Are you throwing your ideas away?

I'm so sorry for the delay in updating, but I got sidetracked by a beauty called Joomla. Why didn't someone tell me about this before? I've spent hundreds of dollars and hours on software and training to do what Joomla does for me effortlessly, but at the same time, if web development continues to progress in this direction, there won't be much need for designers. Programmers maybe, but only for tweaking because the design work is progressively being simplified into push button interfaces that a 12 year old could navigate. I don't know if that's good or bad, considering I owe more in student loans than I'm currently earning - and then Joomla comes along and says, degrees? Ha!! Just click here and it'll all be fine....

I don't want to harp too much on this because its been a hot story lately and everyone's covered it. But there's still people that I speak with who haven't heard of Ashley Qualls and amazing story of how she turned $8 into a million dollar website - all before the age of 17. Go to FastCompany for a great profile on young Ashley, and then check out doshdosh's analysis on her entrepreneurial and internet strategies. In a nutshell, Ashley was a typical teenager using MySpace where she was creating layouts for her friends. The layouts were so popular, that she put together a website to upload them and allow others to use them for free. Word spread quickly and traffic literally exploded until Ashley had to face the fact that she had unwittingly created a monster - that monster that most of us dream about creating, one that would even best Oprah.com in Google rankings.

What Ashley did with Whateverlife.com wasn't complicated. She took a simple idea, something she loved doing and imagined others would love to, and she acted on it. The rest is history. And she did it all with merely $8 for her domain name. She says that she has not spent one dime on advertising, and she originally afforded her webhosting by providing web design services for the company. This is a most incredible example of what a broke entrepreneur can accomplish with little or nothing.

How many ideas have you had that you passed on? How many did you believe in for a day or so, and then either convince yourself that it would never work, or you listened to others who laughed at it and told you not to quit your day job?

One of the most amazing things about the internet is how it opened up the opportunity for virtually any and everyone to TRY. Anything. For less than the cost of a tank of gas, you can purchase a domain name, secure webhosting, launch your business and as they say, see if it flies. Of course, you'd have to apply some marketing and SEO techniques to generate traffic, but you will have taken the steps to make it happen, and not just dream about it.

I carry a composition book around with me where I jot down my ideas all day. No matter how impossible the thought or how undeveloped, I write it down and review it later. Sometimes I scratch them out, sometimes I combine them with others and go in an entirely different direction, but I'm dedicated to not letting any more ideas just slip through my fingertips. I was in the habit of grabbing domain names whenever the thought crossed my mind and it was available, so at one point I had collected nearly 50 that I was simply holding on to. Finally, I decided to let some expire. Now the smart thing to do would have been to AUCTION them off to the highest bidder, but this was one of those times I just wasn't thinking clearly. One of them I dropped was leaveawish.com, which I originally planned to develop as a site where people could post their wishes and have an anonymous benefactor help them out by either donating to their cause or supplying them with other necessary resources. Out of curiousity I later went back to check to see if I could renew leaveawish, and found to my dismay that it was now owned by some megamillion dollar ebusiness investment firm. I was literally nauseous thinking that if they wanted that name, it must be worth something, and I had passed it off, putting it right into their hands.

That's when I purchased the composition book and I've been writing in it ever since. When I read stories like Ashley's, it reminds me of all of the simple ideas that I've thrown away for lack of time or motivation. It's not always the money that keeps success from just within our reach - sometimes its just us and our lack of action. It was Helen Keller who first said, "Ideas without action are worthless", so today, I'm instituting the first principle to follow for all Broke Entrepreneurs - TAKE ACTION. Whatever you're thinking of, take at least one step per day towards making it happen. Even if that first step is buying a composition book. Oh, and a nice pen. Something about nice new pens just make you want to write - don't you agree?