Imagine having your own comic shop.

Many of us think about owning our own business, but the realities of day to day living make it too risky and expensive to quit your job and chase a dream. It shouldn’t be that way. And I’m finding that it doesn’t have to be that way if you are willing to adjust your dream a bit.

Absolute Sandman
One of my featured
products

The web makes it possible to start your own business for very little money. Affiliate programs make it possible to start selling with very little risk (to you or your customer). Combined, these let you start your business working nights and weekends without quitting your job. The downside is that other companies make the bulk of the profit from your sales. The upside is that you get to build up a customer base with little start up cost or risk. When you are successful in generating traffic and sales you will have an excellent “jumping-in” point for a more serious retail store of your own.

Go ahead, unleash your inner entrepreneur.

Pride of Baghdad
Another featured item

For me, taking the fan-boy plunge and starting down the path to living the dream means adding an Amazon.com aStore to this website. The aStore is a recent addition to the Amazon.com affiliate program. According to Amazon.com: “aStore is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.” You set up the store by defining some categories, selecting featured items for each category and choosing a few other options. Then Amazon provides a couple lines of HTML to embed in your website and “voila!”… instant website!

Here are the 7 steps to starting yourself down this path:

1. If you don’t already have your own website, register a domain name and set up hosting. I use Anhosting for hosting my website. Click on the link and check them out. If you are looking for a hosting service you really should consider them because they offer a lot of features for a very low price. For $6.95 a month, they will host your website on their servers. Signing up for a year costs you $83.40 and includes the cost of domain registration. That is pretty much your only monetary cost (plan to invest many hours of your time).

2. Again, if you don’t already have your own website, you can now set one up. I chose to use the free blogging software package Wordpress for my site. Anhosting provides a simple setup utility to get up and running with Wordpress quickly. They also provide a site builder tool, although I didn’t take advantage of it. Wordpress was all I needed. The hardest part was setting up my “theme” which is the overall look of the site. I started with an existing free theme as a template and then built mine. I wanted the page to have a look and feel sort of like a comic book page. It’s a perpetual work-in-progress.

3. Sign up as and Amazon.com affiliate.

4. Once you are part of the Amazon.com affiliate program, set up an aStore. Pick your categories and select up to nine featured items. Using the aStore setup wizard, modify the colors and options to fit your site.

5. Embed the aStore HTML into your website. Here’s where I ran into a little bit of trouble. My theme’s width turned out to be too narrow to display the entire aStore. I had to create a separate HTML page to house the aStore. Getting this page to have an appearance similar to the main site was a pain. This page is also looking to be a perpetual work-in-progress.

6. Now comes the hard part. Driving traffic to your store. You get a cut of every sale made through your store. Not a huge cut, after all Amazon.com needs to make some money and they handle all of the inventory and shipping, but with very little upfront investment you can make your first step into having your own online comic shop.

7. Profit.

With Amazon you can
sell other items like
DVDs

I’m still working on step 6. If I figure out the secret to connecting customers with my store I’ll pass it along.

So there you have it. For those of us who’ve always thought about having our own comic shop but need to keep our day jobs, an excellent option is now available.

You can see my store by clicking on the link in the upper left of the site.

Check out my store and pick-up that something that you’ve been wanting for a while. Because you deserve it.