Legal stuff and stuff...

Wow, late post...This week we talked about how to make your business legal. There's quite a few different ways to establish a business.

The easiest way to establish an official business is what's called a Sole Proprietorship. Basically, you register a name with the state government. In Idaho (where my college is), you need to register an Assumed Business Name. This is good for a very simple business with little risk of legal liability, like one is run on an advertising model or an affiliate. It gives you full control. It's just you.

Another business type is an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation). This one is good for businesses that are a little bigger. There is limited liability because all legal problems--debts, lawsuits, etc.--are on the company and not you personally. They can't take your personal assets. You can also have co-owners in the business. You don't pay taxes on the company, but you pay it as the owner.

Corporations are much more difficult to establish. So, why would you want one? Well, you can have many owners. C-Corps can go public (like on the stock market). Another advantage is lots of liability protection.

So, stock. Why would you want stock? Usually people who buy stock want either dividends or to resell it. People sell stock originally to get funding. Once it's been sold, it can be used to tell how well the business is doing compared to other companies.

Understanding how to set up a business helps you to understand how to pay taxes, which is very important if you don't want to get in trouble.

Website design and credit cards

Hello there! Well, this week, we talked about designing our websites and how to take credit card payments via PayPal.

When talking about design, we talked about how it's important to make your site user-friendly, using familiar devices to help customers or clients know where they need to look to find things. We also talked about how it's important to do things that make your site stand out as compared to others. These two things have to be balanced. Sometimes, it seems that making your site interesting would mean making it harder to use, but this doesn't have to be the case. Sometimes, just finding the right theme helps. Other times, using the right site builder that lets you do the things you want to do helps.

You also want to make sure you have all the pages you need. You'll want a Home page, and an About/Contact page so that people know you're a real person. If your site warrants it, maybe an FAQ page or one for Testimonials. For now, my site has only the Home, About, and Blog pages. When I adapt it, I would add portfolio work as examples and maybe an FAQ. Of course, when I do Freelance editing, I'll need a Contact page as well so that people can actually use my services.

Which brings me to the second lesson of the week, Credit Cards. We mostly focused on how to use PayPal to facilitate purchases of actual tangible merchandise. It's not difficult, and building buttons can be fun. But when your business model runs on advertisement (as mine does currently) or sells services (as it will in the future), this is less helpful.You can't have a "buy now" button when you don't know how much they'll be paying. It'll depend on what exactly you're doing or how much work they're giving you. But I think PayPal still has ways to help when it comes time for the actual transaction. I'll have to do more research there on my own though.

So that was this week. I've got my website half-up. It's not great yet, but if you wanna check it out, go to rorschachfantasy.com. 

Website builders and hosts

So this week, we talked about website builders and hosts. I actually missed the talk about hosts because I went out of town (and state) for my brother's wedding. I write this from my room in South Carolina, instead of from my apartment in Idaho. For this reason, I'll be short.

Basically, the website builder you want depends on your skills in HTML and what you want to do with your site. Personally, I'm a fan of Weebly and Wordpress because I have no skills and both of those do well for blogs, to which I'm inclined. I'll probably use Wordpress since I want to also expand into a freelance editing site one day.

That's all you get this week. I'm sorry.

Week 2

This week, we only had one class. Brother Lundin, our teacher, had to go out of town, I believe, so we had no class today.

However, since we still had class on Tuesday, I still should have something to say, don't you think? I guess you could say I learned a little.

Okay, to start with, we discussed the differences between the Affiliate business model and Drop Shipping. Both involve selling things that you don't actually physically have in your possession (wow, that sounds a little seedy. But it's okay, I promise!). But that's the end of their similarities.

With Affiliate, what you're doing is actually linking back to another website that does the actual selling, and you get a commission. A lot of places seem to do this, like Amazon, Barnes and Noble and ThinkGeek.com. Basically, you're just a salesperson. It's very easy to set up, costs nothing, and you don't have to deal with finding a supplier beyond a company that's willing to let you do it. On the other hand, commissions tend to be pretty low; you'll have little to no customer loyalty (unless you have a really good reason for people to go to your site instead of the original), and the other site sets the price, not you. Still, it depends on what you want out of your web business. If you want it cheap and easy, and are okay with not making tons, then this works!

Drop Shipping, on the other hand, is more like a regular merchant system, except that you don't hold the merchandise; your supplier does. Your supplier holds on to everything. In fact, you don't even buy it from them until a customer has bought it from you. Someone makes a purchase on your website; you notify the supplier, and they package and ship it out. You build more customer loyalty, and you get to set the price. You also don't have to deal with having a ton of stuff in your living room, especially if its gone out of date/out of style or is otherwise undesirable. Disadvantages here...well, you have to find a supplier. And negotiate with them. And beware of scams (you've got to do that with almost anything though...). You've also got a little more responsibility, like having to deal with returns. It's all trade-offs. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but they may be better at some things.

Outside of these things, we talked about the need to find a niche and a little about fulfillment (which is kind of like drop shipping, but you have to start out with the merchandise). There was another type of business model, which I didn't catch the name of, where you gather information about people who might be interested in a certain thing and sell the names (with their permission) to the people who actually sell the product. On your site, you would provide information about the product. I think it's called infomediary, but I'm not positive.

Anyway, that was this week. Wow, for only having one class, we still talked about a lot!