Unlocking Entrepreneurial Success: If I Had To Do It All Over Again, I Would Do THIS
Lauren Bateman (experienced entrepreneur) gives five practical recommendations for people starting a business: 1) confirm you are solving a real, marketable problem (validate demand via Google/YouTube search and view counts); 2) collect customer contact information (own an email list so you can sell directly and avoid platform risk); 3) work with a good mentor to fast-track learning and avoid repeat mistakes; 4) stop waiting for perfection—publish imperfect content to build momentum (early setup allowed her to monetize during COVID); and 5) use a website in addition to social media—publish articles (with embedded videos) to capture search traffic, reach non-video audiences, and gather emails.
Chapters
So these are the five things I would recommend you do if you are looking to start a business right now. I've been in business for over 20 years, and while I've had a lot of success in the brick and mortar space, opening a music school and running multiple locations, and I've had a lot of success online in the teaching space, that wasn't always the case. I've had a number of businesses that have completed completely failed and that I had to walk away from. It's in these failures that I actually learned the most about what makes a successful business. With this experience in mind, I'd like to give you some tips on what I would do differently if I were going to start my business again today. First thing that is very, very important that I didn't understand when I started businesses in my early 20s is make sure you have a problem that you can solve. Let's face it, if you're going into business, you have to make money. And people pay money to business owners and entrepreneurs and service providers if they provide a solution to their problem. For example, if someone wants to lose ten pounds for their wedding or maybe their reunion or something, they go and type stuff into Google or they type stuff into YouTube to find a solution for that problem. And if you have maybe a course on how to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks, you provide a solution to a very immediate problem that they are trying to solve. And you have to make sure that there is a real problem out there and there's a real need for that solution, or you just have a passion project that's not going to make you any money. So how do we do that? How do we know if there is a market for this problem? Well, if you take the prior example, you could go over to Google or you could go over to YouTube, search and type in, you know, how to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks and a bunch of videos are going to populate and you can see how many views these videos have gotten. If you see videos with millions of views or even hundreds of thousands of views, it lets you know, hey, people are looking for the solution to this problem. Now, if you do a search and you only see a few thousand views, it might be harder for you to make enough money in that market solving that particular problem. Now this next one is a mistake I made in almost every single business, and that was collecting customer information, getting a customer's email so that I own that email and I can sell to that email. My first business, I made informational websites. Basically I would write articles about Fitness and losing weight and health and people would hop on over there and I would make money off the Google apps ads that were on the page. Alright, so if they clicked on an ad, I made some money. I was doing very well. Much like how YouTube ads works kind of here on YouTube. Okay, you get paid a percentage. Well, what happened is Google decided overnight to change its algorithm and this business went from making about like $5,000 a month to $500 a month overnight, which was devastating for me. And I didn't collect anyone's email. So even though I had lost a lot of my Google traffic, I, I had no customers to reach out to sell products to. So I was really, really dependent on Google search. So even if you're using YouTube, you're using a website, you need to start collecting customer information so that you can start selling to them right away. And don't get me wrong, it's great using free platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. I love leveraging YouTube to grow my brand, but I understand that eventually I need to get people off of YouTube and onto a mailing list or buying some sort of offer. Okay. Subscribers don't pay your bills at the end of the day. And the great thing about having an email list, if I need a boost in my income, all I have to do is send out an offer to my email list and we can make a lot of money in a week. Now this is something I've done right with my businesses, but there's also a caveat to it and it's working with a mentor and it's working with a good mentor because I've worked with some bad mentors that actually held me back in business. And I've worked for some great mentors who actually helped me move forward in my business. Now, the great mentors are worth every penny because hopefully they have a lot of experience doing what you've done or they've been successful in the space you want to be successful in. And like me, they probably made a lot of mistakes over the years. And the goal of a mentor is you are paying them to kind of fast track your success and they're going to help you avoid making mistakes that they made. For example, when I work a lot with YouTube clients, the first thing I get them on is knowing that they have to start selling in their videos and really dialing in their thumbnails because that was a mistake I made early. I just kind of randomly threw thumbnails up. You know, the text, there's way too much text. You couldn't read it. And I told them, like, you really got to focus in on this. And we're going to. I'm going to show you how to do research so that you know how to make successful videos on YouTube. So by learning from someone else's mistakes, hopefully you can approach that problem differently when it comes by having a different perspective, or you can avoid that problem or mistake altogether. This. This is a huge one for a lot of entrepreneurs, and it's waiting for everything to be perfect. Listen, nothing is ever going to be Perfect. My early YouTube videos were horrible. They were grainy. I had bad lighting. I don't even think I had a microphone. I was just using my phone. I don't have the professional setup that I have now, but some of those videos are still some of my highest performing videos, even though now I do have the professional camera and the lighting and the microphone and everything else. So it just goes to show you, good content does not have to be perfect to get broad exposure, especially on social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. If you're one of those people that is a perfectionist, you need to learn to let go. I know it's very hard, especially if you're someone who's very anxious about what other people think. A lot of us are, are so concerned about what other people think, that we hold ourselves back from achieving the things we want to do in the dreams and desires that we have in life. All right? You can't predict everything in life. And nobody, I'm telling you, nobody predicted 2020 that the world was going to completely shut down. And you know what happened? All the people who weren't worried about being perfect, they were just throwing videos up on social media, throwing videos up on YouTube. They didn't worry about being perfect. So when 2020 hit, they had the perfect storm of being ready. And that everyone else who was waiting for that perfect moment, they hadn't even gotten started. So they missed the moment. They didn't have any momentum. While the people who weren't worried about being perfect already had something going. I had a website up and running with a landing page. My landing page was horrible for my course and absolutely horrible. I don't even know how I sold anything, but I had something. So when Covid hit and people were looking for guitar lessons, they had someplace to go and they still bought because it was something that they really, really wanted. The bottom line in business, again, you need to make money. Stop waiting for everything to be perfect. Get started today. Don't get started. Three months for now, five Months from now. Don't wait until you know you have the perfect haircut or, or your makeup looks great. Stop worrying about that. What's important is you need to start focusing on helping others so that you can reach more people so they could actually start building and growing a business online. And while social media is so phenomenal, I've made a lot of money using YouTube. But a big thing people ignore is websites. Okay? Websites are still vitally important in helping you. You sell. People are like, websites are dead. I don't think websites are dead. As you know, I started in building website sites in my early 20s. My website gets over 100,000 unique visitors every month. That's a lot of people, and that's a lot of eyeballs on my brands, my products, and my services. Remember, not everyone wants to watch a video. My wife hates watching videos, especially tutorial video. She's like, I'd rather see it written in format. Step one, step two, step three. Some people don't like videos. Some people like written word and reading better than watching a video on YouTube. So how are you going to attract those types of buyers if you don't meet them where they are successful? What I like to do is I like to write articles that pair with my social media content. This way, I have an article, how to hold the guitar. Okay, so I write an article like, these are my best suggestions for holding a guitar. I might have some pictures, but I will also include a YouTube video. I will embed a YouTube video. So the people who want to consume my content via video, they have that option. And if they don't want to, they have the article. Now, the thing that this article serves is there's all kinds of keywords throughout this article. And when people type in Google search, they will find my article or my page. Now, it might not be for how to hold a guitar. It might be for some random phrase that's written in the article somewhere, and that's how they find you. They interact with you. They. They interact with your business, and then they start buying your product. The other great thing about websites is when people are searching in Google, they're usually searching for answers to very specific problems. So these are people that know they have a problem and they're looking for an answer. They may not be ready to buy yet. That's why you want to get their email, so you can nurture that lead. But these are people who are looking for a solution to a very, very specific problem. So if you can provide the answers and help them, then it's going to be more likely that they're going to do business with you down the road. So if you're someone who wants to be an online content creator and be an educator here on YouTube and learn how to leverage that, go check out this video over here. We're going to talk about the five biggest mistakes that YouTubers make without even knowing it's.
