So your dream is to become an online business coach.
I get it.
The appeal is obvious: working for yourself, working from home, working directly with great clients, and helping people to make real and visible change that can have a huge impact to their business.
And you’re the perfect fit. You know your stuff. You’ve been doing this for years in a corporate job that you plan to up and leave (or perhaps you already have). And you’re hugely talented.
The amount of consumers that prefer shopping online hoping to find best deals and bargains is increasing day by day. Today, with traditional media declining in importance, companies look towards online tools as an integral component of marketing strategies. Undeniably, the media landscape and marketing has changed in fundamental ways that are long lasting, as digital marketing is expected to continue its rapid growth.
For all you amateur bloggers out there, here are three questions for you. Do you want more people reading your blog? Do you want to build your subscriber list? Do you want to make money from blogging?
(This is a guest post from Jennifer Nini)
Of course you do, why else would you have a blog?
You could just as easily be journalling in the privacy of your bedroom. Instead, you’ve chosen to publish to the world wide web.
So let me guess, you’ve slaved away perfecting your prose, editing and re-editing your work before finally hitting that submit button. But for all the work you’ve put in, I bet you’re not getting anyone reading your blog except for some family and friends who are obliged to. Am I right?
Messy tables, non-stop ringing phones, sporadic schedules, team management troubles, email beeps, and what not; an entrepreneur often has stacks work of finish. It can be quite difficult to manage all your tasks once your business is kicking in and has finally started making profits. You don’t want to mess it up at this point of the cycle since this is a crucial stage in the business. Depending on your survival extinct, your business will pave its way into the market and make a mark with the grit you develop at this stage. One way you can do that is by making smart choices about the sort of tools every entrepreneur should have at their disposal.
If you want your blog to work for your business, then you need to have a strategy in place to make sure that every time you write, you’re creating the perfect blog post. In other words, your blogging should serve a purpose. In this blog post, I’m going to reveal:
When I first starting running a business online, one of the most enlightening exercises I carried out was when I took steps to figure out who my customer was and what they wanted from me (spoiler: it wasn’t what I thought).
If you’re an entrepreneur, let me ask you a question, and it relates to how good you are at staying focused on your business:
What have you achieved today – just today – in your business?
It seems like an innocent question. If entrepreneurs have one thing in common, it’s that we’re dedicated to our cause, so I’m sure your day has been filled with a variety of business tasks.
But working on your business, and achieving something with your business, are two different things. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way, and it’s one I want to share with you in this post.
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The rapid growth of new technology is a real blessing for us entrepreneurs. Running a business online is just getting easier and easier, and I’ve found some of the best free tools on the web to help me get there.
When I first started working at digital agencies back in 2006 it took months to develop a website, weeks or months to add new features to it, and web design required heavy input from someone hugely skilled in Photoshop. Can you imagine how frustratingly slow it would have been back in those days to adapt your business to an ever-changing marketplace?
I’m always on the lookout for new tools, resources and apps that are designed to make the life of the entrepreneur easier. Here are ten that I’ve been really excited to discover (and no, I’m not affiliated with any of them):
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I’m not one to typically write about ‘soft’ topics like emotions. But this post is close to my heart because it’s something I have struggled with. And I know from speaking to customers and from speaking to associates that it is far more common that people realize, even if we don’t want to admit to it. It is the feeling of being overwhelmed. I want to talk about what it feels like to be overwhelmed at the start of your business journey, why it can be so damaging to your business success, and what you can do about it.
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A new business and no sales. Or as I call it: the website launch trap. It’s a problem many entrepreneurs fall into: they spend time and money building their perfect website, fine-tuning their product offering, getting traffic, and then…..wait a minute.
Where are my customers?
It can be so frustrating to an entrepreneur who has put their heart and soul into creating something from scratch. You know you have a fantastic product. You really believe in what they are doing. But people just aren’t buying it. And the longer this goes on, the more you start to doubt yourself:
Am I in the wrong business?
Is my product just a failure?
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