Making money – Setting up and testing a suite of micro-businesses | DiscountCoder.com Blog

Making money – Setting up and testing a suite of micro-businesses

Before the internet, setting up a new business was a relatively expensive and complicated process. These days it costs as little as £1 to buy a domain name for a year. You can get decent hosting for next to nothing. And there’s WordPress, excellent open source software that you can usually install via your host in one click.

Once you’ve got WordPress in place, provided you’re reasonably confident around computers you can create anything from a powerful commercial blog or simple brochure site to a fully fledged ecommerce site yourself, for next to nothing.

Here’s a few ad hoc ideas to get your imagination buzzing:

The ins and outs of a multi-business website

You can set up a separate website for each micro-business. Or you can create just one WordPress site with a page for each micro-business. Buy a .me url and you can use your own name as the umbrella name for all your mini-businesses. Be open about what you’re doing: say you’re testing a bunch of micro-businesses, based on your skills and attributes, to see which works best.

By doing so you’ll tap into the latest marketing concept of ‘Likeonomics’, which is taking big brands by storm. And it’ll make great PR too, an interesting ongoing story for your local papers and business publications to cover.

Website visibility is a big issue and you’d need to perform search engine optimisation miracles to get your new website onto page one of Google quickly. Plus, promoting a bunch of disparate businesses under one url makes natural seo a real challenge. Spend the money you’ve saved not having to build, host and promote multiple websites on Google AdWords – AKA Pay Per Click – instead, for guaranteed visibility and targeted traffic

Testing business ideas one by one or concurrently

Depending on how much time and energy you have spare, you can either set up and test your micro-business ideas one by one or carry out concurrent testing. Give each business a good try. Keep going for six months to a year before making an informed decision about whether to continue.

Marketing a micro-business

We’ll talk about marketing your fledgling micro-businesses next week. In the meantime, here’s wishing you and yours a very happy New Year!