Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
In the past I’ve written that one of the best ways to test out a business idea is to throw up a quick website for it. This is inexpensive and will help you get feedback for your idea and possibly your first few customers.
In the past it took me about 4 hours using Wordpress and I thought that proved how easy it was. Well now you can do it in about 30 MINUTES!
I came across an really cool service yesterday called Weebly. It does the Wordpress technical mumbo jumbo for you (uploading files with FTP, etc) and gives you a totally graphical way to install and build the site!
It is super easy and well designed. In about 10 minutes I was able to create this test site with a professional layout, contact forum, blog, complete forum, and blocks for Google Adsense.
They will host the site for you for about $4/month and you can pick your own domain name. Now you have NO EXCUSE not to get your business idea going!
One final bonus trick: pick a domain name that contains the primary keyword you’d like to rank for in Google. This will help you get on the first page of Google for that search term – which means customers! Boom, you have your own business.
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Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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caleb
November 18th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Would you just use Weebly for testing business ideas, or would you say it surpasses Wordpress and it’s time to upgrade?
Brian Armstrong
November 20th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
For throwing up a quick site I would probably use this. I think it’s still using Wordpress underneath so Wordpress is still great. This just handles some of the technical stuff for you. If you needed to switch over to your own setup later you could probably export it.
Joshua Levin
February 19th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Hi, we’ve been running a pretty successful blog on weebly, and it’s definitely easy to get going (i’ve also used it to create websites for parties, etc). But now we want to switch over to wordpress, because the plugins in weebly are insufficient. i can’t figure out how to do it though. any concrete tips?
Brian Armstrong
February 19th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Hi Josh, sorry I haven’t actually used it, but look for an “export” feature. Or google “export weebly”. I bet it’s possible.
Caroline
November 19th, 2008 at 4:42 am
There seems to be more and more online applications available. There was a show on recently talking about cloud computing and the battle between Google and Microsoft for dominance.
Brian Armstrong
November 20th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Mmm, interesting. This weebly thing probably wouldn’t fall under cloud computing (at least as I understand it), but you’re right there are lots of cool apps coming out every day that are making it easier and easier to get a business going online!
Matt Thomas
November 22nd, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I would think that this service would be especially useful for throwing together quick landing pages for PPC advertising…testing or maybe even for longer term. Thanks for the tip!
Brian Armstrong
November 23rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Yeah, they make the adsense block easy (although it looks like they take 50% of the revenue?!? so may want to place the adsense code in manually).
Any ideas on how you’d get good content on the site or traffic?
Paul
December 1st, 2008 at 3:29 pm
I’m evaluating launching a business website, but it differs a bit from the examples I’ve seen from you.
The website content will include text, photos, audio, and video. But subscribers will pay a monthly fee for access to the good stuff. (And, no, it doesn’t involve porn.)
Do services like Weebly and Wordpress have easy add-ons that allow you to take payment for subscriptions, and then restrict certain content only to subscribers?
If not, any suggestions on services that would do this cheaply and allow for best “speed of implementation?”
Thanks,
Paul
Brian Armstrong
December 1st, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Hi Paul, sounds like a good business idea. I’ve never used it but it looks like there are “membership” plugins for Wordpress like this:
http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2006/07/17/wordpress-plugin-paypal-membership/
Might need to Google around a bit to find a good one and get it working right. That’s how I’d approach it. Good luck and let us know how it goes!
Brian
prashanna
January 13th, 2009 at 1:57 am
i made a site with weebly for free.
now if i get 1000s of traffic per day can it handle?
Just check my site .i am now about to promote it so i want to be sure.i dont want my people to get an error message.
than you
Brian Armstrong
January 14th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Yep…1000’s per day is not that much. I’m sure they can handle it. If not however you can always transfer to another server without losing anything. It’s a hassle but still possible.
ali
October 21st, 2009 at 1:14 am
i have made a website http://www.umarakmal.weebly.com but weebly takes 50% of my adsense revenue? will they still take it if i put the google codes manually?
Brian Armstrong
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:21 pm
They probably try to avoid you doing that. But they need to make money somehow. I think it’s worth it for the free hosting.