Welcome back, glad you decided to join us

So every Monday I will have a new post on the next step.  After the initial phases are set up I might start posting twice a week, but want to keep the time involved to a minimum as well.

Feel free to follow along in real time by doing all the things I do, or you can also sit back and watch while I create a business and then if you think it fits your fancy just go back to the previous posts and do a step by step until you are caught up.  Inevitably there will always be new readers on the site, so I will try and keep all the posts available for review.  That way you don’t have to worry about printing them out or misplacing them, etc. 

Enough talk, let’s get going already.

The first thing I need to do is decide what to use.  There are a great number of free online business opportunities.  Everything from developing programs, writing code, creating logos, writing articles, to creating merchandise and much more.  At some point I will get into each of these, but for now am going to focus on just one.

Since I don’t know how to write code, or develop a program, I will stick to something else.  I am also less of an artist so I won’t focus on creating logos just yet.  Writing articles is also out for now since one of the goals of writing articles is to get people to go to your website.  But the website is still developing so we will have to put that off until we have much more information to share.

That leaves merchandise.  Of course I just told you I don’t know code, so we will have to pick something where we don’t need to create a shopping cart.  I also don’t want to deal with taking customer orders or returns or physically touching the products. 

Now I know what you are thinking, “What, if you don’t do any of that how are you going to be creating products?  Does something like that even exist?…”

Well, the answer is YES.  There are actually several websites out there that will allow you to upload a picture or design and apply that design to lots of different products.  The website company takes care of all the orders, returns, site hosting, etc.  All you have to do is create a design, upload it and apply it to what ever product you want to sell.  These sites are referred to as Product on Demand or POD sites.

I have chosen to use CafePress.com.  Although there are a lot of them out there, I will feature those later after we get up and going with CafePress.  Once we get a design and shop set up on CafePress we can then use that same design on the other sites like Zazzle or SpreadShirt.  Next week I will post the how to, set up a CafePress account.  If you feel like jumping ahead just click on the banners and you will be taken to their sites.

Slippy