Category: Business - Page 2

Step-by-Step on How to Become a Freelancer + Entrepreneur

I’ve been an entrepreneur for 10+ years now, and throughout that period I’ve been meticulous on cultivating and curating the best sources on growing a business. Today, I’m opening up almost a decades worth of knowledge – broken down into the exact order of operations you need to start a business.

Though this post is targeted for the new entrepreneur or freelancer, it really is 100+ resources for anyone that is starting, or growing their business.

I’ve saved my favorite resources in Evernote over the years, and now I’ve narrowed hundreds of articles and guides down to a list of 100, leaving only the best of the best.

I will try to keep this list as updated as possible. If you have anything that you think would be a great fit, please do not spam your link in the comments below, instead send me an email at jay@launchastartup.com and I’ll check it out.

If this post was any help to you, I’d appreciate if you could spread the word.

I’ll break it down to what I think are the five basics that can help any freelancer or new entreprenur, and additional resources that dig into details will be listed below.

Legal / Starting Your Business – First off, full disclosure: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. But you know who is? José Ancer. I love people who spend a lot of their time providing information completely gratis, and this is one of those guys. Ancer touches on a very delicate subject, as an entrepreneur getting started most of us aren’t excited to plunk down a thousands of dollars for company formation. And while he does not advise that you should try to form your own company. He knows there’s a good percentage of entrepreneurs who will try anyway – and this guide is very helpful for that. Forming a company? No lawyer is better than a crappy one.
- José Ancer is a startup lawyer, and his post is really for tech startups. I’d personally make money before you incorporate, it doesn’t cost a dime to become a sole proprietor. And when you’re ready to incorporate, from what I gathered from my research, if you’re the sole owner, it should be relatively straightforward to incorporate a single member LLC. Again, might be worth having this discussion with a lawyer, Ancer did point to DIY-ish option in Clerky, they currently specialize in incorporation, but they soon plan to expand to NDA’s, employee documents, convertible notes and more. Another popular and cost-effective option is LegalZoom.
Accounting / Bookkeeping / Payment Processing – While Quickbooks is definitely the most popular, I’ve tried them and Freshbooks, both of which are paid services, but they feel dated compared to Wave – which is free. While Wave does have online invoicing, if you’re working with local clients I’d recommend Square for payment processing, plus they offer a free card reader for your phone, and free payment processing to get started. And if I could recommend one book to businesses – it’s Lower Your Taxes by Sandy Botkin. A former IRS attorney and Senior Tax Law Specialist, this is a book that will get your comfortable with a rather sensitive topic, and it will pay for itself over and over for years to come.
Starting Your Website – First, you have to decide what type of website you need. Believe it or not, most businesses can launch a create a website for under $100. But if you’re a tech startup, you might need something for intricate and our guide on how to hire online freelancers is a must-read.
- Domain Registrar: Personally, I use to use GoDaddy because they’re the cheapest for the first year with their coupons. But long-term, with renewals at 8.99 (vs $~15 everywhere else), and free domain privacy (usually another $4-5), NameSilo is now my registrar of choice. Another popular option is NameCheap.
- Web Hosting: It’s usually good to separate your hosting from your registrar. I use multiple hosts and have had only had one issue with HostGator (though it was lengthy), so that would be my recommendation. Shared hosting should suffice, and you can always change in the future. When you get your new server, check the speed and setup Pingdom.com (it’s free) to check for downtime. If you have extended downtime I would recommend asking to be moved to another server. If they don’t comply, I’d cancel and switch.
- Email: While Hostgator does provide free email hosting, as do many other hosts. I would recommend Google Apps for Business especially if you’re familiar with the Gmail interface. It’s not free anymore, but $5/mo is well worth it in my opinion. I did test Outlook as they provide free email hosting for custom domains as well, but I had a horrible experience and ended up switching to Google Apps.
Launching / Getting Press – Tim Ferriss is a well known best-selling business author, and his post on How to Get Local and National Press is probably the best on the subject. Everything else is really a derivative or regurgitation. His post helped me land a spot on NBC.
Setting Pricing and Charging What You’re Worth – This short eBook will take you less than an hour to read, but it really is one of the best resources on understanding the difference between price and value.

The above covers the basics, five points that can help any business. Now let’s dive into the additional resources:

Getting Started

A part of becoming an entrepreneur is learning how to ignore the haters. There will be people who tell you that you can’t do it. That you should just get a job (because climbing the corporate ladder is so fun). Your environment conditions your behavior. It’s why many entrepreneurs end up moving to entrepreneurial cities like Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, etc. It’s one way good ideas are formed. It doesn’t matter where you are – this post from TheNextWeb can help show you how to stop giving a f@$% what people think.

Books to Rewire Your Brain:

1. Rework by Jason Fried – I’ve heard about this book since it was released, but I strayed away from it after reading one popular Amazon review that said it was “good advice, but not really anything new.” But I would disagree. Sure, it has some advice that has been talked about before. But it’s the perfect book to rewire someone’s brain and start thinking like a modern entrepreneur.

2. The Startup Manual by Steve Blank – Although the author states that this book is geared towards startups, this book provides step-by-step actionable advice that could help you immediately.

What is the best order of operations if you have a great idea for a website? A short summary on the order of operations you should be thinking about. Here’s another post that delves into a step-by-step guide for launching a startup from 6 months prior to launching, to post-launch.

How to: Guerrilla Bootstrapping. Essentially a super short version of this article that highlights how entrepreneurs can get started with little money.

SEO Tips for eCommerce Startups. Written by yours truly, this in-depth post looks at the creative strategies BetaBrand used to rise to the top.

A Freelancers Guide to Recurring Revenue – Freelancing can be a nightmare if you don’t when the checks will be rolling in, especially true for those quitting the 9-5. Dunn explains how recurring revenue is predictable revenue and something every freelancer should be thinking about.

How to Charge What You’re Worth – This is a 90 minute interview, featuring NYTimes Best Selling Author Ramit Sethi, asking Chase Jarvis how we grew in the photography industry, an industry that’s become very crowded over the past few years. 90 minutes, but well worth it. And even though this is perfect for photographers, this applies to any freelancer as we’re often times tempted to work for below market rate because of increased competition.

A consultants answer on, “How did you make your first million dollars?” A few good insights on building and bootstrapping a company, many other answers in that thread are worth reading as well.

How I Built a Web 2.0 Site for $12,107.09. A little old, but still very relevant today. I’m a huge Guy Kawasaki fan, he’s very personable and a good public speaker – in this post he’ll give you an idea of how to start a business, and what costs are associated with it.

How to Make $1,000,000/mo with Digital Products. A solid outline, even if you’re not planning on selling a digital product. Relevant: How to (Really) Make $1,000,000 Selling eBooks.

An eBook Pricing Model That Resulted in $100,000 in Sales.

How to Organize a Conference: How We Made Over $100,000.

How to Become a Millionaire in 3 Years.

The 6 Counterintuitive Ways We Grew Barkbox into a 100m eCommerce Business. I love this post because the “box of goodies” subscription model has popped up in every niche, and many have failed. But Barkbox is one that succeeded, and Co-Founder Henrik Werdelin describes how they did it.

You Don’t Need a Business Plan, You Need a Business Model

While a business plan can be useful for internal purposes, if you’re starting a business it’s all just projections. Everything shifts as you move forward. They’re still a good idea for traditional B&M businesses, as commercial real estate agents often request your business plan, and banks will ask for the same if you want a loan.

13 Ways to $10M in Revenues Part I and Part II. This is a great post on TechCrunch that breaks down numerous different industries, and how they can get to $10,000,000 in revenues.

Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur – A book book full of business models from startups all the way up to Google and Apple.

Legal

Disclosure: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

How to Do What You Really Shouldn’t Be Doing: “Rolling Your Own” Website Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Antone Johnson is another lawyer who’s active an active blogger as well as popular on Quora, he’s worked with MySpace in their prime and eHarmony. Here he talks about how to roll your TOU and PP.

What are common legal problems among web startups? Another important post that helps you avoid the problems companies before you have found themselves in.

Lawfully – Lawfully’s goal is to create an open community for sharing legal information. Most entrepreneurs don’t want to be wrapped up in the legalese, Lawfully annotates legal documents with plain language to help entrepreneurs understand key terms, issues, etc.

Raising Money

First off, do you need to raise money? This video explains why less than 20% of high growth companies take on venture capital:

How to Hustle with AngelList

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

Do Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists prefer investing in LLC’s or C-Corps? An important consideration if you plan on raising money.

Finding a Co-Founder

Many entrepreneurs can’t do it alone. Some have a sharp business acumen, others are skilled programmers, and some are blessed with design brilliance – but seldom do people have all three qualities. This is something I’ve battled with, and ultimately I decided to hone in on my business acumen, while learning just enough about programming and design to be able to successfully outsource that task if needed. But it really depends on what you’re starting. Seldom do solo founders raise venture funding and thus you’ll need a team. If you’re a freelancer starting a service based business, that’s a different scenario.

How do I find good technical co-founders? Dropbox’s Founder/CEO Drew Houston compares finding a good technical co-founder to “How do I find a really hot single girl to go out with me?”

You Can Do It Alone. Ryan Carson’s (Founder/CEO of TreeHouse) personal anecdote of how he started his startup alone.

If you have a little money, consider hiring someone. Kevin Rose found a developer through a Craigslist ad and built Digg With the advent of online marketplaces, you could find developers on freelance marketplaces, see our guide on How to Hire a Freelancer and also checkout our reviews of UpWork and TopTal.

Software

HR Software from CIPHR – Scalable HR software that can take care of HR, payroll and a host of other things that could help entrepreneurs and startups save a lot of time and money.

DataMax – Offers a host of solutions for C-Store daily operations, both affordable and scalable, whether you run a single store or a nationwide franchise.

How to Get (More) Clients and/or Users

How to Get Your First 3 Paying Clients. Ramit Sethi is one of those no-nonsense guys that provide actionable advice that hasn’t been regurgitated 1000’s of times. Anyone starting their own consultancy needs to read this post.

How We Got Our First 5,000 Users. iDoneThis is not only a useful tool, but they crafted an interesting post showing exactly how they got their first 5,000 users.

Website, Web Design, UI/UX:

Logo Design: You’re logo is the part of your brand everyone remembers. If you’re absolutely on a budget I would checkout our post on the 7 Best Business Gigs on Fiverr, one being a logo design gig. If you’re shooting for a higher quality and want to save time, checkout our guides to crowdsourcing platforms 99designs or DesignCrowd.

Breakdown of Web Development Costs. There’s a lot that goes into a new website, this post breaks down an estimate of what you need, and how much it costs.

Startups, This is How Design Works. I’ve referenced this website several times since I found it a few years ago – very useful.

How to Conduct Interviews for UX Research – Design is only one piece of the puzzle, usability is equally (if not more) important.

What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design? Bunch of great answers on this Quora question.

What qualities are shared by most successful startup home pages? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

What are the best practices for converting blog traffic? What’s the point of blogging if your traffic doesn’t convert? This answer illustrates a few high converting tactics used by popular blogs.

How to Outsource Web Development. If you’re considering outsourcing web development, this is a must read.

Anticipatory Design: Dangers and Allures – An interesting examination of anticipatory web design, it’s appeals, potential, and concerns as it relates to UX and website users.

Launch

Huge list of blogs and websites that a new startup could announce their pending launch.

Two Cold-Emailed TechCrunch Pitches that Worked. Getting press usually requires prior relationships with journalists. This post shows you that isn’t always a requirement. Although this post is about a technology startup shooting for press under a major tech publication, this post is relevant for any business looking to get press.

Pitch Perfect: A Startups Guide to Getting Coverage. This one’s great because it’s written by a journalist at a major tech publication, TheNextWeb.

The Hacker’s Guide to Getting Press. This entrepreneur wrote in-depth guide for getting press, showing exactly how he got featured in Time Magazine and other notable press sources.

Are Press Releases Still Worth Sending Out? Press releases use to be gold for digital agencies. The potential for press and a legitimate way to essentially buy backlinks. Things changed last year when Google essentially forced all press release services to no-follow all links within a press release. Related: What’s the best press release service after Google’s latest update?

Scaling

Branding

Why Apple Uses 67 Characters to Describe the iPhone 5.

The Difference Between PR, Advertising, Marketing and Branding.

Marketing

Noah Kagan was employee #4 at Mint, #30 at Facebook. Today he’s the CEO of AppSumo and he shares his thoughts on “What are key strategies to acquire your first 100k users with zero marketing budget?” Relevant: How did Mint acquire 1.0+m users without a high viral coefficient, scalable SEO strategy, or paid customer acquisition model?

It’s the CEO’s Job to Email the First 1000 Users. As an early adopter to many technology startups, I have always found it reassuring when the CEO sends out an email (even if it is automated).

Digital Marketing Strategy by Portent. I love in-depth guides like this, and when it’s created by a well known internet marketing agency – even better!

Startups: Don’t Outsource SEO. SEO isn’t something that you should just jump head first in. One wrong mistake and you could be de-indexed from Google. Before reading the following posts about SEO strategies, read this post and gain a better understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Link Building: The Definitive Guide. The SEO world is filled with so much regurgitated garbage, but Brian “Backlinko” Dean is a no-nonsense guy that uses data to back up his methods. If you could only read one guide on link building – let this be it.

SEO: The Advanced Guide to Link building. Backlinks are the #1 driver for SEO, and this 30,000+ word guide shows a multitude of different ways that you can build backlinks. It’s similar to the one listed above and could provide a few additional tips.

5 Unconventional Tips to Boost Your SEO with Fiverr Gigs. It can be tough to wade through all the garbage SEO gigs on Fiverr – but that 1% could provide the boost you need. In this post, we show you how to use Fiverr whilst staying on the white hat of the SEO spectrum.

Advertising

Anyone who tells you a particular channel will work 100% of the time with any business is probably lying. My view about advertising is simple – test what works. If you find a channel where you can put a $1 in and receive $10 in return – repeat it, and scale it. The following posts look into the most popular advertising channels:

Note: Google AdWords, Yahoo/Bing, and Facebook Ads often run promotions offering free ad credit, usually from $50-100, though sometimes I’ve seen $200 coupons. It’s worth Googling before you start a campaign.

Google Ads:

Facebook: With its continually improving advertising platform, it’s futile for me to post guides I’ve used in the past. Though I do feel compelled to share with you that GM says Facebook Ads don’t pay off and this video went viral illustrating Facebook Click Fraud. Though the flaw with the ladder video is that their targeting wasn’t narrow enough. When you’re targeting a smaller user base, your click throughs will be a lot more relevant.

I do use Facebook ads, both personally and for clients, but for a lot of people it won’t work. It just depends on whether or not you can reach your target market. For example, if you’re a wedding planner you can target engaged couples. If you’re a realtor, you can target people who recently moved or who are planning to move. If you’re a plumber you’re not likely to find people who need plumbing services.

Yelp: Answers on “What’s your experience with buying ads on Yelp?” The consensus is that Yelp tends to work better for service based businesses. Relevant: Half-Star Change in Yelp Rating Can Make or Break a Restaurant

Direct Mail vs Groupon – By The Numbers. Reddit is usually filled with memes and funny videos, but you can find gold if you subscribe to the right subreddits. This is a complete breakdown of advertising via Direct Mail vs Groupon which not only compares cost, profit, but also retention rate, cost to acquire customer, etc.

Sales

Your #1 Sales Rep Should be Driving a M6 Convertible by Month 12. Why? In short, you want to prove to prospective future sales reps that your business model works.

The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. I come from a newer generation that hates to be sold, and that’s what a lot of sales books (including this one) tend to preach. But this book came as a recommendation from Noah Kagan so I had to at least check it out. If you’re a little close minded on sales, this book will open you up to a whole new world. If you only read one sales book, let this be it.

Sales Outsourcing Pros – If you or your team is struggling with sales, another good option is to outsource sales. This gives you access to an on-demand force of cost effective sales specialists that you can scale up and down as you please. Another pro to an outsourced sales force, is that instead of being restricted to the 9-5, you could have a sales force working in different time zones allowing you to hit different markets.

50 Freelance Websites to Hire Freelancers or Find Online Jobs

The best piece of advice I can give when it comes to hiring freelancers, is to think less about price, and more about value.

Freelancing has changed the way businesses operate and how people work. These days, you can build a career without leaving the comfort of your home. You can even operate with other freelancers to make your own agency. For freelancers, it makes sense to join as many as you can and find the ones that work best for you. It really just takes a few minutes to signup and complete your portfolio, and who knows, you might land a few leads without any additional work. Granted, most of these platforms you’re going to have to spend some time with and develop a reputation. And the best freelancers are really good at reverse engineering what it takes to be successful on a specific platform. Below we’re just going to briefly talk about 50 of the best websites for online jobs, it’s up to you to delve into case studies and other reviews to see how effective it is for you.

For businesses, the benefits are clear, outsourcing can save you money and you’re not restricted to talent within your city. You now have access to a global pool of talent among a myriad of different freelance marketplaces. It keeps operational costs down and you can opt for freelancers instead of employees in a lot of situations. With online communication tools on these platforms or off (eg. Slack), hiring freelancers and letting them operate remotely from their own home can be a win/win. As a business, I use multiple platforms and I’ll delve into why below, so without further ado here are 50 of the most popular websites to hire freelancers or find online jobs:

How to Launch and Create a Website Under $100

How to Launch and Create a Website

Arguably, the first thing you’ll need for your business is a website. Nowadays, there are free options, but you get what you pay for. You can hire a designer and a new website can set you back thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars. Today, I’ll show you what I do for most projects, and even if you have no clue how to code, I’ll show you how to launch and create a website under $100… and yes that includes marketing because Google, Facebook and Twitter often have vouchers for free advertising. But before we delve into the guide, please take the time to read these next few paragraphs as I help you determine what you need. Not every business is alike, and starting a website with the wrong technology can cost you a lot of money in the long run. I’ve used a lot of different technologies for creating websites, and studied graphic and web design since college. But this won’t be any sort of a veiled pitch for my services, as a matter of fact, I’m going to tell you that if you’re starting a business, spending thousands of dollars on a new website is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. But before designers and developers alike start roasting me in the comments, let me explain:

I’ve worked with a lot of businesses and I think some mistakenly believe that “If you build it, they will come.” And that couldn’t be any further from the truth. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of increasing a websites position in organic search results. Web design and SEO are two completely different arts – and seldom do individuals, or even companies master both. And that’s just one source of traffic.
Optimize for conversions. From an ROI perspective, there isn’t much of a difference between a $500 website, and a $500,000 website. Amazon.com converts right around 5-6%, a little above the average conversion rate for eCommerce (3%), I could launch a website in a razor concise niche with an eCommerce platform like Shopify, and get a conversion rate of at least 5%, even higher depending on where I get my traffic from.
In the “Lean Startup” world, the idea of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) came about as a means to test your idea to prove that it’s viable before plunking down money developing a business. Some of the most popular websites today were hideous when they first launched. Take a look at Facebook:

See other examples on BusinessInsider’s post on “What 14 Popular Websites Use to Look Like.”

Breakdown of Website Development Costs

Alright, let’s talk numbers.

So you need a website? You don’t want to hire a new employee to build one. Of course. Makes perfect sense. Just outsource it to someone locally, your friends neighbor… Your cousin… or the infamous “brother in law”, and spend just a few thousand dollars to get a reasonable project done. Typically that’s how it all begins. It’s downhill from there. But it doesn’t have to be. Last month we offered a few tips on how to outsource web development. Today, we’ll show that the costs involved with website development can typically get out of hand, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. Outsourcing web development hangs on a few key pieces of information:

Quality of the software requirements document created
The use of wireframes and mockups to demonstrate expected functionality
Sample websites found and referenced
The level of experience and depth of the person who is building the site
The skill of the designer involved
The use of pre-created templates that already do most of what you need
The leverage of social media and promotable content
Graphic design using stock photos and icons that are cheap or even free

If you follow a typical software development lifecycle process, you will probably be okay.

Here are a few items that you typically have to pay for…

Website host provider, Windows equals $50-$100 per month. Linux = $20-40 per month. And you can score shared hosting for as low as $4/mo through HostGator.
Software development tools (Visual Studio costs $200-500 dollars, eclipse is free,… xcode is 99 bucks…etc…)
Database fees (SQL Server can be anywhere from $30-$100 per month, Depending on how large of a database you need, SQLite and mySQL are both free, but not as sophisticated or developer friendly, then there are other open-source database platforms are also available for free…)
Stacklead user information retrieval. StackLead is a new YC startup that helps companies capture information about their customers. $50-100 per month, depending on the plan you select.
Graphic design work could be anywhere from $300 for a single logo from the crowd source site like 99designs, to $3000, from a local graphic designer who will take a month to give you 100 different variations across five different iterations. It depends on how deep and how broad you want to focus your effort on this piece of work. We reviewed 99designs a while back, and I always recommend them to clients who need a logo.
Software development fees could range anywhere from $500-$5,000 for a basic website, (Of course it can be much higher… Depending completely on your features, requirements, and functionality that you need)…. but doesn’t have to be that high. Upwork can save you a lot of money, provided you know how to get the right programmers for your project.
SEO enhancements: Could be anywhere from $500/mo to a few thousand per month – it really depends on the difficulty of keywords that you’re targeting. Are you a local event planner in a small city, or a technology startup disrupting a tired market? To give you a better idea, Forbes has a really good piece on how much SEO should cost. SEO is one of those things that’s better off done right the first time, especially with Google’s latest round of updates that have penalized the likes of JCPenny, Expedia, Rap Genius, Kayak.com, etc. Work with a “white-hat” SEO company from the very beginning, asking the developer to work with your SEO consultant to breakdown the details. 90% of the time this does not happen. And developers have to go back and look at what tags they are using (H1, H2, Section, etc.) and see what the names of those tags are and how they relate to the content on each webpage… This is a disaster waiting to happen. On-page SEO is one of the ranking factors that is easiest to control – getting it right the first time can save you headaches down the road (and earn you a lot more organic website visitors).
Adwords and marketing campaign work: $400-$1000 To set up an Adwords account and create all of the various keyword entries for your website and your market. This can take 1 to 5 days depending on the quality and scale of your Adwords campaign. Of course then there’s the costs involved with actually spending that money on your google adwords advertising budget.

Did we leave out any website costs? Let us know below!

So I should launch an ugly website?

Of course not! Keep in mind that most, if not all of the companies listed in the BusinessInsider post were created by programmers (back-end web development), not designers (front-end web development). Technology startups have different requirements than most businesses, and as such are often built from the ground up. But most businesses don’t need that, as a matter of fact, more businesses today are choosing WordPress. Matt Mullenweg recently stated at a conference that WordPress powers 18.9% of the web. Even the NYTimes, Forbes, and CNN use WordPress.

What was considered a blogging platform, WordPress has now expanded into being able to launch websites for portfolios, small business, corporations and even eCommerce. As such, that’s my primary recommendation to anyone who needs to create a website. Keep in mind that I’m referring to the open source WordPress.org and not WordPress.com (self hosted with limitations).

Pros and Cons of Wordpress as your CMS

Pros

Plugins – Need social sharing buttons for your posts? No problem, there is a plugin for that (dozens, actually!). Need help with the technical side of SEO? There are plugins for that. Need to backup your website? No problem, a plugin will do that automatically. The open sourced WordPress has attracted many developers to create and submit plugins that help fellow webmasters, so that if you need a function/feature, chances are you don’t need to hire someone ($$$) to build it for you.
Easy to use dashboard, even if you’re non-technical – Here’s a screenshot of my WordPress dashboard as I write this post, it literally has access to everything you need, whether you want to add a new post, picture, sift through comments, etc. The visual editor within posts is awesome and everything is Apple-esque in the sense that it is very intuitive.

Cons

WordPress Limitations – WordPress is perfect for displaying information, which covers a wide range of businesses. And while WordPress offers a myriad of customization options, you’re still based on their framework and that does come with limitations. If your a tech startup you might want to look for programmers. A good way to help you decide is too see what your competitors are using with a tool like BuiltWith.com.
Dealing with WordPress Updates – WordPress is consistently upgraded which requires plugins and themes to be updated accordingly. Sometimes making sure everything works with the latest version of WordPress can be a pain, but as long as you make sure everything is backed up you should be OK. I’d also purchase a theme for a reputable developer (examples later) that has a history of keeping their themes up-to-date.

At this point, this post will focus on WordPress, which is what I use for most projects. If you’re thinking you’re more of a startup and/or want more flexibility that WordPress allows, checkout our post on How to Hire Freelancers Online without Losing Your Sanity where I show you how I’ve hired programmers in the past… and if you’re pre-launch you can use LaunchRock to get a landing page up that can help collect email addresses for your launch.

10 Steps to Making a New Website (Without Any Knowledge of Code)

If you have your website’s copywriting and logo good to go, this entire process could take you less than an hour. If you don’t have a logo, I like the crowdsourcing model (eg. 99designs), but there are plenty of alternatives.

I consider 1-3 impossible to screw up, from there if you want you could just hire someone to do the rest – which a basic install with your logo and text shouldn’t cost more than $100.

If you struggle somewhere along the way, just post a comment below and I’ll help you along. Or feel free to contact me directly and I’ll do it for $100.

1. Buy Your Domain (~$13). Stick with a popular registrar, I use GoDaddy because they’re the cheapest and I’ve had zero problems with them. If you do use GoDaddy, skip all the extras and upgrades that they offer, you don’t need them.

2. Buy Web Hosting (~$4+/mo). Don’t put all your eggs in one basket… meaning don’t buy your hosting from the same place you bought your domain. There are a lot of bad hosts out there, your website is your business and you don’t want any unannounced downtime. I use Hostgator, they promise a 99.9% uptime and with the five years I’ve been with them, I think I’ve only had one prolonged downtime (~5 hours) when something happened (hurricane?) to their primary data center. Plus they have an online chat that I use whenever I have problems – something I wish every company has! I hate having to call in for support.

I have had problems with other hosts. Whoever you decide to host with, use a free tool like Pingdom to monitor downtime for the first month. If your website goes down for more than 5 minutes twice, I’d switch hosts. Because chances are that particular they put you on sucks. And with shared hosting, it happens. You could jump up to dedicated hosting, but I don’t think it’s necessary unless you’re over 100k/mo.

3. Buy Your WordPress Theme (~$25-55). Here’s the fun part, browse the ThemeForest WordPress Marketplace for a website that you love. Every website is customizable and most come with page builders to customize each page to your liking. I’d start with themes with good reviews, then double check the comment and support threads to see if the developers are responsive.

Note: If you will be using WordPress, make sure you’re looking under the WordPress themes section. Otherwise, pick the appropriate theme for your CMS.

You can find free themes on the internet if you just search “Free WordPress Themes,” but they’re often limited and they’re seldom updated. WordPress updates every few months, and if your theme isn’t up to date – it could break your website. My advice: Spend the $50 for a new theme. It will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Steps 1-3 are the easy part. Actually installing your website really depends on the documentation for your particular theme, some are more detailed than others. But this is a general guideline on how to proceed:

4. Point Your Domain to Your Host. In your welcome email from Hostgator, you’ll receive information about your server including the nameservers you need to point your domain to.

5. Install Your Theme. Here’s instructions from WordPress, you can also your documentation.

6. Sample Data or Start with the Barebones. When you first install your theme, it’s pretty barebones. If you want it to look like the demo (which I recommend for rookies), install the sample data.

6. Theme Settings. Refer to the theme documentation.

7. WordPress Settings. Most of these are personal preference, but I would at least recommend changing your permalinks to post name.

8. SEO Considerations. Out of the box, WordPress is pretty good with SEO. One plugin to take your SEO to the next level is WordPress SEO by Yoast.

9. Essential Plugins. There’s tens of thousands of plugins to choose from, and the plugins I use vary from website to website. This post can give you a good start.

10. Graphics and Stock Images. Chances are your website still doesn’t look like the demo even after installing the sample data. This is because the demo uses stock images that the developer had to pay for to use in the demo. Most of the time this is removed from the theme for legal reasons and replaced with placeholders. Thanks to a growing number of photographers, there’s also a growing number of websites that offer free stock photos… one such example is Pexels, who offer free stock photos (even for commercial use). There’s also paid stock websites like iStockPhoto if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

The Launch Process

We’ve talked about SEO before, but that’s for the long game. We’ve also talked about press releases before, and the best press release services. But that can be a hit or miss depending on your type of business. There are a few gigs on Fiverr that are worth checking out for $5. But the first thing I would do is search for free vouchers from Google AdWords, Facebook and Twitter Ads. It won’t cost you anything and allows you to test different channels for your business.

For more on the launch process, read our post on the 50+ Must Read Resources for Starting a Growing a Business.