Building your own online business should not be difficult.
If you are a heart-centered, multi-passionate entrepreneur, follow my6-Step Roadmap. I share how to start building your own successful online business. Use this Roadmap to also attract your ideal clients, turn your creativity, passions and purposeinto profits.
There are various proven steps you can follow to guarantee your online success.
Especially when you are starting an online business. Many guru’s and experts will confirm that there is not only one specific plan for building a successful online business. As a result, I have seen thousands of people start and grow a successful online business by starting here:
Find a need you can fulfill with your passion, purpose or creativity
Design your platforms and touch points so your audience can reach you
Build a user-centered website and use SEO to drive the right traffic to your site
Create your brand personality, message, voice and establish an online presence
Offer FREE lead magnets that will help your reputation as an expert and give value to your audience
Set up automated funnels to help increase your income, nurture your audience and grow your online presence
If you are new to the online world, you can definitely benefit from the process above. Most certainly, even seasoned online entrepreneurs can enhance their online presence by following the above steps.
NOTE: To make it easier to implement these steps, I created a mini-course that will help you start your online business without the overwhelm.
It is specifically designed for heart-centered, aspiring multi-passionate entrepreneurs, like yourself, to help you build a successful online business.
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Looking at the above steps, you can see there are a lot that goes into building an online business. If you are new to the game of online success, it can surely be overwhelming. Even confusing and hard to know where to start.
Should you start with developing your product first?
rather identifying your target or ideal client first?
Perhaps you think you should first build your website?
maybe an online social presence?
So many choices could easily lead to quitting before even you even get started!
But this is why I am here!
I will guide you step-by-step on how to build an online business inside my free mini-course
Not only have I done this (successfully) but I have also helped many entrepreneurs. I help you discover your “zone of genius” and share it with the world.
As a solo entrepreneur for more than 16 years, I built 3 businesses with these exact strategies. I am teaching my students & clients these strategies inside my business membership. I have taken what worked, what did not work well and what could work better and created a mini-course or complete Roadmap.
This Roadmap is a 6-Step Business Course and really helps with reducing the overwhelm of starting an online business.
First, let’s define what it means to Build an Online Business:
TIP: Digital services, products, solutions, coaching or blogging should fulfill a need in the market.
Therefore, it will be a successful, profitable business and not just a side hustle or a hobby
Your choice of
an online service,
n online service,
a digital product,
a virtual sol
a digital product,
a virtual solution,
online coaching or
monetized blogging
should attract the right clients/customers you would like to work with (your ideal audience)
An Online Business should build a brand identity, either a personal brand (yourself) or a business brand (a registered entity) to stand out online and attract your ideal audience
Digital Businesses use a website as it’s main “shop front” to operate from. In other words, it helps direct interested followers into regular buyers by offering specific solutions for each touch point during the customer journey.
Starting an online business requires the help of an expert and sound legal advice.
Unlike any other business, it is less confusing and much easier to manage the compliance side of an online business.
In addition, your online business could also be an extension of a physical business. Always ensure all logistics are carefully handled to avoid confusion .
Like any other business, an online business requires a developed marketing strategy to ensure
In other words, get clear on your vision and goals for your online business.
Having the right mindset, paired with a vision of what your business will do and who it will serve will help you craft the right plan to reach your business goals.
Brainstorm all your business ideas that aligns with your passions, talents and gifts. Above all, find the reason WHY you want to pursue this idea. Getting to know WHO will be interested in buying your “ideas”, help find the answers to WHAT problems you will solve.
Follow by doing market research to help you understand what defines your brand uniqueness.
Creating a financial plan helps to predict your expenses. It assists in creating realistic goals and how to reach them by implementing the B.O.S.S Compass.
The BOSS Compass gives you access to my pricing pillars and pricing formula. It is a complete guideline on how to calculate the best price for your ideal offerings.
Once you are clear on your WHY, your WHO and your WHAT, you can proceed to choose your HOW.
Choosing your online business model is necessary to define the legal formation and requirements you need to comply to. Managing your online business can be confusing if you don’t understand the legal and statutory compliance you need to maintain. Invest in expert help here.
Defining your online business model, will also help clarify your Brand identity. Choosing a personal brand identity will mean your online business model will be operating under your personal name. Registering your online business as a separate entity, your brand identity will be your registered Business name.
One major decision to help clarify your business goals, visions and core values is defining your business deal breakers. For example, one of my greatest business deal breakers is: “I will not have a physical location or office space for clients as my core business goal is to be as virtual and online as possible so I can reach more people, and enjoy freedom of time and location.”
Final process in this step is to write down
your core business values,
an elevator pitch,
a vision and mission statement and regularly refer back to them as a guideline in any decision making process.
Building your Brand for your Online Business is just as important as building a profitable business.
Step 2 – Your Persona
Nothing will accelerate your growth more than positioning yourself to stand out of the crowd.
Many new online entrepreneurs miss the importance of their own “magic” or “zone of genius”. As this is the key to building an online Brand or Persona. This positions your Brand as the “go-to” resource in the market.
Taking the process of defining your business model one step further, you need to focus on defining your Brand. Your Brand Identity is linked to your Business model and this determines how you will show up online.
Your Persona or Brand name will become your domain name for your website. You will need to register that domain name before you “launch” your brand online.
The Brand Voice and Brand Communication Style of your Brand is linked to your personal story or “journey”. The very reason why you decided to do this or your WHY. This is essential in creating a Brand message to captivate your ideal clients.
Deciding on a personal brand, you will probably opt-out of choosing a logo and rather use your personal photos. This is a good time to invest in some professional photo shoots for profile pictures and website photos.
Let’s say you go with a Business Brand, choose to invest in a graphic designer. Graphic Designers help to design your brand logo and a Brand “signature”.
A successful Brand strategy is just as important as your marketing strategy. Keep it aligned with your business goals and visions, and create your Brand manifesto to keep your brand message aligned.
Choosing your Online Platforms for your Business is key to building future success
Step 3 – Your Platforms
When you launch an online business on social media platforms, you do not own any rights on it. You stand the risk of losing your profile should the social media platform decides to terminate your profile or page. This is why it is essential to build a platform that you own, like a website.
A front-end website and back-end email marketing platform should be your highest priority when choosing a platform for your online business.
These platforms can be optimized to attract ideal clients, convert them into buyers and nurture them for years to come. This will result in future recurring income.
Automation and email sequences can help you enhance your nurturing process and promote your offerings on autopilot.
Social Media Platforms is only a marketing strategy to help you extend your promotions to a wider audience. It helps to grow your following and email subscribers.
Choosing platforms that aligns with your marketing strategies contributes to growing your online business and provide value for your audience.
The best social media platforms is where your ideal clients hang out. It is not their job to find you! So make sure you hang out where they do.
Start by choosing one platform. Learn all you can about the platforms’ strategies. It will make it possible to use this platform to its maximum potential. Find ways to ensure your organic marketing efforts are maximized on this platform.
Use clever BIO’s to promote yourself and your offerings and lead them into your sales funnel.
Implement social media tools to help you schedule your content. This way you can stay consistent and in front of mind on this platform.
Detailed content planning will help you to add value, build authority and share your authenticity on this platform.
Content captions and clear call-to-actions lead followers into becoming loyal buyers, use this strategically.
Design your website around your audience and ideal clients, not around you.
Decide what actions you want your visitors to take and guide them by using touch points. Touch points gets them to the next desired action.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used to optimize your pages and test all your online processes before launching. Broken links could hurt your rankings. Use free tools like SureOak to help analyze how you can optimize your website.
Sometimes just a single landing page can help your audience take the desired action. Instead of taking them through all your pages on your website, where they might lose interest before taking any action.
Ensure you implement an email marketing system that supports your marketing strategy. It should offer automation and sequences for a nurturing strategy.
Create a welcome sequence for each different action your visitors take.
Efficient email campaigns can be used to promote your offers, share discounts, launch new offers and nurture your audience.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks all your conversions on all your web pages.
Virtual Communities, like Facebook Groups are a great way to build an online community. Like-minded people engage and sell their unique offerings inside these groups.
Finding and creating profitable offers will ensure the profitability of your online business
Step 4 – Your Products
Your offerings or products are the one unique thing that will ensure your online business idea turns into profits.
Create and design your offers with your audience in mind and ensure it is aligned with your purpose.
I like to refer to your products or services as your “perfect profitable offer”. Your offer needs to be the thing makes you want to get out of bed and do what you do!
Discovering your IKIGAI, a Japanese concept, is to help discover what this “thing” is.
Pricing is just as important as your actual offering. Research competitors and survey your ideal clients to get that “sweet spot” to ensure your ideas turns into profits.
Once you have your perfect profitable offer, determine your pricing. Then you need a way to receive online payments from your buyers. Your payment structure will determine what solution suits you best. If you choose once off payments, the solutions are less complicated. If you want to offer down payments and discounts, then you need a more complexed payment solution.
Online payment gate software or cart software should be chosen carefully. Always read the fine print on how much commission is taken per payment. PayPal for instance takes between 2-5% of each online sale. Make sure this is included in your pricing, to avoid errors in predicting your profits.
Promoting your offers should be planned and mapped out. Using a profit planner can reduce a huge amount of stress. The uncertainty of future profit predictions and expected outcomes can be reduced this way.
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Creating Content to promote your profitable offers is vital for the success of any online business
Step 5 – Your Promotions
As an online entrepreneur, you probably know by now what the greatest secret is to an online presence? CONTENT! Yes, content is KING!
Knowing how to leverage your content in a way that drives traffic & conversions, helps you become the authority in your space.
Content creation should be done strategically to ensure it aligns with your marketing and Brand goals.
Connection and engagement with your followers or audience is necessary to ensure they get to know, like and trust you.
Increase your online efforts with my 5C’s Content Method. This method help you develop a content plan with core Topics and Categories.
Choose a content delivery platform and build from there, for example a Blog. Then re-purpose your blog posts into YouTube videos, Podcast Audio, Social Media Posts etc.
Always ensure your content are niche specific. To ensure that you are not talking to a crowd but rather to one person in the crowd.
Block out time in your calendar to create valuable content. Quantity is not the focus here but rather quality content. Use social media tools to help you schedule this content on your social media platforms for evergreen results.
Develop a social-list building strategy where you can provide free content to get followers. Guide them from the awareness stage to the buying stage of your sales funnel.
Ensure you track all your performances across all platforms. When you know your numbers you can build better strategies and make the changes required for better outcomes.
Content is KING but Knowledge is POWER!
Implementing systems, solutions and sales funnels will help your online business remaining profitable
Step 6 – Your Profits
Who does not like a steady flow of recurring income into their bank account? I don’t know such a person and I am sure you don’t either.
Becoming a BRAVE version of yourself, will enable you to do what you love.
Building a successful online business that helps you reach your dream goals, requires systems. Systems ensure all your efforts are continuously bringing you the outcomes you desire.
A sales system is a vital part of building a successful online business.
Passive Income requires “funnels” to channel all your efforts through a “pipe line”. From here it is directed into the desired “buckets” to reach your end goals.
Basic sales funnels starts at
the awareness stage,
then interest,
consideration,
intent,
evaluation and
only then purchase.
It is a long road before your prospects become buyers.
Decide on a customer product map to create customer touch points for each stage of your sales funnel.
Understanding your Financial Freedom Point will help you to track your profit goals and measure your online efforts.
Implementing different funnels can increase your income and provide a wider range of solutions to your ideal clients. To name a few; a webinar funnel; a book funnel; a digital course funnel etc.
Start with a simple funnel like a Webinar Funnel.
By using a basic sales strategy, your prospect will move through the different stages of this funnel to become a buying client.
The awareness stage can be a social media post about your topic.
The interest stage will be signing up for your free webinar.
The consideration stage will be showing up to watch the webinar.
The intent stage is completing the exercises in the workbook.
The evaluation stage is asking questions and receiving answers about the webinar’s topic.
The final stage, purchase will be when your ideal client proceeds to buy your offer you promote in your webinar.
This type of funnel can be turned into an evergreen webinar solution.
The “system” used here is a Webinar Funnel.
The “strategy” used here is a Customer Journey Map and
The “solution” is turning a live webinar into an evergreen webinar
It does not matter what type of funnel you use, or how many different strategies you align it with, you would like to use an evergreen solution. This will help you get recurring profits on autopilot.
then use 3 systems to get you to recurring profits.
The 3 systems I recommend is
a proper email marketing system,
a content creation and scheduling system and
a bookkeeping system.
Are you ready to dive deeper into building an online business?
You are invited to join the B.O.S.S Society. If you are just starting your online journey and you want to seriously up level your game plan, this business membership gives you access to tried and tested online marketing strategies, mindset coaching, and money mastery to help you Build Online Sales Solutions [B.O.S.S] with purpose for profits!
You will also receive valuable online business resources, tools and discounted offers every month & business advice, money & mindset coaching right in your inbox.
As a member of the B.O.S.S Society, you will gain access to our private online community, Profitable Online Creatives, where networking with like-minded creative entrepreneurs will help you turn your game plans into purposeful profits.
This Blog post is packed with information and to help you take action, you can find access to a FREEBusiness mini-coursehere.
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