How to spend your measly technology budget

December 11, 2009 By

First things first: If you have less than $500 to spend, go look at my list of tools that will let you build your online empire for free (and don’t forget to read the awesome suggestions in the comments).

Now, if you’ve got the $500 and want to know what to do with it, or you just want to know why I think you need $500 to really do a self-hosted website, read on. It’s time to look at some paid services to help you run your online business.

What to do with your first $100

OK, I said this in a previous post, but it’s really worth saying again:

Your first purchase should be a domain name.

This will cost approximately $10 per year. So if you have $20, you can either buy one domain for two years, or two for one year.

My recommendation: Your first $50 should be spent on one domain name. For up to 5 years. If you really want to (or if there are variations on the name, common misspellings, hyphenated versions, and the like), then use the next few increments of $10 to buy multiple domain names. Up to $100.

Just go to GoDaddy (although their checkout process is obnoxious, they’re cheap and reliable. Just don’t buy any add-ons or extras. You only want to spend $10 on your domain name, remember?).

If you’ve got more than $100, you can start planning for the next paid step (keep reading).

But for heaven’s sake, don’t wait until you have $50 or $100 so you can implement a complicated domain hierarchy. Just spend your first $10 on the first domain name as soon as you’ve got it.

No, your domain name doesn’t have to be perfect. You may well change it later (when you’re rolling in cash and can buy all the domains you want, that is). But start with something now. Your name. Your company’s name. Your goldfish’s name. Just register something already!

Now you can plug that domain into your free Blogger.com blog, which will instantly raise your professionalism score by twenty points. And carry on with your free online empire (or, I guess it’s now a $10 online empire).

The bare minimum: No safety net

So let’s say you’ve got more than $100. You’re ready to move beyond Blogger. You see someone like me, crazy enough to offer WordPress installation for $99. You think “Great! I can buy this and still have $1 left over!”

Not so fast.

First, do not spend your family’s grocery money on your website. Please.

Second, that $99 pricetag is not your total cost. Before I can install WordPress for you, you’re going to need the aforementioned domain name, plus a little thing called web hosting (that’s essentially renting space on a backed-up, secure server so that your site is accessible to the whole world).

And that’s the bare minimum. Figuring $10 for your domain name and $120 ($10/month) for web hosting, that brings us to $130.

A digression about the cost of hosting: You may have heard that it’s possible to get free hosting. There really isn’t any such thing, except for Blogger.com (which I discussed in my post about how Blogger is a perfectly valid place to build a website). So-called free hosts put ads on your site, ads over which you have no control. Don’t fall for that.

It’s much safer to simply buy web hosting, which you can get for less than $10 per month (often much less, but I use the $10 figure to calculate conservatively).

So, the thing about that $130 bare minimum? It’s pretty bare. You can spend $130 and have a working website, but you will have to totally and completely do-it-yourself. If you can, by all means go for it, but if you need any kind of help, you may find yourself panicking (or spending money you don’t have, or other inadvisable practices).

An annual technology budget for cheapskates bootstrappers

So that’s why I give the $500 figure. Yes, it’s a nice round number, hefty enough that you can feel really good about having saved it up, a number that you can speak aloud confidently (try it: “My technology budget this year is $500.” You may not believe it yet, but what if it were true?).

But mostly, it gives you a nice cushion beyond the bare minimum.

If you’ve spent $130 on your domain and hosting, you have enough of that $500 left over to do one or two of the following:

  • Buy premium services like AWeber (for mailing list management) or AudioAcrobat (for recording and publishing audio clips and files), each of which is about $20/month.
  • Upgrade your shopping cart capabilities by using a paid shopping cart service (my favorite, and the one I use, is E-Junkie, which starts at $5/month, but there are many others).
  • Buy a premium theme for your blog (any premium theme worth its salt should come with some amount of tech support, by the way).
  • Start a pay-per-click campaign with Google AdWords.
  • Hire a graphics wizard to design your logo and header.
  • Purchase a guidebook or do-it-yourself WordPress class that you can use as a reference as you build your own site.
  • Have someone like me install and configure WordPress for you since that’s a one-time task that you may not want to waste time learning.
  • Hire a tech-savvy VA for a few hours, or a business or marketing coach for one or two intense sessions.

And even $500 isn’t enough to do all of these things. You’ll still need to pick and choose carefully. You might notice that I didn’t mention web design at all, which is because truly custom design will cost at least $1000, and often much much more. You can do a lot with a highly customizable theme and a unique logo, though.

The bottom line is to think carefully about your support needs. And when you’ve figured out exactly how much support and training you’ll need? Double it.

And if I’m wrong, and you survive just fine on the bare miminum? Fabulous! Good for you! At the end of the year you’ll have $370 to spend on whatever your heart desires, and wouldn’t that make a nice holiday gift for yourself and your business?

Filed Under: General How-To's Tagged With: , , , ,

Help save my diabetic cat and send my kids to college!

September 21, 2009 By

Hi, everybody.

I just liquidated my kids’ college savings accounts to pay for treatment for my diabetic cat.

RockyintheDryer

Figure 1: Rocky the Diabetic Cat (he's relaxing in a cozy warm heap of newly-dried laundry...in the dryer. I didn't say he was smart, just diabetic.

Of my two cats, Rocky is my least favorite. He’s kinda thick-headed and has never learned that he’s not allowed to jump on the table. He doesn’t sit on my lap and purr like Jackson, the “good” cat. He’s got an unnatural lust for appliances (as shown in Figure 1. He also likes to climb into the dishwasher when it’s warm and dry. I told you it was unnatural!).

But those are not good enough reasons for me to just let him starve to death because he can’t metabolize his food properly.

I may have made lots of dumb mistakes in my life, but I am not a cat murderer. Sheesh.

This is one of those scenarios that is so crazy that I couldn’t possibly have made it up. It sounds like a classic sob-story scam, even to me (I’m laughing, thinking about all the spam emails I’ve gotten featuring poor orphans and the like).

But every word is true.

So I invite you to laugh along with me, at least until I get to the part where I shamelessly flog this sob-story so that you’ll buy my stuff*.

(*Oh wait, I’m already doing it. Flog flog flog!)

September: Budget crisis as usual

September was already shaping up to be a lean month, finance-wise, here at Casa del Cholbi (yeah, we sometimes do call it that, after a margarita or two). Now, I’ve had plenty of months where the last week or 10 days is a don’t-use-the-debit-card zone, and the family bank account is down to chump change until The Professor’s paycheck arrives on the first day of the next month. But September was looking like it would be worse than the “normal finanancial crisis” scenario.

(Do I see a pattern here? Yes, thank you Dance of Shiva, I do indeed. And the unraveling of it includes writing this post.)

But I still felt optimistic. If not for September, then for October.

Just when things were going so well!

Possibly because of delusion and denial, sure. But also possibly because, for the first time in eight years, I now have time to work on my business at something approaching full capacity. Because both of my Genius Children are now old enough to be in school, full-time. For free.

And I am having so much fun creating and planning and internetworking with fabulous people. I’ve created two new service packages (WordPress Installation and AWeber Tune-Up, $39 each), planned a wacky teleclass called The Gentle Art of Making Money with your WordPress Blog in partnership with my new pal Meredith Curtin, introduced my Web Coach Open Office Hours, started revamping my personal/business Cholbi.com website, gotten more active on Twitter (sorry Facebook and LinkedIn, maybe later), and lots more. Trust me, you’ll be hearing more about these New and Exciting Products and Services here on the blog.

Lots of thinking and planning and also lots of doing. Truly inspired doing.

So, even if we squeaked through September by the proverbial skin of our teeth, October was bound to be better. Bound to be!

But then stuff started happening.

The plot thickens!

  • The Professor is taking a mandatory 9.23% pay cut, because he’s an employee of the Great State of California, which is, apparently, having a bit of a budget crisis of its own.
  • We had to have a huge amount of weed-abatement done. This is mandatory every fire season, and it’s a good thing (trust me, I’ve experienced California’s fire season up-close and personal, but that’s another post). It was, however, more expensive than I’d planned for. Much, much more.
  • My therapist’s office called and surprise! I owe them for several visits, because they “misunderestimated” the number of sessions my insurance company would cover.
  • Rocky, our younger (and frankly, stupider) cat, was diagnosed with diabetes. My cat, unlike myself and my children, does not have health insurance. So far, his diagnosis and treatment has cost about $600.
ChristmasCats

Figure 2: Help my kitty see another Christmas!

So. Several unexpected (or underbudgeted) expenses, one lower-than-expected paycheck, and all maxed-out credit cards later, I turned to our only remaining savings: The kids’ college funds.

I’m frantically rationalizing to myself: “There’s lots of time left until they’re college-bound. Surely we can make it up. Also, they’re geniuses, so they’ll get scholarships, right? And maybe they’ll become Internet millionaires out of high school and won’t want to go to college in the first place!”

Still, it was a hard thing to do. And there aren’t any more savings to draw from. No offshore tax shelters (at least, not yet, bwa-ha-ha!). And looming debt. Did I mention the debt? No? Well, trust me, it’s looming.

This looks like a good spot for a subheading, but I can’t think of anything witty

I could easily get freaked out about all of this. And I do, from time to time. I’d like to say that I’m being all positive-minded and confident and trusting-the-universe about it…and sometimes that’s true, but not always. Not by a long shot.

Mostly I just do what I need to do, right now. I try my best (and sometimes my best just isn’t good enough) to focus on the one thing I really really want to do in this moment. Whether that’s writing a blog post, tweeting about my upcoming class, giving Rocky his insulin shot (it’s much easier than it sounds — he doesn’t even feel it), installing WordPress for someone, figuring out how much I can actually spend on groceries this week, or reading a mystery novel to escape it all for awhile (most recently, I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a real page-turner. And yes, that’s a shameless Amazon affiliate link).

I remember that I am not a cat murderer. And that lots of regular people who haven’t done anything wrong are also facing financial problems, and that I can still be proud of my business ideas even if they fail, because I am working and learning and experimenting and being the real me.

Thanks for reading.

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Happy Independence Day!

July 3, 2009 By

Tomorrow is the day that we Americans traditionally celebrate our independence by setting off explosives and drinking too much beer.

I prefer a kinder, gentler celebration, myself. I also like to think about the many meanings of “independence” and how they’re showing up in my life. July 4 is a nice sort-of-halfway point between the hoopla of New Year’s resolutions and the end-of-year taking-stock that can happen on Thanksgiving. So with 2009 half-over, here are my reflections on independence.

Independence as growing up

For instance, as children grow, they are supposed to develop a healthy independence from their parents. I see it in my own children.

(I’m not talking about them getting their own apartments quite yet — they’re still in elementary school! But every little step, like my son’s first sleepover and my daughter’s first Girl Scout meeting, is both a joy and a miniature heartbreak. Parents, you know what I’m talking about.)

I see it even in families with adult children (I’m at a family reunion this holiday weekend, reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in awhile, watching how families grow and change, mostly for the better).

The key word is healthy. Healthy independence is possible even in close-knit, loving families, of course. It doesn’t have to involve rejection or renunciation. But sometimes those things happen anyway. And then in the dance of family drama, sometimes the breach is healed, and sometimes not. A generous dose of time sometimes helps.

The push and pull between the families we’re born into (our parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) and the families we choose (lovers, spouses, children, close friends) can bring out the best and worst in us. My challenge is to let it bring out the best while remaining conscious and intentional. I guess that’s a challenge for all of us, actually.

Independence from worry

That leads to the subject of emotional health in general. For me, this whole year has been a journey to independence of an emotional and psychological kind. Which, paradoxically, has involved a greater reliance on friends, family, colleagues, and others for certain kinds of healthy support. There’s that word again. Hmm.

And there’s been a lot of questioning on my part about what I deserve. Do I deserve success? Do I deserve sadness? Do I deserve to be treated in certain ways or not in other ways? And I think I’m getting ready to be tired of that talk.

Know why? I do not want to live in a world where everyone gets what they deserve. In that world, there would be no unfair advantages or cheating to get ahead, but there would also be no such things as forgiveness and generosity.

So my challenge here is to stop thinking I do or don’t deserve something, and start thinking about what I really want, and what I’m willing to do to get it. Want to join me? Leave a comment here and let’s start a discussion.

Independence from The Man

But the third kind of independence is the one that actually looms largest for me this year, and I know it’s important for many of you too. I’m talking about financial independence, starting with independence from having to have a job.

I was asked recently if my son’s entry into kindergarten this fall (see parental joy and heartbreak, above) would free me up to finally get a real job, and I was frankly horrified.

The idea of spending any amount of time, let alone eight hours a day, in service to someone else’s goals, with no ability to make more money than my employer deems appropriate, and no job security? Laughable.

I fully realize that writing that sentence, in public view on the internet, makes me unemployable. And I say, bring it on. I positively relish being unemployable. Because honestly? I suck at being an employee. The views I just expressed have come from eight years of not having a day job, and growing into the idea that I’m a real, live business owner. And I think it would be really difficult (impossible, really) to un-grow that perspective. To stop wondering, “Is there a better way to do this?” and go back to “How do I fill my time until 5pm?” That sounds like death to me.

Which means I’ll embrace my independence from the complacency and false security of “having a real job” until I’m down to my last nickel.

Naomi Dunford is changing the world by helping 1000 people quit their jobs this year. I don’t qualify because I don’t have a job to quit, but I’d sure love to help her with that goal by pointing . If you like the idea of quitting your job, you may want to read the article she wrote last fall called Why We’re Broke and How to Fix It, which is a clarion call to declaring independence from the soul-sucking corporate machine.

Happy Independence Day, America. Happy Independence, my fellow small-business owners. May you get not what you deserve but what you truly want.
–Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

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Taking a bite out of the Deadly Carrot of Fear

March 20, 2009 By

Let’s say you’ve mapped out your Small-Business Tree. And you’ve even done some digging to discover the roots of your business, those things that sustain and feed and anchor you.

Which is great!

Except that you keep getting slightly disturbing information about one of your roots. You ask yourself questions like “Why did I go into business for myself?” and you immediately get the answer “Because I have to!”

Hmm, you think. That can’t be right. That doesn’t feel good. It feels kind of … icky and frightening. Let me just skip over that and try to get to some real roots.

And you do. You find some things that really feed your business and help you feel good. But lurking there, still underground, is that scary sentence: I have to. I’ve got to. I must.

OK. Let’s just sit for a moment and breathe, because (I swear I am not making this up) I literally just got attacked by chest pains because I’m thinking about this scary root. I’m sitting here typing a blog post and suddenly I can’t breathe.

After about 30 seconds it passes and I test my lungs with a few deep breaths. And sigh with relief. And recognition. Because I’ve been here before. Yes, I’ve apparently just liveblogged a panic attack.

Because who am I kidding here? When I was talking about you, and your root of “I have to,” I was really talking about me. My root. My fear.

Me: Why, hello there, fear. It’s not exactly pleasant to see you again.

My fear: That’s right! So maybe you’ll stay away from all this excavating roots silliness now! Yaaaargh!

Me: Um. Actually, I’d like to ask you what you’re doing.

My fear: You idiot. I’m protecting you. So just shut up and no one will get hurt.

Me. Okay. See, the thing is, you almost gave me a heart attack just there. You know, with the chest pains? So I’ve kinda got to ask you, do you think we could work out a way for you to protect me that won’t end up killing me?

My fear: …?!?

Me: I know. That’s not what you wanted.

My fear: No! I just want you to be safe!

Me: Safe from what?

My fear: Safe from …OR ELSE!

OK. Another deep breath. Because I see exactly what my fear is talking about here. It’s the hidden end of that “I must” sentence. It goes like this: “I’m in business because I have to be. Or else…”

  • I’ll get evicted.
  • I’ll go bankrupt.
  • I’ll have to get a horrible soul-sucking job that I will never be able to escape.
  • I won’t be able to provide for my children.
  • I’ll end up living in a van down by the river (yep, spoken in the voice of Chris Farley’s Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker)
  • I’ll die alone, penniless, and ten pounds overweight (thank you, Al Franken playing Stuart Smalley)

Yeah. Pretty crappy stuff, there. With all that hanging over my head, you bet fear can be a powerful motivating force. Lots of people stay in those horrible soul-sucking jobs because they’re afraid of losing them. (I did, for years, until I got laid off. Another story for another post.)

And if I listened to the fear, I would probably end up feeling like that was my only root. Or the only root that mattered, anyway.

My fear: Forget support, forget help and encouragement…the only thing that matters is that if you don’t make some money by the end of this month you’ll DIE!

Me: *whimper*

My fear: So hurry up and get marketing! Who cares if it’s sleazy!

Me: B-but…that’s not me.

My fear: No one cares whether it’s you or not! Grow some damn branches right now! Sucker some fools into giving us some bucks!

Me: But if all I have is one root and a few branches, that’s not a tree at all. That’s not what I want to be.

My fear: What are you talking about? We need the money!

Me: Yes, we do. But I want to help people, not squeeze money out of them. I want to be a strong small-business tree, with roots and a trunk and healthy branches. You’re talking about a carrot. Just a big fat root and no trunk and a few leaves. You’re the Deadly Carrot of Fear!

My fear: Am not! Am not! Lalalalala I can’t hear you!

Me: OK, it’s OK, I want to give you a new job.

My fear: …??

Me: I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. The Deadly Carrot of Fear is ridiculous, I know. And you can’t stand feeling ridiculous.

My fear: No kidding.

Me: You don’t have to be scary or ridiculous. You could be a nourishing carrot.

My fear: Do I have to wear some kind of stupid costume? Because I’m sick of that. You know, big, bad, old me, fear, wearing the camouflage of reasonableness or practicality or prudence or safety.

Me: I know. I remember. I don’t want you to wear a disguise. I want you to be strong, juicy fear in all your glory.

My fear: Huh?

Me: Because you, my fear, are an affirmation of my growth. You show me where my path is and what I need to be careful of. And then I can work with you. We’ll be a team.

My fear: You mean… I’m good for something? Just me? Just being who I really am?

Me: Yes. Yes. Being your true, scary self. Showing up when I need you.

My fear: I’m not going to lose this job? You’re not going to laugh at me?

Me: Well, sometimes I’ll laugh, when I see what a good job you’re doing.

My fear: I’ll be the best Deadly Carrot of Fear ever!

Me: Thank you. I love you.

Whew. What a journey. I think I need to go eat some Wheaties for a strong heart.

Filed Under: Small-Business Tree Tagged With: , ,
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