I’m an available papa, that means I can hang out with my son when he gets frustrated and blog about silly stuff. If you blog, you can also be free from working at full time jobs, simply become the virtual resident hero, also known as a awesome dude who shares stuff online.
Hello, I created an advanced analytics consultancy from scratch and here’s how I created my business. First, I want to suggest you start documenting what you learn VIA public facing blogs. Start on blogger, medium, linkedin, and wordpress.
You need a place for your portfolio.
Two kinds of portfolios, ones you own and ones you don’t own. You need a place without you being the owner. If Linkedin works for you, use Linkedin, however how will you stand out among LinkedIn people? Maybe website ownership is good.
One way of determining if you own your portfolio or not is by building a redirect. If you can’t build a redirect for your portfolio then you more than likely don’t own your portfolio. So if you share your portfolio page with someone, and later decide to change your profile link, that means that old link is dead, and you can’t redirect traffic to the new link.
Start with easy wins.
Creating a website from scratch might not be an easy win. Building a redirect may not be an easy win. Start with easy wins, for me it was offering what I’m good at doing; data warehousing and tableau consulting. You don’t want to say you’re good at something you’ve only done once or twice. I worked 80 successful tableau engagements before I started thinking I could do it on my own.
Website ownership.
Buy a website, and this is the part of the story where i wish i had a clear cut winner solution for you but i made a lot of mistakes building my digital footprint. I enjoy buying websites on https://domains.google/. I also use godaddy for buying domains, not for hosting (to be continued). Aim for “.com” but if you get something else it won’t be a big deal.
Start easy, then get complex.
I can’t stress enough the importance and value of starting easy before going complex. Like website ownership, why build the website code from scratch? You can finish the wordpress website right now and do something better later? Why use complex Icons on the website explainers? Instead try something simple so you can easily, gracefully, and more than anything quickly scale up, and make changes faster because you decided you are going to take the fast route. (i know from experience having painted myself in the corner) So, please, don’t paint yourself in corners. Use figma for your logo, branding, color palette, and website assets. Photoshop is a corner of files in a folder. Trust me you need all your graphic artwork in figma immediately. Figma is a user friendly design app (adobe acquired for 20billion).
Hosting your website(s).
Hosting your website is going to be the most expensive thing I recommend you do. You can get it very cheap. I’ve tried many places and feel most are a little slow, inexpensive, and support varies. Don’t try godaddy, it’s awfully big for a little fish like yourself, and nothing works over on godaddy unless you’re willing to sit on hours of support calls just so they can remove gates that you don’t know they created. Try many hosts, don’t expect one will work forever, and get used to migrating your website or ask the hosting companies to do it for you. Hosting/templates are offered everywhere online, but that stuff costs money and I decided to do it on my own with a limited budget. Websites are HTML, CSS, Javascript. Finding something that helps you manage HTML, CSS, and javascript all at once is a benefit unless you want to maintain this code as a part of your grind. Wordpress has nice features like auto updating, and manages a lot of difficulty for you.
Writing blog(s) and distributing content.
Write blogs, distribute the content on social media, text messages, emails, call your grandma and tell her about it too. Just don’t stop blogging, take breaks, but never stop. Finding ways to thread content via one single output is the best path but may cost a few bucks. Wordpress is a nice option as it offers the ability to output all the content into multiple outputs within a single publish. I like wordpress because it works and ranks. It’s not a rocketship but if you wanted to make it a rocketship, it’s waiting. I believe wordpress.com allows to build a free blog, using their subdomains, and this is another great way to begin blogging for free offpage. Offpage meaning you’re not building content on your domain but instead you’re offpage, building things that talk about this website you’re going to create/created.
Digital marketing learning & practices… seo
Don’t google seo, okay but maybe a little bit. Googling SEO is where the best of the best SEO experts tell you “opinions” for facts. However SEO is an algorithm, and if they gave away the facts then everyone would know how to do SEO, but they don’t give away the facts so always take peoples word with a large grain of salt. Here’s the simple explainer for SEO; Blog, link your websites together, and link your social platforms to aim at these blogs, and vice versa. Write blogs on many websites and link back to everything we just mentioned. Digital marketing is pretty cool, lots to learn, keep learning and keep practicing. Google analytics, a few lines of easy javascript, help track meta data, aka user data related to how they use your website. The sooner you start tracking, the faster you understand what’s working and what’s not working on your website.
Scaling up offerings, the pros/cons.
Pros, the more you output, the more you can begin ranking, the more you may earn on these websites, and you can’t earn on an offering if you never rank it online or tell others. Cons, don’t say you can do too much at first. People are scared of small vendors who can do a lot. Conversion is the proof. Be willing to twist knobs, click buttons, change colors, text, everything… and they will come.
CONCLUSION;
Building an analytics company from scratch isn’t easy. You will have some long restless nights.
Prepared to be tired. Work hard. Late nights. Let’s go!
Prepared to have fun. Relax. Sleep in. Only when you hit your goals.
It takes time, patience, and the support of your peers doesn’t hurt when building an analytics consultancy from scratch.
I found being diligent with marketing enough to gain organic/google searches was better than spending money on advertising. I don’t recommend advertising early in your business, but instead I highly recommend you steer clear until you have funding or the ability to waste thousands optimizing your advertisements.
Thanks for checking out my article about starting an analytics consultancy from scratch. Please comment any tips that helped you begin your business.
THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ MORE ABOUT OUR SOFTWARE CANOPYS! IT MEANS THE WORLD TO ME TO SEE PEOPLE USING OUR APPLICATION. FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME ON Tyler Garrett’s TWITTER IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS.
Tyler Garrett
SENIOR CONSULTANT
DEV3LOPCOM, LLC
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Sacrifice time for dreams, or sacrifice dreams. I love you andoni.
