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My honest advice before starting/joining an online business

Updated: Jun 21, 2020

This article is just me giving advice to YOU about starting an online business or joining with a program. I am not going to go in to detail about how to do particular things – I may post another blog post eventually on this.


If you do decide to join an online business/program, they should have training in their back office for you to complete before deciding to promote your business. I just wanted to post an article on this because I know what it’s like entering into this industry, you will probably most likely feel a little alone at the start, but believe me you're not!


Be Realistic

I will be honest. Starting any online business isn't easy, especially if it's your first time. Gaining leads can be quite difficult and expensive when you're starting out. Leads are the most IMPORTANT thing in any business. Leads are what get you the SALES. If you are serious about starting online and eventually building your online businesses and having multiple income streams, then here are few things you need to know:


  • Building your empire will not happen overnight - If you're serious about starting online, then obviously you will want to be a part of serious online businesses. What I mean by this is you cannot be immature and naive when it comes to the online business world. Money doesn't start rolling in overnight, not at first. If you are promoting a product/site/or MLM program, you need to focus on building your leads while doing this, that is if you are starting off with no leads. If you've been in the online business world for a while and you have 5,000 - 10,000 leads or more, it will be easier to make sales.

  • It's all about your presence online - When you're working online, you are YOUR OWN BOSS. This means that you can work as many or a little hours per day, you can take your own vacation days, you can decide your own schedule! However, this doesn't mean you can work very little hours and expect your business to grow immensely. You need to build your presence online before you can expect to gain sales etc... How you this is up to you. There are many ways or marketing your business. Whether it’s through social media, paid advertising or email marketing. You need to be CONSISTENT with whatever one you choose to do. If you choose multiple ways of marketing then you need to be CONSISTENT through them all.

  • Patience is key - Having patience is key when it comes to starting you online businesses. Please be patient when it comes to gaining leads for your businesses! This is for YOUR OWN GOOD, YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, AND YOUR SUCCESS. If you give in because you haven't given your business time to grow, then let’s be honest it's you who you will disappoint. Find your support groups and be a part of them - honestly it can be a lonely world out there online, especially when it comes to building and growing your online business. Sometimes when you're trying to figure out how to do something yourself it can be very frustrating and time-consuming. This is why when you join a program or affiliate marketing, or whatever it may be, join some forums or Facebook groups, watch some YouTube videos - this will help you to build the skills and knowledge that you need to get started. The most important thing you can do is to build your SUPPORT GROUPS. You are not alone when it comes to building a business from the bottom up. Many many people have done it before, this means you can do it too! You just have to be smart about it! You just have to believe in yourself!


If you're serious about joining an online business or building one you can't start for free. Unless there’s an online MLM or affiliate program out there that you can start for free and actually make money off, that I haven’t heard of. This is me being honest from my experiences, I have searched the internet when I first started promoting and joining online programs/businesses, the free ones you’re more likely to give up quicker, than if you were to join a program/business that you have to pay either a start-up fee/or monthly fee to do. I will explain this in more detail. If you're trying to start for free in an online business, then you probably have it in your head that you can promote for free and gain leads and sales overnight. Like I said before, don't be naive in thinking this. If you join a free business - if you find a good one to join with lots of reviews, if you are looking to promote your business for free, then you would need to invest a lot of time and energy in to promoting it on social media. This can be very time-consuming, especially if you're starting with no money, as you will have to go and join Facebook groups that are specific to your online business/niche and you will have to then go and add 10-30 people a day within these groups. This is called TARGET marketing. However not everyone is so trusting over Facebook. Also, you will have to message people within these groups to see if they would be interested in your product/service. So, if this one of the ways you would like to start your online business. Just remember it is going to be much slower than paying for something as you need to build your social media foundation and branding for marketing your online business. But you can take FB marketing courses or watch FB marketing videos on YouTube ,Vimeo etc.. to give you an idea of what you need to do.

The other reason it would be much slower than paying for something is because, if you're joining something for free the likelihood is that these programs haven't spent a lot of money creating good content for you to use when promoting the business/product. At the end of the day if you and everyone else has signed up for the business for free where would they get the money to create good content for you to use when promoting it. If you invest money in program, the program will likely give you a ton of resources that you can use to promote their program. Also, their support is likely going to be much better than if you were to pay for a free program.


Finding what works for you


I want to get my point across that not everyone is going to use the same marketing methods when promoting online programs/businesses. This is because when you first join an online program/business you will likely spend a lot time doing the training that is provided to you through these programs/online businesses. You will find marketing/advertising/promotion methods within the training. Once you have set everything up for you businesses and you’re ready to start advertising and marketing, it is GOOD PRACTICE to RESEARCH the methods and websites that you’re going to use to do this. It is trial and error when it comes promoting your businesses. You want to keep the failures of advertising to a minimum and that why I am telling you to RESEARCH the methods and websites before using them. You might find when you do this that these methods may not be appealing to you. What I mean by this is that you may not like some of these methods or want to use them, so it’s all about finding what works for you. Once you find a method or two that works for you, you probably will become a creature of habit and continue to use these same methods over and over again because they have been WORKING. However, it good to change things up a bit from time to time and experiment with at least one other method now and again. You never know it may work for YOU.


Not all of these methods are going to work the same for everyone. You may come across in this industry that people are using a ton of different methods, methods that work for them and they swear by, but if you were to try it, it may not work in the same way for you. This is because you need a bit more practice or knowledge of these methods. THIS IS OK. You will gain more marketing skills over time, it just takes a little practice and trial and error. Although in this industry a lot of people stick to things they're comfortable with. Just one piece of advice – don’t become a creature of habit, change it up now and again.


Budgeting your business

This is probably going to be most essential piece of advice I will give you in this article. Please take caution with your money when advertising and promoting specifically. Why I am saying this is because I don’t want you wasting your money on advertising methods that aren’t necessarily going to work. This is why I said previously research advertising methods and websites at least for a couple weeks before deciding to use them. Don’t just find one you think you will be happy with and throw your money in to it before you have researched this method properly. REVIEWS are a really good thing to go by when trying to choose advertising methods. You can search reviews obviously on google, however YouTube might be a good place to do this also. Don’t settle on the first method you find either, find a couple that you think could work for you and you have searched for reviews on these. Compare them and then once you are confident about one of them, then you’re set to go.


Set aside a weekly/monthly budget when advertising/promoting your business. This is if you choose do paid advertising. If you choose to the social media way, then you won’t really need to budget. However, can still use paid advertising with social media.

Capture pages and sales funnels

A capture page is one of the things you need to set up straight away when you join an online business/program – this is what CAPTURES your leads for your BUSINESS. If you don’t have one of these you can't capture people's email addresses and sent an email campaign to them – an email campaign is simply like a newsletter for your business, the only difference is you’ll be using a set of email swipes – highly converting swipes to market your business.

You can create a free capture page on WIX – it is very simple. There is some YouTube tutorials on this. However, I may create one for my members as I have some tips and tricks of my own, I’d like to pass on.

The other thing I would recommend is to not invest money straight away into an auto-responder. The reason I’m saying this is because you can use WIX forms to create a capture form. The free plan has a subscriber limit – not sure what this is, but you can continue to use this until you reach your subscriber limit, you may actually be able to do a work around of this by importing your subscribers to Mailchimp – which you can join for free. Mailchimp’s free plan has a subscriber limit of 2,000. So if the WIX subscriber limit was less than this, you could possibily export them and them import them in to Mailchimp to do your email campaigns from there. Of course, you’d then have to delete them off WIX and do the same again when you reach your limit again. But this is just an option.

Capture pages need to be linked to your sales page of your business, so that after the lead has entered their email address in to the capture form they are then taken to the sales page and the goal of this is to give as much information about your business.


In turn this is called a sales funnel. You have a capture page which then links to your sales page. The middle man of this is your email campaigns. You need to send emails out every day to your leads. You need to get your presence out there.


Again, any program/online business you join will have in depth training that explains all of this.

Last piece of advice

If you’re thinking about using Facebook to advertise and promote your business. I RECOMMEND before doing so to find a Facebook marketing course specifically related to MLM or affiliate marketing. You can also find PDF’s on this too! Some programs you join will have a whole course within their program specifically on Facebook marketing, LinkedIn and YouTube marketing. So these may be a good place for you to start if you want to do free marketing methods.

Summary

To do

Be patient! - Things will not happen not overnight. Your business needs time to grow. You need time to get everything set up, to research, to get practice and experiment. You need time to develop the skills need to successfully promote your business. Don't rush, take your time. There's plenty of support out there if you need advice on anything.

Be consistent! - I suppose I am saying this specifically in relation to advertising and sending out email campaigns. If you have set a budget on advertising - that's fine! Any subscribers that you already have - use them! Send you email campaigns out EVERY day. Get your presence known. Set your territory in the industry.

Research before paying for advertising! - This is an important one. You need to take time and find the best advertising methods that you think will work for you. Take time to read the services reviews. YouTube advertising methods for MLM marketing/affiliate marketing. Just make sure you're confident enough before choosing a method.

Budget your money - Learn to discipline yourself when it comes to investing in your business, this is very important when your just starting out and you're still grasping everything.

Research free advertising methods - this is mainly social media, and YouTube. Find some E-books or courses on these before deciding to do them, if you don't you will waste your time, and it will build a lot slower than if you were to read an E-book or find a course or even watch YouTube videos. This is so you can get the tips and tricks needed to succeed at these methods.


Not to do

Give up - in life everything takes time to unravel itself. You have to believe in your business in order to succeed. That's why learning the essential skills is important when joining a program/business.

Throw loads of money into advertising without researching on advertising methods and without looking at the reviews of the service - Please be cautious with your money - throwing loads of money into something doesn't mean you will get loads of sales. Some advertising methods/services may not work as effective as they're portrayed to be.

Join too many things at the one time - this is so you don't get distracted on the first business you just joined. Give the first one time to grow, develop your skills and leads, then you can interpret this all to any other businesses you wish to join. This is also another important piece of advice. If you try and do too many things at the one time, you will likely fail, and get very stressed out.

If you're interested in starting an online business and generating multiple income streams, have a look at this post I created about My Lead Gen Secret. I HIGHLY recommend it!

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