7 STEPS TO STARTING AN ONLINE BUSINESS

hey guys welcome to Silicon Valley girl today we're going to talk about seven steps to starting an online business I'm gonna share the best practices that worked for me and I started my first company back in 2011 and by the way this video is brought to you by the great courses plus [Music] tip number one figure out the product that you're gonna sell and I know you want to over complicate everything because we all want to change the world and build something really exciting like back in 2011 when we had an idea to start a company and I started a company together with my boyfriend back then a husband and we started a company of study abroad booking platform the idea was to build an Expedia for booking all of those experiences but the problem was that we were still studying at the University we were 21 years old and we had $300 like building an Expedia with that budget and that experience is impossible but what we thought is that we needed to start with something really really basic like something that we can sell tomorrow and something that we could sell tomorrow was actually our expertise because I was traveling to learn languages before and I thought that I can just start helping others and we decided to build like a basic landing page and start helping other people and $300 was spent on actually registering the company getting a bank account and building that landing page a lot of beginner entrepreneurs make this mistake when they're like oh I cannot roll out the product tomorrow I need a sit-down like really write down a business plan and calculate everything and then maybe create a great website and then you know talk to friends and pitch my idea but before rolling it out to the market I need to make sure it's perfect that's super wrong like don't do that because the problem is you might spend like two years building something coding something working on something and then you roll it out to the market and the market is like we don't need that like we never needed that because sometimes we just come up with really bad ideas or sometimes we just trying to solve the problem that only we experience so my advice to you just go ahead roll it out to the market hear all the bad words about your idea pivot change it but this is the only way to build a great company tip number two you don't have to go all fancy and hire an expensive developer there are so many tools online that you can use I love to use tilde to build landing pages and now it takes me like 20 minutes to build a landing page there is fix com another tool that I just found is called click funnels clickfunnels allows you to build like basically everything like a profile for all of the users and materials they can download and allows you to build funnels there are so many things that you could do with that but it's a little on the pricier side tip number three start collecting people's emails are you gonna thank me for that because when we started were like oh our landing page is just gonna be selling a product cuz that's the end goal right but the thing is you're gonna start paying for ads you're gonna start paying for influence or product placements and you don't want to just lose that money I would build the business in a way that the first step you're collecting an email or a phone number second step yourselves something cheaper and the third step you upsell them to something bigger and like collecting emails is a crucial point what I use is get response it's a very very powerful platform that allows you to create drip campaigns and a drip campaign is that something happens on different events in different dates like somebody signed up there's an email somebody bought there's an email somebody didn't buy there's another email like you can build all of those different schemes and stuff another service that we use is called send grid but it's mostly for transactional emails tip number four figure out how you're gonna collect pavements because guess what the goal of your business is to actually make money there are a lot of services you can use my recommendation would be PayPal and stripe stripe is super easy to connect if you're from Europe or the u.s. PayPal is really worldwide there's also Braintree but I don't really like them because we used to use them and once asked them for like from better terms to use it and they said they're gonna give them to us and they gave us some different terms and we ended up paying 20% more so but that's a different kind of story but I would recommend stripe and PayPal for collecting payments tip number five pricing your product if there is a thing that we entrepreneurs tend to underestimate what we're doing and I had this problem but then I actually realize that the things I'm talking about it like private consultations on my courses I actually worth so much because I'm saving so much time to other people and it took me like years to learn that so don't under price yourself but also if you're doing like if it's your first business if you're just trying out different digital marketing tools I would stick to a price twenty to thirty dollars this this way you're gonna be able to become profitable faster because if you're selling like a five thousand dollar product again this is something that happened to us our average trip is like two thousand dollars and it took people ages to convert like if we invested like a hundred thousand straightaway it would have taken us years to get that money back so we started to roll out really basic products like a landing page where I sold my own consultation and stuff so really start with twenty to thirty dollar check and this way at your unit economics are probably gonna work and you can always raise your price like you're starting your Facebook Ads you see that unit economics works that you are spending less money there you're actually making you can start raising your price until the demand is still there tip number six is actually how to attract your first customers start a Facebook campaign start targeting people who have the same interests for example you're starting an agency that helps build websites for entrepreneurs go ahead and target Gary these followers or at I love as far as like you know where entrepreneurs are already and Facebook YouTube Google allows you to target them another way is to actually go to influencers like if you know some smaller influencers you can always just DM them on Instagram or just shoot them an email that you want to collab this is how influencers make money so they want to collab with you interest depends on whether their prices are reasonable or not but I would say like I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs they said that 30% of their traffic is coming from their own social media 70 percent is coming from with targeting retargeting Google ads or whatever so I would recommend if you don't have your own community start with targeting and retargeting people before moved to tip number seven I'm gonna share a course with you that's gonna help you start your online company because I know sometimes you're like oh my god I'm not ready yet I have I don't have that experience I haven't studied the economics I want to do my MBA first and then maybe I have an idea of starting a business you don't have to do an MBA or you don't have to do a master's degree in economics to start a company you just need a great idea and you need this mindset you need to be ready you need to be ready to risk to dedicate your time to spend your time for free cuz we worked for free for like first couple of years we didn't get a lot of money with our first client we got like 300 Bilderback basic website with a second client that we enhanced the website because it got more money and we got a third client in six months after studying the company so like three clients and six months which is not a lot but she went to Australia for like eight weeks the commission was really good because the way we work is we get commission from schools and we were able to rent a table in a co-working space for $200 it's all like crawling but it's really slow at the beginning so just be ready for that and again you don't need some extraordinary knowledge you just need to be passionate about what you do and I found this course that's called the entrepreneurial toolkit which actually teaches you every single step like how to find the right idea what's the methodology how do you think about what idea is gonna work for you how do you identify the market how do you market your product like every single step is discussed there and you can find this course on a platform called the great courses plus the great courses plus is subscription on-demand video learning service with top-notch lectures and courses from top professors from the Ivy League and other great universities globally when you subscribe you get unlimited access to a huge library of over 11,000 video lectures on anything you love entrepreneurship art science public speaking leadership like whatever you're gonna find it there the great courses plus is giving all Silicon Valley Girl viewers a free trial so go ahead support me click the link below and get your free trial and go ahead and watch the entrepreneurs toolkit course I think it's gonna help you a lot with starting a great online company and my final tip is tip number seven and if you don't have an idea yet if you don't know when you're gonna start like start with this tip number seven is building your own community I am hanging out with so many bloggers homemaking hundreds of thousand dollars a month not because they're great entrepreneurs but because they have a great community of course they're great entrepreneurs but the community came first so building a community around yourself if you're a professional at something like maybe you are a CPA maybe you're a marketer maybe you're a developer maybe you're a photographer like there are so many things you're probably doing start sharing your knowledge to your community you can do it on Instagram Instagram is the easiest platform to start but it has less organic reach YouTube is a little tougher in terms of like you needa edit videos and stuff but it offers amazing organic reach there is Facebook there is LinkedIn there are so many platforms start something now start building your community and imagine if in six months you have like a thousand people following you you already have your potential customer base to whom you can market with whom you can test your ideas you can be like all guys if I created this product would you buy it and they will give you instant feedback and it's gonna be free you wouldn't have to pay for it so start building your community now it doesn't matter if you have an idea it doesn't matter if you have a company it doesn't matter if you have a business that was it from me for today guys and I know at the beginning you need a lot of support and you need a lot of like moral support and marketing I hope this video was helpful for you and I wanted to offer it one more thing write down the comment below with your idea like what you're gonna do or maybe you're already doing something if you are then share your website or Instagram profile and I'm gonna run them with pic like with a randomizer I'm gonna pick an idea and I'm gonna promote it on my Instagram I currently have over three hundred thirty thousand followers on Instagram and imagine those people are gonna hear about your idea so you're gonna get instant validation like if you get requests in your DMS this means the idea is worth something so don't hesitate comment down below and in a week I'm gonna pick a person I'm gonna announce it on my Instagram lingual marina and I'm gonna also post a community tap here I'm very excited about this and I hope it's gonna be a great opportunity for somebody who wins you're not you subscribed to this channel there's a red button below hit subscribe I'm gonna see you in the next box

Channel: Silicon Valley Girl

Views: 414,210

Rating: 4.874073 out of 5

Keywords: silicon valley girl, marina mogilko, linguamarina, online business, start an online business, company, gary vee, gary vaynerchuk, personal brand, motivational speech, social media marketing, advice for entrepreneurs, how to build a brand online, how to find your niche, sell online, tai lopez, dan lock

Id: Ev8wR0gBV9s

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2019