20 Steps to Help You Jumpstart an Online Business

In developing my own online business over the past year, I’ve vacillated from feeling overwhelmed to helpless to frustrated and to just barely thinking I could make it. But I did make it, and I think it would be helpful to anyone starting an online business to start with these 20 steps.

• Determine your true passion in business. Research if it is possible to make money pursuing this passion. If not, it’s just a hobby and you need to pursue another passion that you can monetize.
• Define your target by demographics and psychographics.
• Determine their pain. What keeps them up at night?
• Determine how your product or service addresses their pain.
• Define your product. What is it? What are its features that support its benefits.
• Define your “reason to believe” that supports the product and makes it unique. What about your product makes it different from the competition?
• Create a rational benefit based on the “reason to believe,” which will likely not be unique.
• Create an emotional benefit based on your rational benefit. Do this by answering, "The (rational benefit) is important because . . . " Do this until you come to an emotional benefit that gets you in the gut. Your emotional benefit will not be unique.
• Create a benefit-driven headline (nine words or less) that separates you from your competition.
• Write 300- and 50-word bios that position you as an expert in your field.
• Write 200- and 50-word descriptions of what your product or service does for your audience.
• Have a professional design your logo, which will include your branding colors.
• Get a professional-looking headshot taken in your brand colors.
• Have someone set up a professional-looking WordPress blog. Put the headline and your photo in the banner. (Few are the number of people who can set up their own blog and have it look professional and inviting. But if you’re one of the few, you’re very lucky.)
• Determine the communication strategy for your blog. What is the reason your target would want to read it?
• Write the core content: Home Page, About Page, Product Page, etc.
• Research topic areas of interest to your target.
• Write 30 blog posts based on your research.
• Schedule the blog posts to be sent out once per day for 30 days.
• Set up your social media accounts and begin to drive traffic to your blog by offering meaningful content.

Depending upon how much time you have or how much you know about your area of expertise, marketing or running a business in general, this list could take you from one to six months – for some, a year. Don’t get discouraged. Just know that by doing the steps in order, you are developing sound marketing strategy. The next thing you need to start doing is market research with your target audience. How you research your target depends upon who is in your target. Do the steps in order and you will build your marketing strategy from square one. And in marketing, it’s important to start at square one. The key here is to be relevant to your target audience in every piece of content that you write. Start with your blog post. Send updates and Tweets to your social media accounts, which are small pieces of content based on your post. Include a shortened URL to your blog at the end of any update you make in social media. These updates with the URL will begin to drive traffic back to your blog. Then you can begin interacting with your customers in a meaningful way.