The First Three Steps To Starting Your Online Business

Starting an online business is an exciting venture. By diving in and developing the idea into a full-blown small business you can gain so many things. For me things like freedom, financial security, and creativity were essentials and something I wanted to plan for and around. For you it might look like: more time with your family or to travel, ability to earn limitless income and grow quickly, a way to do work you are passionate about and give back in some way, and so on.

Getting started with your business is overwhelming. Terrifying, actually. You either fall into the category of being highly motivated but not a lot of ideas or you have too many ideas and are getting decision paralysis. Wherever you are on that spectrum is the perfect place to get started.

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WHAT EXCITES YOU?

First things first, figure out what makes you excited. What makes you happy? What are you going to be content working on into the wee hours of the morning and then waking up early to do more? What gets you wiggling in your seat because you are so freakin’ pumped to share? What do you feel like you could easily talk about for hours and hours and still want to talk about more? 

This might be a huge list of a lot of unrelated topics, or it might be on specific, obvious thing. Neither is wrong! My list could look like: design, wine, art history, travel, yoga, etc. Just take some time and brainstorm about what lights a fire under you – even if you don’t immediately see a way to monetize that, that’s fine. I’m a strong believer that we can all make an income doing something we love and are passionate about, so I truly believe you can too.

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HOW CAN YOU MONETIZE?

Once you’ve developed some ideas of things that are really passionate about we need to develop a way to monetize that and formulate an actual business. This is where it really helps to start thinking in the way of “problems” and “solutions.” Businesses solve problems for people. They offer solutions. So your business will need to do the same. 

During this next phase of starting your business, think through the list and start to associate problems you might have had or others might have with the topics. For example, if you totally L-O-V-E wine, what are some pain points surrounding that? It can be an expensive hobby to jump into for starters. It can feel overwhelming, a bit snobby and hard to understand. You can be confused about food pairings. You might not even know the proper technique for drinking wine, let alone storing it or serving it. How can you, with your knowledge and experience and love of this topic begin to resolve these issues for someone?

Maybe you offer an “introduction to wine crash course” that simplifies understanding the different regions wine comes from and the profiles of different grapes. Or maybe you offer one on one coaching lessons that allow clients to work with you individually to understand wine pairings better. Maybe you write an eBook about all the common ways people mess up serving, storing, and drinking wine.

I don’t think you necessarily need to figure it all out in this step, but just start generating ideas. The hard decisions come later, but in the beginning the emphasis should be on really creating a lot of opportunities or paths to go down and giving yourself options, time for reflection, and an open mind.

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HOW DO YOU GAIN MOMENTUM?

Like I just said, you probably won’t come to any definitive decisions yet, but once you’ve come up with a few different paths that you feel enthusiastic about, I want you to shift your focus to actually gaining traction as a business and growing.

The biggest thing that has helped my business to grow has been blogging and social media use. These are what I recommend to strategy clients to implement into their business and what I am going to recommend to you too.

How does that help? Well for starters, blogging is phenomenal for SEO purposes as you should be blogging about things that pertain to your business. It also promotes authority in that it showcases your value and expertise. It lets potential clients know that you are a resource and that you do have something worth their time and money. Social media is good as a way to build and foster relationships with your audience creating an authentic and natural place in their lives as a blog and business they find reputable and worth following.

But how else can you gain momentum? Things like hosting challenges on Instagram or a mini series on Periscope are fantastic ideas to get your name out there more regularly and build up recognition. 

At this stage in starting your business you probably haven’t fully settled on a particular path, but I do think it’s wise to spend some time planning and doing a little research of avenues you might be interested in using to gain that momentum. This is a way to further explore topics you might be interested in and see just how viable they are as a business, as well as challenge yourself to think through things you’ll actually be doing in your day to day and see if the work still excites you. 

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MOVING FORWARD

I titled this post in a way that showcased these three steps as the first steps to starting your online business because I find that it is easy to get an idea and just run with it. But taking time to fully explore your multiple passions and ideas and see how they could actually become a business is something that will create more lasting success. Once you’ve completed these ideas, you should move into really honing down on one idea and going through the process of figuring out your why, who, and how.

This is something I cover in my eBook Branding 101: Building Your Base. I highly recommend checking it out once you’ve worked on some of the initial ideation phases because it will help you hyper focus and figure out how to start implementing real strategies to setting up your business for success.

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How I Start My Workday + Creating Your Own Routine

I recently had a discussion with someone about figuring out your full time “schedule” of sorts and creating a routine that works for you. When I started I thought I had to maintain a 9-5 mentality, but in reality, that was a large portion of what I was trying to escape. See, my brain doesn’t quite work like that. The first few weeks of me trying to mimic those same ideas proved to be unrewarding, unproductive, and unmaintainable.  That was a lesson I learned pretty quickly – yes, have a routine, but make sure it’s a routine that you can work with.

It’s definitely still a work in progress for me. My current living situation (moving in less than a month, woo!) forces me to work around other people’s schedules, which I find mildly annoying, but I’ve figured out what is best for right now and definitely have a plan for what will adapt when I move.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a morning person. I’m not. I have read so many articles and posts about how the early bird catches the worm and I should have six hundred things done before 7am. But before 7am? I’m a straight-up zombie. I’m gross – mean, slow, and foggy. I spent some time figuring out when my “power hours” are an adapted my schedule accordingly. That’s the point I want to make with this blog post – all those productivity tips only work if it actually works for you. Be self-aware and take notice of yourself and adapt a schedule that fits best with you. Are you worthless at 7am? Don’t schedule hard and thought-requiring tasks then. Are you falling asleep at 2pm? Schedule your daily walk or exercise then to pump yourself up. We all have these glorious ideas and thoughts about working for ourselves but then we fall into these regimented routines that don’t actually allow for our best selves to shine (and produce)!

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First: Workout (Not Because I’m Awesome, But Because It’s Mindless)

My best day starts with me waking up around 7:00, but laying in bed for about 15 minutes just reviewing the day in my head. Sometimes I’ll check my phone, but usually I just lay there and just kind of think/doze (I hit the snooze button to make sure I don’t fall all the way back to sleep). I like this slow wake up because honestly, I don’t really want to wake up, so it makes it a little easier to digest. I’m completely worthless to do anything requiring heavy thought for a little while after waking up and I don’t really want to drink (re:  be dependent) on coffee, so I choose to do my yoga routine instead. I recently joined a gym that includes yoga classes and they have a morning power yoga class everyday, which is awesome. I used to do this at home, but having the class is actually a lot better for me because it forces me to get up and do something and not “take the easy way out”. By the time the class is done I am much more awake and ready to tackle the day (and my roommates have cleared out so I don’t have to worry about our conflicting schedules).

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Second: Inbox Tackle Numero Uno

I’ll do my morning “get ready” personal stuff and be ready to sit down and really work by 9:30-10:00am. My first task? Jump into my inbox. This is honestly a matter of “doing the hardest thing on your to do list first.” My inbox ranges from complete disaster and barely treading water most days. In my personal life I am the person who reads your text message, mentally responds, but doesn’t actually respond for three days. I have to make a serious effort to not do this in my business, because obviously that is not how a business should run. Something that I have learned helps me is to draft responses to emails the night before (when my brain is the sharpest, thanks Art School) and then send those out in the morning. It gives me a little pep in my email-step because I start my daunting task by already being ahead. So I navigate through my inbox, sort things, star things, respond to the simple ones, and formulate a to-do list based off of other ones. This takes about 30 minutes usually.

Ideally I’ll get to a place where I only check my inbox three times a day (morning, midday, and late afternoon). At this point I still have the tab open all day and get the alerts on my phone, which really isn’t the most productive. Something I do incorporate into my business practice that helps is designating days as “admin” days versus “client” days and so on. So I do check my inbox everyday, but I don’t make a point to actually clear it out/fix everything/respond to non-urgent emails unless it’s an “admin” day. If you struggle with focus and feel like swamped I definitely recommend creating a weekly schedule that balances admin work, client work, product/business work, and so on. It’s helped me immensely and let’s my mind turn off thinking about everything at once and focus on the day’s tasks.

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Third: Get Social

By now it’s about 10:30am. I’m generally hungry at this point so I’m on my first snack/breakfast (a banana if I’m not starving, eggs if I’m feeling like trying). I move onto social media. Social media used to consume my day. I’d sit on Twitter endlessly. The switch happened when I got too busy to function and social media was the first thing cut from my to do list. I don’t recommend that, at all, but it helped me break the feelings of “NEEDING to be there.”

For a while I attempted to buffer my whole week on Sunday or Monday, but that felt overwhelming and I would find excuses not to do it. Now I buffer my day out in the morning (sometimes going a few posts ahead into the next day). This might not be the most productive, but as I mentioned earlier, it’s what works for me - and that is the best kind of routine you can create. 

In this thirty-minute block I am buffering for Twitter and Facebook, going through the daily Facebook Group posts I’m involved in, and pinning for about 10-15 minutes. I’ll hop on Pinterest again in the evening and check Facebook occasionally throughout the day (because I find a lot of clients there, so I like to scroll through and answer questions/be available).

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The point of this post isn’t necessarily to tell you how you should schedule your morning, but more to help you realize the opportunities that exist when working from home/for yourself and that you can embrace a non-traditional schedule. Sure,  I don’t get started until about 10am, but I also work later into the evening.  I may work a half-day in the middle of the week if I need to schedule some sort of appointments or if I want to take a long lunch, but I also work some weekends and make up time then. Allowing that kind of flexibility into my life/schedule is a huge part of why I craved this sort of work and though it might have felt counterintuitive at first, I relish in the non-traditional now.

What sort of routine do you maintain? Let me know in the comments! 

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