Tag: Entrepreneur

About Entrepreneur

Subscribe Feeds

How to Start a Business For Free

Posted on by Jerad Hill

The number one reason why people never start a business is fear but close behind that is cost. A common misconception is that starting a business is expensive, but that just isn’t true. In this episode, I talk about how easy it is to start a business online and share the tools you can get for free to get started today.

Episode Sponsor: WPEngine – Best In Class WordPress Hosting: https://jerad.link/wpengine

Links mentioned:
My courses: https://gocreatoracademy.com
WPEngine: https://jerad.link/wpengine
WordPress.Com: https://jerad.link/wordpress
NameCheap: https://jerad.link/namecheap

Get my links of business ideas: https://jerad.link/businessideas

Listen instead!

I have a lot of conversations with people who are interested in starting a business. Pretty much everybody in my circle of people that I talk to that are not currently self employed have expressed some sort of an interest in maybe starting up their own thing. I think it’s something that most of us kind of fantasize about, the idea of starting a business or like this idea that’s been kind of bumping around in our head and we’re thinking like, “What if I put that out there and decided to make it available to the world?” But the number one thing that people bring up to me as a barrier to entry in starting a business is the costs of starting up a business.

Everybody has this misconception that starting a business is expensive. And depending on what you’re trying to do, maybe it could be, but for most of the business ideas that I hear from friends of mine and people that I come in contact with, these are all things that you can start relatively for basically free, if not for a small amount. Because really all you’re doing is getting your idea out there and kind of getting it in front of people and seeing if there’s any interest. And that really is something that you should do first before you dive in and start investing a bunch of money. A lot of us think that we have to have everything ready to go, we have to have a perfectly polished product ready, designed, tested and ready to deliver before we can open our doors for business. And that, that usually requires a lot of expensive startup expenses, a lot of capital that you have to have, you know, and it really does vary depending on what you are wanting to do as far as your line of business.

But most businesses can be started for basically nothing. You could at least get your idea out there and start, you could at least get your idea out there and start to kind of put it in front of people and see if there’s an interest for your product or service. So I have some ideas I wanted to talk to you about today on how you can start your business for free using basically just some of your time, of course. A lot of times we will trade our time for something that we could pay somebody else to do instead and that, of course, takes money, having startup capital. But for those of you that have some extra time in your day, maybe you’re willing to spend a little bit of your weekend kind of plugging away and working on this project, I think it’s something that you can get out there and get done for free, and then even make your first few dollars without having spent any money out of pocket, just your time.

So before I get started, I wanted to mention the sponsor of this episode, which is WP Engine. WP Engine is a WordPress hosting platform that provides websites that are basically turnkey. Now WordPress powers over 30% of the Internet and there are lots of different ways that you can access WordPress. One of the things I’m going to talk about later in this video is how to get a free WordPress website. But if you’re wanting something a little bit more robust that comes with more theme options, so that you can really customize and kind of design your website to be unique. And also, an easy process, I say design a website, that sounds like it was going to require a lot of knowledge, but it really isn’t. And then maybe you want support. You want to be able to email or contact support so that you can have some help and assistance throughout the process. You want a robust system and make sure that your website is going to be up all the time. You want to have storage space so that you can upload photos, or small video clips of your products or your services, so that you could show that to other people. WP Engine is proven to be one of the best out there as far as it goes to WordPress hosting. You’re definitely going to have a great experience with them. The link is down in the description below, or the show notes. Check out their plans and pricing today. So the first thing that you really need to figure out before you go down this path of starting your business is whether, or not you are selling a product or a service. A product, of course, is something that you’re going to have, to have ready. It’s maybe something that you have put together and you’re going to be shipping to people, or perhaps it’s a product that you do on site. Maybe if you’re thinking about starting a local business, but most of the time a product is something that is going to be delivered to a person.

A service is something that is performed such as, if you are a local business, maybe a plumber going in unclogging a drain, or a training session, maybe you’re taking an area of expertise that you have and you’re teaching other people about that, consulting, these are all services that people provide. Products are something that is more of a deliverable. So for example, with my line of work, if I am going to produce a video for a customer or a client, I will go and film. It’s actually half and half. I will go and provide a service, I’ll go and film, I’ll help with, you know, the planning and everything of getting this video put together. But then I also have the deliverable, which is the finished video, that is the product that I deliver. And so you kind of have to look at how your product or service is going to be delivered, how you’re going to work that out.

A lot of online only businesses are usually product or service based, because you can maybe put together an ebook or some sort of a course or a product that you can sell, that’s something that you do maybe provide a little bit of service, because you want to keep your students or your users engaged and keep them around and make sure that they aren’t just jumping from one thing to the next. That you’re providing valuable information for them and continuing to give them useful content so that they can continue to be engaged with you. Or services. Maybe you are a graphic designer or you have some sort of a service that you’re going to provide to people. If you’re like me, you have a lot of experience in website design, so I may actually use my knowledge to build a website and deliver that to a person. I can do that all online without actually having to meet with a person. I do of course, like to meet with people, but I can do that all online.

So you really have to have a clearly defined idea of what you are going to be offering. Is it a product, is it a service, is it some sort of a hybrid? And that’s going to drive your decision making and how you market this product. You have to be thinking about how you’re going to communicate what you’re offering to the person on the other end who is looking for that service. So, the first thing that you need to do is determine that and then you can start moving on through the process of starting to put together your business identity. Now, I have a lot to say too much for this video on how to put together a business identity. Do you use yourself, your name, your face, and make the product and service about you? Or do you come up with a business name and put that out there so the business is more standalone?

I am going to put a video together later on this, because I have several businesses including a business that I branded with my own name. And that has caused it to be a little bit more challenging for me to create content and put content out there under my own name, because the search engines tend to associate you with a particular category or industry. So for example, I marketed myself as a photographer for a lot of years. And so the internet knows me as a photographer under my own name. If you search for me by name, Jerad Hill, you’re going to find a lot of photography related stuff because my name is associated with that. And so Google, thinks when somebody’s searching for me by name that they’re looking for a photographer, unless you put some sort of a word after that to help Google further understand what you’re looking for. Google’s going to bring back all of my photography related content and you won’t see my digital marketing agency, Hill Media Group. You won’t see some of my other YouTube channels unless you start scrolling for a little while. You’ll come across that stuff.

So you want to be careful not to kind of box yourself in. But then again at the same time, a personal brand is a very strong thing and if you are okay with that, if you are okay with associating your name with that particular industry, product or service that you’re going to be producing, then I think that there is a good argument for using your name and building a personal brand, because there’s a lot of trust built in that too. It’s easier for people to trust a person than it is for them to trust a business and so if you decided to go down that route because you’re producing content, like I’m doing here, you’re producing some sort of information. Maybe you’re going to be getting into consulting or something like that, using your name might be better because there’s a better chance for you to build trust with a person. It’s a lot easier for you to build trust by putting information out there and sharing it with others if you’re using your own name.

It’s why I’m using my own name and putting out this content, because I feel like I’m pulling from all of my years of experience of being in business and running different businesses and building businesses and deciding to fold certain businesses and all of this stuff that I’ve done over the years, I want to put out there under my own name. I don’t think that it would be valuable to put it out there under some new business name that nobody knows. So I’m using my own name. So think about that when you are deciding on your identity, and then when you have decided on your identity, you’re going to want to create social media accounts for it and a website of course for that. And so I recommend of course, setting up a Facebook page, not a Facebook profile like you probably already have, but setting up a Facebook business page. I have a link down in the description below to a free course where I teach you how to do that.

So you want to check that out, go through the entire process of setting up a Facebook page. It’s not too challenging, but there’s a lot of options and I want to make sure you choose the right one based on the type of business and whether, or not you’re a local business only or you’re servicing anybody with an internet connection who can connect to your content. There are some variations there, so you want to make sure you choose the right account. And then of course, Instagram. Instagram is very visual, it’s photos and video clips. But you are going to want to create an account there, because you will be able to utilize hashtags and communicating with others who are in similar industries or even the type of audience that you’re looking for. You’ll be able to communicate really easily with people there on Instagram. If you are more, if you’re okay with getting behind the camera like I am, or getting in front of the camera, I guess you should say, or I should say, YouTube would be a great platform as well.

I think YouTube is just continuing to grow. It’s exploding. There are people that are looking for good content, they’re looking for information, they’re looking to grow and expand themselves and they’re using YouTube content for that. And so YouTube creating is definitely an avenue that you should go down if you are interested in creating a YouTube account and getting that set up. I am working on a short course for that on how to go through the process of setting that up and making sure that you have, you know, everything that you can for that YouTube channel when you’re ready to launch it. And then of course, depending on the nature of your business there’s other social networks like Linkedin. If you are offering something that would be marketed to professionals or other people in business, like a business to business type of product, I think it’s important to have a Linkedin. You may already have a personal Linkedin, which is great. You’ll want to customize your Linkedin to reflect the nature of your new business. And then of course, you can start a company page for your Linkedin as well and you could produce content underneath that company page.

It’s been shown that longer form content really works well on Linkedin. And video also works well on Linkedin because there are not a lot of people producing video content on Linkedin. So, when you put up a video it tends to stand out from everybody else. Of course given time, this will change because people are becoming more and more comfortable in front of the camera, which I’ve been doing for a lot of years. I’ve been getting more and more comfortable or trying to get more and more comfortable in front of the camera, so other people are going to be doing that as well. And then last of course, set up a email address that is specific for your business. You can do this for free by setting up a Gmail account. If you want something a little bit more professional, you can set up an email account using the domain name that you purchased and we’ll talk about that here in a second.

So rather than your email address being like jeradhill [at] gmail.com, it would be [email protected] instead, which is a little bit more, a little bit more professional looking and it gives you a little bit more control. And I’ll talk briefly about that here in the video as well. So once you have those things set up, and the reason that I’m, I put social media before your website is when you’re thinking about setting up your social media, you want to use your business name or the name that you’re going to go buy if you’re building your personal brand. So for example, I used to have a personal Facebook profile and it was facebook.com/jeradhill. Well, I decided after a while that I wanted to merge that over to a Facebook page and actually convert it over to a Facebook business page, because I was going to be producing more content related to the different businesses that I have, videos and content, like what I’m producing now. And I wanted that to be a page, so that I had all the marketing tools that they give page owners, Facebook page owners.

I didn’t want to have that for my personal Facebook account and I don’t even really have a personal Facebook account. I have one that I use just so that I can, you know, keep in touch with family and join Facebook groups and stuff like that. But my Facebook page is my primary home on Facebook. And so you want that username, so slash whatever it’s going to be. Or if you’re on Instagram, your Instagram username, you want those to be consistent if possible. It just makes it easier and cleaner if they can be consistent and be the same. So be thinking about that and you may actually have to search a little bit to find a username that’s going to work on all of these platforms. I didn’t mention Twitter, I don’t think so. Twitter’s another one that you should join. I feel like you should join all the social networks, whether, or not you’re going to use all of them is another thing.

But it is important to kind of lock down your business name on all of them, because if later on down the road you decide you want to start using one of those social networks and now your username is taken, you’re going to have to go with a different username, which is kind of a bummer. So I just recommend locking all of those down, it definitely is an easy process and it’s free to register all of those. So why not?

So next we’re going to be setting up a website and you can do this for free. You can go to wordpress.com and when you go to set up a page they have on their pricing page, of course, they have some plans that start at $3 a month. And for blogs and personal sites, you really can just start with a blog or a personal site. They have a tab for business and online stores that gets a little bit more expensive, but you can start with a blog or personal site, which starts at $3 a month.

Of course, if you scroll down below that, there is a free plan. You can start with a free plan, you’re just going to be getting a sub-domain website. And what that means is that it would be like jeradhill.wordpress.com instead of jeradhill.com, and then of course you have to pay a few more dollars in order to get your own domain name. With their $3 plan, you actually get a free .blog domain. I did that early on when .blog was a new domain. So jerad.blog is my actual blog website address and it is a WordPress address. For the $5 a month plan, they give you a free domain for one year and so you get your domain name, you can register it right from within here and you can get your own .com, .net and there’s a whole slew of dot extensions, whatever you wanted. You can also opt to just buy it out, so you don’t have to buy it through WordPress, you could just flat out buy it. I’ve been using Namecheap lately.

I always used to shy away from those cheap kind of low price domain name registers, but Namecheap actually has been like really awesome and I’ve been kind of slowly moving away from GoDaddy whenever I need to renew a domain name, I’d been moving it over to Namecheap. Namecheap has just been super easy to use and their customer support is actually really good as well. So, but WordPress as far as your website goes, you can get one for free. You can use one of their WordPress plans or of course you can use the sponsor of this video, which is WP Engine. If you wanted something that’s a little bit more like professional and turnkey and ready to go, but is still WordPress. I think WP Engine is definitely the best option, but you have to be ready to commit to like $35 a month or something right around there. Of course, the title of this video was how to start a business for free.

So wordpress.com definitely is one that you are going to want to go with, especially if you’re trying to get it done for free or as close to free as possible. Know also that you’re not stuck with one of these, if you want to move your website from wordpress.com to WP Engine or to any other hosting platform that’s out there, it’s really easy to do that. And it’s probably a video that I should put out, maybe not on this YouTube channel, but it’s definitely a video that I should put out on how to move a WordPress website from one site to another, because it is an easy process so long as you just have it set up correctly. So you’re never locked in forever on any of these. You know, I recommend maybe taking advantage, if you’re going to pay for a plan, some of them offer a better price if you pay for six months or a year at a time. So if you know that you’re really going to go after this, you might want to look at getting the better pricing.

But that’s really the only way that you would ever get locked into anything is if you paid for pricing out into the future. And then you kind of have to use the services, because you paid for them already. So, there’s a list of business ideas that I wanted to put together because a lot of times, you know, we’re thinking, “Well, I want to start something, I just don’t really know what it is.” And a lot of times a list of ideas is a thing that can help get you started. You may read an idea, read a suggestion from a list and say like, “Oh, okay, like I didn’t even think about that. I’m not going to do exactly that, but I have this, that just triggered this other idea in my head and I want to do that.” And I am always starting little things and so I want you to know that you do not have to have this all perfected and planned out.

I am always starting little ideas and kind of putting it out there and seeing what happens, and just kind of watching. One of the new things about WP Engine is that they give you fantastic analytics on the traffic that comes to your website. So as you start to share the link and put it out there, as you start to put maybe a blog or two up on your website and a little bit of content, and Google starts to send traffic to your website, you’re going to be able to kind of see what people gravitate towards on your website and whether, or not they’re finding it informational or not. Analytics is a really tricky subject when it comes to websites. All of the numbers and data can help you understand things, but you have to understand what those numbers and all of that data means, so there’s a bit there. But having those analytics helps you also understand whether, or not your idea maybe is going to be able to take off.

A lot of times, and I’m sure you’ve been on a website where you come into the front end of the website, you kind of go through this process of like clicking and looking at things, and then if you leave the website without taking some form of an action, that helps the person who runs the website know where the drop off point was. Maybe you, if you didn’t complete the purchase and go all the way through, then they know what page was the breakdown point. And that’s really cool information for those of us that are, you know, running online businesses because that helps us better craft our message through the process. If there’s a spot in your website that is constantly, like people are jumping off and leaving from that point, there’s probably an issue with the content there. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad content, it might mean that you just solved their problem and then they left. I have a tendency to do that. I give away a lot of the information, it solves the person’s problem and then they leave. And I didn’t do a good job at giving them a next step.

And so that’s the process of making your website kind of flow and giving them the right information, so that it takes them through the process of signing up for your product or service or making a purchase or putting in their email address to learn more or whatever that process is. So I mentioned that list of business ideas, and this is where I will ask for your email address. I have a list of businesses that I think are things that you can start for free. These are businesses that all you have to do is, it may be educate yourself a little bit on before you start them. Maybe take advantage of the education that you got, you know, going to college or something that you’ve studied over the last several years as a hobby, or something that’s been fun or informational to you. These business ideas are things that are not going to require putting out any money to get started. It’s just going to be your time, investing your time to better understand, maybe what some of these are.

And I hope that if, maybe they’re not ideas that you can jump on right away, but maybe it triggers something in you and you say, “Oh yeah, you know what? That’s not it, but this is,” and that’s really what I’m after, is helping you just jog your memory or your mind a little bit to help you come up with something. Because when you can come up with something and get excited about it, that’s going to show through the way that you project yourself and your content and everything online and it’s going to draw other people in. And that’s obviously the kind of person that we all want to do business with. So I hope that that helps, that this helps you on the process of getting started. I think that the biggest barrier to entry is fear, really, fear of just starting. And then of course, money. Sometimes there are other things that block us from getting started on, you know, maybe being an entrepreneur or being self employed. So I hope that this kind of knocks a few of those things down and helps you on the process of getting started on starting your own business.

Signup for access to my list of business ideas: https://blog.jeradhill.com/subscribe

Maybe even one day you will replace your income and not have to go to a day job anymore, but being able to invest in your own business, which obviously I think is just better.

What are you waiting for? Get started on that idea of yours!

5 Ways to Make $1,000 By Next Week

Posted on by Jerad Hill

Since I started publishing my passive income statements, people have been asking me how they can get started making money online. There are a lot of ways to make money online, but if you wanted to get started fast and are ambitious enough, these 5 tips on how to make $1,000 by next week could help you out.

I originally created this as a video, but have since restructured my YouTube channel. I converted the video into an article for you to read. Please let me know if you have any questions about it.

What are your thoughts? Have an idea or something to share? Post it in the comments!

Video Transcript:

Hey it’s Jerad and I have kind of a continuation on the whole like entrepreneurial freelance topics that I’ve been kind of posting videos on lately, and that is how to make $1,000 by next week. Now, sometimes we get in a pinch where we need some extra finances, some extra money or we lose a job or something comes up unexpected and we need to earn a little bit of extra money. Now, typically when that happens we kind of get into this hustle mode where we want to do anything and do everything to try and make some extra money.

But for those who haven’t had to actually go out and try and do that on their own, perhaps maybe you’ve just had a normal job for a long time, it can be kind of daunting because you haven’t had to do this before. You typically go to work and you get handed tasks and those tasks you achieve and then you get paid at the end of the week or the next week or something like that. So, when you actually have to kind of take matters into your own hands and seek out opportunities, it becomes a little daunting. And so I wanted to give you some tips on how you could get started and potentially even earn $1,000 or more within the next week depending on how hard you feel like hustling.

1. Post Your Skills on Fiverr.com

So the first thing is something you can do from home, it’s simply going on this website called fiverr.com, which is Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.com, and if you have some skills that could be put to use there, you can get paid anywhere from five dollars on up for those skills depending on what they are. So they have topics such as graphic design, writing, music and audio, fun, lifestyle, they’ve got lots of different things that are on here, social media. Things that you can do easily but probably you already have some experience in and people will pay you as little as $5 and on up depending on the experience that you have and what you’re able to bring to the table.

For example, say you have an iPhone or like a phone with a decent camera on it, you can provide services like shooting a video for them, a product video or shooting a testimonial video or an explainer video on how to do something. You can create content that they could put on their website. You can write, you can offer your services as a writer even if you’re not a professional writer but just somebody who can do a decent job at writing, and you can write things for people. Write product reviews, write content for their website, there’s lots of things that you can do. Go over to fiverr.com and check that out, I’ve got a link for you in the description below so that you can check that out.

It’s definitely a way … I mean, if you’re doing $5 a job, $5 a job, you’re going to need a lot of jobs, but some of these you can add upgrades or add-ons to this where that $5 job becomes a $30 job or something like that. If most of the jobs are averaging around $30, that’s definitely going to make the path to $1,000 much shorter.

2. Make Money with Photography

The second is photography and I talked really briefly on Fiverr, the topic of Fiverr about that but photography. Most of us have smartphones that take pretty good images and we don’t have to necessarily be a professional photographer these days to take decent photos that people can use. Now, realtors and investors and there’s all sorts of different companies that are looking for photos of properties or things that are outside that they need for either their websites to sell or whatnot, you could call your local real estate office and say hey, I’m looking to take some pictures of properties, I have time available today, are there any properties that you need photos for.

Maybe they just got off the phone with their photographer who’s two weeks out or something like that and they need photos taken right away. If you have a modern phone, you can take some pictures for them and charge them a couple hundred dollars for your time and just deliver them the photos. Most of the realtors are taking photos on their smart phones but aren’t really that good at it, you can practice a little bit taking photos of your own home or your own property and go out and offer this for them. If you have a camera that’s better than an iPhone or something like that, like a DSLR camera, you’re even one step closer to making that $1,000 because the better the equipment that you have, you could probably charge a little bit more. Because, if you say, I’m going to use my cell phone to take pictures but don’t worry I take good pictures, here are some examples, you’re not going to get to charge as much as somebody who has a professional DSLR. So you’ll have to price yourself somewhere in there reasonably.

You can offer $50, tell the realtors look, I’ll go out and I’ll shoot photos of the home for you for $50 and if you don’t like them, then you don’t have to pay me, but if you do like them, I’d sure love to shoot more properties for you over the next week. And that can add up really quick and you can even say the next one I want to charge $80 or $100 to go and get photos. And there are YouTube videos talking about how to shoot real estate photography. You can pretty much figure out how to shoot anything as far as photography goes by watching a couple of YouTube videos. So don’t be afraid to kind of put yourself out there and think about the different ways that you can be shooting photos, maybe product photos. You can call a local business such as like a consignment store or a thrift store and say hey, I’d love to come in and take a lot of photos of the stuff that you offer for sale and help you get them up on your Facebook page.

There are so many ways that you can use photography even if all you have as a smartphone so that you can get paid and help these companies, these businesses around the area get more exposure for their stuff. A lot of these people, these business owners just don’t think about it, they don’t think that they can afford it or whatnot. But because you’re trying to kind of get in at a lower price and kind of get started, you can offer them something that’s affordable to them.

3. Do Work for Family and Friends

Number three is probably the best option here, which is to ask family and friends. You never know what somebody has a need for and a lot of times people only associate what they know about you as something that you can do. So say, for example, you are a teacher and it’s the summertime and you want to earn a little bit extra money during the summer, most people just think of you as a teacher. They don’t think that maybe how to take decent photos with your smartphone so you can take photos for them or maybe there’s some other thing that how to do. Maybe you’re good at woodworking or you’re a little bit younger and you have some good labor left in you, and you can go and do some work on yard for them.

There’s a lot of things that you can do that most people might not know that you’re capable of doing and they aren’t going to know unless you ask them or you tell them. You can ask your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, other people that are around, post it to social media and ask and say hey, does anybody have any projects that they need help with. Do you need work done on this or that or whatnot and see what people have to say, and then you could say hey, I can help with that. Most people aren’t going to have enough work for you to like pay you 40 hours a week and that’s okay. If they have five hours of work for you or even just two hours of work for you, and they pay you 20 or $30 an hour because it’s short-term work, which means you can typically get paid more hourly for that because it’s a short-term project. And you can price per project not the hourly.

So, if you say, that’s going to take about two hours, why don’t you pay me 50 bucks. That’s $25 an hour and if somebody that becomes valuable to them, it would have taken them many more hours to do it themselves or to do it by themselves, it’s going to be worth at 50 bucks. Think about pricing based on the project that they have not necessarily on hourly. Because if minimum wages in your area is say like $10 or $12 or $13 an hour, and you say well, just pay me minimum wage, you’re going to be working pretty hard for a short period of time. So think about charging based on the project or whatever the job is, not based on the amount of time. Of course, the time and everything in the project is part of that but think about saying like I’ll do that for $50 instead of saying, that’s $2 or that’s 2 hours and say $15 an hour that’s 30 bucks, you just made $20 extra by making it a project fee instead.

4. Find jobs on Craigslist or Facebook

Number four is answering and doing odd jobs found on like classifieds or Craigslist. There’s a whole section on Craigslist where people post needs for certain jobs. I’ve read into a lot of them and some of them are kind of weird but you can definitely find something interesting too there. There are companies that need people to sit in on focus groups and stuff like that, there’s lots of opportunities for things there that you could find on Craigslist or perhaps in the classified section of your local newspaper.

People post short-term jobs, I remember this was huge when I was younger. When I was a teenager, I would look in the classifieds for any jobs that somebody might have there temporary and that’s how I ended up starting to go and mow yards and do yard work for people when I was 12 years old. I was going all over the neighborhoods with the lawn mower, pushing it up and down the street mowing lawns and all that stuff making money as a 12-year-old, and it’s definitely something that you can do as an adult to make some extra money especially if you already have the equipment. But of course be careful because who knows what people are posting, you want to make sure you don’t get yourself into a dangerous situation. Make sure to kind of vet whatever job that is before you just randomly show up by yourself. You want to be safe.

5. Drive for Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash

Number five is to do Uber or Lyft. A lot of people have been doing this in making extra money and there’s a lot of conflicting information out there as to whether people are actually making money doing this or if they’re actually just wearing out their vehicle, and in making money in the moment but their vehicle’s going to wear out sooner. I think that it really depends on where you’re located. If you live in a small town and you’re going to Uber and Lyft around there, you might not make much money because people aren’t traveling too far, they’re maybe just going to and from work. It’s not a very busy area so the rate in which you’re getting paid for your time is not very high.

But if you live near a bigger town or city where there is a airport and there’s bigger companies there, for example, I live in the Central Valley, California and San Francisco is about an hour and a half away, San Jose about the same. If you go into one of those areas, you can earn a lot more and get a lot more rides and that makes it worth it. The area is smaller but it’s busier, which means not nearly as much wear and tear on your vehicle as maybe being in a smaller town where your rides are longer. You’re going to get a lot more rides in a shorter period of time and then of course those airport rides and some of those rides that may end up taking them from one bigger city to another bigger city is going to result in a bigger pay for the right as well.

Of course there’s a little bit of time involved in getting approved and all that stuff but those are things you can almost get done in the matter of a day or two if you’re very vigilant. And going down and getting your vehicle inspected, signing up through the Uber or Lyft app or even both and going down and getting that taken care of. I know that there’s typically like a $30 or so fee for getting your vehicle inspected but I know from the experience of people that are really close to me, that you can go and make 4 or $500 in a day if you live near a big area and are okay with driving non-stop for pretty much eight hours in a day. But that’s a way to make money and they’ll pay you out next to the same day and you can get paid really quickly. Yeah, it’s some wear and tear on your vehicle but if you put away a little bit of that every time you go out and drive, you’re going to have money there for repairs or upgrades to your vehicle later on as you need.

So that’s five ways that you can make a thousand dollars by next week. When you get in a pinch, definitely don’t sit on your hands, be proactive, do something about it and you’ll have the opportunity to go and make a little bit of side income. You might find something that you actually enjoy doing and can do over the long haul and that would start to alleviate the stress of putting all of your financial burdens on one job. Spreading that out across a couple of jobs sometimes makes it easier and makes those financial goals of yours more attainable.

Let me know what you think down in the comment section below. Are these valid, have you tried some of these, what are your tips if you have maybe that other people can learn from. Share that down in the comment section below, I’d love to hear those and also see what everybody else is doing out there to earn extra money. Please consider subscribing to my newsletter. Thanks again and I hope to see you back soon.

Five Different Ways to Recognize An Opportunity

Posted on by Jerad Hill

You might often hear people say that there are opportunities all around us. It’s actually true, but it’s hard to figure out what they are and whether or not they are worth chasing. As an entrepreneur, I have to pay attention to whats going on around me in order to recognize these opportunities. I then have to decide whether or not it is worth working on or passing up.

This article was originally recorded as a video and posted to my blog.

What is an opportunity you saw and jumped on, or perhaps missed? Share it in the comment section.

Video Transcript:

Hey, what’s up. It’s Jerad with another Thursday thoughts video, and I have five different ways to recognize an opportunity. Now, I started working for myself full-time at age 20. Before that, about three years before that is when I started really trying business things that were outside of just simple things I could do as a team, like mow lawns, or deliver newspapers, or something like that. I had jobs and my first actual managerial job was when I was 16 years old. I wasn’t even old enough to have a manager’s position, but they gave me one anyway.

By the time that I was 18, I really was thinking about how I could start doing something of my own, because I don’t know if it was my personality or whatnot, but I just at that time didn’t like being told that things needed to be a certain way unless I agreed with that way that they should be done. A lot of times you get told to do things a certain way and you know that that way is the wrong way or the slow way. You want to do it your way. If you’re like me, the only way to get to do it your own way is to branch out and do it your own way.

Over the years I’ve had to recognize opportunities quite often because if I just continued to do the same thing forever, I’m going to get ran over by everybody else who recognized the opportunities and the changes that were taking place. Over the year, now I’m 38, so I’ve been full-time entrepreneur working for myself, freelancer, whatever you want to call it for over 18 years now, and a lot of times I’ve had to look for opportunities and recognize them so that I could either add more value to what it is that I’m currently offering or maybe even pivot to something that’s more beneficial to me so that I can avoid a slowdown.

For example, there have been a few major changes in our economy over the years, so I’ve had to recognize opportunities and jump on them when the time is right so that I can continue to not be so affected by different dips and changes in the economy, which thankfully I’ve been pretty consistent. I’ve had some dips of my own, of course, but as long as I’m paying attention to opportunities, I’m able to react and keep afloat during times when other people are being affected big time during economic changes.

Here are five things that you should pay attention to, to recognize different opportunities when they come about.

1. When Someone Tells You No!

The first one is huge. It’s when someone tells you no. Maybe you’re super excited about something. You have this idea or this thought, and you present it, and you get told no. It’s such a good idea and you’re just sold on it, but then you get told no. It’s such a discouraging thing because you got told no. You did all your homework, you really felt that you were on to something, but somebody didn’t recognize what you saw, and so they told you no.

That’s a real pivot moment in your life when you can take that situation and say, “Okay. I see the value in this. That person said, ‘No.’ I was trying to give them this knowledge, this information, this way of doing things, and now I’m just going to take it and do it myself.” I mean, that’s a fantastic opportunity right there if you can recognize what it is that’s happening in that moment. Instead of being mad, instead of going and being like, “Oh, they didn’t recognize my work,” or, “I’m not appreciated,” or whatever. Forget all that. Forget them, forget what they didn’t see in you. Take that and make it something.

I’ve done that several times. I think when you get told no, a lot of times it is an opportunity for you to branch out. Not everybody can see the bigger picture. Not everybody is open to outside of the box thinking like you are. So, when you get told no, look at that as a potential opportunity to take advantage of.

2. When Someone Says “That Won’t Work.”

The second one is someone telling you that that won’t work. Sometimes that goes in with what I said number one is, which is being told no. Sometimes people will say, “That doesn’t work,” or, “That would never work,” or whatnot. There’s been a lot of situations where I’ve been told, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s going to work.” I go ahead and do it, and sure enough, it does work and I end up earning an income off of it, or it ends up being another thing that I can add as a service. I get told that that won’t work so often that it’s funny.

I remember when social media was first taking off. The church I go to, I was telling the pastors, “Look, you need to be on social media because that’s where everybody that goes to church is. That’s where everybody that doesn’t go to church but you want them to go to church is. That’s where all of your kids are that are students in high school and whatnot. They’re on social media.” I got told no, like pastors, “No, we can’t be on there. That’s too risky,” or whatever. Blah, blah, blah. Now, social media is used for everybody and, of course, every church and every pastor and whatever is on it.

You can take that not just for in the church, but I wanted to use an extreme example that I was getting told, “No, that won’t work. Why would pastors want to be on social media,” this and that? “Our kids and our people shouldn’t even be on social media.” They had too narrow of thinking and they didn’t think that social media was going to become what it was. You can take somebody telling you that something won’t work as an opportunity to turn it into something, to make it an article, to make it a video, to make it a business. I mean, if you know something’s going to be a certain way and other people are telling you that it’s not, but you see the future and they can’t see past whatever’s in front of them, that’s an opportunity for you. It happens every single day when you bring something to somebody. There’s always a chance that they’ll either accept it or they won’t. If you think it’s a good enough idea, you can move forward with it.

3. You Spent Time Researching Something

The third is that you spend time researching something. That time either didn’t end up getting used, that research didn’t end up getting used, somebody didn’t want that research, it ended up not being a part of the final product or whatever. There’s a lot of times that we spend time researching or looking into something and then we feel like we ended up wasting our time. Maybe we were told that we needed to research this heavily and then it didn’t end up getting used in any way. That’s information that you’ve acquired now, and you can take that and maybe there’s an opportunity in it, in that information.

You may have researched something and now you can turn that into a white paper that you could share with people that’s going to inform them on a specific topic, or maybe it’s information that you can package together in an ebook. There’s a lot of times that we end up researching something and then just letting that research go, or maybe we don’t even think we’re researching. We’re scrolling the internet just going down a rabbit hole, per se, and you’ve accumulated information about something. If you don’t do something with that information, you might have lost it.

There are times we go down these rabbit holes and the information just leads us to a dead end and you just leave it at that. But there are a lot of times you find something interesting in that and you continue to go down that and head towards it. It might not be applicable to your job, or it might not be applicable to other things in your life, but there may be an opportunity there. It doesn’t hurt to look into that a little bit further and see if there’s an opportunity there for you to do something with that. There are always opportunities, you just have to go and look.

There’s a video I did on finding video or blog ideas. There are three tools that I talked about there, so if you go and check out that video and article, I’ll post it in the comment section … I’ll post it in the description below. Check that out because you can use those tools to also validate research ideas and stuff like that.

4. You are Continuously Asked About Something

Number four is somebody asks you about something or maybe even repetitiously. I recognized an opportunity when I started getting into cryptocurrency mining. I put it out there on social media to my friends and family that I was messing around with cryptocurrency mining. I had people coming out of the woodworks asking me questions about it. Because that doesn’t happen that often, that people just randomly are contacting me even people that I hadn’t talked to in five or six or more years, I saw an opportunity there, the fact that people are really wanting to know about this. I saw that opportunity as a way to teach them about it. I produced a course on how to build a mining rig, a mining computer, and that course has made me a couple thousand dollars over a period of two months.

If it wasn’t for recognizing that opportunity because people were asking me questions, I would have never thought to come up with that course. When people ask you about something or maybe even more than a few people ask you about stuff, people are coming out of the woodworks to ask you questions about something, that’s an opportunity to do more than just answer their question, but come out with something whether it be an article, or a video, or a course, or maybe a whole business to solve that.

5. People Are Complaining About Something

Number five is people are complaining about something. The number one way that new products and services are developed is to solve a problem. I mean, problems are being solved every day. I mean, Apple felt like the iPad was solving a problem, that the iPhone was solving a problem. This mouse that I use has specific buttons and a configuration on it to solve a problem, which is like navigating your desktop in a better way. There are new things coming out all the time to solve problems.

What’s a problem that you’re constantly having? How can you turn that into something? Or maybe there’s a problem that you’re always helping other people with. How could you turn that into a product, or a service, or an article, or a video, or something like that to where you’re adding value to where you’re fixing that for them? The whole reason that our economy exists is that there are problems and there are solutions.

A lot of times there are solutions that can be made to problems that people don’t realize they have. I mean, did we all sit around and realize that we wanted an iPhone and so Apple made one? No. They saw an opportunity. They saw a need that they could make us have, in a sense. We didn’t need smartphones, I guess, but they came out with smartphones. They gave enough value and added enough cool things to them and now all of us have one.

You don’t even necessarily have to wait around for people to complain about something, you just have to see an opportunity to add value. But when people are complaining about something, maybe something is a constant problem, that’s an opportunity for you to say, “Okay. Well, how can I fix that or how can I package this together as a fix and sell it to people or make it available?” It’s definitely an opportunity that arises all the time in many different facets of your life. Maybe not just work, but with your kids, or with your family, or with the hobby that you’re involved in, or something like that.

There are lots of opportunities there to be had all the time. That’s one of the reasons that the Shark Tank show exists. People are coming to the sharks with solutions to problems and they want money so that they can expand this and sell more of their solution to somebody’s problem. That’s how the beginning of pretty much every pitch starts out.

That’s going to do it for this Thursday Thoughts post. Consider subscribing to my newsletter to get updated when I post new articles.

If you have any thoughts or anything that you’d like to add, the comment section down below is a great place for us to communicate. For us to talk about opportunities, and share them, and work on them together down in the comment section. Let’s do that. Until next time. I hope that you’re having a great day and I hope to see you back here soon. Thanks a lot.

I Almost Shut It All Down!

Posted on by Jerad Hill

I have been self-employed since I was 18 years old. I went full time self-employed when I was 21. Perfect timing considering that it was 2001 and two months after I quit my job to go full time after my business the biggest attack on American soil ever took place.

Since then I have had my share of setbacks as an entrepreneur, and a lot has changed in my life. When I quit my job and went full time into my business, I did not have any responsibilities. I lived on my own, so I had rent and a car payment, but that was it. If I ate ramen three meals a day because I had to put out money to order more product, I did it. I started my business with $2,500 in inventory and grew it in less than four years to a business that grossed $1.5 million in sales. In 2003 I was shipping products internationally from orders that came through my website when most companies were just learning what a website was. It was fun, but it wasn’t what I saw myself doing for the rest of my life.

My online business taught me more than just how to run an online business. Through that process, I taught myself how to code and that set me up for my next business venture as a web developer. Though I have had a few other ventures since such as Photography and running a Tech News and Review website, website design and development has been my constant since 2005.

In 2008 I had a rough year. The economy was down, and nobody was spending money. Businesses were cutting back on marketing expenses and Brides were spending less on wedding photography. I almost took a job with a company in Southern California handling search engine optimization for a large corporation. I stuck it out, and the market returned.

It has not been easy running a business and trying to grow that business. I have had some success, but it has been matched by frustration and some failure as well. Nothing has come easy.

During the slow days of 2008, I started reviewing iPhone Apps on a blog I set up and that turned into a business that generated an average of $13,000/mo over the course of six years with the best month earning me $32,000. It was pretty amazing.

Web Development started to pick back up in 2013, and I started focusing more heavily on what I knew would carry me over the long haul as a business owner. The app review site had garnered a ton of competition, and I could tell I would need to focus my attention elsewhere after that.

I have always found it necessary to reinvest in my company. If I am not reinvesting in myself and my business, I am stagnant. The revenues from the app review site allowed me to do this more freely. This was also a challenging time for me as I had started growing my family in 2010 and by the end of 2013 had three children. Yes, three kids in three years.

Now I love people, and I love my clients, but not all clients are easy to work for. I am very thankful that I have had more good clients than bad ones. The problem with bad clients is that they suck the life out of you and leave you beaten on the side of the road. I have always taken my work seriously and being that I don’t have a traditional education to fall back on, I always took myself very serious as well. Bad clients can make you question yourself and your core competencies. Like finding out that your significant other doesn’t love you anymore, it makes you question yourself and your self-worth. It’s hard not to get emotional about business when it’s your work and your business you are putting out there. I have never been able to believe anyone who says they can completely separate business from personal life. Business is personal. I do not trust anyone who does not take their business personally.

As I mentioned before, I have celebrated plenty of little wins in business, but I have also taken quite a few jabs to the ribs both from clients and from the logistical aspects of running a business. I have a wife and three kids. We don’t own a home, not because we don’t want to, but simply because it is very challenging for a self-employed person to purchase a home. We are a single income household by choice. We made the decision to provide our children with a Christian education. We are considering adoption.

I am closer to my 40’s than my 20’s, and my personal responsibilities will only continue to grow. My goal since closing my retail shop and starting web agency was to provide myself with more freedom. Running my shop, the online store, and a small parts distribution center was time-consuming. I found myself working 14+ hour days. I closed my store on Mondays simply so I could catch up without customers coming through the door. I knew that I could not live that way if I was to get married and start a family, so I shut that down. I pivoted in my life toward something that offered me more freedom, and since then, freedom has been my goal.

My professional life has allowed me a lot of freedom. Those that have known me since I started having children know just how much time off I have been able to take to be with my family. At the time of writing this, I currently work a regular 8-5 day, but I am working every day to change that to provide myself and my family more freedom.

About a month ago I was offered an opportunity to work for a fast growing company in my area. I always recognized that if I were going to quit working for myself, I would probably have to move to the Bay Area or Los Angeles to find a company that could afford someone with my skillset. The idea of working for someone else was desirable to me because it was something constant. There is not much in my life that is consistent other than the needs of my family and my clients. The concept of money getting deposited into my bank account every two weeks and only having one client to deal with sounded great.

Over the course of three weeks, I was all over the place. I was all for the job one moment and then the next I was totally against it. I was a wreck. I constantly prayed over the opportunity. I knew that if I took this job, I would not have time to run my business any longer. I didn’t want to run my business on the side while working full time. I was not going to let my work cut into the time I wanted to spend with my wife and kids. Whether I worked for myself, or another company, freedom still had to be my guiding cause.

If there were any time during the year that a consistent income would be welcome, it would be the holidays. I think anybody can relate to that. Being that my business does the majority of its business with other businesses, holidays are notoriously slow. Nobody wants to start designing and roll out a website or a new online marketing plan in December. Most of our clients are small businesses, and they are focused on the holidays. Turning down the job offer was very hard to do going into the holiday season.

Ultimately, I decided not to take the job because I have not yet had the time to flesh out all of the ideas I believe have a lot of promise. I often get too busy to work on my ideas because I am focused on my clients, but I never stop thinking and dreaming. If I wanted to start working on one of my ideas, I could by simply cutting back on client work. If I was working for another company, I would have to be all about that company during work hours. To moonlight on other ideas while on the clock would be giving less than 100% to the company I was working for. I am not ready to turn off that part of my brain, and I am not going to divert that energy to time I am at home with my family.

I am not going to say that this is the last time I will consider taking a job, but I can honestly say that it is the closest I have come to working full time for someone else. I work for myself, but I have clients whom I work for as well. My clients have expectations of me just as an employer would have. People often comment on how nice it must be to be my own boss. I explain that it is nice to be my own boss, but I also have a dozen clients I have to answer to as well, so it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.

Another thing this opportunity has given me is a renewed drive to grow my business. I can not honestly say which direction I will point all of this renewed energy, but I do have a renewed focus and am excited about the future.

Who knows what will happen with Trump in office, but the last almost decade has brought more regulation and difficulty to small business owners than ever before in the history of our country. Regardless, challenging and uncertain times are often some of the best to start a new business. I am blessed to have been able to direct my own professional direction for the last 15 years of my life and I am not quite ready to give that up, even if the opportunity is great.

I have had job offers from other clients in the past, but I appreciate this one the most because I believe in the company and it’s potential. Even if I had taken the job, my life as an entrepreneur wouldn’t have been over; it simply would have been paused. I am looking forward to finishing this year strong and focusing on new things in 2017.

Before You Start A Business

Posted on by Jerad Hill

Not quite ready to step into the world of entrepreneurship? There are ways to get a head start on building trust and goodwill in other people so that when you are ready to start your business you are already one step ahead.

[audio:http://blip.tv/file/get/Jeradhill-JeradHillsBlogBeforeYouStartABusiness256.mp3]