A new month starts and so does a new Entrepreneurial Mondays series. This month, I will be talking about how to start an online business. The number of online businesses has increased dramatically over the last years, but the truth is that only 8 out of 10 online businesses found the way to success among an ocean full of business and competitor.

This month, I have decided to talk about the first steps that we should take if we want to start an online business that will succeed. I am going to split up this post in three parts, as I want to explain the process giving as many details as possible. This is the first part of the series. I will publish the second part next Monday, and the third and last part on the 20^th, the Monday after.

Let’s start with the three first steps that we have to take to make our business succeed.

1. Analyse the needs of your audience.

The first thing that we have to do when starting out is to do a market research and analyse our Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA). When we analyse our ICA, we also have to find out what are their deepest concerns and fear. Why?

Because people always try to reinforce their weaknesses. If we know our clients’ weaknesses beforehand, we will be able to know how to adapt our services to their need. For example, let’s think that I know that one of my weaknesses is that I am not very good at doing my bookkeeping; hence it will be likely that I will have to outsource this task and hire an accountant. Why?

Because bookkeeping is an essential part in any business; actually, if you don’t keep your records for a certain amount of time, you will be breaking the law. And maybe I  couldn’t find the time to train myself on how to keep my records, or if I could, maybe it wouldn’t be worth it for me to do it, because I would be spending too much time on something instead of spending this time on my main activity.

In this case, an accountant that is aware of my weaknesses could offer me their services and solve one of my needs. Easy peasy!

How can we do that?

• Research, research and research. We can join forums related to our fields of expertise, explore what the common questions are and try to solve them through our services.
• We also have to know how to explain why our services are the best solution to their problems.
• We can also look for the trends on the key words that are being used in our field of expertise and see if any of them reflects a problem that we can solve.

 2. Adapt your services/products and solve a need.

Once that we have analysed the needs of our potential clients, we have to tailor our services or products to these needs.

Obviously, we can’t solve every single need that our clients have. However, the more needs we can solve, the more chances we will have to be hired. That is why we should specialise our services and products and offer something different from our competition.

That is why we have to find out the point where the needs of our clients meet the services that we are offering. That’s the key when you start an online business and want to sell your services.

How can we do that?

• Step 1: Write in a piece of paper all the needs that you can find in your market research.
• Step 2: Classify them in three columns. The ones that you can solve, the ones that you would be able to solve with more training on a specific field and the ones that you can’t solve.
• Step 3: If there are needs that you can already solve, that’s great! It’s time to contact your client with a good offer. Draft an action plan and establish SMART goals for those that you would be able to solve in the near future. Look for people that are able to solve the needs that you can’t and build a solid network of colleagues.

3. Write copies that sell.

Now that we have gathered all this information, it is time to implement a good strategy. All online business starts online. They need a good platform to sell their services or products. Now it is time to write the content of this platform taking into account all this information.

The key is to focus on how our services can solve our audience needs.

How can we do that?

• Pay attention to the headlines. Make them as appealing and catchy as you can.
• Explain how your services solve the problem. And make this the key point of your copy.
• Go a step beyond and explain your audience how their businesses can benefit from your services. You can even write a copy that touches your clients and gets to their feelings.
• Ask previous clients for testimonials and use then to build your credibility among your audience.
• Make a good offer tailored to every client.
• Make a guarantee and do everything that is in your hands to fulfil it. But, be careful and never promise something that you can’t do.
• Make a strong call to action. What do you want your clients to do? Contact you through a form? A call on Skype? Email you at a certain email address? Make that clear!
• Care about the quality of your copy. If you know that you’re not able to do it, hire a copywriter. If you know that you can’t translate the copy of your website into different languages, hire a translator specialised in marketing and web copies.

Extend these tips to every communication with your clients: emails, letters, phone calls, newsletters, etc.

I know that this is a lot information to process, so we will leave it here until next Monday, so you can have some time to apply these first steps. How does that sound?

What do you think about these first tips? Do you implement already some of them in your business? I would love to hear from you!

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