Assuming you’re pretty new to these topics, I suggest you go through the material once to familiarize yourself with it. I think the biggest hurdle you’ll need to overcome is just learning the jargon. Once you do, the rest should be fairly easy to understand.
For the record, I don’t like it when people say, “I”m not very technically oriented, so keep this really simple.”
If you have ever gone to school to get your real estate license anywhere, you didn’t say, “Gee, I’m not very savvy at real estate, so this is going to be really hard for me,” did you? Or college?
What I’m trying to say is, you’re a human being with an interest and desire to learn something new. This is no different than learning a foreign language or learning to ski or sky dive or drive a race car or cook gourmet food. Everything you might want to learn has its own specialized vocabulary, and while the words might sound familiar at first, they probably don’t mean what you think they mean. So it’s confusing.
You’re starting down a path of discovery that’s no different than anything else you’ll encounter that’s new to you. The hardest part is the jargon! If you know anybody who got their real estate license or went to law school, they’ll say the same thing — most of it was just learning a new vocabulary, and how familiar words are often used to mean unfamiliar things. That’s not “techie”. That’s “human learning”.
The stuff you’ll need to build a business online is no more complicated than the stuff on your phone. In fact, it’s a LOT SIMPLER than learning to build a so-called “brick and mortar” business! There’s some overlap with both using your phone and building a B&M business, but the things you’ll need to learn may be named something different and the things you’ll need to click will be located in different places — and sometimes in very odd and unexpected places. Sometimes they only appear or are enabled at the “right time”.
In particular, almost everything you’ll do is going to include one or more patterns that look like this:
- Open a file or Create a New file
- Edit / Modify the file
- Save / Update your work
- Cancel / Undo / Redo some or all of your work
- Search for something
- Replace something
- Copy something (maybe to the clipboard)
- Paste the clipboard into the file
- Delete something
- Close the file
The focus is either on what’s highlighted, selected, or around or next to the “cursor” or the next/last thing you touch(ed).
You don’t need to memorize this because you already know it. And it’s universal. VIRTUALLY EVERY SOFTWARE PROGRAM AND APP YOU’LL EVER USE will employ these ten functions.
The thing you’ll be working with may not be called a “file”, but a “page”, “document”, “filter”, “recording”, “video”, “image” or something else. To the computer, they’re all the same: just a bucket of bits.
Next to the jargon, the hardest thing to get used to is that not everything is in the same place. Here’s what I mean: if you’re like most people, you keep all of your clothes in a closet. When you set up a website, you’ll have a lot of things to manage, and you’ll naturally think they’ll all be stuffed into the same place. But, alas, that’s not how things work in the web world. You shirts might be in the closet in your room; your pants may be in your garage. Shoes might be in a closet in the house across the street. And your private stuff might be in the attic. There may not be any rhyme or reason to it, and all there is to do is two things: first, figure out where certain things are kept; second, memorize that bit of data — AND how you finally found it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found something and used it, then later I couldn’t remember where it was; so I thought about how I found it, and then I was able to find it again, only quicker. Eventually, it becomes second nature.
And just about everything you mess with online that does the same thing will use the same stuff. The trouble is, different tools usually keep their things in different places. So, the game is simple: you probably know what you’re looking for, you just need to figure out where it’s kept. In other words, think of it like a treasure hunt. And the people who are able to do this work the fastest have figured out where everything is squirreled away and can find it really quickly.
Here’s an Analogy
What you’re doing by setting up an online business is like creating a restaurant from scratch, starting with a large empty building. You probably want to build an area where guests will be seated and served; a counter with extra goodies and a cash register or two; a space for take-out / pick-up orders; a kitchen area with stovetops, grills, ovens, sinks, prep areas; a cooler and a freezer; storage for non-perishable stuff, and other things.
If you’ve never worked in a restaurant before, but maybe eaten in a few, some things will be familiar to you, while others will be totally new. Someone will mention “the cooler” and you’ll go looking for … what? Or the “freezer”? They’re the same things you have in your house or apartment, but WAY BIGGER! And they don’t look anything like what you expect. Someone might say, “got get some hamburger patties” and you’ll think of a couple patties you’d pull out of your fridge. However, they may be talking about a 50 pound box in the freezer! Pretty much everything you’ll find in there will be familiar, and at the same time, very different.
Think about everything you’d need to do to open a restaurant — if you’re like 95% of the other people reading this, you’ve probably never worked in a restaurant or even been in the kitchen or back areas. Even if you have, you’ve probably never built a restaurant the ground up. So it’s natural that you’re going to feel a bit overwhelmed at the thought of taking a huge empty space that might remind you of an airplane hanger and turning it into a quiet, intimate, full-featured restaurant (assuming that’s your goal).
Luckily, building an online business doesn’t require nearly as much effort as building a new business in an empty warehouse. There’s a script I used to use to whip out an entire sales site for a new digital downloadable product on a new domain in about 10 minutes. Sadly, that script stopped being maintained, and it doesn’t work any more. But there are just as many newer ones that you can learn to use; and once you get proficient at using them, you’ll be able to stand up a new sales page / site for something really quickly.
But your first one or two are going to be a grind. Which is why I suggest to go through the material once first to get familiar with the jargon. And at some point you’ll find a suggestion for making your first sales site a LOT simpler. Also, you’ll run into a lot of recommended products along the way, but don’t buy anything until you’ve finished going through all of the material. Seriously.
(It’s like the old saw where you’re taking a test and the instructions say “read through the test in its entirety (all 25 questions) before you start writing down your answers.” And then near the end it says, “Only answer the first three questions.”)
So, welcome to this Big New Adventure!