Weekly Update: Self-Employment Progress

 

update3

Just a quick update this week because there’s not a huge amount of progress to report. But, we continue to take steps in the direction of our goals. We’re getting into the process of designing our websites, and that was the main focus of our progress this week. We keep having to remind ourselves (and each other) that everything doesn’t have to be perfect from “Day 1.” Both of us tend to over-analyze every element of our sites and every step along the way. Yes, we are our own worst enemies at times! So, If you’re going through this process with us, try to keep in mind that your site will never be “perfect” or “finished.” Throughout the life of your business, your site will continue to grow and evolve based on your customers’ needs, business demands, and a host of other factors. Okay, with that said, here’s what we’ve been up to this week…

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Contest: Win a Free Copy of Headway 1.5!

 

Web Candy Listen up, folks! There’s a contest going on that you’re NOT going to want to miss! I discovered it while browsing around on Corey Freeman’s Headway Hacks website. Three lucky people are going to win a FREE copy of Headway 1.5! Not only that, but your site will be customized for you by a professional designer!! This is like the contest of the century. Not familiar with Headway? Check out the Headway 1.5 preview video below and be dazzled!

How to Enter the Contest

For full rules of entry and an entry form, go to the Contest page at Headway Hacks. The contest is being judged by the Headway developers themselves! Basically, for entry into the contest, you have to submit the answer to this question: What kind of Website would YOU build with Headway? The top 3 ideas will get their Websites created (using Headway) for FREE! This is so totally awesome! The contest ends December 10, 2009. And for crying out loud…check out Headway Hacks and hire Corey for Headway design and coaching! Let us know if you’re one of the winners so we can check out your Website. Good Luck!

Weekly Update: Self-Employment Progress

 

Did you miss last week’s update?

Update Well, we seemed to have turned a pretty cool corner on our journey to getting our businesses started. We have finally waded through all the legalities and paperwork! Now, everything is all “official” and our businesses are separate legal entities with their own bank accounts, licenses, and permits. As Scott said last week, we’re planning on actually launching the sites in January. Scott’s business, New Mind Insight LLC will be focused on the “motivation and behavior niche,” while my business, Earthen Motion LLC will be focused on the “eco-friendly living” niche. It’s a huge relief to have all that not-so-fun stuff out of the way so we can move on to the more creative, hands-on, interesting tasks involved in getting the websites up and running. So, here’s an update on what we got accomplished this week and what fun stuff we plan to tackle next week. Also, a little more detail about my current job situation, or lack thereof…

Goals we accomplished this week:

  • Registered with the Department of Taxation
  • Signed up for hosting for our business sites
  • Installed Wordpress
  • Installed the Headway Theme
  • Niche and keyword research
  • Blog design

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Internet Business Mastery Academy: Our Mid-Term Review

 

Classroom Back in July, we joined Internet Business Mastery Academy, and gave you a peek at what we got accomplished on Day 1 at The Academy. Since then, we’ve made some good progress toward starting our online businesses. Now we’re on Lesson 7 at the Academy and we’ve had plenty of time to dig in and find our way around, so we wanted to give you a more thorough review of what you’ll find there, what we like about it, and what we’re less than thrilled with.

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Our Self-Employment Progress This Week

 

update1Every day is getting better and better because each day I get closer to the time when I can quit my day job. Every week, we set up our goals and knock ‘em down. And this week was no different. Not only did we nail down things on our list, we also got to some other things.

I can really feel them momentum building. It seems like it took so long to file papers and set up our LLCs. The process could have probably taken less time but I’m still working 40 hours per week at my day job. Plus, sometimes we had to wait for other people to process papers. These things take time, no matter how fast you want to go. Fast or slow, we’re making progress every week.

Here’s what we got done this week:

  • We met with a CPA
  • I registered my fictitious name (at the state level)
  • Continuing health insurance research
  • Selected a WordPress theme for our blogs
  • Studied at the Internet Business Mastery Academy
  • Research and development for our blogs
  • Set a launch date for our blogs

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Take Our Money…Please!

 

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you probably saw this coming a mile away…

We need your affiliate links!

Time for us to give away some more money in the form of affiliate commissions. Call it an early Christmas gift, or a late Halloween “treat.” Whatever gives you warm fuzzies. This time we’re doubling up and asking for two affiliate links. We’re soon going to be purchasing Headway Theme, and Scott has decided to sign up with Bluehost to host his business site. Of course, both have affiliate programs and that’s how we’re going to put some bling in your bank! If you wanna’ play, here’s what you do…

Sign up as an affiliate for Blue Host, and get your affiliate link.

You can also sign up as an affiliate for Headway Themes.

Once you have one or both affiliate links, hustle back here and give us your links as a comment to this post. You can give us your links to each programs separately, or you can give us two in one post, or you can give us just one. We’re not picky. We’ll use the first legit, properly functioning affiliate link we get for each program. If yours is the first one we get, we’ll use your affiliate link when we make our purchase and you get the commission. Easy, right?

Ok, now for the standard message that has become a part of all these Affiliate Give-Aways we do. If you know the routine, you can skip this part…

NOTE: When you post a comment with your affiliate link, it will probably be “flagged” by our nifty little comment-spam-thingy, and we’ll have to manually approve your comment. So, If you reply to this post and your comment doesn’t show up right away, DON’T PANIC and don’t re-submit it 14 times. We will be checking spam-thingy frequently and we can see whose comment came first. When we manually approve your comment, it will be displayed in all its spamified glory for the whole world to see. Cool?

Blog Makeover for $100 until November 13

 

Web Candy In my web wanderings this week, I ran across this limited time offer on blog customization. If your blog needs a new theme, customization, or an overall facelift, this could be an affordable way to get what you need. If we had the extra cash right now, I’d be tempted to jump on this offer simply because our blog is making my eyeballs jiggle right now. More about that in a minute…

What’s the Deal?

Inspired Design Studio is offering a special this week on installation and customization. The special offer includes the installation of your choice of any theme offered at Studio Press Themes. There are some nice-looking Magazine style themes there. My guess is that the $100 offer from Inspired Design Studio does not include the theme itself. In other words, you buy the theme and then pay $100 for the install and customization.

Edit: Thanks to Bridgett for the details. The $100 does include the blog theme. Which makes this an even sweeter deal!

Head over to the blog at Inspired Design Studio for all the details. There you can see what’s included in the offer, and check out some sample work from Inspired Design.

I think our blog needs either an attitude adjustment or an exorcism, as it seems to be possessed lately. Among other things, it has decided to randomly apply formatting here and there just to give us that periodic reminder that we are not Wordpress wizards. Yeah, we get that. So, if you visit the Quitters blog and the entire home page is in bold print or something odd like that, just throw some holy water on your screen and bear with us while we try to sort it out.


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Our Self-Employment Progress This Week

 

update1Guess what? We actually began doing some of the fun stuff we’ve been looking forward to doing. YES! Over the past few months, we’ve been so busy planning, and checking off all the boring (but absolutely necessary) steps needed to start off with really strong business foundations.

If you are starting a work-from-home business and you’ve chosen the path (rather, adventure) of starting an LLC and all that goes with it, I suggest you keep up with our weekly progress reports. You’ll get a really good overview of the process as we share what we’re doing every week toward starting our own online businesses. But what’s more important, don’t just read what we’re doing, go out there and start a business online. So many people say they want to but don’t know where to start. Well, HERE is the place to start…and NOW is the time to start! Our progress this week was comprised of the following:

  • I registered my fictitious name (at the county level)
  • More health insurance research
  • Researched WordPress themes
  • Studied at the Internet Business Mastery Academy

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Four Wordpress Themes You Shoudn’t Miss

 

evaluation If you’ve been following along lately, you know that Scott and I are working on establishing our own internet businesses. We’ll both be starting new blogs as part of the business model, and this week we’ve been spending a lot of time looking for that perfect WordPress theme. In this post, we’ll show you our “short list” of themes we’re considering for our business blogs – and we’d love to hear opinions from any of you who have used any of these themes. We’re probably going to be making our final decision this week.

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Our Self-Employment Progress This Week

 

buriedinpaperworkWe made some good progress over the past week and scratched a few more items off the list. A little while back, we started off with a long checklist of steps we needed to take in order to start our businesses, and each week we’ve been crossing things off the list. It a great feeling. Tammy and I like to talk about where we could be in a few months at our current rate of progress, and what our lives could be in 6 months to a year. We’re very optimistic but we also keep ourselves in check.

If we were both in our twenties and had fewer responsibilities and obligations, we may have taken a different route to become self-employed. But at this stage in our lives, we are very careful and thoroughly analyze every option before we make a decision. It’s too easy for unexpected bumps to appear in the road so we like to plan with an eye on security. And the greatest security I know of is to be financially self-dependent; to be responsible for your own sources of income rather than be totally dependent on your employer’s business doing well, or the economy remaining stable and not losing your job. Considering the fact that so many people’s lives have been uprooted due to losing their jobs, it seems like less of a gamble to start a business while I continue to work 40 hours per week at my current day job. So we keep chipping away at our business To-Do list. So for this week, here’s what we’ve done:

  • Met with our attorney to review and approve our Operating Agreements for our LLCs
  • Tammy registered a “fictitious name” or DBA (“doing business as”) for her website and filed it with the SCC (State Corporation Commission)
  • Opened business checking accounts
  • Reviewed Business Group Health Insurance Plans

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