Welcome! Are you looking to start your own online business or if you have already started the business looking to grow it?
Trust me you’re in good hands. In this article, I will walk you through how to start an online business from nothing.
Feel free to skip ahead or go through each section one by one. In the following article, I will discuss:
-Overview of Online Business
-How to pick the idea for your Business
-Registering Your Business & Open Business Account
-Create Business Plan
-Making the Products or Services (MVP)
-Market & Sell 90% of the Time
Overview of Online Business
Starting a business can be one of the best things you will ever do. When you begin this process it can seem hard and confusing.
Trust me I’ve been there. You spend hours and hours reading content that doesn’t really help and then the content that does help still doesn’t do much for you if you don’t know how to execute it.
Over my years of studying business, I have compiled a easy to read guide that answers most of the questions about starting a online business.
The purpose of this article is to provide you with the content and practical steps needed to start your business after reading this guide.
A business is when a person or entity offers a product of service in exchange for money. The highest paid businesses or the businesses that provide the best value to customers and have the greatest amount of reach and grabs peoples’ attention.
To succeed in business you must learn to apply core principles and practices to your life and work for maximum achievement. Generally, a person has an idea for a business then works to validate if it is worth pursuing.
Often exploration is the first step when trying to find business ideas worth looking into. I will give you the phases of business that I think will help you see the overall picture.
These phases of business are from a author name, Howard Love, who discusses these phases and what happens in each phase. These phases of business are from a lean start up stand point but can be applied to people who desire to start a business from home and often keep their day jobs until business revenues is at least stable and producing same as the day job or higher.
The phases of business are called the J-Curve.
Phase 1- Create
This phase you create the products or services.
Try not to spend to much time here because a common mistake of business owners is to spend years creating a product or making a service that know one cares about or buys.
Spend a brief period doing this. In the business world, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product made in a miniature form or on a small scale.
In other words, this is a testing product to see if it can generate any interest in potential customers. If no interest is generated then the product may need to be changed.
Phase 2- Release
During this phase businesses release their MVP usually for free or even pay others to use it.
At this phase your looking for feedback and data to understand more about your product to know what direction to go in.
If you’re getting bad reviews this can help you make changes and if you’re getting good reviews this can be momentum for you.
Phase 3- Morph
This phase is when businesses are continuing to change or morph the product or service until it has reached an acceptable threshold in terms of attracting and retaining potential customers.
The morph is in direct response to the feedback from people who have used the free product.
Phase 4- Model
Once businesses have found what version of their product is most attractive to customers then they find a business model that helps them generate revenue.
I will not discuss business models in depth because there are numerous ones.
The goal here is to find a business models that help you drive profits and grow more and more each year.
Phase 5- Scale
After your business has a solid business model next is to find ways to scale. This is not easy but will help you tremendously once done correctly.
The whole point here is to identify what marketing channel give you the greatest return on investments or ROI.
Then you put more money and resources into this channel for heavy and rapid growth.
Phase 6- Harvest
This phase is where the company has so much success it can either be sold or get put through a initial public offering or IPO.
I recommend not worrying about the mansion or fancy cars you will drive once you get here because this is rare.
Aim to build a basic business that does anywhere from $100k to $1 million or more in revenue.
Start your Free Wealth Creation/Business Training NOW!
To do things faster Start Your Business Now
Other Articles to help you understand wealth creation more:
Complete Guide to Wealth Creation
How to Start a Business with No Cash
How to pick the Idea for Your Business
Picking your business is not easy but often people have to many ideas and try to work on all of them.
The best advice is to focus on one idea first. In my study of business and listening to hours of content the best business owners use what is called the 20 idea method.
This method is where you list 20 things then you only proceed with 1 of them.
Jeff Bezos, currently the richest man in the world, in this documentary spoke about how he listed 20 products to sell then choose books when he founded Amazon.
This is a powerful method to help you decide what idea to use for your business as you get started and begin. To do this is simple.
Take a sheet of paper and a pen then write out 20 things you are interested in selling. Once you compile your list pick only one of the 20 to move forward with.
Search and find data on the one thing you choose so that you have data to back your logic around choosing what you intend to sell.
If the data doesn’t support a reason to enter into selling your product of interest then it may be wise to pick another item from the list of 20 you made.
Start your Free Wealth Creation/Business Training NOW!
To do things faster Start Your Business Now
Other articles to help boost your knowledge of Personal Finance & Business:
How & Where to start Budgeting? Should you get a Financial Advisor?
Best Wealth Building Books for year 2020
Register Your Business & Open Business Account
It sucks but there are so many different types of business structures you can use to register your business.
You can look them up to see which one you can go with. Most people usually start with a limited liability company or LLC or they use sole proprietorship to conduct business.
Some people never registered their business and just start going hard into the marketplace. When they drive sales they just add the extra money made to their taxes.
Its your choice but be sure to register your business fast so you can get on with things and eventually get to marketing and selling.
Find the places in your local area that are entities that allow you to register your company. Use google search for the city or area your in if you don’t know where to go.
It can be a register of deeds or any such government entity. Sometimes you can register all online which makes it easier but sometimes you may have to do it in person.
To open a business account go to your local credit union first before going to commercial banks.
Credit union business accounts may have little to no conditions plus they are not trying to suck you dry of every dollar.
Commercial banks may have hidden fees and other ways of taking money from you when using your business account for transactions.
Start your Free Wealth Creation/Business Training NOW!
To do things faster Start Your Business Now
Other articles to read for personal development and business material:
The Wealthy didn’t panic during the Coronavirus because they knew these 7 Things
How Regular People are Becoming Millionaires
Create Business Plan
You must have a business plan. I get it and I know you will want things to happen faster and I completely get it.
A business plan is necessary because it really helps you think through things you may have not considered or left out.
Also, making a business plan demonstrates business competence. If you don’t know how to make a business plan then you need to learn how to make one.
It depends on what your goals are but I personally am not about to spend months making a business plan if anything a few weeks or so.
I recommend for first time business owners or beginners to use business plan templates. With most templates you simply plug in information and it is very easy.
What happens here also is that the business plan is done poorly because the business owner doesn’t have enough knowledge of the industry they are entering so when business plan is completed it is not that helpful.
To avoid this mistake you must be one of the people that knows the most about your industry and when entering a business market at first you may not know the most but you need a strong basic understanding of the business.
Later you will continue to learn and become a thought leader or have an advanced understanding compared to most people.
This gives you an advantage. Lets take a step back before writing the business plan. Spend 3 months, maybe less, before writing the business plan or do it as the same time as you do your market research, studying what you need to do to be successful in your industry of choice.
I know I mentioned not spending months to write a business plan and you still don’t have to but you do need the knowledge to know what techniques and tactics are the most effective in your business you will be starting.
After you develop a basic understating of the market you are going to enter now you complete the business plan.
After your business plan once done make sure you stay current and read for growth so this means setting aside times in your daily schedule to learn more and apply what you know.
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To do things faster Start Your Business Now
More articles to check out:
Making the Products or Services (MVP)
Making the products and services can depend on what you’re actually trying to do.
I recommend making a list of steps in the exact order you have to complete things. Ill provide more information to come and show you how that would look.
Ill give you use some examples. If you want to do online courses as your product then you need figure out the formats, technology and other resources you would need to complete a course.
It is often the hardest at the beginning but once you start making the courses then you get better and can produce courses faster in less time.
This is how you would make your first online course.
Remember when I said to make things easier for yourself using steps up until everything is 100% done. It would look like this:
Step 1- Pick online course topic
Step 2- Decide on the format & make a content outline
Step 3- Organize and identify what technology & online course hosting platform you will use (Doesn’t have to be expensive. Can using your phone or laptop can work and free screen recording software)
Step 4- Pick a station or location to make the online courses
Step 5- Make a schedule and timeline of the times when you will create the courses
Step 6- Edit courses then upload to online course platforms
Step 7– Market & Sell your own courses (This gives you more power and control over your revenues verses letting platforms do it)
When you’re making a product or service be sure to make a mini version or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test to see if people are interested.
Here is a BONUS!
Don’t even make the course yet just make announcements and take pre orders to validate the course and if you get sales go a head and make the course if you don’t get sales change the offer or refund what sales you did get because the demand was not high enough.
I get it you must be thinking didn’t you just tell me to make the course in a MVP form now you’re saying to not make the course until you do pre-order to validate demand.
What I’m saying is that you can choose either way.
If you want to make a MVP to test in the marketplace you can or you can decide to make a offer with the product not created yet to see if you generate pre orders or sales.
Either way is fine.
This example was for a product but you can apply these lessons to a service based business and offer.
The purpose and I emphasis is to get things going fast and get the offer in front of people that are likely to buy.
Start your Free Wealth Creation/Business Training NOW!
To do things faster Start Your Business Now
More Articles to Read:
How to Boost Investment Returns
Fastest Way to Pay off Student Loan Debt
Market & Sell 90% of the Time
Marketing and selling are what makes a business a success or a failure. This part of your business must be taken very seriously.
To many business owners don’t spend enough time on marketing and selling. Your marketing and selling needs to be aggressive and effective.
I will go over a few broad ways to market for the purpose of you taking these ideas and customizing them to your own methods.
Below are the most effective ways to market as of this moment in time.
-Blogging
-Podcasting
-YouTube or any relevant video sharing platform
-Social Media
What ever you decide to do you must incorporate into your marketing strategy the above listed ways because this is where billions of people are spending their time.
What are the odds that your potential customers are along some of these billions of people? I’m sure they are.
When you’re just beginning to market you must understand some core concepts. Marketing is a high-volume and high-quality game.
Whoever produces the highest volume of content and highest quality is the winner. The goal is to get peoples attention and keep it.
The best way to market, according to Moz.com, one of the best marketing blogs worldwide, is to build a community.
All great companies have built a community of people around what their products and services.
Additionally, when you market consider the following as you begin creating your marketing strategy. Moz.com said to have these in place in order from top to bottom:
- Goals
- KPIs/Metrics
- Strategy
- Execution
- Analysis
Your goal could be to have 1K followers on all your social media platforms in 6 months.
Metrics or KPIs are follower count. Strategy is to build content that educates potential buyers and solves their problems.
Execution is making a content calendar and everyday forming content to distribute.
Analysis is what you need to do to see if your actions are working or not and how to adjust to get better results.
Basically, if you’re are selling fitness products like protein supplements then you create content like educational videos on how protein helps you build muscle and enhance strength.
You display or post content in a blog post, YouTube videos, podcast form or on social media.
What some brilliant marketers are doing is making content then customizing them to fit all the major social media platforms other marketing channels.
For example, you make a 30 minute or 1-hour long video of how to pick the right protein for your personal fitness goals then you chop up the content to be available in audio, video and written form to be distributed through a blog post, podcasting, YouTube and social media platforms.
Also, you must make it a habit to post daily and be consistent as much as possible for as long as possible.
The general rule of thumb is to post at least 3 to 7 times a day across multiple platforms.
Additionally, utilize a buyer’s persona this helps you pinpoint exactly who your targeting for your products and services.
As you complete the buyer’s persona now you will know who you’re targeting as you make your content and marketing material.
Lastly, another powerful technique is collaborations.
Simply hit up and ask to interview other successful people in a business market where they have the customers you want to sell to but they are not competitors or sell the exact same things as you.
Interview them with basic questions about what their story is, their life, ambitions, and success experience as well as advice. This exposes your brand to them and their audience or followers.
As far as selling it is simply design a selling process that takes a person from a stranger to making them aware of your brand or business then move them from strangers to buyers.
Make a landing page and drive traffic from marketing tactics you decide to use to the landing page to collect emails, also known as lead magnets.
Next, develop a sequence to provide extreme value that improves their lives and then make your sales offer available to them after the value has been provided.
If you’re marketing through emails lets say you send an email three times a week.
An example is emailing valuable content that helps potential buyers 7 to 10 times then make a sales offer on the eleventh email.
Know one wants to see sale pitches all the time so make a combination of value added and sale offers to balance everything.
Repeat the sequence or adjust to get better results. Do this in any form that is beneficial to you and to grow your sales.
Conclusion
The most important thing about starting a business is to know what you’re doing before starting. Know enough to get started then learn as you build your business.
Please leave a comment below about how this helped you and other questions you may have about starting your own business.
Start your Free Wealth Creation/Business Training NOW!
To do things faster Start Your Business Now
More articles to Read:
What is the FIRE Movement: Financial Independence Retire Early
What is the Psychology of Money
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