[inaudible]
Jaymi with a 'y' recently messaged me and said this:
"So I own a couple businesses. I'm still in startup mode, year two.
I'm at the early stages of positioning myself as an instructor and consultant
and I plan on creating a digital course to sell within the next six months.
And that adds up to I'm currently very, very poor.
Jaymi wanted to know if Instagram could actually help a photography instructor
like herself grow a business.
If you're in the same shoes and you need to figure out how to get clients, like,
yesterday, stay tuned for today's video.
I'm covering how to grow an online business fast using my favorite free app and
what I'm going to coin as the four M's.
And stay tuned until the end where I'm going to share my pricing strategy so
that you never have to worry about whether you're charging too much or too
little ever again. So Jaymi sent me that message on August 25th.
Four days later on August 29th she posted in my private Facebook group that she
was already getting leads from Instagram from a visibility challenge that we
were running.
So what I'm about to share with you in today's video has worked for Jaymi,
has worked for me and it's going to work for you too.
I'm Elise Darma and I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs like yourself grow
their business on Instagram and today I'm sharing how you can grow your online
business fast. Before I get started, I do want to give you a heads up.
I'm going to go deep into online marketing and business today,
but this is kind of a continual learning thing,
so make sure you hit the Subscribe button and the bell so that you don't miss
any of my future trainings on Instagram marketing and growing your online
business. Let's dive into the tips,
but first I need a gut check.
I need you to answer these very important questions. Number one,
is your business already validated?
Are there people who are already paying for your services or product?
And lastly, is there competition already in your market?
If you are a 'yes' to all of these things, great. This video is for you.
If you're a no then I have a few other resources for you that you'll want to
check out. First is my online program called Freelance Biz in a Box.
This is your fastest way to get started with your own service-based business
online. If you're more of a coach,
then I have a video just for you how to build an online coaching business.
Go ahead and check it out.
Now let's dive into the four M's of growing your online business fast.
The first M of growing your online business fast is Messaging.
Is your messaging clear? Is it more clear than clever?
I know with my students, I see a lot of people getting caught up in, well,
first trying not to niche down too much because they want to serve everyone,
but the second thing is they want to be really creative and clever about their
messaging. The thing is, when you have half a second to make an impression,
you lose people really fast if it's not clear who you help and how.
So the very first thing you need to do to grow your business faster is nail that
messaging down.
You can do this by really explaining the problem that you help your people
solve.
Go into the benefits of what happens when they solve that problem.
Question for you: With your Instagram posts,
are you hiding behind generic messaging?
Are you avoiding showing up as a real person? Kinda like Jaymi,
before she took the visibility challenge and then once she showed up,
she got leads.
I'm not too surprised about that because people want to do business with people.
So I encourage you to not hide behind generic wishy washy posts in your,
in your Instagram feed. I want you to get real.
I want you to get specific and I want you to speak to that one target customer
that you have in mind for your business. Back when I was starting my business,
I can see so clearly now that my mistake was I was too afraid to get specific.
I was too afraid to niche down because I was worried that I would prevent other
people from working with me.
I was also really afraid of over-promising and ultimately having a customer be
unhappy that they invested with me.
So this all brings me to my second M, which is mindset.
Back in my early days,
I felt like I had to do everything alone because I was a solopreneur and I
wanted to be totally independent.
It didn't even occur to me to invest in a coach or a community of people like
me, but one day I invested in my very first group coaching program.
It was $50 a month, which was kind of a big investment at that time.
But since that happened, everything in my business changed.
I got connected to 800 people who could relate to what I was going through and
some of them even became customers of my business.
So putting myself in a community helped me understand in my mind that I was not
alone and that I had the support when I needed it.
Another area of mindset where I see people getting tripped up is that they
think, "Well, my market's too busy. It's too saturated.
There's no room for me." I would encourage you to reframe that and think it's
actually a great thing that your market's been validated because that means you
have customers in your market who are willing to pay for your services and
products. So keep going.
I can go deep into the mindset roadblocks I see entrepreneurs struggle with,
but I'll just share one more,
and this is one that I've struggled with for probably most of my life and it is
caring too much about what other people think of me.
Can you relate to that at all?
I was so scared when I first stepped out as an entrepreneur or even launched a
personal brand, but the funny thing is,
I was most scared of what my friends and my family were going to say,
so it took a couple of years,
but as soon as I really let go of their opinions that I was projecting they
might have, the more comfortable I got with putting myself out there,
even doing videos just like this for you. Question for you,
do you struggle with your own internal thoughts, mindset, and motivation?
If so,
pop a comment below this video saying "MORE MINDSET" and I might do a full video
on this very topic. Let's keep moving along. The third M is math. No,
don't get scared. We're not talking about grade eight calculus.
Did we do calculus in grade eight? We're not talking about high school math.
We're talking about you knowing the numbers of your business.
So the very basic number I ask my students to know is,
how much do you need to make in your business to live? So,
look at your living costs, look at your expenses and understand,
do you need to make $5,000 a month or are you okay with $3,000 as you're getting
started with your business? So count backwards,
look at how much you need to live and set that goal as your first initial goal.
When you're getting started with your business, as your business is running,
now is the time for you to become really clear on the difference between revenue
versus expenses versus profit.
This is one of my favorite topics to talk about because I see entrepreneurs
often kind of bragging about their big revenue goals that they hit,
especially when they launch something live. But the truth is,
we don't actually know how much money they're taking home after their expenses.
So I used to be kind of obsessed with revenue numbers too,
but then when I realized I was only taking home 20% of what I made,
that didn't seem right to me.
I then shifted my focus to not make more revenue but to actually cut down on my
expenses so that I could take more home.
So knowing the difference between your revenue and your profit is really key to
actually understand the health of your business.
The last thing I'll say about math is actually knowing industry benchmarks.
So what do I mean by that?
What you want to know is the typical averages that your industry is getting when
it comes to conversions and sales. I don't want to get too technical here,
but just to give you an example, if you were to create a landing page,
the industry average of people who land on your page and opt in,
so they make it your Thank You page is about 20%, maybe even 30% I would say.
So for example,
if your landing page is not converting 20% of your visitors,
that is a red flag for you to understand, "Okay,
I'm not meeting the industry standard.
I need to revisit and redo this." The last of the four M's is money.
Money is a big one.
So how do you know if you're charging enough or not enough?
Here's what I recommend to someone who's getting started,
especially if you've worked in a day job.
My best recommendation is to look at your last salary and calculate what your
hourly rate was.
That's a good benchmark number to start with when you're looking at charging for
your services or your coaching. So when I got started,
I was making about $25 an hour.
So when I'd calculate how much time I'd spend with each client,
that's how I landed on my very first client package of $1,000 a month.
Where I failed was I didn't continually raise my prices.
So I recommend to you to raise your prices every six months.
Literally go to your calendar and put a reminder in it for you so that you can
take that day to reassess where you're at with your business and if your
experience warrants raising your prices. And my guess is,
it will. One last takeaway about money,
and this is something that I wish I did a long time ago and this is the idea of
incorporating an upsell.
So maybe you have a customer join your world for $50 or maybe they buy something
that's $1,000. Well,
what can you offer to them after that service or that experience is done?
For me, my customers came to me,
they took my course and then they just disappeared into the abyss.
I never offered them next level coaching.
I never offered them a one-on-one call. But this is truly where the profits are,
because once a customer enters your world and they like you and they like
working with you,
you're actually doing them a disservice by not giving them an opportunity to
work with you even more.
Now, if you liked these tips and you want to apply them to my favorite app -
Instagram - I invite you to take my free masterclass over at
FreeInstaCourse.com.
That's where you're going to learn what strategies are working today in 2019 to
grow your business on Instagram so that you actually grow your revenue.
The link for that masterclass is right below this video. Now,
if you enjoyed today's training,
I want you to hit the Subscribe button and stay tuned for next week where I'm
going to share how to automate your small business. Yes,
this means waking up to Stripe and Paypal sales on your phone.
To ease and revenue, I'll see you in the next video.
Yo, Yo, Yo, what's happening? What's going on?
Let's talk about travel and entrepreneurship. Yeah.