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Ready To Accelerate Your Online Business Growth?
It would be nice if we could just wake up one day and everything we’ve ever wanted was laid out right in front of us, but unfortunately, that’s not possible.
And when it comes to online business, they’re built overnight. They take hard work, dedication, and discipline.
While it may be disheartening to see all the people with hundreds of thousands of email subscribers and thousands upon thousands of Instagram followers, it’s important to remember that we all started out from zero.
That said, there are ways to accelerate your business growth to the place you want it to be.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Know Your Why
Why do you want to have an online business?
If it’s just about the money, let me stop you right there.
Because if you are just in it for the money, you’re not going to get the results you want out of your business. Yes, money is important, and you should never be afraid to sell, but it’s critical to know why you want to create this extra source of income (or a replacement source of income, if you’re looking to create an online business to replace your day job).
Your why can be whatever you want. It can be to support the down payment and mortgage on your dream home, so you can travel more (or quit your job and travel full-time), it can be so you can have your dream wardrobe, to help your children afford to go to their dream school, so you can follow your passions.
The most important thing is that you know what your why is. When you know your why, you have a driving force to propel yourself in the direction of that why, of that goal, every single day.
You don’t need to know how to get there (that’s part of the journey anyway), but you must know what you’re journeying toward. How do you really clarify what it is you want? One way is through journaling, which is critical for online business owners. You can read more about the importance of journaling in this post.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Know Who You’re Helping
Once you have that clear determination of your why, then you have to determine who you’re helping.
This is your ideal client, and you must know who they are if you want to be successful.
At the core of it, you need to know what they want, what they’re willing to do to get what they want, and most importantly, how you can help them.
When you have the clearest idea of who you are here to help (and how to help them), you can then better craft your marketing copy to them.
When you know exactly who you’re helping and how you can help them, it makes marketing a breeze.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: You Must Take Action
This is critical.
You can’t grow your business if you don’t take the appropriate actions to grow your business.
What are those appropriate actions?
Growth-centered actions that you are aligned with. That’s important. Grow in the way that you want to grow, and promote your business the way you want to promote it, but make sure that you are taking action to grow it..
Because if you don’t take action, any action, then you’re not going to grow at all.
Even if you don’t know what action to take, you have to take some action, period.
The more action you take, the more clarity you are going to achieve, and when you achieve clarity, you get to grow even quicker.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Be Consistent
As with action taking, consistency is critical.
These days, it’s all about being own the mind of your audience. You can’t just go on a tear for a few weeks, and then disappear completely. You can eventually grow to the point where you can put systems in place that automate your marketing, but what is most important when you are getting your business off the ground, is to be consistent.
When it comes to blogging—and even marketing in general—you want to get yourself into a system that works for your life.
If you don’t have the time or the capacity to churn out three blog posts per week, then don’t force yourself to try.
Remember, it’s about quality over quantity, and then providing the quality content consistently.
Need help being held accountable for creating consistent content? Join my free Facebook community, Consistent Content Creators.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Have An Email List
If you don’t have an email list, you don’t have a business.
Full stop.
You may be able to make money online in other ways, but if you want a business that is not just scalable, but is sustainable, you must have an email list, and it must be growing consistently. I go deeper into the importance of having an email list in this post.
By and large, you are much more likely to make sales from your email list, than you are from your social media following. This is primarily because your social media following only sees a fraction of the content that you post.
Thanks social media algorithms.
But when someone subscribes to your email list, it’s because they want to see what you have to offer them, they want to learn from you, they want to get to know you and your business better.
And even more than that, you own your email list. You do not own your social media followings. You can lose your social media following at the whim of the owners of the platforms you’re on. If Facebook disappears tomorrow, how are you going to reach your audience?
In April of 2019, a story went around of an “Instagram blogger” who lost her account with over 100,000 followers, and dreaded the prospect of having to take a 9-5 job to support herself. It’s important to know that I use “instagram blogger” in quotes, because a blogger really is someone who grows their platform with an email list, while this to me feels more like this person was an “Instagram influencer”.
If she had an email list, she would have yes, had a bad day because her six-figures Instagram following was gone, but it wouldn’t have decimated her entire platform. You can read more about the situation in this article from LADBible.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Find A Mentor
Here’s the thing, you can’t do it on your own.
Yes, you can run an online business by yourself, many people—including me—do that, but building it on your own?
That’s next to impossible.
You can’t build your business in a vacuum, because that puts so much more pressure on you.
When you find yourself a mentor, find yourself someone who has done what you want to do, it’s going to be much easier to get to where you want to be.
You can find mentors in Facebook communities (like my free community, Consistent Content Creators), and get to know online business owners who are doing what you want to do. And when you put yourself out there with the willingness to learn, you’re going to be able to find the exact mentor that fits your needs.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Invest In Yourself And Your Future
If you’re serious about growing a business, you have to invest.
And yes, that means investing money before you’re making consistent income.
Consistent income comes from investing in yourself, investing in the right products and software and services and mentorship.
Consistent income comes from investing in your future.
Do you want a business that earns you income while you’re watching House Hunters and dreaming of buying your own dream home? Do you want a business that allows you to travel the world and work from your laptop? Do you want a business that allows you to live the lifestyle you’ve only ever dreamed about?
Then you’re going to have to invest.
And when you do invest, invest with the knowledge that all that money is going to come right back to you tenfold.
When you invest in yourself and your future, you know that you’re serious about finding success. Putting financial skin in the game allows you to further propel yourself to reaching your goals,.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Take That Course
Sure, you can Google how to grow your Pinterest following to more than a million views a month, and you can read blog post after blog post after blog post about growing your Pinterest platform (including this one, which I wrote), but what that’s really going to do is overwhelm you.
But a course all about how to accelerate your Pinterest growth is going to have all that information and more distilled into a product that you have (by and large) access to forever.
And not only that, but when things change, course creators will often update their courses with the updated in formation and how to navigate things like algorithm changes and the new emphasis on video, so all you have to do is watch the applicable, updated videos, and then implement those new strategies.
Online courses are a massive industry, and for good reason. Find yourself a course that teaches you everything you want to know, has the support you need, and any other bonuses that strike your fancy (and also, have reviews that showcase the stories of other successful students from the course).
If there’s something you’re dead-set on learning, taking the course is the quickest way to mastery, and much quicker than trying to do it on your own.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Find Your Community
By and large, your friends and family are going to have no freaking idea what it’s like to grow an online business.
They’re not going to understand it, and when you gripe at them, the terminology you use and the struggles you undergo are going to fly right over their heads.
It’s well-intentioned, but it’s not constructive.
But when you find yourself a community of fellow entrepreneurs—whether they’re in your niche or not—you’re finding your people. They’re the people who are going to celebrate with you when you win, they’re going to help you work through things that don’t go your way, and they’re going to understand every single thing that you’re going through when you deal with the growing pains of online business.
That community is going to be that thing that gets you most excited about building your business. It’s not a replacement for your friends and family, but it’s a supplement to your circle of people who have the same drive, the same mission, and the same passion that you do.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Join A Mastermind
Masterminds are amazing. They’re like the communities I talked about above, but on speed.
When you join a mastermind, you’’re not only working with someone who knows what they’re doing (which is so freaking important it’s not even funny), but you’re also working at a very high level with fellow online business owners who are just as passionate, just as driven, and just as invested as you are.
And when you join a mastermind, your journey is supported by these fellow online business owners. They get to know you on a much deeper level than in a community, and you get to be a lot more open with them, to really push through the barriers you encounter (whether they’re self-imposed, or other roadblocks that come from, you know, life).
You don’t even need to be in the same niche as the people in your mastermind. In fact, that’s one of the benefits, because you get perspectives and insights from people outside your niche, and then you get to apply those insights to your business, molding and modifying them to fit your needs.
It’s those differing perspectives that really help you grow, and grow quickly.
Accelerate Your Online Business Growth: Hire A Coach
If you really want to stay accountable and really want to grow quickly, hiring a coach is key.
And this is really where that investment in yourself and your future comes in.
When you hire a coach, you are committing to investing your time and energy into someone who knows what you want out of your business—and more importantly, has also done it.
You want to find yourself a coach that you really feel connected to. A coach who is someone who could be someone you’d want to be friends with.
And importantly, a coach being someone who does what you want to do, and does it very, very well.
You can take all the well-intentioned advice you want from friends and family, but well-intentioned doesn’t mean accurate. It may even mean that you’re going to take twice as long to reach your goals if you take advice from someone who hasn’t done what you want to do.
With a coach that you work with 1-1 (which goes deeper than joining a mastermind), you get advice that is not just concrete, but is tailored to your business.
Speaking of coaching, I work with a select number of highly-driven online business owners, helping them craft a content plan that highlights their assets and converts into growth, establishment of expertise and converts to income.
Ready To Start Your Own Online Business?
Have a lot to talk about, but don’t have the website to guide your readers to? Now is the perfect time to get started.
Now is the perfect time to take my free email course, where I teach you how to plan a year’s worth of blog content in just one day. This training takes away all the mystery behind figuring out what you’re going to write from week to week and helps you plan the ultimate in blogging content that your audience will absolutely love.
Don’t forget to get hosting (plus a free domain) for as little as $3.95/month through Siteground. You can read why I choose Siteground to host my websites in my post, 6 Reasons I Host My Side Hustle On Siteground (And You Should Too).
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