“The RoseBouquet”

My first student of the week-long course had his 5th lesson yesterday (the earlier week he had to be away on the Friday). This one was about how to set up a website. Although I warned that it usually takes weeks or months to get a site up and running well, I told him I could take him through a fast do-it-yourself process so that by the end of our 3 hour session he would have a one page website up. Even if it was nothing but one large ad for his business. Well, we did it! I’ll probably be mentoring him for a while as he learns how to add more to it and build it into a true site, but we covered three basic steps;

1. We went to GoDaddy, and he registered a domain name to go with his business name, Moen-Advertising-Specialties.com
2. I set up a hosting account for him on my reseller package. It was live in a matter of moments.
3. We spent most of our time, on learning the most basic HTML tags as I built him a web page based on the info he had brought to go on it.
Then I uploaded it for him, and showed him some of the things he has and can now do in his cPanel where he can manage his site.

I would still prefer a few months to get a site up and running, but by trimming out a lot of extras, and with me working programs I’m used to, I found it is possible to do it in three hours flat. He came away a very happy man, and bragged to some friends when leaving the building, “I’ve got a website!” Of course, now he’ll have to order another batch of business cards.

An epiphany came to me last week when I realized that I was going about the marketing of my courses all wrong. Marnie Perhson of IdeaMarketers.com pointed out the value of press releases and articles to promote a business. Duh! I knew that! But in setting aside work on my own sites to get this new business off the ground I’d forgotten to go that route for free marketing. Now my goal for the rest of this week is to get up some decent webpages, maybe even a new site, just to promote what my training courses offer. Then I must get some press releases and articles out.

I am ready to set my business as unique in many respects. It shall honour the Lord.

If I don’t have any students next week I will spend the week cramming some time on my SBI site. Usually I only dare designate Saturday evenings for it, but by then I am so sleepy I can’t get much accomplished. Since that site is suppose to be a good steady stream I need to move it forward.