As an entrepreneur the question is ALWAYS in front of you….do I buy a more expensive solution for the convenience of getting something that works quickly vs saving some money, investing my time and figuring it out for myself.
This is the case for everyone – whether you’re working on-line and building solutions or if you’re in a traditional business.
The challenge on-line is that there is a plethora of solutions already built and presented as “THE SOLUTION”.
Whats really frustrating is when I just follow a traditional route that I’ve always followed, instead of taking a minute to find a new, less expensive solution.
That’s what happened with this site. I built it on my mac originally, then I paid a developer on o-desk to redo it in PHP format, then he installed WordPress for the blogging functionality. In other words, I did the traditional thing – I tried a little bit, got out of my element and hired a developer…spending a lot more money than I needed. Here’s how I found out…..
For the re-launch of my first business, I’m following the product launch formula stuff from Jeff Walker (but I’m not paying for his program)…I’m just using the free stuff he’s already put out there to capture my attention. So, I wrote up all of the specifications of what I wanted for my product launch and put it in front of the last developer I used on o-desk for a quote. He informed me that he wasn’t interested in this type of work, but that it shouldn’t be too hard to build. That sounded funny to me….why would someone turn down easy, billable work? So I decided to do some google searches for some of the functionality I’m looking for, like “Squeeze pages”, “name capture”, etc for a site. After about 10 min of searching and checking the links, I felt really stupid!
It turns out that WORD PRESS is pretty much all I need to build the website I want and there are plenty of plugins to enhance the blog & Site’s functionality.
Anyone who’s been in the blogging world maybe thinking…”yes you’re an idiot Dave”, but please be kind. . Yes, I’ll have do to some HTML basics, but I found a $47 plugin to build a squeeze page and sales page. I found several other free video tutorials on how to get the most out of wordpress and how to build an entire site using it’s functionality.
Funny because I can see that Jeff Walker is going to be pitching the launch of a complete solution for a completely packaged solution to do just this. I can’t find the name of this product right now, but I’m sure it’s going to cost a lot more than the $47 plugin combined with my $5.00 / month godaddy hosting where I’ve installed WordPress for free. Yes, I’m going to have to mess around with this plugin, learn the tool & do the whole set up myself, but that’s ok with me. It’s going to let me get my hands dirty and learn some new stuff. Besides, I’m probably going to be doing this for SEVERAL more websites, not just a one time product launch, so for me, it’s worth investing the time and effort to learn this stuff inside and out.
I’ll be sure to put my learnings on my future blogs.
BTW…the plug in I bought is called WPSQUEEZEPAGE. You can get to it directly from this link: http://djhafer1.pteam.hop.clickbank.net