8 Steps to Launch an Online Business in 2022

What if I told you launching an online business doesn't have to be super complicated and that I actually launched my own online business without a business plan and now I'm making over half a million dollars in my business each year. I bet you might be wondering how. Well, after running my business for over six years and seeing so many people launch their own online businesses, some successful, some not so successful, I am breaking down how you could launch your own online business in eight basic, basic steps. And I do have a bonus step thrown in here at the end of this video that you will want to stick around for because it's probably the step that took me the longest to actually do in. Wish I would have done it a lot sooner. Now, since I want to make launching an online business super easy for you, I'm going to throw in a quick caveat here. It is going to be the easiest for you to launch a service based business, meaning working with clients one on one. It may not be the ideal situation that you want, but trust me, you're going to need to start here first to get to the place where maybe you're selling digital products like courses or digital downloads or like that Etsy stuff. Because starting at this service based business process first is going to allow you to make more money faster and it is actually going to help you get into the digital product and like that passive income stuff quicker and give you more success over there if you do service based first. It's kind of like earning your stripes. An online business. And I know this from experience. When I got started I got sold the idea that if I just made this course course I could sell it passively passive income and sit my ties on the beach. Well, it doesn't work that way. You've got to earn your stripes. You've got to show people that you can actually deliver on what you're promising and you've really got to nail down your process to explain to people why your process is best and how you're going to help them get this solution that they want. And without working with clients, one on one is going to be a lot harder to do. So I definitely think that's an end possibility for you. But talking about launching an online business, you've got to probably, probably start launching with a service first. And there's one more last thing again before we jump in the steps. I know you want to hear this, but I want to make sure I'm laying everything out on the table here. Business, legal stuff. Yes, there is legal stuff with business that is not My zone of genius. That is why I hire a lawyer and I have an accountant. So I would recommend checking out the contract shop by Christina Scalera or the legal page, Paige Griffith, and check out all their content because they are the legal people that I would go to around all things legal legal. Starting an online business. All right, now let's finally get to step one. What problem can you solve? Or even thinking it a little bit deeper, what problems do you like solving? Listen, business exist for solving a problem. For example, I have my program, Video Strategy Academy. And the problem that my Video Strategy Academy program solves is showing business owners how they can get started on YouTube and DIY their own YouTube strategy and YouTube videos. Now, my agency, which is my service side, which is where I started the problem that is solving is basically doing the entire YouTube video for our clients, right? We literally tell them what they need to film and they send it to us and they magically get a YouTube channel. So that's the problem I'm solving. Overall. The problem in my business that I'm solving is helping people get on YouTube. But each side of my business solves a little bit different of a problem based on the person that we're solving that problem for. Let's do a couple more examples. So a copywriter, if you are freelance copywriter, you could be solving a lot of different problems. So really think about the one problem you like solving. I have a copywriting client and what her bread and butter is, is launch copy. So how to write launch emails and how to sell more in copywriting with launch copy, right? Launch emails, launch sales pages, launch ad copy, launch social media copy. Right now you could also be a copywriter and the problem that you solve is writing website words. And you could specialize in writing people's websites. You could also be a copywriter, which I have hired myself to write my content. So her specialty is literally just taking these YouTube videos, writing them all up to look good in a blog, and turning them into social media posts as well. So each one of these versions of a copywriter are solving three different problems and they are in their own special zone. So this is the point where I tell what is that one problem that you like solving? Because if you are a copywriter, maybe you don't like repurposing content, or maybe you don't like writing website, but you really like launch copy, or maybe you do really like website copy. So you've got to stop here at this step and think about what problem do you like to solve? I will say this is Also, why it's pretty important to start with a service based business, because you can play around with this. You don't have to like commit to anything. You can get a client that you're solving their launch copy problem for and say, I actually don't like doing this. Or you could get a client for content writing and say, I actually really like this and I want to double down over there. And so this is a great opportunity and this very first step to really figure out what you like doing. Because the last thing you want to do is launch an online business that you hate. That's why you're launching an online business, right? You want to love what you do. So this gives you some space to kind of experiment and figure out what it is you like to do. I will tell you, when I got started my very first venture into my online business, I wasn't YouTube. I started playing around with getting clients before I quit my 9 to 5 job. And I was an Instagram manager. And so I was helping a client grow her Instagram by responding to comments and going and commenting on other accounts to help her grow her account. And that's what I realized, not for me. And so that got me over into YouTube and playing around with YouTube. So again, very important step here in step one. So once I figured out YouTube was kind of the zone that I wanted to go in, there was a problem that I ran into. And this is step two of launching your online business. And it's who do you want to work with? When I got started, I started with the good old Spray and Pray method. Like I would work with anybody and I tried to work with everybody. The problem that happens with the Spray and Pray method is nobody really knows who you are for. So when you try to be something for everybody, you end up being nothing for everyone. Right? So they aren't sure if you're the right fit for them or not. And that's what kind of happened to me for a while. I skirted down this line between working with business owners or working with people that wanted to grow their YouTube channel. And I wasn't talking loudly to either one of these groups of people. So neither one of them knew if I was the right fit for the problem that they had. Until I realized I'm doubling down on business owners. I'm focusing on business owners. And when I started changing what I was saying and how I talked about YouTube for specifically business owners, that's when we grew our agency by 300. And we continue to get client inquiries about our agency just Shifting our messaging and really understanding who we want to work with. Now this is where people usually talk about niching and I did an entire video. A lot of people love that video and they say that video makes it all click for them. I will link to that video right up here. But I dive into why you should be niching specifically for a person and not a topic. So a lot of people will say, you know, you need to niche down to like YouTube or niche down to Instagram. But I think it's more than that. I think it's about niching down to a particular person or an audience and you can watch that video next where I kind of break down how to do that. So I want to give you another example of why this is important. Because let's say you're coming out of the gate and you want to be like a social media manager or a virtual assistant that helps people with their social media account, right? You could be a social media manager for influencers, or you could be a social media manager for business owners. Because influencers and business owners have different goals being on social media and they have different problems being on social media. So if you know you want to work with business owners, you need to make sure what you're saying and how you're talking about what you do. Hits on the pain point business owners have like getting clients and growing visibility and maybe booking speaking engagements. Whereas influencers, you want to be talking about how to grow their account, how to get more followers, how to book those brand deals, right? This is why it's so important in media social step two to understand who you're talking to. Because it's really going to affect how you say what your online business is all about. Now again I will reiterate here steps one and steps two, we don't need to stress over to launch our online business. This is a time as you're getting started that you can experiment, play around with different types of people, play around with different problems you like to solve to really figure out, you know, what is your bread and butter, what is your sweet spot. Step number three is deciding on your offer. So what is it you're going to actually sell? I will tell you once you figure out your offer which going to give you some examples of offers. But I will suggest you come out of the gate. I think I said this already trying to find people that are going to beta test. So maybe you do your offer for them for free, but you tell them in return you want feedback from them. You want to hear how you could do this service better or what they liked, what they didn't like. Maybe you asked them to give you a testimonial if they like the work that you did. And maybe you say you could, you know, send me some referrals if you really like what I did. And so getting these beta testers, you know, maybe two or three to get the ball rolling so you can talk about, you know, these testimonials and you can really see if your system is working. It will allow you to obviously charge more with your offer when you do get, you know, paid clients. But it also gives these paid clients examples to look at and see work you've actually done and hear from people you've actually worked with. So some different types of offers that you could have would be like project based offers. So this may be, you know, just writing a website that is one particular project or maybe it could be just, you know, setting up your dubsado account. Right, that's just one project. One and done. So you'll need to continuously get new clients every single month. For example, we do a VIP day where we set up your YouTube strategy and get six videos ready to go for you in one day. I also am hiring somebody for a VIP day to set up all my Google Analytics and all my tracking codes so that we have a Google dashboard and she's going to set that all up in one day. But again, this is the type of offer where you're going to need to constantly have clients every single month. Or you could do retainer based or ongoing services. So this is what we do in our agency. We charge a monthly fee every single month to put a weekly video up on our clients YouTube channels. We've had clients with us for over two years and they pay every single month to get a weekly YouTube video up on their channel. You may be a virtual assistant and you have a package of 20 hours a month and you will work with that client every single month for 20 hours. This allows you to kind of take away that task of constantly finding new clients. You hopefully are making the clients that you have happy and you stick with them for a long time so you have that constant reoccurring income. So those are just three different offers that you could have. Project based VIP day or ongoing services or retainers. Moving on to step number four when launching your online business. And this is super important is knowing your numbers. Let's break down what numbers that you really need to know because I'm going to tell you this is super important because if you don't know what your finish line is, you're never going to know when it's over, right? You're going to keep grinding and working or stressing out. So if you know the numbers you need to hit, then you're good to go. So one thing that you need to know is your expenses. What expenses are you going to have every single month? And also think about the expenses you're going to have in the future. So if there's a course that you want to buy, or if there's a membership you want to join, or if there's a tool you want to purchase that can make your business run smoother, once you have some reoccurring income, think about those future expenses that you want to have to see how much you are spending each month and how much you think you will be spending in the future. You also want to think about taxes here as well. Again, not my zone of genius. I have my own accountant that updates me every single month. But you also need to think about paying taxes every single month as well. And then think about what take home pay do you want to have every single month? Do you want to put in your bank account like $5,000 every month? Because then you're going to need to start reverse engineering how much you need to make every single month to get $5,000 in your pocket. So if we just do like a rough estimate of like 50% is going to be expenses, you know, let's say any kind of tools that you have, any kind of apps that you use and your taxes. So you would need to make $10,000 a month to put $5,000 a month in your bank account. And that's just like super easy math for me. Your expenses could be a lot less, but I'm just making you aware of accounting for these expenses so that you're getting what you actually want in your bank account every single month so that you know what you need to make. Because if you say, okay, I want $5,000 in my bank account and you're like, okay, I only need two clients for two VIP days and charge them $2,500 to make that $5,000, you didn't account for your taxes, you didn't account for any types of expenses that may come up, so you're not going to put $5,000 in your bank account. Instead you're going to realize, okay, I need to make $10,000. So that means I need to get four clients every single month to book a $2,500 VIP day for me to bring home, $5,000 a month and make sure all of my expenses are accounted for. So again, once you understand these numbers, it breaks it down in something super manageable like, okay, I only need four clients every single month. And then you can start to figure out how you're going to find those clients and start to strategize all of that. But again, this is very important that you know your numbers here because that's how you're going to make sure you have a successful business. Because if you're starting your own business, you're going to want to be setting your own hours, right? Which leads me to step five is figuring out how many hours you want to be working every single week. Go ahead and hit that like button right now if it sounds magical to set your own business hours and to have three day weekends if you want, because that is exactly why I started my business. And we still have three day weekends most of the time in my business. And I'm also flexible in that I can take the kids, kids to school in the morning, pick them up. If somebody gets sick like they did this week, I can stay at home and not have to worry about the work situation. So you need to take this step and think about how many hours you want to work. So if we are again thinking about this VIP day, you need four clients every single month to make that 10k. If you're charging them $2,500 per day. So that technically means you only need to work four days a month. And you could space that out. Now there's going to be like some pre work and some post work that you're going to need to do. But even if it's just that that's three days, you know, Tuesday you do the pre work, Wednesday you do the VIP day, Thursday you wrap up and you know, send the project off. You only need to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Or if you're going to do retainer work and you know it's 20 hours a month, you know you only need to work five hours a week. Maybe that's five hours all in one day. Maybe it's two hours and two hours. However you want to space it up. But this is where you really start to figure out again. Once you know your numbers and you know the hours that you want to work, how your online business is not only going to be successful, but work in helping you create the life that you want to lead. Now, as I share step number six, there's something that you may not realize when you're really in the thick of Launching your online business. And this step number six is going to be really important for you to actually pull this all off. And step number six is to pick one person to learn from and turn everybody off. Basically what I see so many online business owners do, especially when they're getting started, is they try to learn everything from everybody. And what happens is they go into analysis paralysis, they're figuring out how to email market, they're figuring out how to set up a website, they're figuring out how to set up a funnel, they're figuring out how to be on Instagram, and they're not actually making money in their business or consistent money in their business yet. So I highly recommend, and this point in launching your business, you pick one person to learn from for like a year and implement their strategies and not look at other people's paper, so to speak. So that you actually are implementing and not getting into analysis paralysis or having squirrel syndrome, thinking you need to do all this other stuff as well. I want you to always be learning and always be improving, but you don't need to be learning a million things at once to launch a successful online business. Step number seven is probably just as critical and it is to make it plan. I personally like to work in 90 day segments and then I can really figure out how many projects I can actually complete in 90 days. I know this, I've done this for six years because I so I know what I realistically can complete in 90 days. I do look at my year at the beginning of every year to kind of have an idea of how my 90 days will break down throughout the year. But it's really important to make like a 90 day plan. So you can start with breaking down the projects you want to complete into months, into weeks and into days, because it is going to be important for you to actually implement this stuff. And I have found that if you don't have things on your calendar, you don't set yourself duties, you're going to fall back into analysis paralysis and not actually do things. So as you make plans, it allows you to take this big action item like launch an online business or launch your VIP services into smaller steps to actually get you there without overwhelming you. I'm going to go into step number eight. But remember, right after step number eight, I'm going to be sharing that bonus step. That's probably the one that I wish I would have done most when I launched my online business. But step number eight is to do it messy. Look, perfectionism is going to hold you back. And if you wait until you have everything perfect. You have the perfect email funnel, the perfect website, the perfect landing page, the perfect opt in. It's never going to happen because perfect does not exist. So launch that online business right? Tell people you have this service. Even if you aren't sure if it's the best service that you want to do or if it's the people you want to work with. You've got to get started. You've got to start making money in your business and you've got to start figuring out what it is you like and don't like doing. And you're not going to be able to do that if you don't just get it out and do it messy. Many of you probably didn't even know that I was a social media manager as my very first online business business, right? So as you start to progress and you learn and you change, nobody's going to know probably where you actually started because they're going to see you as you grow. So don't worry about it right now. Get started. Messy, but just get started. Here's that bonus step that I promised and it is to find people are a community. You do not want to do this online business thing as a lone wolf, especially if nobody in your general area knows what it is that you do. It's overwhelming. You never know if what you're doing is working or not. And so having a community, having people that you can rely back on, having people you can ask questions for is such an important step to launching your online business. You could find this in Facebook groups, you can find this in masterminds, you can find this in some courses. But I think it is critical when you're launching an online business to have some type of community that you can fall back on to just have some support. These communities are also great for finding referrals and finding clients as well. It's kind of like that networking thing that we used to do in public, but now we don't. These online communities are. Finding your online community is critical in launching your online business. Here's a very important step for you to do now. Make sure you are subscribed to this channel because the next video that I am going to publish is all about how to grow your audience if you're starting at zero. So we talked about how to launch your online business now, but how do we grow your audience to start getting those clients and getting people to book you to work with? So make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss it.