I spent about 10 years working at a few corporate jobs that led me to nowhere close to my dream
lifestyle. And just in one year since starting my online business I was able to quit my day
job. And went to making about $350k/year by the end of the 4th year in business. It’s
not a multi-million business just yet but it’s an income level which I could Never
and I will stress this I would NEVER reach at my day job. And since I’ve gone through
this very recently, I want to share with you today the 7 steps you should take to start
your own online business the right way.
If you think that to start an online business you have to invest a ton of money upfront
or that you HAVE to quit your day job right away, you are wrong in both assumptions.
I started in 2017 while working at my day job full time, and I quit my job about 11
months later when my online income was at about the same level as my day job salary.
Honestly, I could continue doing my online business on a side but I wanted to accelerate
my growth and generally get back to the normal life/ work balance.
Because of course working at a full-time job, spending about 2 hours a day in commute and
you will see that I was spending at least 11 hours every day except weekends doing what
wasn’t really satisfying nor promising in terms of future income potential.
And I started with a wooping investment of about $3 a month for my website hosting. If
you can afford that, you can start an online business and make money from wherever you
are in the world.
Hi! I’m Anastasia of anastasiablogger.com and on this channel I share my online business
tips every Thursday. If that’s want to learn or get some inspiration from me, Subscribe
and hit the bell button to get notifications.
Back to our conversation, I can tell you honestly that my family was so blessed with this online
business that we are running together. I spent about 10 years working at a few corporate
jobs that led me to nowhere closer to my dream lifestyle. And just in one year since starting
my online business I was able to quit my day job. And went to making about $350k/year by
the end of the 4th year in business. It’s not a multi-million business just yet but
it’s an income level which I could Never and I will stress this I would NEVER reach
at my day job.
We now have a baby at home and I would be terrified if I had to send her to a nursery
school at the age of about 4 or 5 months in the middle of the Pandemic. I could tell you
all things about laptop lifestyle and working from a beach. But for us right now what is
important is a very basic desire to simply spend more time with the baby, and have flexible
working hours adjustable to the baby’s schedule.
And you know what I think? Maybe not EVERYONE… but about 80% of people CAN run some kind
of business online. And you don’t want to miss the opportunities that Internet gives
us to start a business on a very low budget and often basically without any upfront financial
investment.
If you are someone who never had any business at all, this video is for you! Or if you already
have an offline business but you feel like there is a shift towards the online platforms,
and you don’t want to be left behind the global trend, then this video is for you too!
I will not cover in this video specific online business ideas I can recommend you to start,
I made another video with my top list of ideas. I’ll give you a link in the top right corner
and in the description below this video.
In this video though I want to give you the steps you need to make when starting an online
business. They are absolutely essential in my opinion and if you want to make sure you
follow all of them, stay with me until the end of the video because I’ll give you a
link to a Checklist that will help you stay on track with every step we’ll be talking
about today.
1. Make a list of your skills that you can start monetizing right away
If you don’t have any skills you think can be monetized, then I recommend you to make
a list of your passions and hobbies or even things you’d like to learn. A lot of successful
businesses started from just a hobby.
Give yourself 20 or 30 minutes and brainstorm your ideas. Just put everything out of your
mind on a piece of paper. Don’t try to evaluate any of these ideas just yet. The next step
is to narrow it down to your top three choices. Well, even if you don’t have the 3 ideas,
even one really good idea is good enough to start with.
I can’t tell you what is the best idea for you because we are all different. But if you
ask me what I think is the easiest way to start an online business – I would say start
with something you can sell as a service to someone is the easiest. You don’t need a
lot to start it – just position yourself as an expert in that area. It’s even possible
to start without your own website if you’ll be selling services. You can use your social
media profiles for this and find clients also on social media. For example, in Facebook
groups where people are searching for solutions for their problems that you can help them
solve.
2. Do Competitor Research
I strongly believe that NOT all of us have to be Elon Masks, change the planet or the
entire Universe. A lot of businesses can be built around ideas and problems that were
already solved and addressed by someone else. And your task here is to do your research
on Google, Youtube, Facebook groups, online forums and any other places online where you
think your potential customers like hanging out. By doing this, you will find what are
the strongest pain points of your ideal clients, but also will find who are your most successful
competitors. If someone is profitable doing or offering
things similar to your business idea, that mean there is a demand and you too have a
chance to build a profitable online business around it.
3. Just start doing it – don’t try to figure out everything in advance. In most
cases, trying to learn everything about how an online business works is just a way to
procrastinate and a form of imposter syndrome. I made another video on this topic and if
you feel like you are getting stuck mostly because you are constantly self-doubting,
check the link to that video in the top right corner and in the description below this video.
A lot of experts would tell you to start an online business you need a business plan.
But I can tell you honestly, I never had any business plan when I just started online.
I just had a lot of motivation to quit my day job and while doing my online biz as a
side hustle, I figured out what I like to do more, what I don’t enjoy and what I would
rather outsource or completely skip in my business.
Only by doing things I could find out what is more profitable, what are my strengths
and what I’m not good at. You can’t “business plan” all this in advance before you actually
start doing it.
My advice is don’t even waste your time on business plans. If it helps you see some
pointers to follow, just make a very simple list of goals you want to achieve. What are
your financial goals in the short term, and in the long run. How do you want your business
to change your lifestyle. Based on that big picture, you will always adjust and pivot
your online business in the future.
4. Work on your Mindset: I told you that you don’t necessarily have to invest a ton of
money when you start an online business but be prepared to invest your time and make up
the time to grow your online business.
Don’t expect to see immediate results. I think we are all exposed to so many influencers
these days and seems like they all have this explosive growth. And I see a lot of people
get started and then give up like in a month.
How many times I’ve seen these types of comments or questions. I started my Pinterest
account, created the boards and saved the pins and nothing happened. This Pinterest
doesn’t work! What a waste of time!
Then I ask them when did you start your account? The answer is 3 days ago. Gosh, are you for
real? The platform probably didn’t even have time to collect the stats in your analytics
to show you. Then I ask them to show me the profile they
worked on so hard. I check the profile and it has no verified website, 5 boards not optimized
for keywords at all, and 3 pins saved on each board. Ok, that was a lot of work indeed.
With this attitude and expectations of “working” for 10 minutes a day and becoming an online
celebrity in 3 days you can’t go far. Definitely need to work on your mindset.
Seriously, some people expect to make millions or see millions of likes or whatever, in days
or weeks of starting an online business. Hey, I hate to be nay-sayer but viral and explosive
growth online is exceptional. Some – few – people just get lucky.
But even they have to work hard to maintain their growth at the same pace. And the majority
of people who start online just need to be patient and consistent and the success will
come.
5. Focus on one platform at a time, and build a community around yourself.
In the online world, there is always the next shiny object that seems to be an easy path
to an explosive growth.
And while fomoing about the next shiny object, people tend to spread too thin, try all things
at once and see no real growth on any platform.
What will help you see the results is focus on one platform that you enjoy most. It can
be your blog, a Youtube channel, a Pinterest account, Instagram or maybe a podcast.
Whatever you choose, is up to you. But focus on one main platform, at least when you are
starting online. If you try to be everywhere, you’ll end up being one week on Youtube
and then coming back to create your new video 3 months later, in the meantime you’ll be
trying to post on Instagram once a day and launch your podcast which you will start and
make 4 episodes and then get back to your podcast audience a year later. So it’s not
going to work.
What you can do instead is focus on one platform and probably share the content from your main
platform across the other social media sites but if you try to create original content
for multiple platforms, you will be growing slow on all of them.
6. Start an Email List You probably heard about the importance of
your emails list from so many people. And the reason I included this as one of the steps
you need to take when starting and online business, is because you most probably are
going to ignore what so many people told you… well, I did it when I started and my email
list didn’t grow for at least the first 8 months since I started my website.
I thought it would take my time and focus away from creating content so I kept delaying
it. In reality, I was making a huge mistake. I should not publish any content until I had
my email list set up and at least a few lead magnets created so that all the content I
was working on could actually help me build the foundation of my online business.
It doesn’t matter if your business is a blog or an eCommerce site – you always need
to collect emails to be able to reach out to your audience more than once. If you don’t,
you are attracting people to your content and chances are even if they like your content
or your eCommerce website, they will never get back to your site because there is an
ocean of other shops and blogs on the Internet. Plus, as you maybe know, if your audience
is only on some kind of social media platform, there is always a risk of you losing all that
audience. Accounts on social media get suspended, blocked or penalized – it’s not only happening
to the bad guys and spammers. Sometimes legit businesses get caught into the trenches of
algorithm changes or spam filters and the only asset you really own is your email list.
7. Setup Payment Methods This step is just a technical thing – you
need to collect payments from your customers. But I thought it was important to mention
this step because depending on where you live you might have limited options. I believe
that PayPal as a payment method is currently available everywhere in the world and Stripe
which allows you to collect payments through credit cards, becomes more common but it still
has quite a big list of countries where it’s not available for sellers and service providers.
Just check what is available in your country and if you have PayPal and Stripe, usually
these two will cover most of the needs of your potential customers around the world.
Ok now that we’ve gone through all the 7 steps I wanted to recommend you, I hope you
found them useful. And if you did, I would be so thankful if you tell Youtube algorithm
you enjoyed this video and give me a thumb up! Let’s see if we can get to a 1000 likes
on this video! As I mentioned, I publish my videos about online business on Thursdays
and if you want to learn more about it, Subscribe to my channel and don’t miss the Bell button
to get notified when my new video goes live!
And you can start implementing what you’ve learned today. Just download this checklist
that includes all the steps and start documenting how you follow the process of launching your
online business.
I left a link to the Checklist in the top right corner and in the description below
this video.
I don’t know which type of online business you are looking to start but I thought it’s
also a good time to remind you about a great opportunity you have in the online course
market. If you have some knowledge or skill you could teach others and if you want to
build a profitable business around it, I have an 8-Week Accelerator program for aspiring
course creators where I teach you how to build and sell online courses not only with great
profits but also in a stress-free way while automating most of the marketing and sales
processes.
I’ll give you a link to my program in the top right corner and in the description below
this video.
Before you leave, I have hand-picked a few videos on my channel that are perfectly complimentary
to what I shared with you today. You can check them out here and there. I’ll see you in
the next one!