There‘s no shortage of information on how to make a living for yourself as a freelancer, online business or solopreneur.
As a marketer for over the past five years, I’ve become familiar with many technology tools of the trade. Here are my top choices that I believe will help guide you to build out your idea and start generating sales. This goes for starting a sports podcast, selling tshirts, a service-based subscription, a consulting company, or any number of things. It’s up to you to decide what that idea is.
Let’s approach your business plan in 3 Phases — Idea, Design, and Test.
Chances are you may not get it right the first time. Which means, you need to have a workflow that allows you to make what are called, iterations. You critique your idea fast on what works and what doesn’t, so you can keep fine tuning your product until it starts to really take off. That’s the concept of this approach.
Your business growth may start off slow, but as you iterate, you will see those numbers continue to climb.
Phase 1 — Idea
Since sales is what makes a business successful, we want to cover as much surface area as possible. Meaning, we want to showcase our talent to as many people as possible. Obviously we can’t talk to hundreds of people at once, so we create frictionless points where people can interact with us through end points. It’s like people standing in line to order a coffee, or at a food truck. They know what we can provide, we just need to tell them what we have to offer, and service them accordingly. So what are some end points we can set up for our customers…
* Taking payments online
* Booking appointments
* Website and Email/SMS
* Cloud storage
We don’t need to cover a huge gamut of endpoints, only the ones that can help us keep our business revolving. Podcasting is great, because your content can cover the stuff you enjoy talking about, and that your audience equally loves. I recommend using a hosting service such as Simplecast for the fact that they handle the delivery to Apple, Google and other podcast platforms, and secure your podcast links for around $15/mo. It’s peace of mind when all you have to do is upload, and embed your player on for example your Shopify site or website.
I highly recommend Shopify as your goto website builder for the simple fact that it’s versatile. It’s not the cheapest solution, once you start to add on other features you will need in the future, but it’s fast, reliable and is less to worry about if you’re focusing more on your content creation and building an audience, instead of the heavy lifting on the backend where a web developer would be needed.
Phase 2 — Design
Send Owl — Digital products and subscriptions (Paid or Free)
This first tool is helpful in securing your products in digital form. In marketing we call these, lead magnets, PDFs, downloadable content, freebies, and so on.
We’re not designing in the traditional sense like you would with carpentry or a car. What we’re doing is designing a framework, method or even a system that we use, (that we’re knowledgable about), that we can show others so they can use it for their own benefit. This could be for example, the proper mechanics on how to throw a baseball, how to edit and publish a podcast, how to start a lawn care business or any number of things. Again the subject depends on what your skillset is currently or what you want to be an expert in.
Active Campaign — Gather signups
I highly recommend Active Campaign to learn email marketing, for the reason that it is so widely used, has a number of enterprise features, and it’s ability to scale with your business needs as you continue to grow. A majority of the tools I use and recommend are used by fortune 5000 businesses, and by learning to use them, you gain an advantage to land your next job in either a corporate or small business environment.
Phase 3 — Test
Creating ads are fairly straightforward for the simple fact that, that’s how companies like Google, LinkedIn and others have designed it to be. You upload an image, or video with some text. Add in your copy, a link to your landing page or sales page and that’s it. Now there’s a lot more thought process that goes into advertisements, but it’s become a staple to brands, and marketers for generating awareness and leads.
Remember, when considering technology tools, always use the K.I.S.S method, Keep It Super Simple. Don’t let yourself get side-tracked with the latest trendy tools. You know the ones, that market as having “predictive Ai”, to generate copy and do all these other magic tricks for you. Don’t get me wrong there is a time and a place for it, but in my opinion, it removes the humanistic factor, and the point of selling is to build a relationship with your customer and actually help them. Don’t automate endlessly, be a people person. Use what you need, nothing more.
Now since video content is king, I recommend and like Vimeo for its ease of use, and for about $12/mo, you can host video ads, and protect where they can be displayed. If you’re serious about running ads, you should consider video provider like Vimeo instead of YouTube, because you don’t want other videos being displayed from competitors after your video ends. Plus, Vimeo gives you optional customization over controls to make your video layout super clean.
Ready to learn online business management? If you want, check out my free guide on The State of Downloads.
