Online Business by Michal Wurm www.onlinebusinesslaunchpad.com Read this book if you want to survive. Well, this may be a bit over the top, but I mean it in the most caring way possible. (You’ll see my point on the next page.) 2 The storm on the horizon Here is the deal. There is an economic storm brewing. You can probably see the signs here and there already. Many businesses are in dire straits and were forced to lay off workers due to the unfavorable economic situation. In 2020 the unemployment numbers went way above the great recession of 2008. At the time, the International Monetary Fund concluded that it was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. If you look at the US 4-week average jobless claims, the amount of people who lost their job has reached unprecedented levels. Hundreds of thousands of people out of work has to affect the economy in one way or another. It should scare the living daylights out of everyone who’s not in the top 10%. Unfortunately, many people are blinded by the media and ignorance when it comes to economics. March 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown spike Below is a chart from the US Department of Labour. You can see that things are not by any means pretty. (in thousands = 6 000 000 unemployed people) United States Jobless Claims 4-week Average Early 1980s recession 1973 oil crisis 2008 great recession We are here 1979 energy crisis 3 This doesn’t concern me, right? So what, you may say. I don’t live in the USA, so why should this concern me anyway? The aftermath of the 2008 US housing bubble finally rippled across the Pacific ocean to the pristine, remote country where I lived. And everything stopped almost overnight. The economic crisis, which began 12 000 km (8 000 miles) away, wreaked havoc everywhere. Well, the economies worldwide are so interlinked that if a major player like the USA, China, or the EU gets in trouble, the whole world is up the creek without a paddle. In the next three months, I had 16 clients who declared bankruptcy. At our average rate of $2500 for a website, this amounted to approximately $40 000 of lost revenue. Things became ugly, really quick. Some of my staff panicked and left for less-paid but more secure jobs, even though they hated them. Suddenly we were down to a skeleton crew of three people. I’ve seen it happen before. I lived in a lovely seaside town in New Zealand at the time. I started my own web design business a couple of years earlier. After an initial struggle, we finally seemed to be doing amazingly well. My company became one of the top brands in the region. I had eight people working for me, and I just closed the biggest partnership deal in my career, which meant I’d need to hire another five people to keep up with the demand. Things were going great. After we closed the deal me and my team went for steaks and wine to celebrate. I remember I ordered an inch thick beef steak with pepper sauce and roasted vegetables. Little did I know it would be the last steak I’ll have for a very long time. It was in December 2008. I couldn’t believe how quickly things turned sour. I learned from this experience that there is no such thing as enough security. You can never protect your income enough. You need to diversify your income and don’t rely just on a job to provide for your family, for God’s sake. 4 Back to today and back to you We can see the writing on the wall. We know the wheels are going to fall off the economic bandwagon we’re riding. And it would be best if you weren’t caught in the middle when it happens. The best way to generate wealth, become independent, and secure your income is to build your own business. So how do you protect your income? I found that the best way to generate wealth, become independent, and generate income is to build your own business. But how are you supposed to do that if you’ve never done it before? The good news is that it’s not that hard anymore. There are plenty of freely available or cheap tools that you can use to start your own online business. And it is where this book comes in. 5 The 5 steps to start an online business Here are the steps we need to go through to start an online business: 1. Purpose 4. Sales The WHY? You need to be sure about why you want to build your own business. What’s in it for you, and why you want to help others. 2. Product You need a web page or sales process which you will use to sell your product or service. Where in the internet are you going to sell your product or service? 5. Traffic The WHAT? You need to figure out what you are going to sell. The ideal way is to use your passion and turn it into an income. 3. Packaging The WHERE? The WHO? Once you have everything in place, send as many people to your website as possible. The more people who visit your sales page, the higher the chance of you making money. The HOW? Let’s go over each step and see how you can tackle them from the comfort of your bedroom. How are you going to package and present your product? It needs to be simple to use and easy to distribute to as many people as possible. 6 Step 1: Why start an online business? 1.8 billion people shopped online last year. There are many reasons why you need an online business. The main ones that I see are these: It is an additional income stream. Someone out there is looking for what you have to offer. Even if you have a job right now, it never hurts to make a little extra money on the side, does it? Passive income Independence Once you setup your processes, it can run on autopilot, with There is an incredible degree of freedom when you do not have to minimal maintenance requirements on your part. Your online answer to a boss anymore. You can choose where and when you business can be a passive income that you receive, whether want to work and what you want to do. Once you taste this kind of you work or not. Sure, it’ll require your time and energy at the freedom, it’s hard to go back to a regular 9-5 job. beginning and lots of it. Still, once you have everything in place, you can take the family on a road trip without feeling guilty Unlimited potential about not working. If you choose the right product to sell, there is no upper limit on income. You can scale it to level you don’t even dare to dream yet. 7 Step 2: What are you going to sell? Figuring out what you are going to sell is sometimes the most Alright, so you want to start your own business, but maybe you challenging part. have been struggling to figure out what you can actually sell to people. There are so many options and variations to consider. You can sell these three types of products: Let me give you a few examples, and hopefully, these ideas will point you in the right direction. • Physical products • Digital products • Coaching & consulting There are pros and cons to each type. I like digital products The ideal way is to take something you are passionate about and turn it into a stable income. the most because you can easily scale them. They can run on autopilot and don’t require large startup capital. What you want is to create something once and sell it many times. 8 Business ideas to get you started Step 2: What are you going to sell? So what can you sell online? If you’re handy with DIY projects: Chances are, you already possess the knowledge you can share. • Teach people home improvement. • Publish series of guides on fixing things. For example: If you are a stay-at-home mum, you could: If you are passionate about woodworking • Write a cookbook with healthy recipes children love. • Record a woodworking course. • Write an ebook with fun games parents and children can. • Design furniture plans people can use to build their own play to spend some quality time together. • furniture. Compile handy tips to help with house chores. If you are an artist: If you know how to bake: • • Create online art classes. Create a book with baking recipes. If you’re into health and nutrition: If you know how to sew: • Create a weight loss program. • Design sewing patterns and sell sewing pattern kits • Record a healthy eating course. • Decord a video course on how to sew • Publish a book about proper nutrition. 9 Business ideas to get you started If you’re into fitness If you’re into fashion • Record videos about how to exercise properly • • Create a fitness program for a specific outcome Step 2: What are you going to sell? Create a video program showing people how to dress better If you are a makeup artist If you love to travel • • Record a course on different makeup styles Write an uncommon travel guide to a place you love to visit often If you know a particular software really well • Create unique travel maps that follow a specific theme • • Write interesting stories about your travels Create a set of courses explaining how to use the software If you are good at languages If you’re a really organized person who gets things done: • Create a language course • • Design tools or materials to help people learn better Teach others how to be more productive. If you know how to fix cars: If you like to work on model trains or planes: • Do a set of courses on fixing cars. • • Teach people how to do car body repairs. 10 Teach people how to do specific modeling techniques. Business ideas to get you started If your passion is dancing: If you are good with kids: • • Create online dancing classes. Step 2: What are you going to sell? Create a course on a specific parenting issue. If you like fishing: If you’re good with finances • • Write a book or a course on how to get out of debt • Help people organize personal finances • Educate people on investment options Create a course teching people how and where to fish If you’re into golf: • Teach specific golfing techniques. If you are in real estate If you love pets: • • Teach people the best way to care for different animals. Write a guide about house flipping, house selling, or house buying issues. If you know a lot about camping and survival: If you are a software developer • Tech people how to prep. • Create a software as a service (SAAS) • Compile bug out kits. • Teach people how to program mobile apps • Teach survival skills. 11 Research your competition Step 2: What are you going to sell? Before you commit your time, energy, and hard-earned cash Tools to help you with your research: into starting your own business, do thorough research first. • Google search • Facebook pages Start with a simple Google search to see what other people are • Facebook Ads library already selling and if there is enough demand for a particular • E-learning platforms (Skillshare, Udemy...) product. • Amazon bestsellers It’s far easier to copy and improve existing ideas than coming More research tips and advanced search techniques are at onlinebusinesslaunchpad.com up with an unprecedented way of doing something when you are just starting out. You can afford to spend your time developing a new, It’s far easier to improve existing ideas when you are just starting out. revolutionary product from scratch once your business takes off. 12 Step 3: How will your product look? Once you have figured out what you will be selling, it’s time to Following is a list of incredibly useful tools to help you create actually create your product. your product. I have personally tried all of them to make sure they are helpful. Even though it’s usually the most time-consuming part of the process, it can be a lot of fun. There is something rewarding I actually demonstrate how many of these programs work about creating something new all by yourself. and give a quick 101 introduction to them inside my Online Business Launchpad course. The tools you’ll use depend largely on what kind of product or service you want to use. There is plenty of software available that will make the creation of your new digital product seem like a walk in a park. Many of these tools are free or have a free trial. You don’t have to go out buying expensive programs right at the beginning. 13 Tools for starting your business Step 3: How will your product look? Brand name generators Namelix.com Shopify Business Name generator Logo design 99 Designs Fiverr BrandCrowd Smashing Logo Education Skillshare.com Udemy.com Complete course How to Start an Online Business Example of brand design projects at 99designs.com Includes practical demonstrations and real-world examples OnlineBusinessLaunchpad.com 14 Tools for creating your product Step 3: How will your product look? Text editing and page layout Free graphics Book cover mockup generators Google Docs Freepik Placeit.net Microsoft Office Agencymockup Other resources Apple Pages Adobe InDesign Royalty-free photos & videos Fiverr - outsource anything Unsplash.com Envato Digital Marketplace Graphics editors Pixabay.com Canva - free online editor Pexels.com Adobe Creative Cloud Vimevo.com Affinity Photo Royalty-free music PDF editing Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech) Adobe Acrobat Royalty-free sound effects Sound editors Freesound.org Audacity Canva: Free online graphic editor anyone can use Adobe Audition 15 Step 4: Where will you sell your product? When you have your product ready, you need a website or some space on the internet to sell it. There are so many options you can use to build your own website it’s not possible to cover them all. Here are the most common solutions: ClickFunnels ClickFunnels is one of the best solutions on the market. It is a platform where you can easily create your sales page by dragging and dropping pre-designed elements to a page. With a few clicks, you can add an order form and connect it to a payment gateway to accept credit card payments. The whole system is designed primarily to help you sell more. 16 Step 4: Where will you sell your product? With ClickFunnels you’re not just building a website, you are creating a sales funnel. This means that every page you make here is encouraging your visitor to take action. You can collect email addresses, sell your products, present your upsell offers, and even create membership areas right inside ClickFunnels. There is no programming involved or any “techy stuff,” so everyone can use it. If you need to build a sales page for your business quickly and easily, give ClickFunnels a try. It comes with a free trial, so you have plenty of time to test it out, build your sales page, and start selling. Click here to try out ClickFunnels for free. Example of a sales funnel. 17 Step 4: Where will you sell your product? WordPress Did you know one-third of all the websites on the internet runs on WordPress? What started as a system for bloggers has quickly grown into one of the most versatile content management systems freely available. You can install the base system and extend it with many of the thousands of plugins available. If you want a fully-featured e-shop, then WooCommerce is probably the best way to go. The pros of WordPress are that you can adapt it to suit your needs. The downside is that you need to have at least some IT knowledge to make it work. WordPress homepage 18 Step 4: Where will you sell your product? Online marketplaces You can also make use of existing online marketplaces. These Regardless of which system you decide to use, the best advice are great when you are selling physical products. I can give you is to start tinkering around with it and adjust and improve on the go. Some of the most known marketplaces are • Etsy • Shopify • Amazon Handmade The pros are that the infrastructure is already created. All you need to do is sign up, setup your products, and you can start selling. The cons are that the platform takes a cut of your profits. Also, any follow up actions such as upsells or email newsletters become challenging to perform because you cannot adjust the Etsy is a popular marketplace for selling anything handmade. way the platform works. 19 Step 5: Who will buy it from me? The more specific you get with your dream customer’s definition, the better you can target them with your ads. It doesn’t matter if you have a fantastic with a beautiful sales page unless you can get people to see it. Many people fail at this point because they simply don’t know how to market themselves. The key is to find the right people – your dream customers – and show them your ads to bring them to your web page and read your offer. That’s way too general. You can drill down the description and be really specific. How about this definition instead? “My dream Now, to find your dream customers, you have to spend a fair customers are women in the age of 30-40 and 50-65, who like amount of time on research. I’d suggest making a list. Write down to sew and have children or grandchildren in the ages of 3-12 who your target customers are. Be as specific as you can. years old.” Here is an example of what specific means. If you sell sewing The more specific you get with your target customer’s patterns for children’s clothes, some people would simply say: definition, the better you can target them with your ads. “My dream customers are women.” 20 Step 5: Who will buy it from me? If your audience definition is too broad, you’ll be wasting your Paid advertising valuable budget on your ads. That is not something you can When it comes to getting quickly in front of a vast group of afford when you are just starting out. Suppose you do narrow people, the best way is to pay for advertising. your audience as much as possible. In that case, you’ll be able to create more engaging ads, use your budget efficiently, and There are two platforms where it makes sense to invest in paid you’ll have a much better return on your ad spend. ads for a startup entrepreneur with a home-based business right now. Facebook, and Pinterest. Once you know who your dream customers are, you can do a search on Facebook groups, Facebook pages, discussion Facebook is, by far, the most used ad platform. It offers a forums, blog sites and all the other places where they gather great way of targeting your potential customers by interests online. and demographics. With over 2.7 billion active monthly users, Facebook can reach an incredible amount of people. Signing Write everything on a list, so you know who to target and where up for a business account is free and setting up ads is relatively to show your ads. You can reach out to the owners of blog straightforward. sites or groups where your dream customers interact with each other. You can start commenting on these platforms, build a reputation, and gradually promote yourself. 21 Step 5: Who will buy it from me? Facebook also offers a free course on Facebook marketing Setting up advertising is free and simple enough. You simply called Facebook Blueprint. I highly recommend you going create your pins, then go and promote them based on the through it to know how the ads work and what the advertising interests your audience has. The added benefit is that when policies are. people like your promoted pin, they save it to their collection, which supports your pin’s organic reach in the long run. If you target your audience correctly, Facebook can be an Over 70% of Pinterest users are female, making it a great incredible way to get new customers rolling in. advertising channel if your product is aimed towards women. Pinterest has a much smaller reach than Facebook. However, with over 400 million active users, it’s still not a bad option to consider. While Facebook has been known for disabling ad accounts by mistake, rejecting ads, etc., Pinterest seems to be much more straightforward in this regard. 22 The big question Will you do it? You now know the importance of having your own business. You generally know what to do. The question is, will you do it? Odds are you won’t. There is a guide, though... Why? If you are serious about starting your own online business, I have created an extensive course that shows you: Because like most other people, you will reach too many obstacles, and you won’t know how to conquer them. You’ll get • How to build an online business that’s easy to manage. distracted by other things, it’ll become too complicated, and • Finding the right product to sell you’ll get stuck somewhere along the way. • Which are the recession-proof niches. • Different software and online tools and how can you use them to start your business. 23 • How to succeed even if people don’t buy at first • Practical demonstration of the entire process. The big question You can literally follow me, click by click, how I create an entire sales funnel, including credit card payment options. • How to start with a limited budget • Marketing secrets gurus use all the time. • Email marketing the easy way • Build email lists, send out email campaigns, and automate Will you use it to finally create emails with minimal effort. the life you deserve to have? How to grow your audience and keep fans engaged in just a It’s up to you. few minutes a day • ... and heaps more! All the best, Simply visit http://onlinebusinesslaunchpad.com for more information. Michal I’m giving you all the tools and knowledge I’ve used to build Michal Wurm successful businesses in the past 20 years of my career. michalwurm.com 24 Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. – Farrah Gray 25 www.onlinebusinesslaunchpad.com
