and then log in to the site and your leisure to change text and images (WordPress is surprisingly easy to use).
There are cheap WordPress designers all of the place because WordPress is very easy to use.
I’ve learned WordPress, my salesman knows WordPress and most of my clients now make their own changes to their websites (use the ‘Avada’ or ‘Bridge’ theme with the ‘Classic Editor’ Plugin if you want my recommendation).
Create a Google business page, make sure to fill in all the details (will review this in more detail later) and you now officially have a business.
That’s right people, a website and Google Business Page is all that it takes to be a business.
It’s a glorious age that we live in.
You have a brand, you exist online and when you decide to mention your services to people they can now find you and learn more.
For $500 you just created a business and are ready to begin accepting clients.
Step 2, the actual creation of a business used to be so exhaustive and required so much capital that most people didn’t even bother starting the process but because of the radical shift that Google has created in the customer acquisitions process, “creating a business” is now by far the easiest part of…. Creating a business.
It’s much harder to market, elevate in the search rankings, convert web traffic, hire people, find the right card stock, pick a computer, pick the right slacks, and do all the other little things.
Back to Jon.
He slapped a website together, created a Google Business Page, got a couple of cheap business cards at VistaPrint.com and he will now be a legitimate option whenever people search for ‘IT Consultants in Scottsdale’.
The problem, which he will soon discover, is that merely being found is not enough, you have to be at the top of the SERPS (or search engine result pages) and you have to convert your traffic.
If Jon wants to succeed, nay THRIVE, then he has to be number 1-3 for all of the lucrative search terms for his industry and then turn that traffic into paying customers.
This is where Jon needs to do:
