The next important section I want to talk about is your resources. How much time do you have to devote? Do you need more? How much cash do you have to put down? Do you need more? In this short introduction section, just for examples purposes, I'm going to give you some insight as to my own personal working time table and how much cash I spend on what, so that you can see how similar products sometimes require diverse panning and bring up very different situations.
Something that's very important to me here is that in light of the last section on professionalism, you don't misunderstand what I'm showing you as 'do everything a hundred times over and spend a week on every little section until it's perfect'. Every single product and service that you create, or decide to sell for someone else is going to bring it's own revelations with regards to cost and the time out of your schedule that it takes and this is something very important that should be taken into account in the planning process, because lets face it, you don't want to find yourself three quarters of the way through a product, just to find out that you've run out of time or cash.
Here's an example of my personal schedule for you. Bear in mind that my business is my job, and I don't do any outside work aside from freelance affiliate promotion for others. For this reason, I don't expect you to follow this, or ours to be the same. This is here for one reason only, and that's to give you a heads up. Ok so, week one, I'll do general admin work of the business and sites, keep on top of accounts, make a few new contacts and generally talk to a lot to people and current customers. Read feedback, make small adjustments and so on, less than an hour a day if I can help it.
Week two; along comes one of the contacts I made last week who suggests an idea for a new site. This is where things go crazy and I'll spend pretty much the whole of the week and every spare hour planning and crafting this product and it's sales material, the follow-up, site graphics and preparing any scripts etc.
Week three comes the launch, and aside from spending a few hours a day on admin duty and making sure everything is functioning correctly, and arranging, preparing and getting the launch promotion drive going, this is all that's going on.
Week four, with everything running smoothly again it's back to the admin, meeting people and planning new products, and analysing and, most importantly, improving the way things are at the moment. This process of easy laid back work, onto major hard time consuming stuff, then back to the slower pace seems to be a pretty regular pattern you can rely on when creating your own sites.
Here's another example for you. The secondary affiliate promotion that I do with other people, removing the need to create my own products takes a big chunk out of that time. I may spend an hour or two a day in total creating promotions for others, writing new ad material and general business admin, but that's it.
When you consider not all websites that you create have a time limit, which is especially apparent when creating sites with a partner we’ve done with this one, and you can spread that work load out over the course of a week, two weeks, a month or maybe more, the answers to 'How much time does it take?' is easy; as much time as you can spare. What I want to show is that something that could seem too huge to comprehend having the time for to start with can be spread out over time. Creating your own products does take longer. However, I don't want you to think that you're restricted to affiliate promotion just because you have other real life engagements such as work. This is by far not the case, and something that you have to pick up on right now if you're going to be a success when we move onto the practical sections.
The same is true for the financial side of things. How much cash does it take to start an online business? Well, to be honest, not a lot. You could easily get going for maybe $50. Get a website, create a product and get hosted.
I want you to know though, that you're not gated from creating something big, something profitable and a business to be proud of because of small time constraints or budgetary concerns. A little of each is good to start out with.