How to make your passion into an online business ❤

Has there been something that you have been passionate about for years and do it very often and as a means to wade off boredom, or get a semblance of sanity into your lives? Here’s an interesting way out. Why don’t you convert this into an online business? Make some money, while you are at it!

You love cooking, painting, writing, art or craft. How about you start offering your services to people who need them? Or teach skills to people. Do you have products that you want to sell? Go ahead — start building your business.

Let’s start breaking it down step-by-step so that you can take actions. This helps you reach one step closer to your goals. As Senia Maymin, Ph.D., co-author of Profit from the Positive, recommends, “If you want to accomplish something, break it down into smaller steps, and go after them incrementally.”

Starting off, the things you need to do is the following:

1. Define your Target Segment / Persona (create a sketch of everything you need to know about him)

• Age group
• Gender
• Location
• Interests/Hobbies
• Key problems faced by the customers

I will soon share a worksheet here which you can refer to, for creating the persona you are trying to solve the problem for.

2. Creating your Value Proposition — You might say that you are offering earrings for sale, but what good does that do for a customer? For her, it’s an accessory that helps her look/feel better or helps her stand out. THAT is the value proposition you should write. The benefit a person gets vs the value you are trying to provide.

Let’s give this another shot — You offer coaching services. How would you frame your offering/proposition?

I am a Start-up coach. I help in getting your business online

Vs

I help people get over the fear of starting an online business and guide them through their journey with small actionable steps.

3. Create/Stock up/Source your inventory — Before you start with promoting your business, you check out your inventory in case of a business that has selling goods. In a digital world, you create the content that is required for you to sell your product/service. It could be writing the description for your physical goods or the landing page content from where you will sell your book/service/course etc. I know we are all eager to start off often and miss taking this crucial step that is creating the content around the product/service. This will help you create a funnel better. Now moving on to explaining what a funnel is for you.

4. Creating a funnel — Online or a physical world. A funnel is a must. Often people feel this is a complex concept and they cannot create one for their own business. But a funnel is simply a customer’s journey from knowing about you to buying from you. So giving a sample of a funnel. This can be used for an online course or for an apparel business (which is both online and offline)

Course Funnel

• Publish Quality content around the topic/course and ask people to sign-up for your content/newsletter (The first step, getting people through the door)
• Weekly touch base and building up your list through emails/social media/any form of personal connect ( warming your leads)
• Sell products of smaller value and get them to be your customers (hot leads). If you have a course, offer them a small checklist, an ebook. Deliver the best possible value you can so people start believing in you and your product (build trust, show excellent customer service)
• Now sell them your main product. They have a much higher chance of accepting and buying from you now since they have dripped down your funnel. Now compare this to selling to somebody at the first go, when they know nothing about you.

5. Marketing and promotions — Your product is ready, your content is ready and now your funnel is ready. Now start using Social media for its benefits. Create a weekly and monthly calendar to put out content. It could be Images of your products/content that helps your target audience. Try out different forms like — Images/gifs/small videos. Now is the time to learn what works best for your target segment.

Slowly, once you are able to build out your content and this should take roughly 2–3 months of regular posting, shift to Paid promotions to grow your account faster. Paid promotions give an accelerated boost to your organic growth and are much needed for fast growth. I will write a separate article on how to start off your Paid promotions, how to target and convert relevant audience for your business. So content marketing using your funnel + Social Media Marketing + Paid promotions will help you build a recall as well as build your base.

6. Get in the first sale for your business — You know what the most difficult part is? Getting the first sale. It could be worth 100 Rs (roughly 1.5 $) but the actual conviction that you can sell will not come to you until you make a sale. The fear of failure is the biggest procrastinator. So go out, convince the person to buy your product or service. IT could be your friends, family or any word of mouth referral. Now use the testimonials from those people and showcase them, people like seeing results and not being told about them. Hang the testimonial where you are selling, social media, emailers everywhere. That is your badge of honour.

7. Final nail on the coffin — Excellent customer service. Your journey does not end when you make the sale. As soon as you make the sale you have to ensure that your customers feel fully valued. They love the product, you hear them, get feedback. They do not like your product, also good. This makes for a strong case in understanding, if your product is being accepted by people and if they are good enough. You can improve the quality, fix any issues they have while buying it and be generous in offering refunds if they ask for it. It’s worth much more having one customer who’s loyal to you than a few extra bucks.

Now, if this is what has been bothering you for ages, now is the time to start! Let me know what are challenges you face as a new business owner and I would love to help you get out of it!