Kenji Crosland: What Makes a Person an Entrepreneur?

What makes a person an entrepreneur? Maybe it’s just a decision to do something different with your life. That’s how BizSugar Contributor of the Week Kenji Crosland discovered his passion.

“I became an entrepreneur in 2009 when I quit my job as a corporate headhunter in Tokyo and moved back to the U.S. with no job prospects, and no experience in the areas where I wanted to work,” Crosland remembers.

He first hit upon blogging as a way to promote his own venture and the services he provides.

“As an English major, I thought it would be a good idea to start blogging to promote my services as a freelance writer,” Crosland writes. “The more I dove into the Web world, the more I thought about what I could do to change it. I taught myself how to program using the Ruby on Rails web development framework, and created the database driven website goldhat.org.”

Launching his own Website quickly taught him the barriers facing most online entrepreneurs.

“User adoption was abysmal,” Crosland said. “I learned very quickly…how hard it was to build a project on such a scale all by myself.”

But, like all good entrepreneurs, Crosland learned from his failures as well as his successes.

“The failure of goldhat, however, opened many doors for me,” he said. “I used it as my resume–showing that I knew how the web works and that I had the skills and initiative to be an asset to any web startup.”

Finding His True Calling

“I quickly realized that my amateur programming skills weren’t a match for what most web startups were looking for,” Crosland said. “My knowledge of code and blogging, however, was invaluable knowledge for an SEO/Inbound marketer to have.

Once he spotted an opportunity, Crosland dived in head first.

That’s what I do now,” he says. “I’m an SEO/inbound marketing consultant for great startups. My two main clients are evenues.com and vittana.org. I help advise these companies on content initiatives and help them with onsite optimization issues to help drive more traffic and conversions to their respective site.”

Crosland uses many tools in his business, including BizSugar.com.

“BizSugar has been an invaluable resource for me to keep in tune with just what kind of content small business owners and entrepreneurs find useful,” Crosland says. “Since one of eVenues target markets is very similar to BizSugar’s demographic, I rely on BizSugar to help me get a clear idea of where we should take eVenue’s content strategy.”

You can also check Crosland out on his own Website, www.unreadyandwilling.com!

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