Life without the pursuit of a
dream (vision) is a waste, and a dream worth pursuing relentlessly demands
that you believe in it (and yourself) absolutely. There will
come a time when you wonder why you "decided to do such a lame
thing", so make it a deeply
personal, moving and passionate vision that blesses the greatest number of
people you can absolutely grow your way into the presence of.
Write it down. Writing it down
is an amazingly simply step which many people resist doing, yet it's essential for
success. Break your dream into tasks that can be crossed off on a to-do list.
By making a habit of making lists, you'll find the pleasure of crossing things
OFF the
lists becomes its own reward.
Start the process with a Member profile: 
Get some feedback on your plans.
There's nothing quite as helpful as peer review. Alightintheattic
Members will help. Keep in mind that Orville and Wilbur Wright's father strictly,
and repeatedly, smashed their dreams because he believed that "flight was reserved
for the angels." They got "impartial" feedback outside of their family and
succeeded as you know.
Find a Member to ask for their
input:
Pick the best location available. My
first lemonade stand was outside my house. This encouraged my family to say
"We told you it wouldn't work!" When picking your domain
name, hosting company and software to build the site from, consider asking
someone who's got a lot of experience for their feedback.
For assistance setting up or hosting a web-site, visit clickLOCAL.com: 
Gather the
ingredients. You'll want to create a professional look to your web site
and not a collage of animated gifs and fonts. Got an idea already?
Great. Need some help? Go to step 2 and 3 above.
Do it! The genius
of creation isn't having the right idea to start with - it's
FINDING the ideas that don't work and not giving up until you have no
other options but success. This step will stop most people dead in their
tracks. Remember - "FAIL OFTEN AND FAIL EARLY" is the
motto of the most successful of entrepreneurs.
Make a sign. The
simplest advertising you can do is to add your web address to the "signature" of
your E-mail. Another free resource for marketing is to submit major
pages of your web site to directories and search engines. Refining
your placement in the search results is essential to getting visitors to
your site, so you'll likely want to hire an experienced developer - even
if it's simply to point you in the right direction. Contact
clickLOCAL for suggestions or...
Learn about your role in expanding and improving your site ranking here:
You should follow this up with free Internet classified ads. Start here:
Learn. Life-long learning is a
requirement of staying ahead of the masses.
Go to the resource Library:
Read about search engines and marketing on the Internet:
Learn about Internet communities:
Study the rules for the new economy:
Read about strategy in Net Gain, available here:
Renovate. Take a survey of your
visitors. Reword your titles, keywords, text, and page descriptions. Change your
classified ads. Revise your strategy. Put what you've learned into
action. clickLOCAL (step 3) can help remodel and add buoy pages to your initial site.
Barter services with a Member here:
Don't quit. Quitting is the
only way to guarantee failure. Failing 49% of the time still moves
you forward 1% per failure. Edison failed to find the Tungsten
filament how many times? Many of the Members have been through exactly what you're challenged with.
There's a community development adage that goes: "I do, you watch....We do, we
watch....You do, I watch. That's impartation and mentoring. Ask for
some help.
It's probably time to get more feedback from step 3 above:
Give out samples.
How do you bring visitors back to your web site again? Give them something of value
that changes from time to time and make it free.
Remember the rules for a new economy? No? Read this:
What feedback do your visitors offer? Add a message board, a guest book, or offer free
updates about your services:
Ask for more help. Research the
other member web sites and ask them what they're doing right and what things to avoid.
Remember, the growth of the Internet is organic and exponential. We're trying to hit
a moving target that very few people have an understanding of, and certainly no one has
any control of. Learn from others and copy what works. Ask for more feedback here:
Start back at the top. You can't be
too certain you've covered all the steps can you? If you find you're doing the same
thing and expecting different result, ask for help. What we usually learn by going
"back to the basics" is that we never mastered them in the first place.
