Starting A Business With Strategy
Starting a business isn’t just putting together a plan to earn money. Instead, we are creating a system that serves, that can establish income and security, and that can open doors for us down the road.
Our own businesses can lead us to greater opportunity, through strategic development.
And when you’re at the beginning of things, you have an amazing opportunity to follow a simple formula that will lead you to faster paydays.
In this episode, I am going to walk you through my 30-day plan for starting a new business. This plan is for first-time business owners and seasoned business owners. You can even apply it to your business if it has been collecting dust and not earning income.
Finding An Audience First
Oftentimes we get excited about our future business and what we want to offer the world. From here, we build our businesses and open our virtual doors. However, this may result in crickets.
Inside this 30-day plan, I educate you on the importance of building an audience before you build a product. There are of course exceptions to the rule. However, when you build an audience first, you’re likely to create a higher converting offer.
This episode will walk you through the process of finding and building an audience for your business.
My Suggested 30 Day Plan For Starting A Business
In this episode, I am going to walk you through what I suggest your first 30 days in business look like in order to reach that success.
Now if you’ve already started your business, don’t worry. You can absolutely still apply these 5 steps to your business starting today.
I created this plan in particular to avoid a few things I was seeing inside entrepreneurship.
The first is building a business and waiting for an audience to find you. Sound familiar? And the second is spending time and resources on platforms where your paid audience isn’t.
If you are looking for a way to get your business off the ground with a few quick wins in your pocket, then you’re going to love this episode.
Or if you’re starting a business and you’re looking for a step-by-step plan for what to do at the very beginning that is going to give you results, then this episode is really really for you.
01. Lead Magnet Creation (Day 1 – 15)
When starting a business, the first thing I would tell you to do is to create 2 – 3 value-added lead magnets focused on subjects within your business. And I want this process to take up about 10-15 days.
If you’re starting a business, you have a pretty good idea of what you want to provide or what you want to sell. And this means that you’re likely a subject matter expert within your business.
So I want you to create lead magnets around that expertise. And I want them all focused on various areas of your expertise.
For example, if you’re a portrait photographer that captures weddings, families, and engagements. Can you create 3 lead magnets focused on each of those areas?
Maybe a free local wedding guide, a family portrait checklist, and/or 5 top secrets for a painless engagement session.
Each lead magnet focuses on different areas of your business. And as we progress throughout this 30-day blueprint, you are going to see why this is so important.
With this strategy, you can see what lead magnets are downloaded more and easily determine where interest is inside your business. And more importantly, where it’s not.
These lead magnets serve two purposes and they don’t need to exactly change that offer idea inside your mind.
They are going to 1) help you establish an email list. This is your real audience. And 2) they are going to help you get to know more about this audience that is interested in your content.
You can download my Free Lead Magnet Workbook to get started. This is an 11-page download where I walk you through what a lead magnet should look like, I give you examples, a checklist, and a page to really build out your first lead magnet.
02. Admin (Day 16-18)
Next focus on admin work and setting up your email service provider. This is the system that is going to invite people to download your freebie and the system that is going to deliver all of the money-making magic afterward.
Your email service provider is the system that connects your email accounts. And allows you to build forms where someone can “opt-in” to your email list, or in this case, opt into your email list in exchange for your free lead magnet.
And from there, your email service provider is the system that delivers your lead magnet and sends automated emails that you can create that continue to deliver after your lead magnet lands in their inbox. This is what helps your business run on autopilot.
There are two options that I recommend when it comes to email service providers. Option #1 is ConvertKit. This option is free until your email list reaches a certain number of subscribers. From there, you continue to pay based on your subscriber total count.
Option #2 that I can recommend to you is Flodesk. Flodesk is my email service provider of choice.
I find Flodesk to be extremely easy to use and simple to digest. It has a very clean and minimal interface. Easy to understand analytics. And is forever one low monthly price. Save 50% off your entire first year of Flodesk by signing up right here.
Both Convert Kit and Flodesk will allow you to create something called a landing page. This is a page you can have published all on its own, without a website, that allows someone to sign up for your email list. So all you need in these first 30 days, are landing pages where you can share links.
03. Lead Magnet Promotion (Day 19 – 28)
The third step in this 30-day plan is to promote your lead magnets.
I want you to talk about them every day, share them on your desired platforms, and invite people to take part in this valuable content that you’re sharing.
So let’s talk about some do’s and don’ts when it comes to sharing your lead magnets.
The Do’s of Promoting Your Lead Magnets:
- Be excited about the value and content.
- Talk about the transformation someone will get if they download your free content.
- Share all of your lead magnets (maybe a different one each day)
- Announce you’re starting a business and present your lead magnets as a way to start establishing yourself as a subject matter expert.
The Don’t of Promoting Your Lead Magnets:
- Con’t want to call them lead magnets.
- Don’t just want to focus on family and friends.
- Don’t try to sell anything right now.
Some suggested places to put your lead magnet (with permission of course) are facebook groups, group boards on Pinterest, Linkedin groups, or as a guest on someone’s podcast.
No matter how you promote your lead magnet, I do want you to do this for about 10 days straight. And don’t me wrong, promoting your lead magnet will be a forever thing inside your business. And one where you get to refind methods of promotion over and over again.
04. Email Marketing Planning (Day 29 – 30)
Where I want you to end your 30-day journey is by creating a plan to welcome, nurture, and poll your audience. And this won’t happen over 2 days. But 2 days is a perfect amount to create a plan for these 3 things.
Put together a plan to nurture your audience. This means emailing them regularly with value-added content. Again something you can do with your email service provider. You can even create emails ahead of time and schedule them to send out.
Continue serving this audience, speaking to their pain points, giving them more information, tips, advice, and any value and encouragement you can create.
You know what else this does to your new audience? This establishes yourself as a trusted expert.
Lastly, I want you to put together a plan in place to poll your audience. Polling your audience is a fantastic way to build true engagement and to really unearth their issues, concerns, and needs.
And you can poll your audience in a few ways:
- Ask them to hit reply on nurturing emails
- Send out a literal poll. Google Forms is great for this.
- Incentivize a Google Forms poll ($5 Starbucks gift cards, etc)
Make these polls informative. The information they give you here is going to help you build your paid offers.
Ask them more questions on the problems they are experiencing in relation to your business, what value they need, or maybe even list out your upcoming products and services and ask them which ones they see are interested in and which ones they are not.
05. Product/Service Development
If you can’t guess what comes next when starting a business, I’ll let you know… it’s creating your offers!
And it may take another month of growing your audience, nurturing this email list, polling, etc to truly refine your offer suite. However, the value it gives you will help your offers sell and convert more easily.
By taking the time to truly find and nurture an audience, you will be able to build offers that convert more easily. Plus, you will also be able to have an audience to launch offers to.
Far too often entrepreneurs spend time creating businesses, opening virtual doors, and just waiting for people to come.
And although, this can happen. Launching a business with an established audience is almost always easier. And a strategy that will make your paydays come quicker too.
How To Start Your Business Today
If you have any questions about developing your business or anything we talked about today in the episode, I would love to connect. You can follow the show on Instagram @sidecheckspodcast. Send me a DM with a question from the show and I would love to answer it.
If you’re starting a business, let me help with this first step. Swipe my Free 11-Page Lead Magnet Workbook right here. This free guide even includes free Canva templates for a guides/e-book, checklists, and cheatsheets. Creating your lead magnet has never been easier than this.
More income is possible. Better days are possible. Empowerment through owning a thriving business that truly serves others is possible. And I would just love to be someone that could help you get there.
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