Due to the arrival of the COVID-19 quarantine, many of us were working from home. But after all that was wiped out, many of us were told to go back to the office to work. For those professionals who got used to remote working and liked it, you may be walking around with the idea of starting an online business. If so, this video on how to set up an online business is for you.
Pamela Wilson of pamelavilson.com sits down with Shawn Hessinger of Small Biz Trends to talk about setting up an online business.
For more from Pamela Wilson, visit her site†
How to build an online business?
Here’s a recap of the discussion from this episode:
Shawn: How can professionals who think now be the time to open a business and translate their knowledge into selling a product or service that they can sell online?
Pamela explains that she loves this question because online is a great place to be. You can market to clients outside your geographic location, and it’s not uncommon to sell your expertise online to people on the other side of the world who need it.
She adds that online businesses that have been online for a while have 100% iteration, which basically means they’ve been around for a while and have fully developed their website and business tactics.
Don’t let it overwhelm you, though, says Pamela. Instead, she tells online merchants to start thinking about the services and products they can offer others and approach it all with an iterative approach – repeat your business, your ideas, who you serve… all that.
And if you don’t like something, it’s always easy to go in and change it, because you’re working in a digital environment.
If you want to know how to grow your business online, the first thing she says is to think about the direction you want to go and build around that direction.
Shawn: Let’s say you have multiple experiences. Or maybe you have developed multiple talents and they might not be related. What then? What expertise should I focus on?
You can combine a few areas of expertise, Pam says, but recommends that market research, or what she calls “market exploration,” works well when it comes down to it.
She suggests spending some time mining information online to find out: What are people looking for? How can you reach them? And other marketing research related questions.
Pamela says it can literally be as simple as going to Amazon, looking at a book topic, and reading the book reviews. Then see what the reviewers learned and what they liked and disliked.
That and more can let you know that people want to know more about this topic. Then you can do something with that information and what to do once you’ve explored your market, she says.
Shawn: What do you recommend for people who are not tech savvy? For example, people who might not know the first thing about building a website or the online atmosphere? It can be so intimidating.
It’s so easy to see your competitors online. You may notice that they are on their 100th iteration online for your topic. Then you can get “comparison inflammation,” where you may feel like you can never measure it, explains Pamela.
Instead of feeling that way, she says you don’t have to have a super complex website to have an online presence.
She recommends starting with one page, just a homepage that shows who serves you, how you serve them, and a little bit about who you are.
Pamela knows everything that can be a major technical hurdle to overcome because there are several things involved. For example, you need to secure a domain name and get the software to set up that homepage, say a simple WordPress installation to set up that one page.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be super confusing, and there are tons of YouTube videos that can show you how to do this in 10 minutes, she says. You want that to happen as soon as possible so that Google can associate your domain name with this topic expertise.
To learn how to monetize your expertise and sell products online, you need to familiarize yourself with the iterative stages of building an online business.
Finally, Pamela goes into detail about the four iterative stages you need to build an online business. So be sure to listen to the 15 minute video that will help you break out of the ‘comparisonitis’ mentality and a video where you can sell your knowledge or products from the comfort of your home.
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