Jan 9, 2019
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com
Already have a website?
Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com
In episode 206, I’m taking you back to basics for marketing your side hustle online.
If you find yourself thinking that online business is too complicated, it doesn’t have to be.
And if you’re new to it and want a clear path to getting started, this is the episode for you.
There are 5 ingredients to any successful online business.
- Niche
- Build Know, Like & Trust
- Email Addresses
- An Offer
- Consistency
Click here to get the full show notes
Welcome to episode 206 of Pep Talks for Side Hustlers, where we’re going back to basics with Marketing an Online Business 101.
I love that the beginning of the New Year is a time to reflect on the past year, what went well and what we want to change.
And in Episode 205, I walked you through all the lessons I learned in 2018 from my very first year of self-employment, and almost all of them had to do with mindset and changing my beliefs.
So today, I want to give you some really practical, actionable advice that you can walk away with and start to implement today to grow your online business.
We’re going back to the basics.
To the 101 level, of exactly how to start a business online and how to market it.
This episode is perfect for beginners who are in the very early stages of starting an online business.
But if you’ve been in business awhile and you’re anything like me, you can be guilty of overthinking and overcomplicating things.
And when you’re side hustling, you’re working 40-50 hours a week and you have a family and a life, it is so important that you have the simplest yet most effective structure to your online business that you can have.
When you’re a solo-entrepreneur, it can be really tempting to set up a bunch of “automation” to run your business, but what I’ve found is that there’s a point at which it becomes more of a time-suck than a time-saver.
And there’s a point at which you can ask your prospects to choose so many different adventures that they get tired of having to make all these decisions!
Do you want to upgrade or join my membership? Do you want the membership with bonuses or without? Do you want lifetime access or not?
Like, the reason that I’m a long-time subscriber to HelloFresh is that I honestly do not want to decide what to make for dinner. I want the decision made for me!
(And no, HelloFresh does not sponsor my podcast – but if you’re listening, HelloFresh, I’d make a great spokesperson!!)
Anyway, I realized that I have been asking my subscribers to make waaaay too many decisions.
I took some time the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day and the first week of January simplifying my business.
Undoing complex funnels and automations that created more headaches for me and my customers.
Paring down the number of freebies I offer on my website and sending people into my virtual company through just one front door.
Removing services that cost me more to offer than I make, not only in direct dollars, but in time taken away from marketing my business.
And deciding to get back to basics when it comes to the trainings that I offer.
Because yes, I know a lot about a lot of things when it comes to online marketing, but I don’t have to be the one to teach all the things. I can be the person that refers you to the right people that specialize in the things I know.
So if you find yourself thinking that online business is too complicated, it doesn’t have to be.
And if you’re new to it and want a clear path to getting started, this is the episode for you.
So let’s dive in.
There are 5 ingredients to any successful online business.
I’ll list them out for you, and then I’ll go into detail on each one.
They are:
- Niche
- Build Know, Like & Trust
- Email Addresses
- An Offer
- Consistency
Niche
I think one of the most challenging things we have to do when we’re just starting out is to figure out how to translate what we love to do into a niche.
The definition of “niche” is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.
For example, I absolutely love building websites.
And technically I have the skillset to build any kind of website for any kind of company.
When I first started freelancing as a web designer, I worked for anyone who needed a web designer by word of mouth.
And what I discovered is that I don’t love building websites for just any kind of company.
In fact, there are some kind of companies that I absolutely dread building websites for, and every time I work with those companies I think to myself, “I am NEVER working for that kind of business ever again.”
So when I discovered that I could teach WordPress and make a living online from it, I was really forced to think, “Well, what kind of website am I going to teach people how to make?”
I talk about this in New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Guillebeau’s book Side Hustle, about how I figured out who I was going to serve with my web design skills.
I’ll link up to it in the show notes and you can read that story in detail in Chapter 8.
But I decided that I wanted to help people who were just like me.
Solo entrepreneurs, determined to build their own business, while working full time, and they needed a website that helped them market themselves and build their email list, and they needed to be able to like, sit down on their lunch hour and knock out part of their website.
And then sit back down the next day and get the next chunk done.
And that’s why I created the 5 Day Website Challenge in the format that I created it, because the people I’m serving only have a limited amount of time every day to dedicate to it.
And I actually niched it down even further in my mind to target women only because I felt like I could better relate to women, but what I’ve discovered is that my niche isn’t a specific age or gender.
My niche is people with a specific situation and mindset and goal.
They want to create an online business. Their time is limited and they want to transcend beyond one-to-one time for money, and they want financial freedom and control over their time.
I’m passionate about helping those kind of people, because I’m passionate about having that in my own life.
That’s what makes it not feel like a grind.
And if I marketed myself as someone that could help anyone with a website, it’s hard for potential customers to figure it if I’m really the right person for them because I’d have to be so generic and vanilla so as not to exclude anyone.
That’s why I teach students in my Web Designer Academy – to choose a niche. Who are you going to build websites for? What are you going to learn about their industry so that you’ll be more knowledgeable than they are about what they need in a website?
I’ve been listening to the Life Coach School podcast with Brooke Castillo. She teaches people how to be life coaches. She used to teach people specifically how to be weight loss coaches. How do you, as someone who wants to be a weight loss coach, walk into a room with 50 other people who also want to be weight loss coaches and not feel totally scared that everyone else is doing what you’re doing and worry about how you’ll ever get a client?
By choosing a niche.
Weight loss for people that:
- Have over 100 pounds to lose.
- Want to lose baby weight
- Have been overweight their whole lives
- Have recently gained weight
- Have the last 10 pounds to lose
- Have a chronic illness
The biggest challenge in choosing a niche is taking the focus off of yourself and what you do.
I’m a web designer.
I’m a weight loss coach.
I’m a social media manager.
It’s not about you. It’s about who you want to help and the results they want.
Web design for solo entrepreneurs that are done with DIY.
Weight loss for women who are recently divorced.
Social media for non-profits who want to increase donations.
Blank for blank who want to blank.
Figure that out first, and you’ll be golden.
Know, Like & Trust
Once we know who we’re serving, we need three things to position ourselves as the right person to help them.
Know, Like and Trust.
I’ve gone in depth on this in previous episodes, but it boils down to this:
Does your niche know you exist?
Do they like you?
Do they trust you.
That’s the work you have to do, and your website is a huge, huge part of that. Social media too.
When it comes to the Know part, does your niche know you exist, I hear the same thing over and over from people:
“How do I get people to find me online?”
They want to be Googled. They want to be stumbled upon on Pinterest or YouTube, or scrolled by in a social media feed.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that…
UNLESS it’s your only plan.
You cannot sit back and wait for niche to find you.
Well, you can, but it’s just going to take you a lot longer.
You have to go out and find your niche.
Show up where they are hanging out with awesome, valuable content.
Just saying that made me think back to 7th grade when I liked a boy who was on the wrestling team and the baseball team. So I signed up to be a stat for wrestling and baseball…
It sounds a little stalker-y now that I think about it… But it worked. We got to know each other, like each other and we were “going together” for like a whole month.
Do people still say “going together”?
Anyway…
I’m talking Facebook groups. Networking groups in real life. On other people’s blogs and podcasts that serve the same audience. There are so many ways to do this.
That’s what gets people to Know, Like and Trust you.
You show up, you’re your awesome self and not trying to be someone you aren’t – because people can see through that – and you give your knowledge away freely which positions you as a trustworthy. It’s a signal that if I pay you for more of this, you’re gonna deliver and I’m gonna get results.
So this valuable content you’re sharing, it lives on your website.
“Hey, I have a blog post about that, here’s the link. Hey, I have a free training on that, here’s how you can sign up. OMG I’m holding a webinar on that exact topic next week, here’s the registration page.”
Social media is how you find them, website is how you build know like and trust.
Which leads me to the third thing in our list, email addresses.
Email Addresses
Now, you might be thinking,
“Shannon, it’s 2019. It’s the age of live-streaming and Instagram stories. Why are you still talking about email? Everyone talks about how much they hate email and how they are overwhelmed by their inboxes. I don’t want to annoy people. Can’t they just go right to my sales page and buy my program?”
There are some kinds of email that I hate too. Especially when I had a day job – because all of that email was just someone else’s giant to-do list for me, full of drama and fires that needed to be put out.
But I love email that’s going to help me, and serve me and teach me something new.
Especially if I’ve taken the time to go to your website and put my email address in to get the resource that someone in a facebook group told me I HAD to get. Or something that speaks to a results I want in my life.
Another thing about email is that it lets you continue the conversation. It doesn’t get lost down the feed. You can save it for later. It lets you lead your prospect on a journey through making a decision to work with you or not.
So the way you get someone’s email address is to offer something of value for free for the privilege of showing up in their inbox and starting the relationship.
And I like to make that free thing really, really good. Like something people would pay money for.
I see a lot of crappy freebies out there, especially on Pinterest. It might be enticing enough that I’ll put in my crap email address – do you guys do this too? You have an email account just for junk mail and store coupons and stuff?
Like, I’ll put my Yahoo account in if I’m like, yeah… I kinda wanna see if this is going to be any good, I’m gonna check this email to get the freebie but if it sucks I don’t care if I never open another email from this person again – they aren’t getting into my Good Inbox.
Then I have a personal email address that I’ll use once I’m confident that I really do want to hear from that person. Maybe I’ve heard them on a podcast, read their blog, read their book. The way they market their freebie makes me think YES, I want that and I want everything else I can get my hands on.
If your freebie is that good, I’ll use an email address I actually check. And I’ll look forward to those emails.
And that’s what I want you to do – make a freebie that people are going to let you into their inbox that they actually check, and look forward to getting more from you.
But you gotta know who you’re doing it for. That’s why niche is so important.
But here’s where people get tripped up when I say this:
They are so worried about making it so good that they never actually put anything out there. They worry about whether they made the right freebie or not, if they gave away too much or not enough…
You gotta come up with an idea, put it out there in front of your niche, and do all that work, and then they will tell you if it’s good or not.
You might not get it right the first time. In fact, I hope you don’t because the feedback you’ll get when you get out of your head and into your customer’s head is so valuable.
An Offer
Once you have someone on your email list and you’ve developed a relationship with them, and they understand how you can help them, the way that you turn prospects into customers is to offer opportunities to work with you on a deeper level.
You can make offers strictly via email, you can invite people to attend a webinar and make the offer on a webinar.
But you have to make offers and let people know how they can work with you.
Don’t expect that they are doing to figure it out on their own – it’s your job to let people know and give them all the information they need to decide whether or not they want to.
Describe all the results people can get from working with you.
If they don’t pay attention, that’s okay.
Maybe now’s not the right time.
If they do pay attention and decide not to buy from you, that’s okay too.
But follow up and find out why – super valuable information.
Before I talk about the final ingredient, let’s recap:
- Be really specific about who you want to serve even if you could serve everyone.
- Build the know like and trust factor – and take the lead on becoming known. Don’t wait for people to find you. Then use your website to build the like and trust factor.
- Give people a reason and a way to give you their email address so you can deepen the relationship and lead them through all the information they need to decide whether or not they want to work with you.
- Make offers to let people know exactly how you can serve them.
Consistency
The final ingredient to making this formula work is consistency.
You may not see immediate results. Keep planting seeds.
You may discover you need to tweak your niche.
You may discover that you need to spend more time building the know like and trust factor.
You may need to test out a few different freebies.
You might need to change your offer or change the way you talk about your offer.
Where I see mistakes being made, and I’ve done this too, is that you think oh, this tool or platform doesn’t work. I need to be on Instagram or Pinterest or YouTube. I need to change that. I need to run ads, I need a new logo. I need a sales funnel.
It’s all shiny objects that overcomplicate your business.
You gotta give yourself the time to let things unfold. And give the tactic you’re testing time to unfold and get traction.
And that’s the beauty of starting an online business as a side hustle.
You have the luxury of having a paycheck coming in so that you’re not desperate to make it work.
So that you have time to test and change and test and change.
But don’t CHANGE until you’ve spent time actually going out and finding your audience. You can’t sit and wait for them to come to you and then say, “Well, that didn’t work. I guess I need to redesign my website.”
Consistently create valuable content.
Consistently share your free stuff where your niche is hanging out.
Consistently reach out to people who serve your audience and offer to add value.
Do the work without expectation of immediate results and without fear that it might not be the right thing.
I want you to get through all the wrong things as fast as possible.
So that’s it. Those are the basics of marketing your online business.
One niche. One freebie. One email campaign. One offer.
That’s all you need.
I spent 2018 testing a whole bunch of different things. I honestly tested like 10 or 12 different services.
And now I’m scaling back to the 4 core things that got me to this point:
Teaching solo entrepreneurs how to build websites.
Teaching them how to market their websites.
Building websites and creating marketing strategies for people who are done with DIY.
And teaching web designers how market themselves, get clients and manage projects.
It all started for me with just one thing: teaching people how to build their websites.
The rest came directly from my audience telling me what they wanted from me next.
So keep it simple, keep it consistent and I can’t wait to see what you create in 2019!
And if you’ve been listening for awhile and haven’t left me a review yet, can you please do me a ginormous favor and subscribe to the podcast and click here to leave me a review (reviews are a signal to iTunes that there’s good info here and they are more likely to suggest my podcast).
Thanks so much for listening, and if you want step-by-step video training on how to build your website and set up your email list and hook up your freebie, head on over to www.peptalksforsidehustlers.com/5day and sign up for my free 5 Day Website Challenge!