After a strange 2020, creating an online business in 2021 doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea. With many people working from home already, working on a profitable online business on the side might seem more feasible. And that’s not accounting for all the people who actually lost their jobs! As a millennial, I “came of age” around the time of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the recession that followed it. I am well aware that the dream of getting a university degree and then easily “landing” a stable career doesn’t always pan out that way. Am I a pessimist? Not at all actually! But I do believe that I have my own interests at heart more than any company would.
Whether you have a job, you’re studying or you’re looking for something fulfilling to do around looking after your kiddos, an online business could provide you with both income and freedom. Now, as a mean comment pointed out, I’m not currently a multi-million entrepreneur and I can’t necessarily teach you how to build the next Facebook. What I can do though is help you figure out what you want to do with your online business, how to work on building trust with your audience by providing value and how to turn that into income. Sound tempting? Let’s dive in!
(Note: this post contains Amazon*, Etsy*, Bluehost*, Canva*, ConvertKit* and Start a Mom Blog* affiliate links. If you click a link marked with an asterisk and make a purchase, I may earn a commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work! Another way to support my work is to join my membership, where you can unlock exclusive benefits that will help you in your online business journey.)
What is an online business?
Back to basics
Let’s start with the basics: what is a business? In his Personal MBA* book, Josh Kaufman defines a business thus:
Roughly defined, a business is a repeatable process that:
1. Creates and delivers something of value…
2. That other people want or need…
3. At a price they’re willing to pay…
4. In a way that satisfies the customer’s needs and expectations…
5. So that the business brings in sufficient profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.
~ Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA
So what is an online business? It’s a business… online! (Thank you Jessica for clearing that up!) Or should I say on the line? (PS: if you haven’t seen The Internship* yet, I’d recommend you do! It’s a feel-good movie that might just be the pick-me-up you need.)
Anyhoo, with the widespread use of the Internet, it’s possible to sell products and deliver services from the comfort of your own home (or Bali if you’re a fancy Instagrammer!). With just a laptop and an Internet connection, you can create digital products like printables, ebooks or courses to sell on your own website or another platform. You can also provide services, for example health coaching or nutrition advice via Skype or Zoom.
Common misconceptions about online businesses
There are a few misconceptions about online businesses. Are they a scam? While there are plenty of scams online, as well as dubious pyramid schemes, lots of businesses operate entirely online and benefit millions of people. My working definition of an online business is indeed quite simple: it’s the process of earning an income by helping people (online).
Is creating an online business a get-rich-quick scheme? Mostly no. Even the creators of PayPal and Facebook probably had several years of hard work before hitting the jackpot. The quickest pathway to riches involves consistently showing up for your online business (more on that later) while trying not to get down about things “not working” for a while. Though once you do figure things out (with trial-and-error), success does then snowball and you get to enjoy financial abundance and a lot more freedom than those stuck in a 9-to-5! It just isn’t an overnight success story (in most cases).
How to start an online business in six steps
1. Pick a niche
There’s a common saying in the online business world, which is: the riches are in the niches. But what even is a niche? Simply put, your niche is the problem you solve for your customers. It can be very tempting at the beginning to blog about everything that you’re interested in (guilty!). But what makes a business work is choosing a specific niche that people will then be attracted to.
For example, if you wanted a haircut, you’d probably go to a hairdresser’s. They have posters of people with funky haircuts on the windows, they have a list of prices of the different hair-related services they offer and they might even have an Instagram account or Facebook page showcasing their clients’ new hairstyles. Therefore, you deduce that they can probably help you with your problem: having hair that looks like you don’t give a damn (also guilty haha). You don’t show up to a building that isn’t labelled as anything specific, for a business that has pictures of cats, dogs, cakes, plants and hairstyles on their social media and who can’t really offer you a list of services they provide.
That’s not to say that you need to find “the perfect niche” before getting started! It is perfectly fine to pick a few things, or choose a wide niche, then get more specific with experience actually doing things (i.e. not just hiding behind your computer and “researching”!). Essentially, just pick something and go with it for a while, then adapt as you come up with better ideas.
As you start to walk out on the way, the way appears.
~ Rumi
For example, you could start out blogging about baking and photography, your two main hobbies. You eventually realise that it’s a lot of hassle coming up with new recipes each week, so you choose to focus on photography. After a while, you keep getting the same questions about editing photos, so you focus on helping other bloggers easily edit their blog photos. You could sell Lightroom presets* and a course about photo editing. And then your niche could still evolve after that: nothing is set in stone!
Or on the other hand, you could run out of things to say about photography. At some point in your blogging journey, you personally decide to go vegan. You then decide to focus on vegan cakes and desserts. You could offer a membership, where people cook with you live on Zoom every month, and an ebook of your best recipes. Same starting point, two different niches! But you only figure this out by actually showing up and trying things.
Another way of thinking of your niche is to imagine what people would google to find you. I still have quite a broad niche, so for example people could find me by searching for:
- How to set goals and actually stick to your plans;
- How to work from home productively;
- How to start an online business!
Many people often end up helping people who are in the same situation they were in two years ago. Have a think: what were you struggling with two years ago? What could have helped?
2. Set up your own platform
Just like a hairdresser operates out of a salon, you need a “home” for your online business. Regardless of whether you want to write blog posts, produce a podcast or film YouTube videos, I highly recommend having your own website. Even if you just have an about page and a list of your YouTube videos, it is worth having a little corner of the Internet that is yours. There’s many horror stories of people’s entire channels or social media accounts being deleted, so you want to have a platform that you have control over.
I go into more detail about creating your own website here: Becoming a blogger: How to create the website of your dreams. But suffice it to say: save yourself a lot of trouble, sign up for Bluehost* and follow their instructions on how to set up your very own website! Once I signed up for Bluehost, I added WordPress to it. WordPress is essentially the engine that makes my website “work”. I recommend Bluehost and WordPress because I use both of them, but also because they are super common and the answer to all your tech queries is only a few clicks away.
As a side note: don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by the tech! These days, there’s pretty much a video explaining every challenge you can encounter. So if you get stuck creating your website, just google it!
3. Create consistent content
Once you’ve created yourawesomewebsite.com, it’s time to start populating it! You’ll want to create an About page, but most importantly, you want to be creating content around your topic (or niche). Let’s imagine you’re focusing on blogging for now (easier to start with than podcasting or video in my opinion). Decide how often you want to post on your blog. I’d recommend at least once a week. Then choose a day you want the posts to come out, so you’ve got something to aim for (and you know if you’re getting in your own way!).
If you don’t know what to write about, there are a few strategies (that I will also delve into further in later posts). One of them is to ask yourself what you would have liked to know two years ago about your topic. Another one is to head over to Pinterest, Quora, Google and Facebook groups and see what people are searching for / asking about. If we go with the examples above, I typed in “editing photos” into Quora, which then led to questions around what apps to use or how to edit photos for free. These would be great starting points for blog posts!
If I use the vegan baking example, then the questions on Quora are around how to get started with vegan baking and what replaces eggs and milk in vegan baking. You could therefore write blog posts such as “The ultimate guide to vegan baking for beginners” or “Top 10 egg and milk substitutes for making vegan cakes”. You get the idea!
4. Get people to your website
Later on in your journey, your SEO efforts will hopefully pay off and some of your content will start appearing on the first pages of Google search results related to your niche. But until then, you need to help people find you!
There are many ways of doing this. I recommend you start by sharing your content with people you know in “real life”. You could send some friends an email or post on your personal Facebook account. This might feel a bit scary at first, but most people aren’t out to “get us” and the negative reactions we imagine are often just creations of our brain to keep us in our comfort zone. Fear of “failure” is a way that many aspiring entrepreneurs hold themselves back. If you want help with how to deal with this + the two other ways you may secretly be sabotaging your success, get your free guide by entering your email address below!
At some point, your online business is hopefully going to grow beyond your “real life” connections. To do this, I recommend being strategic with your online presence. The idea is to focus on a few couple platforms rather than spreading yourself too thinly to be “everywhere”. The main question is: where do your ideal clients hang out? In some cases, this will be obvious: if you’re targeting corporate career-minded people, LinkedIn is a good bet. If your content is very visual, Instagram and Pinterest are probably what you’ll gravitate to. Pinterest is actually an interesting one as, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the most “gendered” social media platform, with 70% of its users being women.
Have a think about which platforms make the most sense for your content. I would aim to focus on maximum two at the start. You would ideally want a way of reaching new people (Pinterest is great for this, but so are platforms where people search by hashtags, such as Instagram and Twitter). And you also want a way of building a personal connection with people, through video, for example through Instagram Stories (check mine out here!). There’s a learning curve to all platforms, so if you only remember one thing, let it be this: focus on maximum two social media platforms at first, until you feel confident on them and ready to branch out.
5. Stay in touch with your audience
As I mentioned earlier, online content creators are in a way at the mercy of the businesses that own social media platforms. Algorithms change and all of a sudden you could have a lot fewer people coming to your website. You can generally learn about the changes and leverage that knowledge to stay visible. But in any case it is worth having a way to reliably stay in touch with people who are interested in your content and products / services.
Enter the email list! From the early days of your online business, it is a good idea to collect the email addresses of interested people so that you can stay in touch with them. The best way to entice people to give you their email address is to offer them an “opt-in freebie”. You can easily make these on Canva* and they can take the form of a checklist or a short guide. Think of them as the shortcut from A to B, whereas your products/services would take your customers to C, D and beyond. If we went with the examples above, you could offer a “free guide to making your photos lighter and brighter with 5 easy Lightroom shortcuts” or “3 crowd-pleasing cake recipes which work for every occasion”.
You would advertise this freebie on your website and on your social media accounts, and then collect the email addresses (+ send out the freebies) with an email marketing tool. There’s a few of them out there. I started with Mailchimp and now use ConvertKit*. Both are free until you reach a certain threshold of subscribers (2,000 and 1,000 respectively). I like ConvertKit because it integrates better with my website and I can send new subscribers to a thank you page where I offer them an “upsell” (currently to book a coaching call). This forms a rudimentary sales funnel, which brings me to…
6. Start making money online!
We like to overcomplicate things but essentially here’s the idea behind a sales funnel: you reach people with your free content (they can find you either on social media or via Google for example), you offer them something enticing so that you can stay in touch with them (for example they get an opt-in freebie and join your email list) and then you sell them something.
As discussed above, if you were blogging about vegan baking, you could offer visitors an ebook of your favourite recipes and a membership, where people have access to exclusive content every month. Or if you were helping people with their photography, you could sell Lightroom presets and a course about how to improve their photography skills.
There is no magic formula for deciding what or how to sell, but I will be going into more detail about going deep (e.g. one-on-one coaching) versus going wide (e.g. printables) with your business in a podcast episode soon, so make sure you subscribe below to know when I launch my podcast (hint: soon!) and to be told when that episode comes out. It might help you decide what is most appropriate for your online business, in terms of what product or service to focus on and how to market them. As a bonus, you get my free guide to having more energy today when working from home!
Tips for success in your online business
- Business is a huge mindset game. There are no external deadlines (or at least very few), so it’s on you to work on your thoughts, show up with your actions and get the results you want. This can be a great opportunity for personal growth, but also quite daunting if you were previously stuck in a cycle of: inspiration, motivation, action, “falling off the bandwagon”, waiting for inspiration, etc. There are plenty of resources out there to help you with this, including those in my membership. I’d also happily coach you towards developing an identity that “pulls” you towards the results you want, rather than having to “push” yourself all the time.
- Once you’ve started working on your mindset, you’ll want to look at strategies that have worked for other people. Plenty of people have done things similar to what you are trying to achieve, so why not save yourself the headache of figuring everything out on your own and instead learn from their mistakes and success? I’ll be creating a resources page soon with my favourite business books, podcasts and courses (make sure you subscribe above to know when it’s live!). But in the meantime, I can recommend these two courses: Blog by Number* and Printables by Number*. They’re perfect if you’re starting a blog or want to make money selling printables (workbooks, planners, small ebooks…). Investing in your business will mean that you have skin in the game and are more likely to keep going.
- For the smaller challenges you’ll inevitably encounter: google it! We often get stuck on tech issues for example, but very often there’s an article or a YouTube video that can walk you through how to make things work. Building your own business is a great time to flex your resourcefulness muscles and figure things out, rather than staying stuck in indecision or overwhelm.
FAQ about starting an online business
- What is the best online business to start?
The one that you actually commit to and keep going with! I can’t remember the statistics, but a lot of businesses do fail early on. Part of that could be because the people who start them don’t keep going: they give up when they reach “the dip“, i.e. the moment when they’ve put a lot of effort in, but the results are still very slow. If you commit and keep going past the dip, you’ll have outdone most of your competition! Remember: if you persevere, you will succeed. - How do I start my online business with no money?
Website hosting* can be very affordable, but if you wanted to start with no money whatsoever, you could create a free ConvertKit* account. Then create a landing page to collect people’s email addresses. You would then share that page on free social media sites (Instagram, Facebook…). You could collect payments for your services via PayPal. Total cost: 0! - How do I start an online business from home?
Everything I’ve discussed so far you can do from home. No need for expensive software licences that you covertly take advantage of at the office! If you are working from home, it’s very easy to drift in and out of work all the time and not be very productive with your time. I strongly recommend creating boundaries and setting yourself up for success by using my free guide to six ways to have more energy today when working from home. - What is a good business to start in 2021?
This might not be very satisfying, but it will all depend on your unique combination of skills and interests. There are many ways to make money, but they will be easier to stick to if they resonate with your values and interests. If you are really stuck for ideas, I recommend using Pat Flynn’s videos as a starting point: 5 Business Ideas That Will Be BIG for 2021 (But Easy to Start!) – he’s one of my top five online business thought leaders! - What business makes the most money?
The one that you take the most action towards! Remember: our thoughts create our feelings, which create our actions and then our results. If lots of money is the result you want (it is a business after all), then you have to put in the work to create helpful thoughts and then take action from there. I am happy to help you with the mindset bit of starting your own business – learn more here! - What is the easiest business to start?
Many businesses are quite easy to start. I’d begin by looking at what you already know and can share now without doing too much additional research. You can easily set up a coaching business and coach people remotely on something you know about (e.g. fitness, going after their goals, parenting…). Or you could create printables based on processes you already do (e.g. recipes, organisation systems, meal planning…) and sell those on Etsy*. If you get overwhelmed, remember to take a pen and paper and write down what comes to mind in response to the question “what would this look like if it was easy?”.
The last thing you need to know about building an online business
- There is no magic business idea waiting to be uncovered. So pick your best guess, then apply the steps above. After an initial surge of motivation, you will probably get discouraged (it happens to all of us). This is the key moment where you need to pick yourself up and keep showing up consistently. I am happy to help you out in the early stages or when you reach this dip – learn more here. But if you only remember one thing from this whole blog post, let it be Dory’s advice: just keep swimming, just keep swimming!
- If you feel like you are constantly getting in your own way (e.g. delaying starting your business, procrastinating on important tasks…), sign up below to get my free guide to three ways you are secretly sabotaging your success… and how to follow through with your plans instead! Think of it as your shortcut from procrastination to productivity (+ success and happiness!).
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