An online business can be a great way to make money, and it’s completely scalable.
You can start a website or social media group for fun, while working at your “regular” job. In time, if things take off, you could be looking at six figures or more by way of a full time, virtual gig. It’s up to you how much time and investment in all the right tools you want to put in to make your online business unique, interesting, and profitable.
If you’re well versed in a niche topic that you love, you can kick things off by starting a blog. Take an hour or so each today to write a new article or share content that someone else has written, and keep on growing your collection of posts.
In time, people will start to recognize your name because your blog posts that you continue to add will be indexed on the search engines, which means you’ll come up when people search for certain words and phrases that you’ve included in your blog pages and posts.
So, with that in mind, what are some shortcuts you can take to move your blog out of the Google sandbox (yes, that’s really a thing) and into the big leagues?
Start collecting email addresses right away. It doesn’t matter if you don’t send a mail for another year (although the sooner you do email people, the better). Put a signup form on your website so that people who are interested in what you offer will be added to your list.
Email marketing continues to be hugely, wildly profitable, so don’t drop the ball. Use a site like Aweber or MailChimp to manage your email lists and mailings. You can segment your list into different audiences, set up autoresponders and funnels, and tons of other great, profit-producing stuff.
Get known on social media. Everything connects to everything else. The more you focus on building a presence on all the major social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, the more your blog will be known – and yes, you DO need a blog or website. That’s the home base of your business.
If one or more of the social sites goes down during the life of your online company, you’ll want to still have your website and email list to fall back on, so you don’t lose all your hard-earned contacts and content.
Be transparent. The best way to not peeve your online audience is to tell them exactly what’s going to happen if they buy from you, sign up to receive your emails, join your groups online, or hire you. Not only should there be disclaimers on your websites, but you should also just take the time to explain and communicate clearly.
For example, if someone is considering joining your list, write down how often you plan to send out emails. Let them know that they are in control thanks to permission-based email software. If your products are in limited supply, let people know.
Systemize everything. Find software to manage your list, upload products to sell and send out emails automatically. Create templates for content that you recycle over and over, like emails to your customers, letters, job quotes and such.
Sign up for every free membership that you can because these offer the best free and low-cost tools and content sources to build your following. Get a junk mail address to manage it all, so you won’t have everything funneling into one inbox.
