- Welcome to The Journey.
Today we're gonna talk about
how to take your home-based business and put it online.
Let's jump in.
Today I have a special guest,
our co-host Justin Nealey in the house.
What's up Justin?
- What up?
- How's it going?
- Living the dream.
- Yeah, so first thing that comes to mind,
and I get asked this a lot,
is where do you start when it comes to just technology?
Or, you know, 'cause you say online,
what comes first?
Website or domain?
- Well you're currently offline, right,
as a home-based business?
- Yeah.
- You gotta get online and the first way to do that
is with a domain name and a website.
That's your online real estate
and it's how people find you online.
That's like godaddy.com or coffeeandkickflips.com.
It's how people get to you.
It's like street address right?
And after that you need hosting,
essentially think of that
as like online storage for your website,
and then you need something to build the website.
Now many people aren't web designers
and they don't want to spend a lot of their time
building a website, so there are tons of tools out there
that just help you build websites
or there's WordPress
if you're a little bit more technically inclined, but.
- Not me.
- You don't have to go overboard.
Just have a homepage.
Have a little bit about what you do,
maybe the services you provide or if you're online shop,
like if you're on a Farmer's Market
and you really wanna bring that to life
and sell your products online,
then you can have a little online shop
that's pretty easy to use and a contact page.
- Yeah, so speaking of Farmer's Market,
let's say I'm out there you know,
selling some plant-based soap.
- Okay.
- Or hot sauces, or both.
- I'm in.
(Emma laughs)
- So once I get a domain that makes a ton of sense
'cause we're going from offline to online.
Then what's next?
- Well probably the next step is social
and that's kinda where you're the expert.
Now you want to be on your favorite platforms,
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
You also wanna be on business directory sites
like Yelp, Google pages.
- Oh absolutely.
- And claim your your listings.
- Yes.
- Don't let it just be open to the masses.
That's your baby, right?
It's your business.
Make sure you control it.
- Okay, so once you're on the social media,
I know that's a big step,
but it's not where the majority of your time is gonna go.
The majority of your time goes
into actually creating content
so you connect with your customers, right?
- [Justin] Right.
- So can you elaborate on that?
The importance of engagement
and connecting with potential customers.
- Right, so we'll take the kinda the Farmer's Market
example that you have there.
So if I'm, what were you selling?
Hot sauce and what?
- Plant-based soaps of course.
- Great combination, so if I--
- You use them after you use the hot sauce.
(both laugh)
- If I'm selling hot sauce and soap at the Farmer's Market--
- Yeah.
- I wanna take it online
and I really wanna take it into social media presence.
What I don't wanna do is just start listing off my products
and saying, "Hey this is all the cool stuff
"you can buy from me."
What I wanna do is basically start opening people up
to my world, the hot sauce and all natural soaps there.
- Interesting world (laughs).
- So you do that by basically showing what you do.
Like the Instagram Stories is a great way to do that.
Just pop up, cool I'm making a soap
or I'm makin' a hot sauce.
- Ooh, behind the scenes.
- Try not to get those mixed,
'cause you don't wanna like
be scrubbing with the hot sauce soap.
But open up your world.
Talk about what you do as a business and be relatable.
People buy from people.
They don't buy from companies, right?
- [Emma] Yeah.
- And if you start to really open up
who you are as a business owner, your day-to-day,
the struggles you go through,
maybe just some of the cool stuff you do
beyond your business itself.
It really helps people connect with you
and then they're more apt to buy it from you,
tell their friends about you.
- And get a hashtag.
- Yes.
- About your soap or the hot sauce,
well my soap and my hot sauce brand.
- #Hotsoap?
- So that way, yeah (laughs).
So that way when customers are using my products
they can use the hashtag and then--
- Yes.
- I can re-share that or reTweet it, right?
- Right, over and over--
- And over. - And over.
And that's helping you create just more content.
That's called user-generated content.
And I know you're an expert at this.
It's making people create posts
and having your hashtag in there
and that gives you more content to post.
- Yeah, I'm curious, email?
Does that matter?
Email marketing?
Still a big thing?
Should businesses do that if they're trying to go online
with their home-based business?
- Yes, email is super underrated
and a lot of people think of email marketing as spam.
And it shouldn't be spam.
It is spam if go the same approach of like saying,
hey, here's all my products, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
But you wanna really engage the conversation.
- Bye, bye, bye.
(Justin laughs)
- Engage that conversation and help your people out.
If you maybe say you're doin' the hot sauce
and all natural soap,
maybe you send out recipes of your all natural soap.
Maybe try this at home with your family or your kids.
Try to get different ideas
and be creative about the content you give out
and even if people don't open your actual message
that's okay, they still see your brand,
each and every time they go in their inbox
and that's brand recognition.
- Stay top of mind.
- And it's saying top of mind.
- Yeah.
- So with your website a great think to do
to start collecting those emails,
you can't just say, hey sign-up for my newsletter.
Nobody cares about a newsletter.
You create a lead generator and what that is,
is just something free that you can give them
in exchange for their email address.
So if I'm a hot sauce and all natural soap maybe I'd say,
cool, sign up, enter your email, I'll send you 20% discount.
Or enter email, you'll get five recipes to do this yourself.
Things like that.
- Cool.
- And it's kind of an even exchange and then,
because then you build that list, build that list--
- You're giving me some really good ideas.
I check my email when I wake up.
I check it throughout the day.
I check it in the evening.
So it's--
- It's with me forever.
- Yeah, it's still very much a channel
that consumers are using and checking frequently.
- Yes.
- So it's another avenue, if you will,
to reach that next customer
or, like you said, with your regulars,
just stay top of mind.
- Right, you wanna be where your audience is
and your audience lives on social
and they live in their emails.
- All right so that's a wrap on today's episode.
I wanna give a huge shout out to my co-host, Justin Nealey.
(crowd cheering)
The expert.
(Justin laughing)
I hope he helped your home-based business get online.
If you have any questions or comments,
we'd love to hear from you.
Go ahead and share below
and in the meantime subscribe to our channel.
See ya.