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In the very beginning of your online business journey, I typically do not recommend that you focus on building up your blog first. The reason is simple…
Your concept is unproven.
If your goal is to build a business, then we need to focus on the business basics first. This means we will put the blog on the back burner for the time being, as counter-intuitive as that may be. Instead, we will focus on establishing our product/market fit.
This Bootcamp is a series of live workshops which were delivered to Lab members with the purpose of showing how to start from scratch. The basic outline of the process we will go through is:
- Identify the target market you wish to serve and how you wish to serve them.
- Learning as much about the needs and wants of your target market as you can, including developing a customer avatar profile.
- Setting up a lead magnet and landing page specific to attract your target market and get them in the door.
- Using paid traffic to send targeted traffic to your landing page to test the conversion rate on your lead magnet.
- If too low, we adjust and re-try until we can reliably put people onto the email list. If conversion is adequate, we move to next stage.
- We set up an initial offer to extend to new leads. This could be a service offer, affiliate offer, or a pre-sale for a product you’re thinking about making.
- We test the offer, again, using paid traffic and test for rate of sales.
- We make adjustments as needed, based on feedback from the market.
- Only when we have a lead magnet which converts and an offer which is selling do we then move forward with setting up a full blog to serve as your home base around this market.
By removing all the usual “fluff” of blogging and going right to the heart of the matter – getting leads and making sales – you’ll go into blogging with a proven product/market fit. And everything else becomes SOOO much easier. 🙂
So, you’d like to start up a profitable online business based around a blog. But, you don’t have a blog yet. You have no product. You have no email list.
What do you do? What’s the next steps?
In those beginning phases, it does feel like a lot of things are based on your gut feeling.
Will people care? Do they want what I’m providing? Is your idea going to work or end up being a waste of time?
And a lot of “paralysis by analysis” can result from this. Especially if you have a real visceral fear of failure, as many do.
But, all that is completely unnecessary.
By taking a series of specific baby steps and making small tests along the way, we can prove our ideas before going “all in”. And we’re talking about hard numbers. Real math. Either the numbers work or they don’t.
If the tests show all positive signs, we move onto the next step. If not, we make adjustments and re-test.
The Business Building Bootcamp is an 8-workshop series originally delivered live. Over these 8 sessions, we will walk together through the steps to build your online business out of thin air. One baby step at a time, one test at a time.
