If you are a business that trying to connect with your audience through social media, chances are you also need to know how to successfully run an online business. It’s not as simple as it looks, in fact people running successful online businesses are very strategic and savvy about how they approach this way of running a business.
I’d like to share eight simple steps that can help you get started once – and this is important, you have absolute clarity around your business model. That’s right, the model, the way you make money.
1. Pick an Ideal Client: You should know who your client is, be able to pick them out of a crowd, and know exactly how to identify with them when the are talking to you. Yes, you need a crazy sense of awareness about who they are if you want to serve them well. If you think everyone is your client, you have fallen into the trap of most new business owners. This is serious work and it is important work and is covered in great detail in The Social Business Academy.
2. Go Where Your Ideal Client Is: Where do they hang out? If you don’t know who they are and what they like to do or are interested in, it is almost impossible for you to find them. If you cannot find them – you cannot build a relationship and that is the key to creating success. It’s not some fancy system, it’s all about your ability to build a relationship.
3. Learn How to Connect with Your Ideal Client: Ever meet someone and you had so much in common you hit it off right away? When you know who your ideal client is and you know what their needs are and how you can help them sometimes you can connect with very little effort. When we meet people face to face we are pretty savvy about social norms, what is appropriate and what is not. Learn these same norms for online. Learn how to be social. You need to talk with other people online, not at them.
4. Build Your List with the Right Audience: All lists are not created equally. You can buy a list, you can mine the internet and add names to a list (believe it or not this is how an email marketer taught me years ago and I didn’t do it because I knew it was wrong). Or you can build your list with integrity. If you don’t know who your audience is, you will never be able to attract them to your list. I can’t say it enough, know thy client, it matters!
5. Have a Solid Communication Plan: Build a communication plan that helps you to create new fresh content on your website every week. Then create a social sharing plan so that you can use that content via your social networks to add value. Communication is key – if you don’t have a plan, you really do have a plan, it’s called “planning to fail.”
6. Demonstrate Credibility and Reliability: This is probably the most critical action of the entire list. You must be credible in all that you do and in the content that you create and most of all you must be reliable. Don’t say “weekly blog” if you blog once a month. Say what you mean, and do what you say you will do – always.
7. Offer Them Something to Buy: Don’t be “pitchy-pitchy” right from the very start. That is just way too hard and it makes you look desperate for business.Have a plan when it comes to selling something online. It isn’t just a magic button that works, you need to consider what they are buying and what happens in the back end once they press that button to say “yes”.
8. Wow Them with Everything You Do (especially with what you charge money for): When people are happy with your products and services – they tell you about it, and they tell their friends. This is called Social Proof and your next customer is looking for it.
Make what you offer so spectacular that your customers are dying to thank you and tell all their friends about you. If you do this one thing exceptionally well, you will never have to sell again because your customers will do that work for you. I hope that this gives you a starting point to look at how to build an online business. When you are ready to take your business to the next level, check out The Social Business Academy for a more intensive program.
Or if you just want to learn about Online Marketing and the details I covered in this course, you can get more information about it here.
