Web Business Freedom

The Internet Saved My Life.

And frankly, it has saved the lives of a lot of other unhappy people who get tired of working for The Man and decide they want to join the ranks of the self-employed.

When I graduated from journalism school in 1987 (from UNC Chapel Hill, one of America’s finest programs!), I was in the last class to bang out copy on tattered IBM Selectric typewriters. It figures that the very next year, they hauled off those mammoth beige desk weights (must’ve been one heck of a landfill fee!) and replaced them with desktop computers.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a computer or Internet access in college. Actually, no one would be online (except some freaks in the Defense Department, spending our taxes on their war games!), until the mid-to-late ’90s.

My point is this: I didn’t study computers in college (except for one terribly painful Pascal programming class—what was I thinking?). There was no Internet. So I learned how to write in journalistic fashion, graduated and months later—in desperation—talked my way into a job in public relations (without formal training in that, either). Eerily similar to now, the economy sucked, and it took moving from Charlotte to New York to find a “real job” (delivering pizzas, waiting tables and working at a mall didn’t qualify for me, the newly minted college grad).

About 12 years later, after a somewhat meandering path in PR, I found myself quitting my job as a public relations professional one day, and launching a web development business the next.

The story of how I discovered an aptitude for web development is not terribly exciting, but the real trick was, I had found something I was really passionate about. And in my experience, passion is what makes normally sane people take crazy turns in life like quitting their jobs and starting over.

Without the web, I seriously doubt I would’ve left my monotonous but steady PR career.

In the early stages of web development, things were pretty basic and simple: You put up some pages of information, a handful of photos or links, and people worldwide could check them out. I instinctively grasped that public relations (and marketing, advertising and sales) as I knew it would never be the same again, and I wanted in on wherever the Internet was headed.

What I didn’t foresee was how incredibly empowering the web would be for the entrepreneur or small business, beyond a mere communications vehicle. (Those old 56k modems sucked the life out my x-ray entrepreneurial vision). Yet in very little time, our fledgling company was a virtual David, slinging rocks at some big Goliaths and knocking them right on their butts. We looked bigger than they did, reacted quicker than they did, managed our projects better than they did (eventually)…all using web technology ourselves to the nth degree.

We were constantly waiting for these big, established, traditional advertising agencies to catch on and catch up—but they didn’t. It took most of them years to grasp what was happening, and even now a lot of them are still taking rocks between the eyes.

The web is the great equalizer for entrepreneurs. But despite major advances in the technology since I started in web design full-time (1999), many people remain befuddled about the web. They think it’s too complex, or too expensive or too whatever to mess around with. It’s a shame, because those same types of people either don’t understand what the web can do for them, or they waste a bunch of time and/or money implementing poor solutions or get-rich-quick schemes.

Instead of finding Web Business Freedom, they find Web Business Confusion or Web Business Frustration. I feel their pain.

Many web design professionals work hard at convincing people that, indeed, web design is hard, time consuming and technically complicated. After all, it is tough to sell profitable websites if you pitch them as quick and easy, unless you are geared up to do a massive volume of websites, in a factory-line mentality.

Granted, there is truth to the idea that web design can be and often is, laborious, head-splittingly arcane and a rabbit hole of coding goobleygook. Web design firms, professional designers and programmers can and do serve huge roles in making the web a better place. The really big, corporate type websites require top-notch design and complex back-end solutions to run smoothly.

But in many, many instances, people (particularly those running small businesses) fail to realize they have lots of choices in how they can take advantage of all the web can do for them personally and professionally. They think it’s too big, so they think small.

I want to flip that logic around and help people see how to think big and take small, cost effective steps to get there.

Web technology has truly sped up in terms of how easy it is to establish and groom a thriving web presence. So whatever your passion or muse happens to be, you can use the web to your advantage.

Once you understand that, naturally a quest begins. You fire up the Google search box and start jamming in phrase after phrase.

Make money online….work from home…web business opportunities…

What you get back just leads to more and more confusion—those endless, scrolling sales pitches with screaming headlines and fonts, otherwise known as squeeze pages, that hurt your eyes and seem to have a tractor-beam affect on your credit card. Is this the magic answer? you ask yourself, as you hit squeeze page after squeeze page. Hopefully, like me, you hesitate long enough to think, If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Sorting through all that junk, sharing really credible resources and enlisting your help are the goals of Web Business Freedom.

So tell me, what are the sites, and who are the web masterminds, that you’ve encountered who actually had good advice and helped you or your business reach a new level? I’ll write about some of my favorites in the next article.

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaja_1985