Online Business Essentials For Fast Business Growth!

Today I’m going to share with the foundation of creating a successful online business. From my 16 years in business there are some essential pieces that are a must have in place that are often missed when building an online business. These online business foundations are critical for success. They include understanding your ideal client, mapping your client journey, lead magnet creation, nurture sequence, and then traffic. 

Online Business Foundations – Ideal Client

At the onset of building an online business it is critical to determine who your ideal client is. I truly believe it is critical to get to know who that person is, what their desires are, what fires them up, where do they shop, what kind of car do they drive and so much. This is a crucial step to building a solid online business foundation. Get to know them with great specificity. What is that burning desire that they are trying to accomplish? When you know your ideal client well you can strategically map your marketing efforts around what they might be thinking but not actually thinking and get them to think, “How did they get inside my head?” Ultimately that is how well you should know your ideal client. This is the basis for setting yourself up for success later on in business so don’t be afraid to do research and spend some time on this as it will have a ripple effect in your business. 

Online Business Foundations – Client Journey

A client journey is ultimately the steps or actions a client would take from prospect to your very best high-paying client. Mapping this out as part of the foundation of your online business is a key component to growing and scaling. When I work with clients in our group program to map this out we do this at high-level and for many clients all of these steps may not be created yet. That’s ok. The goal of mapping the client journey is to understand at a high-level ultimately what you’d like for your clients to experience with you over time. Essentially, you will build this in your business over time and it will serve as your online business ecosystem. Everything from the first interaction with your business, to lead magnet, one time offer, signature offer, and high end offer (and everything in-between)

Online Business Foundations – Lead Magnet / Opt-in

A lead magnet, opt-in, or freebie is a training, downloadable or blue-print that you share with someone in exchange for their email address. This typically happens at the beginning or early stages of a relationship s the lead magnet or the opt in or the freebie. One important element of creating a successful lead magnet that converts and urges the person to move onto the next step, is meeting them where they are. Often times, I see people make the mistake of creating an overly complicated lead-magnet that the person never even takes the time to digest because it is simply too overwhelming or they don’t meet the ideal client where they are. 

When thinking of what content to leverage as your lead magnet it is important to address the problem the ideal client KNOWS that they have. For example, if you tutored high school students and a parent comes to you because they want their child to get a better grade. This is the problem that we as the entrepreneur can often overcomplicate. We would know, assuming we had been tutoring for some time, that the root cause of bad grades typically has something more to do with study habits. But the parent is focused on getting the grade up not the root cause, which is study habits. So with this example in mind, address the problem at a surface level where the ideal client’s brain is not necessarily at the root cause of the problem you know you can solve. 

The other thing to keep in mind with a lead magnet is that you want it to be short and actually help the prospect move one step forward. After experiencing the content you’ve created the goal is to have the prospect or lead feeling a sense of accomplishment. 

Online Business Foundations – Nurture Sequence

A very crucial element to building an online business and having the right foundation in place a nurture sequence. Now I’m not going to go crazy diving into all of the different emails that make up a nurture sequence, I’ve already created a video on that which you can check out here.  The important thing to understand is that the nurture sequence should take your lead on your hero’s journey and how you got to where you are today. The struggles and challenges they faced along the way. They should be able to imagine themselves in your story succeeding. You can check out my nurture sequence here. 

A nurture sequence is five to seven emails where you’re sharing your story and really talking about the turning point in your business. Take some time to sit down and determine what story you should share about how you’re living your purpose and you’re really practicing what you preach so that the person who’s reading that can be like, Oh my goodness, that’s what I want to do. 

Online Business Foundations – Call to Action 

At the end of the nurture sequence, you MUST have a clear call to action because ultimately you want them to move to that next step in the client journey. Perhaps that is signing up for a course, joining a membership, or potentially even booking a call with you, or whatever that step might be. A clear, consistent call to action is goal. The call to action will get the lead to take the next step on the client journey with you. Yes, this can happen in other ways with some marketing tips, which I’m not going to get into today but understand that at the end of the nurture sequence you need one and only one clear call to action. And if you are looking for some ninja tips on how to get your emails opened check out this video . Your job then becomes sending traffic to this funnel, right? So once you have got all that stuff up, you’ve tested it, it’s working great. You then need to start to switch your role to traffic. So when you think about traffic, it’s really important to understand there’s kind of three types of traffic.

Online Business Foundations – Traffic

Once the other foundational pieces we discussed earlier on place your role as the entrepreneur then becomes to send traffic into this funnel. There are three types of traffic: 

1. Paid Traffic: Google ads, Facebook Ads, Pinterest Ads etc. Essentially you pay to send people to your website or funnel. 
2. Organic Traffic: This traffic comes from good SEO through google, youtube, social media, your website. People put in a search term and your content appears. 
3. Earned Traffic: This type of traffic is very labor intensive, typical examples of this are a dream 100 strategy where it is all about creating relationships, podcast interviews, collaborations, giveaways etc. There is often a big payoff with this type of traffic but it takes time and effort to establish. 

These are the basic foundational pieces you need to have in place to grow and scale an online business. While there is certainly more involved to growing and scaling an online business but at the very elementary level this is what you need to get started. Feel free to let me know any questions you might have below. 

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