First off, you need to find the funding. This can be done in a myriad ways whether it’s getting money from family, friends, or acquiring a small business loan. You’ll likely need to put up some of your own cash. There is a level of risk involved here because you don’t know if you’ll be successful or not but having your own company is always a risk. It’s important to note that banks are asked for money constantly and they’re going to be far more likely to lend you money if you have some capitol of your own to invest with. This shows them that you’re serious and you believe in what you’re doing because you’re also accepting a level of risk. This is only part of the equation though and you should also consider other variables before proceeding any further.

You need to seek legal advice and assistance before you launch any web site or business plan. Companies, large and small, have fallen victim to not properly trademarking their name or products. The likes of Apple, Amazon, and others have been all over the news lately because they didn’t research or get the proper trademarks for their programs. Other small businesses that have been using the names far longer are taking these companies to court over similar issues. If you’re starting up a business, don’t rely on a quick Google search to find out if a name is taken. There are legal advisors from Miami attorneys to across the country that will help you start with a good legal base so you don’t find yourself in court a few years down the road.

If you’re starting an online business, which many are these days, you’ll need to give a lot of thought to your online approach. You may have a great idea but simply starting a site and waiting for the business to come to you is a terrible business model. Search rankings are everything these days. You may have the best product or service around but if people aren’t aware they you exist, you’re going to get nowhere fast. Using online reputation management and search engine optimization, you can increase your online profile and get in touch with those who need your services most. There are many companies that can help you with this so do some research on various ways to improve your online visibility before you start throwing a lot of cash at your business because you might be tossing your money down the drain.

With so many businesses struggling to stay afloat, it’s important to consider some of these initial concerns before beginning your venture. There are a million ways to make money and improve online performance but unless you’re aware of the right steps, you could be killing your business before it has a chance to start.

Movies like Animal House and Old School are certainly great college movies, but I think we’d all agree that they don’t cast fraternities in the best light. This goes for both fraternities and sororities – there tends to be such a stereotype that Greek organizations are simply about cramming as much partying as you can into a semester, and perhaps being a bit loose with the morals.

All of us at GreekForMe.com are here to change that stereotype. Sure, that stereotype may hold true for a sorority or fraternity here or there, but Greek organizations are overwhelmingly excelling in the classroom and are involved in extensive community service and volunteering endeavors. Men and women now join Greek organizations based on the value system of their chosen fraternity and sorority, and often have some of the highest grade point averages on campus, with many organizations requiring their members to stay above a certain GPA each semester.

If you’re just starting out at college, rushing a fraternity or sorority is the perfect way to get to know more people on campus. Just be sure you’re choosing an organization that embodies the values you yourself hold important, and you can see yourself becoming friends with the other members in the fraternity or sorority. Just go for it!

We’re committed to highlighting the great works of fraternities and sororities, and we hope you’ll follow us on Twitter.com/GreekForMe, Like Us on Facebook, and check out our GreekForMe Blog! And of course, once you do join that fraternity or sorority, you know the perfect spot to get Sorority Apparel and Fraternity Apparel

So tell us, what made you want to join a fraternity or sorority? If you haven’t yet, what’s holding you back?

More Businesses to Start Out of Your Dorm Room

When you are in college, the urge to stretch out and see what you can do is both an incredible rush, and a kind of humility lesson. When you really consider that Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg pretty much started their billion dollar businesses “from their dorm rooms,” (not technically in Jobs’ case, but pretty close) you start to realize that you might be embarking on a lightly trod path to great riches. And indeed, once you really ‘make it,’ it can be an incredible rush. But whether you are glancing over the reading materials for a couple of franchise opportunities, and seeing if they are right for you, or if you are just practicing a skill you have developed, and keep having this crazy dream that you might change the world, there are a LOT of possibilities you can choose from. So let’s look at a couple of these options.

A toiletries stockpile

A long time ago, a college freshman noticed that a lot of his fellow dorm rats had neglected to bring a few necessary but often forgettable items with them. These items included tooth brushes, tooth paste, toilet paper, and other miscellany. So he took a cabinet, filled it with these things (which he bought inexpensively), and arbitrated these goods for a reasonable profit, while keeping them substantially less expensive than the on campus options would be. Needless to say, that young man went on to do great things. And this might also be the start of your entrepreneurial career.

A social networking web site

While it is true that social networking is no longer new in the slightest, there will always be the ability to niche it down. Consider that while fashion is not always new, it is constantly being tweaked and resold in an innumerable variety of different styles. Now think about the kind of social atmosphere your school has – is it being extremely well represented through sites like MySpace and Facebook? If not, you might just have the start of something big.

A dorm room cleaning business

While this may only come into play during the periods when every college student is suddenly obsessed with cleanliness (think parental visits, trying to avoid studying for finals, and trying not to get charged a fee before they move out), it could also get some play as a “membership” service. Say, for a small monthly charge, you come in one day a month while they are in class, and turn the place from “disaster area” into “halfway decent.” Get a hundred people to pay you $40 a month (which even most college students could probably scrape up), and that is a decent income.

Going to business school, you are taught to write up a business plan. I just want to say this is a bad idea. Sure, it will probably be required down the road for some annoying reason, but not right at the beginning. At this point, it’s a time waster.

All business plans that are drawn up at the beginning of a venture normally just talk about the ‘market potential’ of the business. This means nothing. Especially when you are trying to get some funding to get it off the ground.

Instead of spending your time writing up a business plan, run a PPC campaign. This will truly help prove (or disprove) the market potential you think there is.

There use to be a time where you had to look at market surveys and data available to you to determine whether or not you had a shot or not with that business idea. Turns out, that data is really expensive to come across and just not viable for you to acquire as a Dorm Room Biz person.

Luckily though, you can get that data all on your own. Take $500 or so of your own money and invest it into a PPC campaign. Here’s a short step-by-step way to implement this plan.

1. Get a domain name. Any name related to whatever you are doing, not necessarily the one you will end up using. If you are going to start a cookie selling biz, get cookieseller101.com.
2. Find some cheap hosting and install a CMS.
3. Create a few landing pages. Up to 5 should be enough and ask questions on them. You are looking for answers from the people in the market you want to serve. You can even go ahead and offer your service now.
4. Setup your campaign in Adwords and spend the allotted amount.
5. Collect all the data and read through it. Pour over your keywords and clicks data from Adwords and even send messages to some of the people (your new ‘customers’) and try to get some more information from them.

Once you’re done, you should have some information. And if you didn’t get any, well, you might want to start rethinking that business idea right away.

Then you need to take that data and reflect over it. Find new perspectives that you think the business should take. If you think you need some more information, try running another campaign and see what you can gather from that.

This can really work. It’s how I helped start my Surety Bonds company with some friends.

And it’s also what saved me from wasting 9 months of my life and a lot of my money chasing the idea I had of starting a local textbook buying and selling website.

This is a guest post from Kevin Kaiser, a web entrepreneur and college student. You can connect with him on twitter, @kevinckaiser.

• Be a personal coach – Are you a fitness freak who enjoys hanging out at the local gym? If the answer is yes, become a personal coach or fitness expert to a classmate. Amateur dietitians too can easily find a market.
• Be a painter – Painting is a job that requires only minimal capital. Get a brush or two, paints, a ladder and overalls, and you are ready to start. It may well progress to more paying dry walling jobs in the future.
• Be a fashion designer or a writer – For individuals suffering from the creative spark, both are good options. In fact, schooldays are the right time to start on a portfolio of your own.
• Dabble in real estate – Admittedly, this is one of the riskier options and requires some amount of natural flair, but many students do find it worthwhile. I knew a guy who bought himself a Mercedes at 23; he bought a house for 60k, refurbished it himself, and sold it for 110k.
• Start a cleaning and laundry service – No doubt this option will definitely attract many customers because not many people actually enjoy doing laundry. This can progress to a whole new business line in the future too.
• Start a ride service – For those who have a vehicle, travel regularly and enjoy driving, a ride service is an apt choice.
• Be an eco/green consultant – Do you feel incensed when you see forests disappearing and animals becoming extinct? If you do, go green and become an eco consultant. Read, write, and blog on the subject. Do your duty to the planet and earn money in the process.

So much for the physical, offline businesses; on the online front, business options are more diverse and interesting:

• Designing – If you are skilled at Photoshop or CorelDraw, you can shine at student parties and functions by designing brochures, banners, etc.
• Copyediting – This type of work does require some creative and language skills. However, the jobs are generally highly paying.
• Researching for term papers – You will find many clients for this service as very few enjoy researching or facts checking for their term assignments and the like.
• Designing websites – This is viable if you have an Internet connection and enjoy playing with colors and fonts.
• Developing content for websites – All websites need content writers. The jobs offer good payments and are highly flexible.

The idea is to play to your strengths. After all, the best lessons you learn are the ones outside the school.

• Garage Sale Marketing and Promotion Service – One of the worst parts of holding a yard sale is getting everything together, pricing items, and advertising the sale. So, why not offer this service to your local community? Now is the time to start up a service like this as the spring season is starting to get rolling, people will start ‘spring cleaning’ their houses, and yard sales will pop up all over the place. Check Craigslist in your area for people advertising yard sales and offer them your services.
• Personal Conceiger Service – How hard could it be to get some reservations set up at a restuarant or to get some tickets to a game? Actually, probably pretty difficult starting out. You’d really need to be able to work your personal network and tap into other networks to make it happen. However, starting small is what it’s all about. Since you’ve got the extra time in between classes and studying, it leaves the perfect opportunity to work on getting your name out there, making connections at hotels, restuarants, stadiums, clubs, etc. Offer the service to students and faculty at your school looking to plan an event (say a Valentines Day date or a birthday party) and set everything up for them. Along the lines of a personal assistant, but without all the bitch work.
• Green/Eco Consulting – Into the idea of going green? Read up on it because it is the latest and greatest thing happening. Once you have a solid foundation from books, magazines, industry blogs, and other resources, break out on your own and create your own website promoting green and eco-friendly practicies. As your site grows in popularity, so will your exposure and ability to grow your business into a consulting service. Start working with companies and families providing tips and tricks to help them be more green. Provide home inspections and office inspections to see how green your clients are and what else they can do. The kicker here is to also offer the service of whatever you are promoting they do. So as an example, if you inspect someones house and can tell that their lightbulbs should be replaced with CFL bulbs or their windows could be replaced with more energy efficient ones, offer this service to them. This is where real money can come in because you could then outsource the work to a

What do you think? Have a dorm room business idea that you’d like to share? Leave a comment below!

“Green” or “Eco-Friendly” or “Sustainable” business concepts and ideas are becoming more and more popular in the recent months. The idea of launching and running a green business is nice if you’re looking for a way to make money AND help the environment. Within the US and I would imagine many other countries, the trend of “going green” is HUGE and continuing to grow rapidly.

So, as a student entrepreneur, how can you capitalize on this?

Take advantage of any opportunity that comes your way to to learn about green business ideas, the concepts behind going green, the reasons for doing so, and the affects your contribution, no matter how small or big, can make. If you can do these things, and turn your interest into a business, why not? So, here are some different green business ideas for students.

>Eco-friendly is hot right now, are you ready to jump aboard?<

Eco-friendly business ideas:

• Green Home/Energy Consultant – meet with homeowners to help show them the ways that they can make their home more eco-friendly, reduce their carbon footprint, and save money.
• Electric Scooter sales/rentals – scooter sales and rentals are nothing new, but offering electric scooters rather than gas powered is a slightly newer trend. Scooter rentals around campuses would cut down on the need for students to have cars to get places that a university/city transportation service may not go.
• Eco-friendly cleaning service – just like a traditional cleaning service only your focus would be on using only organic and environmentally friendly cleaning products.
• Recycle trash into treasurer – most people just toss things into the trash without thinking about any other potential use. Now, entrepreneurs and designers are taking trash and turning it into cash. Products such as purses made of old license plates and more are starting to show up all over the place.

Here are some other similar articles with ideas for green business ideas:

• Green Business Ideas for Dormers
• 10 Green Business Ideas for Phoenix Entrepreneurs
• Best Green Business Ideas
• Cool Green Business Ideas

Every year, thousands of new students and old students return to the dorm rooms on their college campus. This usually means that besides the student, the students parents are there on campus helping their child move all of their stuff into their dorm room. At the end of August, it can get pretty hot out during the middle of the day when moving a bunch of boxes and heavy items, so why not offer to lend a hand?

Put together some flyers and signs that you can hand out and put around campus offering help with moving a students belongings. If I were a father and had a car full of boxes and stuff, I wouldn’t mind paying another student $10 to help move the items. It gives the parents a chance to take it easy, go slower, and not be paniced or worried. Having a helping hand when moving in to a dorm room will also give the student a chance to work on unpacking the items while someone else is carrying them in for them.

Equip yourself with a dolly or cart that you buy or borrow from someone and you are all set to start moving. An extension of this would be to just rent the carts or dollies to families to use when moving. For a couple bucks, it would be worth it for parents to pay to not have to make 100 trips back and forth to the car, walk up and down the stairs, or wait in long lines to use the elevator.

I have seen this personally work and believe it is a good idea. I have also seen it happen in different capacities – organizations have used it as a fundraiser or organizations have even used it as a community service event.

If it works well enough during move in, why not offer the service at the end of the school year when students are moving out? Because students move out constantly during final exam week as they finish with their exams, you have a good opportunity for steady business for a full week instead of just one day.

Go get ‘em! I’d love to hear if you take advantage of this idea or a spin off of it to see how it worked for you! Leave a comment if you have done this or know someone who has.

I currently have the archives area shown because it was a requirement for a couple different paid review websites that I use, however, as month after month passes, it gets so long! I either want to get rid of it or figure out how to shorten it to say maybe the last 5 months only.

The other area I am thinking about knocking off is the categories section. Do you use it? I know for me, if I was looking for something specific I would do a search on the website rather than utilize the categories on the sidebar. Now having the categories is good for when you want to link from a post to another area of your site (say a whole topic of posts such as business ideas or monetizing websites), but this is also a long list that as time goes on, will probably only get longer.

What do you guys think? Keep them, loose them, or keep one or the other?

CashCrate is a great system because you can make money without even filling out the surveys. Although filling out the surveys means that you can make more money, it is time consuming and can be a bit of a pain. The problem with these surveys and offers is that to complete one you will definitely have to give up your email address and will most likely have to complete other offers for it to go through. However, there are some great ones that pay well, if you pay. For instance, I completed the Netflix offer which was a 15 day free trial and then costs like $8.99 a month after that. I joined through CashCrate and submitted it as being completed, and although they waited the 15 days to make sure that I actually joined the service and made the first monthly payment, I was then paid $15.00 – so I essentially made $6.01 for joining Netflix which I had been wanting to do anyway. If you take some of the higher paying offers that you may spend a couple bucks on, you can make even more money back. Some offers will cost you $2-$5 to complete (usually for shipping of something like a book or DVD) and then you’ll get paid say $15-$20.

However, surveys are just the tip of the iceberg with CashCrate. They have a great referral system which allows you to promote a referral link on your website or in forums. When people sign up through your link, you get paid. When the person completes their first $10 worth of offers (the minimum payout), then you as the referrer get paid $3.00, these are your first level referrals. You then also make money from your second level referrals. This means that when you refer someone to CashCrate and then they refer someone else, you make money that way. Starting out, you make 20% of what your referrals make and 15% of what their referrals make; yet as you refer more people, this percentage gets adjusted and can increase.

So, if you can continually refer people to CashCrate, or any similar service that has the same kind of referral program set up, you can be making money without even having to fill out the surveys. This is the point that I hope to get it. So far I have 13 first level referrals and a second level referral. As these people continue to refer others, I will continue to make money.

Here is the important secret though – you need to complete your first $10 worth of offers to really take advantage of the program. So, spend 30 minutes when you sign up and just keep completing offers. If you reach that $10 mark, great, but you could always keep going. For my first check, I only had one referral payment of $3 and the other $20 some was from referrals. For April so far, I am making about $10 from my referrals. So if you join and complete that first $10 mark and then refer people, you can really make some money with the CashCrate program.

Now, this is a great side income generator so, I encourage you to join CashCrate, complete the $10 worth of offers, and then promote the hell out of the program. It is great to watch your monthly earnings continue to rise and receive emails saying that you have earned more money for not doing any work.

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Are you already a member of CashCrate? How are you promoting the service and earning money? I’d love to hear other people’s success stories from using the program!