How to Start an Online Business
Starting an online business in 2020 has never been more important and easier! Tools for creating websites are easing bariers to entry, not only is this a piece of cake but you can also get your first leads and scale them instantly with the right advice.
Total Cost: 0 USD
Required Tools:
– A Computer.
– Internet Connection.
How to Start an Online Business
Step 1 : Picking A Niche
Zero in on your niche and it will make all the following steps easier
Step 2 Set up a Landing Page
Set up a landing page to start acquiring leads from any channel you wish!
Step 3 Craft Your value proposition
Your value proposition is the cornerstone to all forward facing client content. Nail this and you’ll be on your way.
Step 4 Acquire First Leads
Acquiring your first leads signifies your process is working and there is need in the market. Well done, you will be able to start setting up processes to scale your efforts.
Step 5 Cold Email
Cold Email has been instrumental in me earning a 6 figure salary. Learn this strategy and shoot for the stars.
Step 6 Job Boards
Not only do Job Boards Bring you instant value, they will diversify your backlink profile and be the start of your SEO backlinking strategy.
Step 7 Refine Your Lead Generation
Hone in on whats working and start buiilding out processes for that sweet orgainic lead generation. Uncover what is vital for SEO.
Step 8 Paid Advertising
Figured out your product market fit and have started to see the leads roll in? We don’t like rolling, we like avalanches, lets rock and roll….
Welcome, Introduction:
The Business incubator is a tailor-made course for 2020.
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Online Businesses are thriving now more than ever
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A good process can easily bring in 6 figures
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Nobody is driving and competition is low
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Anybody can achieve success here, it is a matter of getting past all the rubbish.
In this guide, I’m going to teach you, every single step, to start a business and earn 6 figures and beyond.
I’ve been in the business of setting up businesses since 2013. I’ve gone in and out of full-time by myself, to jumping into companies to give them a hand. Ever since I landed my first 10k per month clients I certainly feel like an authority and wanted to give back to the community that has given me so much.
The process for this success is not the result of luck or well blessings, I have taken steps and advice taught to me by others and I have a structured build for replicating this rinse and repeat method to grow businesses successfully.
As a result, years of hard work have been poured into this purpose-built guide. You aren’t just going to learn how to make a 6 figure income, you will find out how to surpass it!
Overview of What’s to come
What is an Online Business?
Online business is any business that runs to some capacity on the internet.
Online businesses can be anything that to some extent using the web as part of its core product offering, although the full service may not be completed through the online medium, the business still relies on the internet for Business as Usual.
Type of online business
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E-commerce
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Lead Generation
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Services
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Design
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Affiliate
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Entertainment
Steps to Starting an Online Business
Step 1 : Picking A Niche
To get started we will zero in on your niche. We’re going to jump right in and get practical so either grab a pen and paper or open a new google doc.
List 5 niches you know or are passionate about.
List 5 key skill sets which you currently have.
List 5 problems, fears and desires of the niches that you selected.
Take a look at the problems and desires of the niches, which of these has the most impact to you?
The next step, find out how capable you are of solving this problem to reach the desired goal.
Are you capable? Welcome to your niche you are now finished with this exercise!
If not, how hard would it be for you to break the problem down and solve it?
Do you know of someone that has solved this problem?
Yes? How are they solving it? > If no, pick the next impact problem/desire and keep trying this funnel till you can find a solution.
Next, are you able to take the solution and help your clients?
Write out the process from start to finish of what you will need to do to complete this solution for your clients.
Now, what do you need to learn in the future to complete this solution ASAP? How long will it take?
Step 2 Set up a Landing Page
Landing pages are possibly the most important tool that you are going to have to lean on to capture client information. Landing pages are also a cash grab for digital marketing courses to sign you up for $150 a month for a simple landing page funnel. Do not fall for this trap trust me I’ve been there.
The alternative? Do it for free, one provider that lets you do this is https://mailchimp.com/features/landing-pages/, be a good online citizen and find 3-5 other sites and compare them. Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Once you have a landing page you can do a range of outreach to start attracting your first leads. I’ll get to that soon in one of our topics below. Now the most important feature of the most important tool is what goes on the landing page.
Step 3 Craft Your value proposition
Creating a value proposition is a critical step in the flow of your business from the clients first touch to converting to a lead. Ideally, a value proposition will have an affinity between a client and their problem, whilst also assuring a solution. This value proposition will be the fire to keep your business burning strong so it is critical that the message is sellable as it will be across your entire online business strategy.
Hubspot is a marketing platform for businesses, although the price of the actual product is quite high, their articles are free and they are great thought leaders. Learn more about crafting your Value proposition on their page here:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/write-value-proposition
Step 4 Acquire First Leads
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Linkedin Outreach
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Linkedin is one of the 2 platforms in 2020 where if you put in the time and produce quality content, you can be seen by a massive amount of people. The other is TikTok, however, TikTok is a lot harder to convert people into leads from.
The mirror of something being hard is yes, something else being incredibly easy. LinkedIn can put you in touch with Hyper-Targeted leads at mass scale. For example, you are able to use different tools to automate your outreach. With just 1 hour of setting up, your LinkedIn can reach out to people with tailored messages and add to your contact count.
This will do 2 things:
1- generate leads straight to your inbox.
2- increase your connections so more people see your post.
If you want to do some research on these tools, they are completely free to start (although there are paywalls). Two that I have used are Octopus and Meet Alfred. Octopus takes longer to set up but can be more reliable. https://octopuscrm.io/
Alfred is super easy to use, however, set up trouble-shooting can be a little painful if you are not into that kind of thing. https://meetalfred.com/. Meet Alfred also has an option to refer people so you can use it for free!
This little hack gives such outstanding value, it makes time and is set and forget, spending time refining your messaging will have a plethora of benefits.
Let’s dive deeper into some other avenues for landing your first leads.
Step 5 – Cold Email
Cold email is amazing. This one method, in particular, is what landed me my first 10k/month lead. With the right messaging hitting the right person at the right time, you can cut away the fat and enjoy the meal.
Like the LinkedIn method, there are strategies to make cold email outreach super easy and super effective.
Some quick tips are to send up to 4 emails to the target up until you receive a response. You will want to test different subject lines to see what is and isn’t working. You will also want to test different types of messaging until you find your product-market fit.
Although this website is trying to sell a product, I really enjoy their tips on writing emails and acquiring your first leads. https://www.leadfuze.com/how-to-write-a-cold-email/
Tasks like building emails lists can take as little as 10 minutes/100 emails at their most efficient, depending on your process. These processes can take a while to gather and the outreach strategies can get very intricate. A good guide on building a typical email outreach list is here:
https://blog.toky.co/how-to-build-a-valid-business-email-list-for-cold-email-campaigns/.
Step 6 – Job Boards:
Job boards are severely underrated! This will take a little bit of set up. If you diversify your link profile with directories, Google will love you and you will start going up in the search rankings! Want to rank 1st for one of your keywords? This is one strategy that will help with your rank.
Check out these sites and post your website on all of them! Do not skip this step! This is vital!
https://www.seocopilot.com.au/blog/australian-business-directories-local-seo/
https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/best-job-boards
These are a few results I received on Google. Why not try yourself, type in Business Directories in “your product delivery area”.
Great you have some avenues to acquiring your first leads. See this through and you will start receiving leads. It is a simple matter of cause and effect.
Step 7 – Refine Your Lead Gen
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SEO
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SEO has brought in 20k/month in leads for 2020 on one of my websites. I have spent countless weeks chasing rabbits down holes and have done extensive amounts of testing to generate you the path of least resistance in generating results via Search Engine Optimisation. For those of you who are not familiar with this kind thing, SEO is where you show up in Google when someone searches for your niche and product.
Step one for the health of your site and rankings…. SET UP A GOOGLE MY BUSINESS AND KEEP IT UP TO DATE. This is how you will show up on Google maps when people search for your products. Make sure to encourage your clients to leave you a review, if your product or service is great, you should not be concerned about the review quality.
It is super easy to set this account up, just click through to this site and follow the steps: https://www.google.com/intl/en_au/business/
Once you are listed on Google my Business, Google will recognise your site at legitimate and you should see some improvements on your rankings.
How to track your rankings?
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-search-console
With this setup, you have a good base for SEO, keep in mind the rabbit hole for SEO is never-ending. My particular favourite go-to for any SEO techniques is Mathew Woodward. Make sure you head over to his page for some SEO madness.
https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/
The next 2 strategies will add to your arsenal of SEO tactics.
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HARO
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HARO or Help a Reporter Out is an amazing site for anybody to jump on and start delivery powerful links to not only increase their SEO rankings but also to acquire traffic from wherever the article is posted!
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This one is simple, you sign up for https://www.helpareporter.com/ and you will get an email delivered to your inbox daily about an article that reporters need respondents to. Parse this daily until you find something relevant you can write about, get in contact and bing bang boom! You have just broken the internet, hats off to you.
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Guest Posting
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Guest posting is a similar strategy to HARO, with guest posting you reach out to another website to see if you can write content for a blog post for their site. What happens here is that they are happy someone is writing content for them, the trade is that you get a link on the article to your site. Google will love this and you will also receive traffic from the blog.
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I use Ahrefs for all my SEO needs, it is expensive like HubSpot, consequently, it also gives out free articles that deliver extreme value. Check out this article about the value of guest posting and best practices – https://ahrefs.com/blog/guest-blogging/
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Step 8 Paid
Pay for leads? You must be making some great return on investment if you are at this step! This is my personal favourite. In particular, I like to dabble in Facebook Ads. It allows me test a range of different things in a matter of hours. Not only can I test a wide range of messaging, imaging and pricing, I can also get unlimited leads to keep the money rolling in.
Neil Patel is generally a good source when it comes to anything Digital Marketing and he does a good guide on Facebook ads https://neilpatel.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-running-facebook-ads-that-convert/.
To go to the next level for Facebook ads there are generally courses where you can learn from the experts in tailored courses.
So why not start with paid advertising? Well, it’s expensive and can dry you out very quickly if your product or service has not been refined. This is why we want to see about 10 leads come through a free avenue before we start spending money. When we get 10 leads and conversions, we can scale the approach.
If you want quick wins or testing for SEO, you can jump to the top 4 spots almost instantly (depending on the competition for your keywords) with Adwords: Get More Customers With Easy Online Advertising.
Another outlet for Paid Advertising is Youtube, unlike Facebook Youtube is pretty set and forget and can give you great long-term results: https://blog.hootsuite.com/youtube-advertising/
LinkedIn Ads are one more avenue you can try. The results from LinkedIn are usually quite expensive, however, if your product gives you great return LinkedIn is an amazing avenue to hit exactly the right people with your message and has forms built in to capture the lead information for you. Anyone who is well versed in FaceBook Ads should have no trouble playing around in LinkedIn. For more information about LinkedIn Ads, check out this course: – https://www.jellyfish.com/en-gb/training/courses/linkedin-advertising
What I have found with the Paid avenues is that you can do the cheap courses like on Udemny but for any of the cool hacks that are actually going to get you some wicked results, the $500+ courses are well worth it.