A marketing failure? Not even close. The Freestyle Entrepreneur (TFE) has been and continues to be a fantastic learning experiment. It’s also a tremendous avenue to forge new relationships, lend credibility and voice to its owners / authors, and keep on top of the latest online endeavors.

We at TFE feel the leaders of a community or country must do everything they can to help develop and assist those within that community. The future success of the community depends upon it. Sometimes that’s something as valuable as creating a job or building a business. We’re not in a position to do that just yet.

As an alternative, TFE will donate 100% of its ad revenue for 2008 to the V Foundation for cancer research. Folks aren’t able to focus on business-let alone their lives and families-if they’re fighting cancer. This nasty character affects people of all ages, socioeconomic statuses, and geographies. It’s past time we knock cancer down for the count. The V Foundation is a 4-star rated charity on Charity Navigator and uses very little of its funds for administrative costs.

We challenge all the friends of TFE to donate to their charity of choice and we wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season.

In the 14 months we’ve operated TFE, our technology and marketing prowess have grown considerably–if not our profitability. ;-( We found ourselves outgrowing our previous platform and possessing a desire to “get with the program”. After considerable research, we decided a move to WordPress would afford us certain advantages as well as accommodate new features and needs.

Creative Flexibility

I highly recommend starting out leveraging one of the full-service blog providers: TypePad, Blogger, Live.com, etc. You will encounter no worries about hosting, DNS, domains, redirects, coding, up-time, scalability, SMTP, etc. (if you have no idea what I’m talking about…go full-service). However, a full-service blog provider also must, for this same reason, keep you in a box; their sandbox if you will. You must use the provider tools and while customization is possible, you’re limited to just those tools the provider puts forth. I was tired of living inside that box and, as a full-time developer with web master experience, was ready for a change.

Lower Costs

Blogging is inexpensive. My personal blog Effective Thoughts is hosted for gratis courtesy of Google Blogger. As I wrote earlier, our premium-level TypePad account was only $15/month. This is very, very reasonable given all the service and features they provide. However, remarkably, most everything related to WordPress is free: themes, shared hosting (via WordPress.com), widgets–you name it. Our excellent new theme is courtesy of SoloStream, who, as of last year was yet to charge for this theme (they’ve since begun charging $50…still a bargain).

Our only true cost is hosting (well, and our time…but that’s another post). To post ads (hosting on WordPress.com does not allow advertisements) as well as achieve ultimate flexibility, we choose virtual, shared hosting with BlueHost. They are one of the top WordPress-recommended hosting providers and are also very reasonably priced. Because the WordPress software is also free, our total monthly costs dropped to under $10/month.

Learning Opportunities

One of my personal goals from TFE is learning: both interactive/blog marketing and web content/platform management. With a full-service blogging platform, I learned much about plug-ins and blogging technique in general, but I missed the nitty-gritty. Don’t shield me from the cool stuff! I wanted to experience the SEM, the platform, developing some custom code, understand hosting, etc. I wanted to fulfill my desire to learn and experience new things.

Go Where the Cool Kids Are

Wil Schroter, of Go Big Network, gave a talk about interactive marketing I attended last year. Wil, a serial entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial legend in my town (Columbus, OH, USA), spoke about what he called going where the cool kids are. It was about attracting buzz, attention, being hip: not Long Tail but more Facebook, Google, Apple, in your face, getting it done, everyone wants to be involved kind of energy.

Ok, so WordPress isn’t that cool but it’s definitely where the cool kids are. Of the Technorati Top 100, over 1/3rd are on WordPress. So, as an implementer, that affords me a huge advantage with technology and marketing. If the top bloggers and many of the mainstream bloggers use WordPress, everything related to WordPress will correspondingly increase in quantity and value: writings on techniques, plug-ins, themes, hosting, advancements, etc. There’s a certain (warning: cheesy corporate term) synergy in using the same product lots of other folks do.

Next Steps

From here–the experiment continues. WordPress is certainly the best platform for TFE at this moment. This cannot be true for all blogs (If not, here’s a solid evaluation of free or almost free blogging platforms: “Powerful Software for Better Blogging“). But for now, self-hosted WordPress will provide us with the features and flexibility to meet our goals:

• Provide a forum for delivering great content assisting and guiding the small business owner (SBO), entrepreneur, solopreneur, retirepreneur, etc.
• Form a community
• Learning interactive and social marketing; web technologies
• Provide a platform to host TFE’s entrepreneurial endeavors
• Profitability

Stay tuned and thanks for joining us on this journey!

“Because there’s only one thing worse than working for yourself…
and that’s working for somebody else.”

Now you can get this mantra on your own coffee mug. Just click on www.cafepress.com/freestylebiz for details. Thanks for visiting The Freestyle Entrepreneur, and thanks for your business.

–JRIngrisano
The Freestyle Entrepreneur