This year may be a time when many people lose jobs or hours are cut back. But it will also be the year when many people take advantage of their situation and start a business. It’s the ‘Year of the Entrepreneur’. You may have a great idea stored in the dusty back blocks of your ideas closet, which could turn out to be the next ‘Liquid Paper’, or ‘Babcock and Brown’, or even the next ‘Leggo’!

Before you turn an idea into reality, you have to get all the essentials sorted out. Here’s the essential 5 things to starting a business.

1) Register your business name. This can be done at your government registrar office. For Australian Residents, you will need to register the name at the Office of Fair Trading in your relevant state.

2) Register your domain name. Try and pick a name which can be remembered. Not too long. We have a few called protectmywealth.com.au and protectmyloan.com.au and protectmytrade.com.au and of course askaboutmoney.com.au. So I try and keep them simple and easy to remember. If you are going to branch out, be sure to try and keep a constant theme like I have with the ‘Protectmy’ series.

3) You need to host your website. I’ve found that the best priced and most reliable for all of our sites is Webhost4life.com They have probably the cheapest hosting package around, and if you get stuck with a technical issue, they will get back to you within a reasonable time frame. Just click on the ‘Windows Hosting’ and choose the $4 per month to start. This will more than cover your traffic for quite a while.

4) Designs/Brand. Unless you already have a logo or a brand, such as a designer brand to market, chances are, you haven’t looked at doing the actual designs for your brand. It’s always best to do it straight from the start. Otherwise, you will end up changing it down the track when you realise you don’t like the ‘cheap’ look anymore. Sometimes, designers can be very expensive, but overall, they are worth every cent if they come up with the right designs. If you have no money at all to spend, then a graphic designer probably isn’t going to cut it for you. So have a look at Guru.com. It’s a bit like a services eBay where you can request what you want (designs, sales, technical help), and some companies from around the world will bid for your work.

That should give you the fundamentals of starting a business. Then, go ahead and read as much as you can, make plenty of mistakes (because that’s how you learn), and enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, why the heck would you do it?

PD