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Can a fast-lane business be started on WordPress?

chrisbiz4444

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( Give me a break if this is a stupid question lol) I am starting my first online business. I am going to have to learn many new things and im aware of that( Looking forward to the challenges). But this business has scale-ability in an unsaturated market. The business plan is great and is certainty fastlane but the process of executing it is going to be long and educational. I have no experience in web design/ SEO. This is all new to me. I have started business's before. But I have never started an online business. Any advice would be awesome. This thing is going to be huge and passive. I would eventually like to sell the site. But I am wondering If I could use a wordpress format or is that a bad idea? My pockets are not very deep and I feel word press would be easier and faster to grasp then actually coding a site. But I also do not want to cut corners.
 
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throttleforward

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Wordpress is fairly dynamic - you can run just about any kind of website off of it (although some platforms support certain operations much better than Wordpress). Checkout Themeforest.com for some good, cheap Wordpress themes/templates.

Full disclosure - as a non-programmer, I run all my sites through Wordpress or (when I did ecommerce) BigCommerce, so I may be biased toward Wordpress as an easy, non-technical fix.
 

chrisbiz4444

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Awesome man. Thank you for the response and advice.
 

chrisbiz4444

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Does anyone know if MJ used word-press to build the limo business talked about in the fast lane book? If you see this MJ any insight would be awesome for you personally. If not if anyone has an answer that would be great too. I'm just trying to figure out if it has any effect on value when and if time comes to sell the business.
 
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decaobr

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Does anyone know if MJ used word-press to build the limo business talked about in the fast lane book? If you see this MJ any insight would be awesome for you personally. If not if anyone has an answer that would be great too. I'm just trying to figure out if it has any effect on value when and if time comes to sell the business.

I don't think so, Wordpress was created in 2003, and MJ founded his website on 2001.
 

decaobr

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About, Wordpress, if you are planning to build a SAAS type of website, i would advise you against Wordpress. Wordpress is great if you are building a blog, or website based on content, or even a e-commerce. But beyond that, Wordpress may compromise you ( because of performance )
 

chrisbiz4444

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Thanks for the response it was helpful. My site is going to be similar to this. This concept just much different.
 
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FastNAwesome

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As a developer I'm not in love with wordpress.

But as for your question...Yes, many successful businesses do run on wordpress, but it also depends on what you want to do.

A note about feature packed wordpress themes, with many sliders, fonts and other stuff. Theme authors do this because it sells, and it's a competition, who will bloat their theme with more features. But the thing is - many of these "theme features" normally should be plugins - a theme is meant primarily to define website's look, not functionality.

Why this matters? Because if you ever decide to change a theme - your website might lose some of the functionality as well.
 

eqttrdr

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why not start with wordpress because its free open source and once the biz takes off you can invest money into hiring a programmer from elance, odesk, or freelancer? Make them created a custom PHP website from scratch once you are sure it will work...

thats just my .02
 

Thriftypreneur

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( Give me a break if this is a stupid question lol) I am starting my first online business. I am going to have to learn many new things and im aware of that( Looking forward to the challenges). But this business has scale-ability in an unsaturated market. The business plan is great and is certainty fastlane but the process of executing it is going to be long and educational. I have no experience in web design/ SEO. This is all new to me. I have started business's before. But I have never started an online business. Any advice would be awesome. This thing is going to be huge and passive. I would eventually like to sell the site. But I am wondering If I could use a wordpress format or is that a bad idea? My pockets are not very deep and I feel word press would be easier and faster to grasp then actually coding a site. But I also do not want to cut corners.

It really depends on the functionality you expect your site to have. Without knowing that, it's really hard for anyone to advise you. I see you mentioned "it would be like this." If you're referring to The Fastlane Forum, I'd recommend looking into forum software specifically, or, even better, membership site software. It's just really hard to say without knowing what you're trying to accomplish. To start though, Wordpress is so versatile and easily customized that it's certainly a good recommendation to start your platform on.

As for content based sites, blogs, affiliate sites, e-commerce sites, etc... Wordpress is an easy, no-brainer for someone who lacks coding experience (especially if you intend to sell it privately later. Wordpress is so widely used that it makes private buyers much more comfortable picking up your offer, rather than grabbing something where they would have to learn any amount of coding).

One word of caution, however, is that you should expect (I would go as far as to say it's required, depending on what you want to do) to learn at least basic HTML/CSS/PHP, depending on how hands-on and customized you want your site to be. As FastNAwesome said,

Theme authors do this because it sells, and it's a competition, who will bloat their theme with more features. But the thing is - many of these "theme features" normally should be plugins - a theme is meant primarily to define website's look, not functionality.

people don't always make themes/plugins that are catered to whatever is you're planning to do. In fact, if your customer acquisition is largely going to be based on SEO, and with how fast Google is transitioning to mobile-friendly rankings (read: your site better be mobile-friendly, free of errors, and load lightning-fast), a lot of the stuff out there may, in fact, hinder your progress on that front.

I guess that's a really long way of saying, "Yeah, Wordpress is all right to start with." ;)
 
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splok

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To be honest, any time anyone asks if they should use Wordpress, the answer is pretty much always yes. Wordpress makes it easy to start, and starting is the hard part. If someone was experienced enough to use anything more complicated than Wordpress, they would know whether or not they should use it. It's not to say that people can't learn other things, but WP's low barrier to entry just trumps the shit out of more "proper" ways of doing things. Maybe it has to be changed over later, but by then you'll have revenue that you can use to sort it out (if you don't have revenue, you don't have much of a reason to change, do you?).
 

FastLearner

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WordPress is eh.. Good for blogging or blogging about a specific niche.
 
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H. Palmer

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Can a fast lane business start on Wordpress? Yes. Because anything can start anywhere.

Can it be built on Wordpress? No.

Wordpress is in my opinion overhyped. It is a great tool for people who want to start a blog in 2 hours. That is for lazy people.

If you want to build a fastlane business, the software platform should give you Entry Barriers, Control and Scale. E C and S out of the CENTS requirements of a fastlane business. See MJ's book.

E. It's hard to build entry barriers into your business model based on a tool that can everyone can download.

C. It's impossible to have complete control over your business if you base it on somebody else's infrastructure. Whether that be the Wordpress platform itself, the themes or the plug-ins.

S. In theory you can build scale on WordPress, but only if the blog functionality is all you need. Like a news website would do that has 100 000 visitors per day and lives from advertisements. But if your company gets off the ground by selling a product, you need databases, custom made software that accesses them and custom made delivery software and more stuff like that.

So can you build a fastlane business on WordPress? I wouldn't consider it.
 
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Tom.V

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C. It's impossible to have complete control over your business if you base it on somebody else's infrastructure. Whether that be the Wordpress platform itself, the themes or the plug-ins.
E. It's hard to build entry barriers into your business model based on a tool that can everyone can download.
Keep in mind that Wordpress and all of it's available "potential" configurations are nothing more than systems used for leverage. Just because anyone can download and use the CMS, does not mean anything. It is all dependent upon the application of course, but for most simple content based systems WP works just fine.

Also keep in mind that Wordpress has teams of developers working around the clock for FREE to keep the CMS safe and up to date. That alone keeps me coming back for more, one less thing I have to worry about. I can instead focus on more important matters.

It's all about leverage.
 

H. Palmer

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Keep in mind that Wordpress and all of it's available "potential" configurations are nothing more than systems used for leverage. Just because anyone can download and use the CMS, does not mean anything. It is all dependent upon the application of course, but for most simple content based systems WP works just fine.

I guess a business is somewhat more than a content management system.
 
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DennisD

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If you want to build a fastlane business, the software platform should give you Entry Barriers, Control and Scale.

First of all, the every platform you use for every part of your business doesn't have to meet every point of CENTS... just the business itself.

And even though I agree that you don't get 100% control, your barrier to entry point is silly.
It's like saying "Skype is free, and anybody who wants it can get it. Therefore I don't recommend making cold calls to prospective clients via Skype". In this particular case it doesn't really matter who else can get it for what price.

You don't need to create a new platform for every new website, the same way you don't need to develop a new social network to get 'likes'.

And your "scale" point is also silly. It's free to scale. Whether you have 10 people visiting your website or 1m, it costs the exact same amount and doesn't lose viability or functionality.

I use paypal to accept payments (no barrier to entry) which redirects them to a download page. I use ejunkie to send them their products after they purchase (straight HTML, can easily be used within wordpress, $5/mo.) Paypal processes the payments (free or % of sale) and they're automatically added to my MailCheat(Chimp) email address (free).

It might be worth it for the OP to discuss what their website will do so we can all give better incite.
 
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Tom.V

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I guess a business is somewhat more than a content based system.
Depends on the business. Once upon a time I thought I wanted a completely bespoke website because of "control", then I thought about the time aspect.
 

H. Palmer

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For some reason, every time someone says WordPress is lacking in something, people get emotional. It doesn't just happen here.

Dennis, I get your point.
But as I read OP's post, he wants to build a fastlane online business on a WordPress format. He doesn't even mention other types of software.

O yes, you could start with WordPress. And yes, if the business gets off the ground, you can add other types of standard software.

But I maintain that if you want E, C and S built into your business model, you NEED custom made software.

Personally I can tackle every competitor's business model just with tailor made software alone. Doesn't mean it is advisable every time, but it can be done.

OP should start to learn coding. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Ajax, stuff like that. If nothing else, he would learn what these languages can do for him even if someone else does the coding. And it helps him a lot with SEO.
 
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botnickguy

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WordPress rocks for a lot of websites, I'm also a developer and I'll say it to you straight. I'd check out ElegantThemes as well, for $39-$89 you have access to 80 themes and 4 plugins (all incredibly polished) as well as their design templates in adobe format. Hostgator for hosting too. That being said, no, a Software as a Service site wouldn't work well with WordPress. I'd go far enough to say avoid WordPress for eCommerce. If you do choose WordPress, develop a psuedo "design" of ALL you website structures, writing, etc, through document files and illustrations before pushing it onto the platform. That way in case like people say the theme doesn't work out or you don't like WordPress, you can withdraw easily without too much resistance. The whole theme idea can be easily avoided if you choose a single developer like I did, I think ThemeForest is just a bunch of developers themes if I recall correctly. Also, plan on learning some code. It will help you in the long run and is easier than it sounds especially if you just learn what you need.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4
 

H. Palmer

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WordPress rocks for a lot of websites, I'm also a developer and I'll say it to you straight. I'd check out ElegantThemes as well, for $39-$89 you have access to 80 themes and 4 plugins (all incredibly polished) as well as their design templates in adobe format. Hostgator for hosting too. That being said, no, a Software as a Service site wouldn't work well with WordPress. I'd go far enough to say avoid WordPress for eCommerce. If you do choose WordPress, develop a psuedo "design" of ALL you website structures, writing, etc, through document files and illustrations before pushing it onto the platform. That way in case like people say the theme doesn't work out or you don't like WordPress, you can withdraw easily without too much resistance. The whole theme idea can be easily avoided if you choose a single developer like I did, I think ThemeForest is just a bunch of developers themes if I recall correctly. Also, plan on learning some code. It will help you in the long run and is easier than it sounds especially if you just learn what you need.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

Personally I think the whole theme thing is vastly overrated. Just because a bunch of designers can think up a few thousand themes and the world has a lot of themes to choose from, doesn't mean themes play a decisive role in getting a business off the ground.

I'd rather not waste my time looking for the best WordPress theme out of 6000 and instead design a server based database that allows me to segment my customers and squeeze a higher margin out of them with follow up mailings.
 

Tom.V

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Enlighten us.
You must not believe in the power of good marketing + good copy. You could have THE most basic HTML 7 page site that receives 10k visitors per day. If it has a 20% CR and you make $10 per sale/lead, you've got a very profitable, low maintenance, low overhead business.

Ask me how I know.
 
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H. Palmer

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You must not believe in the power of good marketing + good copy. You could have THE most basic HTML 7 page site that receives 10k visitors per day. If it has a 20% CR and you make $10 per sale/lead, you've got a very profitable, low maintenance, low overhead business.

Ask me how I know.

Oh I do believe in the power of good sales copy, but if that sales copy comes directly out of your boss's head, he doesn't have a fastlane business anyway.
 

botnickguy

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I dunno, a theme can be important. The default WordPress theme is a blog basically. I mean especially if you have a product? you want to catch a consumers eyes before anything. If its purely an info website you can settle on something simple but an unthemed website of pure HTML will drive me away in a matter of seconds for something visual

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4
 

H. Palmer

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I dunno, a theme can be important. The default WordPress theme is a blog basically. I mean especially if you have a product? you want to catch a consumers eyes before anything. If its purely an info website you can settle on something simple but an unthemed website of pure HTML will drive me away in a matter of seconds for something visual

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

If you mean by theme the design and lay out of the website, I seriously do not see why you would need WordPress for that.

In the end it is all design work with the help of CSS. That is what WordPress themes are about.
 
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botnickguy

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If you mean by theme the design and lay out of the website, I seriously do not see why you would need WordPress for that.

In the end it is all design work with the help of CSS. That is what WordPress themes are about.

Correct me: a design

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4
 

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