Start a Freedom Business

Check out The Exile Lifestyle for an awesome example of the great things you can do by starting a website and blog. This guy is a creative entrepreneur, author, and full-time traveler. He travels to a new country every 4 months, chosen by his readers, and writes about the epic adventures and life knowledge learned.


A friend of mine referred me the website and I was so inspired by our alignment of passions that I immediately bought one of his eBooks: Start a Freedom Business. Just finished it, and for only $1 is about the best value I’ve ever purchased. Great advice, ideas, business concepts, and interviews with other entrepreneurs.

Freedom business… What a sweet lifestyle!

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Free Blogs – Not Really Free

As with most things in life, “free” doesn’t always mean free. For web hosting, “free” means that you don’t pay now, but here’s where you will pay: 1) splitting any money you make from your website, 2) having to put ads or links you don’t want on your site, 3) you will inevitably be pitched to pay for additional features.

It costs money to host websites, and companies that offer free hosting have a plan to make money eventually from you. It’s just business.

You can get quality hosting for $4/month. For total control of your website and domain name, that’s quite a bargain!

Benefits of Paid Web Hosting:

  • Unique domain name. Instead of ‘example.blogger.com’, you get ‘example.com’. More professional, cooler sounding, and you OWN it.
  • More reliable, 24/7 customer support, more space and bandwidth. You get what you pay for.
  • Full creative control of your website’s content.
  • Any revenue you generate is 100% yours.
  • More features and options. Actually, infinite creative options.

You may be starting a blog for fun now, but a lot of time these fun hobbies turn into money makers. When this happens to you, you’ll eventually need to get paid hosting anyways. There will be challenges when you later decide you need to switch… Usually you are hosted under their domain, which means you need to move it to a new domain. Switching domains is bad for search rank and branding, and you can run into problems with the appearance of your website.

If you start a blog or website, you should go legit and buy reliable hosting. Save money by creating it yourself following my tutorial for Starting a Website or Blog.

 

 

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Take a Class and Learn Some New Tricks

School, the Second Time Around

This is more of an article about life, business, and creativity… I want to share what has been a great experience for me: Going back to college part time, even after having a degree and working full time. School the second time around is so fun, and if you only take 1 or 2 classes about something you really want to learn, it’s easy to get engaged and really master the class. This is what I’ve been doing the last couple of years… I figured, why not?

It started about 4 years ago when I was thinking about a career switch into physical therapy. So I started taking Kinesiology classes. Having graduated 4 years prior, I was eager to sit in on a class and get back in campus mode. The first day back I was taking notes in an Anatomy class, buzzing with the excitement of being in a collective learning environment. I eventually took whatever classes sounded fun and interesting… piano, physics, e-commerce, InDesign…

This website actually spawned from my final project in my InDesign class, which was to make an ebook. It was a cozy little ebook about how to start a blog, but I figured I’d reach a wider audience and have more fun launching it as a full website instead… and as a result, here is The Blog Backpack. It’s still a youngster, but the ‘start a website’ tutorial I created is there for anyone to read, follow, and have their own website up and running in an hour. That ebook will eventually come in handy though, as I revisit it and stack it full of info from my blog later on when I can bundle more pages of useful content into book form.

I guess my point is that you never know what will happen once you start creating. This blog is definitely no Internet powerhouse, but it has helped people and will continue to grow as a useful learning tool that can guide anyone to starting their own website and sharing their mind with the world. So go for it, take a class or 2 on a topic that interests you and see where life takes ya.

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