Your Product, What Makes Yours So Unique?

So now you have your own business. You repair computers! Whoa, you didn't think you would make it this far, well congratulations!

Now that you think of it working for an hourly wage even for yourself is really hard!

What's techie to do? What else do you have in your business tool box that you can use to sell not only your experience but your brand?

One thing all new techs do is build a computer or a bunch of them.

Consider this:

Can you buy the parts (case, motherboard, memory, processor, and so on) then make a computer cheaper than say Dell or Gateway?

I don't think so.

Used to be that the major manufactures such as IBM and Compaq and to a lesser degree HP had the market locked down. At that time an IBM PC or a Compaq Deskpro cost over $3000!

Then a company reverse engineered an IBM PC XT motherboard, made some changes and started selling the motherboard only. Due to copy right and patent infringements they went out of business real quick. But the Genie was out of the bottle and the big manufactures knew it, they just didn't respond to the fact that the "Clone Wars" were about to begin.

At that time for about $600 worth of parts you could build a state of the art computer with the latest and greatest technology. But the big manufactures failed to see this as a threat for a couple of years.

A lot of little companies sprung up and were making and selling computers for a third of the cost of a Compaq or IBM that was around $1200, they were making a 100% profit on each computer they sold. What a deal! The companies were Dell, Gateway, Acre, and some others that have since went out of business or were bought up.

Those little companies started in a garage and grew in to some of the largest producers of computers today. We used to have a name for those computers, and it wasn't clone, no it was BIG Computers Inc that is Built In Garage Computers. Not kidding!

Even if you build a special or custom computer with lots of high quality parts and don't charge for the labor you can not compete with the major manufactures. Yes, you could offer custom computers for sale but before you do price out an Alien or one of the premier CAD computers, check the cost of parts and see if you can compete. BIG Computers went out of business in 1994!

For your product have you thought about a book? A report (ya those are boring aren't they). Or even a web site?

Think it through, how did you get here? You either came by one of my publications or you found this site by searching the internet.

Here is what I have:

• Web sites about computer repair - 2
• Computer repair E-Courses - 5 6
• Computer repair Checklists - 38 41
• Computer repair Manuals (e-books and hard copy) - 6
• Computer repair CD / DVD - 2
• Custom ERD (through an e-c0urse)

[Check the "Products" listing in the main drop down menu...]

By this time you have your brand or your products, mine is DIY (Do It Yourself) Computer Repairs.

The 5 Steps to high quality and cheap DIY Computer Repairs Get It Today...

Depending on your business you could do an "information" type web site like mine, or you could do one that sells computer parts and products, or you could do a mix of the two.

If you go the web site route study up on the options for web sites, do the research, there millions of web sites that have no readers or only a couple a day.

To make money from a web site you need to be found by searching for a topic and let me tell you the "computer" and "computer repair" topics have hundreds of millions of web sites. (If you use Google and do a search on these two terms, then look on the top of the return page. Hundreds of millions of web sites.) So you need to come up with a unique selling point for your web site concept and topic. Don't forget the name of the web site, it should also be unique.

Or you could write computer repair courses, books, e-books, checklists, and make videos.

The problem you have to over come with out a web site is marketing your products.

Some enterprising people write hard copy books, video's, cd's, and of course pdf's (e-books)

I do all the above except the videos at this time and may do video at some future date.

My main point is if you are in business, be it local or global, you really are missing out on a large portion of the world population by not having a web site.

However if you do go the web site route do your research for the web site host, for the domain name, and the concept of your future web site. There is nothing more disheartening than to put hours of work in to a product and not be able to sell it.

Last word:

A business is not a "Get Rich Quick" scheme, neither is a web site. Web sites (ones that are not stale) take a lot of work. Computer web sites take more work because the technology is ever changing. Yesterdays news might as well been last year's news. In most cases you have to keep the content of the web site fresh or your readers will go and not come back.

If you decide to build your brand with a web site here is my favorite hosting company. If you know how to write web content or not they are the best! www.sitesell.com