Having Your Own Business – Starting and Optimizing Your Site

Having Your Own Business - Starting and Optimizing Your Site

We hadn’t had an entrepreneurship/small business episode for a while so I thought it would be great to have the CEO of CanSpace on the show to share some best practices on running your own site, and top mistakes to avoid.

This episode is for you if you already have, or are considering having your own online business, a blog, or even as a place to showcase your portfolio to recruiters and companies that you may want to work for.

Now I definitely consider having your own business on-the-side as one of the core pillars of personal finance. When we were first getting started, I used a small online business as a tool to help us get financially independent and pay off our mortgage quicker, because we could use the profits from that business to help pay for our vacations and discretionary spending. This way, my income from the day job could go towards investing or paying down the mortgage.

Because of how much having a side business has helped us financially, this is definitely a subject near and dear to my heart. With this episode, my hope is that it’ll help you prevent some of the mistakes that I made when first getting started.

Also a huge “Thank You” to our sponsor, Canspace.ca

Want Lightning-Fast, Stable Web Hosting?

Today’s sponsor, Canspace, has the answer you’ve been looking for.

Why should you care? Well…

Having a website that is down frequently, or just loading slowly, can cost you business, and more importantly damage the reputation of your brand. Choosing a reputable web hosting provider like CanSpace helps avoid these issues.

They’re helping Canadian entrepreneurs and businesses by providing a reliable and high-speed platform to host their websites.

If you’re itching to get started, or even just thinking of starting your own blog or business, then visit Canspace and enter your email address to get the coupon while it’s still available. You’ll get $10 off the web hosting that’s right for you.

Question’s Covered:

  1. One of the things that kept me from creating an online business for years was that I thought I needed to know how to code to actually have a site. For those not familiar with WordPress, can you speak to what prior skills or knowledge are actually required to have your own site, whether it’s for your own business, a blog, or a place where you can post your personal portfolio and build your own brand for companies that are hiring.
  2. I see a lot of advertisements from companies trying to sell an all-in-one solution where you’re using just their site to host and build your site instead of using your own hosting provider and something like WordPress. It looks easy-to-use and almost too good to be true. Yet, every successful blogger that I know is using WordPress. Why is that, and can you speak to the pros and cons of going with these types of solutions?
  3. What are the costs involved in creating a website for your business, blog, or personal portfolio?
  4. I learned the hard way that hosting is actually really important for your site when my site crashed recently and completely stopped working. What are the key requirements that we should look for when choosing a hosting provider for our site?
  5. When I launched my first site years ago, I also had the misfortune of the site getting hacked which basically made the site inaccessible. It was a stressful time, I missed out on a bunch of sales, and I didn’t know about website security back then. So for anybody getting started, what are the top best practices that you recommend for making your website secure?
  6. If we’re building a site that focuses on serving a Canadian audience (whether it’s for our business, blog, or our personal portfolio), what are the things we can do to get an edge and show up higher in the search results when Canadians are looking for our content?
  7. Of course one of the ways to get the most mileage from your site and build your audience is to actively promote your site through different marketing initiatives. What has worked well for you guys, and what types of marketing have you found to be more difficult to get traction on?
  8. Tell us a bit more about CanSpace and how are you different than the other hosting providers out there.