- What would I do if I were starting
my business all over again from scratch?
What would I do today, in 2019,
if I wanted to build an online business?
Well, I'm gonna talk about that in-depth,
but before I go any further, there are five books
that I wanna recommend to you if
you are trying to build an online business
or you're trying to get started in entrepreneurship.
I'm gonna recommend 6 Months to 6 Figures by Peter Voogd.
I'm gonna recommend Will it Fly?
by my good friend, Pat Flynn.
I'm going to recommend the $100 Startup.
I'm going to recommend FU Money by Dan Lok.
And I'm going to of course recommend
Crushing It! by the man, Gary V,
tremendous entrepreneur, somebody
that I've been following for a long time.
And I think that these five books will
really help you understand a better sense
of what you can do, the possibilities,
and also sort through the ideas
in your head and help you set priorities.
So I'm gonna link to these five books
in the description down below,
as well as another five other secret books
that I think will help you crush it as an entrepreneur.
Hey everybody.
This is Roberto Blake, helping
you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
For the new people here, welcome.
My name's Roberto Blake.
I'm a creative entrepreneur, public speaker,
a YouTube-certified marketer,
and I have a social media coaching business
also, on creatoracademy.com.
Today I wanna talk to you about
what I would be doing in 2019,
maybe even 2020, if I were gonna start an online business
from scratch, and some of this is,
I'm gonna reveal the process behind
how I got started, but I'm gonna
really put it into the context
of what I believe a beginner could do today
and lessons that I think you can learn
from me and other people.
Now, in context, I think that the tools
and systems available to you,
and also the free education available to you,
is far better than when I was doing this.
There wasn't actually a lot of great information
for starting an online business just even a few years ago.
It's become something that's very much more popularized.
Entrepreneurship itself is much
more popularized than ever, and if
you've watched any of my videos before,
you know that I talk a lot about things
like passive income, affiliate marketing,
e-commerce, and freelancing.
And where I begun in all of this was freelancing,
which I think is one of the
most accessible things for people.
It is more of an independent job
than it is an actual business.
So that's a really good mid-range starting point
for somebody that's transitioning
from being an employee but isn't
fully able to go into building a business
that doesn't rely on them actually getting up
and hustling every single day.
Now, a lot of people will believe that,
if you don't have employees,
then you don't have a real business.
I disagree to some extent.
I understand where they're going for that,
but you can pull and extract yourself
out of your business and have an exit
if you have systems in place that are making you money.
But that's very hard to do and not everyone can do it.
So I understand where they're coming from.
Most businesses do need employees,
and most people can't operate as a solo entrepreneur.
I think that there's a specific type
of personality and talent for that.
I think it's something that's more reserved
for people who are stoic by nature.
That being said, I feel that there are a couple
of approaches here, and e-commerce is
very powerful, in the sense of,
you could always have virtual assistants
and remote employees that handle a lot of the back-end.
And I also think that the systems
and tools, once you build up the marketing engine
or the advertising behind it, allow
you to scale that business to six or seven figures
without a lot of day-to-day sweat.
I think that the work is done up-front
on that for the most part.
That's been my personal experience.
But I think I really need to break
this down a little bit more for you guys
'cause I think that we're getting into the weeds.
Let's say you're just starting out.
You don't have a lot of money,
but you have a few hundred dollars
in the bank and you have a cellphone,
and you have a laptop or a desktop computer.
I think that one of the most practical things
you can do is you can look at what skills
you have and you can make a decision.
You can decide that you can either sell
those skills directly to the market
in the form of doing freelance work,
or if you have knowledge, you can become a coach
or a consultant, and you could do that.
Or, depending on your skills, you can build a product
and you can use digital e-commerce
to sell your own product directly.
Now, if you find out that your skill is
that you're good at sales in general,
or you're good at making content,
or you have a good personality,
then another option for you is
to sell something for someone else
and get into the realm of affiliate marketing,
and that way you don't have to build
your own product, and that means
you don't have to necessarily provide a direct service.
You can leverage the ability to cultivate attention
and your ability to develop a brand.
Those are different approaches to a online business today
that don't cost you a lot of up-front money.
Now, given my own background and skills,
if I were starting over, the good news
for me is that I know how to build a website.
I taught myself coding, so I have a skill
that I could go to, say okay, I can build a website
and I can develop maybe a blog,
and I can do affiliate marketing,
get a traction, leverage SEO, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.
I also, in this case, I'm good at public speaking.
So if I don't do a blog, maybe
my content vehicle is podcasting.
Maybe I do a podcast, set that up
as my website, talk about a lot
of different and various topics.
Maybe they're related to technology.
Maybe they're related to books.
Maybe they're related to personal development.
And then that allows me to leverage affiliate marketing,
or develop my own product, or a coaching service,
and then use that as a marketing vehicle for that business.
And that wouldn't cost a lot of up-front money.
I could buy a microphone.
I could use that laptop that I have.
You could even do it on your cellphone with Anchor now.
There's this app called Anchor.
The hosting wouldn't cost a lot.
You can get unlimited hosting with Simplecast.
That's what I use for my podcast.
By the way, I'm gonna link to all these resources,
and books, and things that I'm mentioning down below
'cause I think that could be helpful.
So yeah, I could develop a podcast
and I could either build off a coaching business
from that, do affiliate marketing,
which is a lot of what my good friend, Pat Flynn, has done.
There are any number of options,
and of course I can develop my own products.
Now, as another content and marketing vehicle,
obviously there's ability to use a YouTube channel.
My background says, well, you know video editing
and you know how cameras work,
so you could build a YouTube channel
and you could use that to market and grow a business.
I actually used this to help market
myself as a freelancer in the early days
of this channel, and then my freelance clients realized
that I was out-marketing them and
that I knew all this social media stuff,
so they transitioned to hiring me
less for creative and technical work
to handle marketing for them, and management,
and then ultimately I would become a consultant
and a coach, and grow that business.
Later, I would brand that and separate
it from just being Roberto Blake
and robertoblake.com to me building Awesome Creator Academy
as its own brand and build it
as a separate six-figure business,
separating out my personal brand,
which also makes a substantial income,
and then also the B2B side of consulting,
and doing workshops, and things
of that nature, and private speaking.
You'll notice that we have a recurring theme here.
Sales, marketing, and skills.
This is very important.
You need an actual skill that you can put
behind your business, either for
you to be able to develop a service or develop a product.
And if you can't develop a product
or service of your own, you have
to sell on the behalf of someone else.
But you can't sell to anybody if
you don't market, and cultivate attention,
and build an audience of people
that might be willing to buy it.
And so that is kind of where we're
at when it comes to building an online business.
You have to have a content platform
of some kind, whether you have a blog,
a podcast, or a YouTube channel,
or even another social media platform
like Instagram, per se.
You need some kind of content vehicle
because it is the cost of being relevant in the 21 century.
You need that so you can leverage traffic
to whatever it is that you want people to buy.
Now, in terms of some practical measures
when it comes to that online business,
the thing that I wish I'd prioritized
when I got started was growing an email list
to have direct access to all of my audience.
I came to that game a little bit later
because, when I worked in corporate America,
I did email marketing and I wasn't happy with it.
But my good friend, Amy Landino,
said, "Roberto, you don't have to do sucky email marketing.
"You're awesome.
"Just do awesome email marketing."
And that resonated so much with me,
and it got me past my own internal bias
against email marketing, even though
I knew it was practical, even though
I knew that I could deliver value
to people that would be happy to open my emails.
I just had such a bad experience
with the way it'd been done, and even the emails
that I was reading from people,
to where I was reluctant and resistant to that.
So I would encourage you more to embrace email marketing
and also, of course, even if you're gonna do social media,
own your own website.
Have your own analytics.
Own the traffic.
Own the relationship with your audience.
Do not be beholden to these algorithms.
So these are some of the lessons
and some of the things that, if I were starting out today,
I would be prioritizing and focusing on.
I also probably would've prioritized building e-books
to help solidify my credibility
and reputation after a certain point,
and to reach that evergreen market.
It would've also helped
me leverage speaking opportunities more.
It would've given me more leverage
for interviews, to be able to say author of.
So it's something I would definitely pay attention to.
So I wanna open this up to you.
What do you wanna know about starting an online business?
Because I would love to make some dedicated
and specific videos for all of
you about starting an online business
and directly tell you what you think you need to know.
There are a lot of videos that
I've done on this channel about online business,
about starting a stay-at-home business,
about how to make money online.
But I would love to make some very specific, catered videos.
There's a chance that they never get
more than a couple thousand views
because they'll be specific, but I think
it's important to cover these topics,
to go in-depth on them, and to make sure
that you're getting the answers to questions you need.
And that's why I make the videos
that I make on this channel.
I know that there are videos.
Look, if I wanted 50 to 100 thousand views
on every video, I know exactly
which videos and which topics will get clicks.
But at the end of the day, I'm here
to give my audience exactly what
I think you need, because I wish
somebody was right here, doing it for me,
day in and day out, when I first got started.
So anyway, I want you guys to answer
that in the Comments section for me.
All the resources that I've mentioned will be linked
in the description.
Like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome stuff here on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so
very much for watching, and don't forget.
Go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.