While Marina was living in Costa Rica and traveling with her family, she decided it would be fun to blog about it.  It was when people were contacting her about their travels to Central America where she discovered a huge void in the travel industry: information about where to go with a family in Central America.  Marina took advantage of the situation and started her own business, helping families find more boutique hotels and packages for their entire family.

This led to an extremely niche business for Marina which has allowed her to make a living and travel to amazing places with VIP service for free.  Not a bad way to take your family to trips you would have taken anyway, all on someone else's dime.

Marina shares her story of how she got started, and how she built her business from just a blog to much more. 

How did you monetize this idea? Originally the business plan was going to be to work with the companies hotels and resorts, and then it would be based...

I honestly don't believe it does.  Sure, you look at the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg,  and you immediately put yourself down because well, you used DOS, and you were totally okay with it, right?  Or you had your favorite tracks on MySpace, so you felt no need for anything else.  (And if you don't know what DOS is, *sigh*, don't say anything because you'll make me feel old.)

Granted, I believe people like them are absolutely brilliant too.  However, I'm not going to let the fact that I never got into Harvard (okay, I never tried), stop me from following a dream.

Here is what I believe entrepreneurship takes, and it's just two simple things:  A Dream and Willingness.

Yep, it's that simple.  You see you don't need a ton of money, and you don't need to be the smartest person you know.  You can always hire out the tasks that you don't know how to do.  In fact, if you know how to do EVERYTHING, you're kind of a freak of nature.

So...

So you have this best friend, and you both have an interest in the same thing, and you think you would be great business partners.  

So the natural step is to start a business, right?

Well, just take a quick step back.  Sure, you're right a partnership with your best friend could work out really well.  You can split the costs, along with the work, and you could end up moving that business forward faster than you ever dreamed.  

BUT.....Not trying to be a negative Nancy, but you could also end up with a failed business and a friendship that no longer exists.

I'm not trying to scare you, but there are definitely things you need to consider along with the preparations you need to make before you jump in with both feet.  I talked with my friend Holly Signorelli who laid out five great tips that we can do to set-up the partnership for success.  

These are really, really important steps!  Just because you think you know someone on a personal level,...

Rachel Rofé is back for another great talk with us, and this time we’re going to breakdown the world of copywriting and sales letters.

This is a super important topic because if you own a business of any kind, whether it be product or service based, you need to sell your item in order to make money.  You can put it out there and hope for the best.  Or you can create a great offering, and detail that offering with great copy, which will put you at a massive advantage.

Rachel is here to breakdown the three steps we need to take for a killer sales page.

1. Create an Offer That Your Audience Really Needs

A lot of times people don't do their research and create an offer that their audience really doesn't even want.  One of the best things you can do is to talk to people and find out what they're willing to buy for a problem you can solve.  You can use your current audience and list if you have one, and simply ask them via email or even a survey....

After growing up in a pretty unconventional environment, Tania left behind her ‘natural roots’.   However, after becoming a mom she started to become more aware of the bad product in so many of our beauty product.  She started getting more interested in the topic and decided to start a blog (after everyone kept asking her the same questions).  From there, that passion and hobby became a bit time-consuming.  She decided to officially turn it either info a full-time business or settle on a hobby.

She decided to take her wealth of knowledge and just make her own company from it, by making her own natural beauty line.

What was your first step in starting a skincare line?  Research.  She’s super big on research and decided to find out first if this was something she could do herself or if she needed to find someone else to do it for her.  Once she decided she could do it on her own, she made a contingency plan that if she...

No matter what you're doing in life, you should never set your creative juices on the back burner.  After coming home on the weekends, completely drained by the work of her corporate job, Becca Piastrelli took this to heart and started nurturing her creativity through a blog.  When her posts started gaining momentum on Pinterest, she figured she might be on to something.  That's when The Dabblist went from something a little fun to a full fledge career!

Becca had an incredible story to share with us about her journey from Corporate America to entrepreneurship.

How exactly did the Dabblist.com come about?  What started as a weekend outlet to discover and nuture creativity, turned into a blog, and then launched into tons of shares on Pinterest.  When Becca realized she was looking more forward to her weekends than her weeks, she decided it was time to take the plunge.  It was six months ago, and she hasn't looked back!

What was the first step you made...