Category — Entrepreneurship

A business student is someone that goes to business school, takes courses, graduates and looks for a job. An entrepreneurial student is someone that starts their own business while still in business school. If you lean to the latter, here are a number of low- to medium-capital businesses that you can start while still in business school, either singly or with partners.

Some people are natural entrepreneurs, even students. Numerous successful business powerhouses - such as Dell Computers, Microsoft, FedEx and Apple - got started in college. You don’t have to be a geek, but you do need some basic accounting, advertising, market research and business skills, and a specific salable skill (how you’ll earn your income). College is actually an ideal place to start a business because students tend to be bright-eyed, passionate and unjaded. As well, classmates tend not to mind other classmates promoting their business.

Here are a few businesses you can start in college for relatively low capital, then build on them as income comes in. Because you’re in charge, you can take as much or as little work as fits your study schedule.
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Paul Edmondson knew he had a great idea, but even he didn’t expect such rapid growth. Edmondson is the CEO and Founder of online publishing site HubPages, which launched in August 2006 and now has over 100,000 registered users. It gets more than 5 million hits a month, mostly from search engines like Google and Yahoo. Authors create content-rich pages with easy to add text, photos, videos, and RSS feeds and earn money from Google Adsense, Amazon, and Ebay. To reach the masses, Edmondson and his colleagues have created the site so that no technical knowledge is required. And it’s free. Definitely a killer startup.

In this interview I ask Paul Edmonson how he knew he was on to something and what prepared him to go out on his own.

LD: What gave you confidence that HubPages would be successful.

E: We thought if we made a great product and built a community that people would use the service. We had a simple plan. To try things. To do more of the stuff that worked and to stop doing the things that didn’t. Nearly 6 million people visited HubPages.com last month. One of the things we did well was monetize Hubs, so we introduced a new ad optimization product called YieldBuild that served nearly 200 million ads last month as well.

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Guest article by Angelique H. Caffrey

Need some inspiration after pulling yet another draining all-nighter?

Want to feel like that business degree you’re slaving away to earn could actually pay for itself before your own kids go to college?

Thinking of dropping everything and trying your hand at a Vegas blackjack table instead of plowing through another semester?

Stop and take heart. You’re not alone, and you could be on a fast track to buying your own private jet… or island.

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What is the one common hurdle that often stops a would-be entrepreneur from starting up? Lack of funds and thus lack of resources. However, starting a business no longer has to be limited by your resources in the offline world nor by lack of funds. In fact, there are successful businesses that are entirely run online, and were started with minimal capital. You don’t even need to wait until you graduate from business school to start.

Of course, not all businesses can be run that way, but if yours can, you still need to draw targeted web traffic to your site. There are many ways to do that:

1. Traditional advertising. Buy print or other traditional media ads.
2. Online ad(vertorial)s.
   • Buy online banner ads. These can be costly, depending on site, and effectiveness varies.
   • Buy online text link ads. (Frowned upon some search engines such as Google.)
   • Buy online “reviews” of your site, products or services. While these might look like articles, they straddle the line between reviews and advertorials. It depends on whether you use a web service that allows you to indicate to potential reviewers whether or not the review should be “positive” in tone.
3. Build content. Write/buy and post fresh, relevant article content regularly and promote the articles at social media sites. You can package this either as a set of articles or as a blog, but it depends on tone of voice in the writing as well as frequency and expected interaction.
4. Build links. This, in a nutshell, includes commenting on related sites/ blogs and/or forums, guest posting on other sites in your niche, using social media sites and loosely-related services such as Twitter for promotion, buying listings in web directories, etc. Building links does not require that you also build content, but both activities together are usually more effective.

If you need/want to keep startup costs down and thus choose to go the bootstrapping route, you’ll have to do a lot of the work yourself. You need to decide on the following:
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