 Hey what's up guys, so in this video I'm going to be talking about simple steps you can take to start a business online. I don't want to complicate this. I've been on this space for a while, I failed a lot of times. I mean a lot, a lot, a lot of times I failed and I've succeeded at some. I failed more than I succeeded, it's like kind of the 80-20 thing. But I do want to talk about simple things that I wish someone told me when I first started out, okay? Because you hear so many different things, Facebook ads, Google, etc., etc. And most people are looking for the shiny object or the shiny object syndrome to chase around all these things. That doesn't matter. In fact, that's a disability when it comes to growing what you want to grow. What matters the most is understanding what you're getting yourself into and understanding what you're trying to build. Most people are infatuated with the tactics, infatuated with that, oh if I do this I'm going to get that. As opposed to what are the economics behind the business, how can the business scale, remind the right niche, is there longevity to this, like the real fundamental basic building blocks of your business? So before entering any business online, you want to ask yourself this question. Why are you entering this business? What are you selling that's more superior than your competitors? Is it a better quality product? Is it faster? Is it cheaper? It has to have some kind of unique selling proposition as opposed to your competitors, okay? That's the first thing. Number two, your domain expertise. What expertise do you have in this industry? I'm not saying you have to be an expert, that's not the case. But if you're entering into a competitive space, what kind of knowledge do you bring to that space? Do you have a network? Do you have distribution? Do you have a special set of skills at only time? With time you can achieve, etc. And finally, number three, when entering this space, are you starting this business as a side business or are you starting this business as a full time business because it does matter? I've made a video in the past where I was talking about it's not that wise to quit your full time job to start a business. The reason be, you need cash. How are you going to support yourself? Forget your family right now, yourself. How are you going to have rent? How are you going to have food? How are you going to have clothing? How are you going to have the very essential to survive when your business isn't making any money and you've quit your other business and you've gone, sorry, quit your job, you've gone full time? How? You're not. You need cash flow. You need cash flow to live and your business needs cash flow. Cash is king. So, you know, you've got to answer all these questions first before you decide to just jump in. And once you've answered these questions so you can take your time, don't rush. I fucking wished I took my time with that. I mean, too many mistakes is jumping in. Okay, so take your time, write it down, do an analysis, figure out is this something you actually want to do and is this something that you know you can do it better than other people? Okay, once you have that answer, the next thing comes into play is what type of business model and this is really important. Most people they're focused on, oh, I'm just going to grow the website and I'm going to get traffic. Now that doesn't matter. What matters is the business model or say plural business models. So kind of business models you have. Are you selling information online? Are you selling a product? Are you doing affiliate marketing? Are you doing, say, commission sales? Are you doing lead generation? Are you doing SaaS? Are you doing membership model? There's so many different models when it comes to building an online business or any business in general. I would highly recommend that you figure out three out of the five models because I'm going to tell you something. If you think you are going to start here and end up there, most likely you're going to start here and somewhere you have no fucking idea where you're going to end up, okay? So it's really important you figure out and test different business models and within those business models, you want to make sure that your margins are good, right? At least 35% per se. You don't want to have low margins. You don't want to be in low margin business. It's not really good business. You don't want to be in a Walmart business, right? Especially if you're starting out. You want to have high margins, okay? So once you have that set up, great. Next thing that you want to do, okay, is go study people who are doing it already. There, you know, that's your competition. You have, I would say, you have two lines. You draw the direct competition that you're directly competing against and then you have the indirect competition. So people have similar services and products but not directly competing against you. And you do a full SWOT analysis, analyze those businesses, figure out what they're getting traffic for them, figure out where their customers are coming from. So basically what I love to do is like I'll get five on each group, five on the direct, if there is five, sometimes only one. So let's say up to five on the direct and up to five on indirect. Then I would scan their site. I'm going to do a full Google scan. Tools you can use like Ahrefs or SEMrush, whatever. You can hire people to do that. So you scan their website. You see where the traffic's coming from. You see how much traffic they're getting. You see their search volume. And based on these numbers, you can kind of hypothesize what their revenue is, give or take. Then you buy their products or you buy their services. You want to capture the process of being a customer of theirs. So I always say reverse engineer what your competitors are doing. So I would say go to their website, screen capture website, see how it makes you feel, see what kind of copy, design and colors they use, buy something, follow the process, see what type of emails they send. So capture their email sequence, capture their buying process, and also really important, a lot of people, they kind of forget about this, contact the customer service and see how they respond to customer service. And I would do this for every single business that you have, both for the direct competitors and the indirect competitors. Then once you have that, that kind of gives you like a roadmap to create yours. Obviously you're not going to completely rip them off, but what you're going to do is you know this model works. There's a reason why they have certain copy on their page. There's a reason why traffic's coming from Google, Facebook and these other say third-party domain websites. There's a reason why, because it converts. There's a reason why they have their picture image like this as opposed to that, okay? So there's a science behind this and it's really important to know that it's not just your intuition. Sales online with copy, with conversions, with images, with topography, that's a science. So once you have that, you want to do it to yours, okay? Then once you have that going, basically what you want to do is you want to get as much traffic as possible to your site. So once you have your product up there, based on your research that you've done. So once you have everything up there, I would highly recommend that you start feeling in the top of the funnel because there's three elements to a funnel. You have tofu, top of the funnel, so up here, awareness. You have mofu, middle of the funnel, so people are kind of knowing who you are, building trust with you. Then you got tofu, mofu, and end of the funnel. Some kind of people call oh, ifu, I don't know, it's dumb. But end of the funnel. And end of the funnel is where they know and trust you, so you convert them into customers and that's where you figure out your, that's where you figure out your LTV, left hand value of your customer, okay? So that's what I would do. I would try to figure out how you can get as much people up on the tofu. And a great book for this, I highly recommend it for email marketing, for getting traffic, it's Ryan Dice's book, Invisible Selling Machine, good book. Look, it's a pretty small book. Maybe if I can grab some highlights of it for you. Maybe you'll like that. I don't know, good ones over here. Give you an idea of what they have over here, okay? You know, like they do the same thing like I mentioned before, like for example, this one. You know, they go into, you know, you see Lowe's, they capture Lowe's, what they're doing, you know, Lowe's a billion dollar company, I think. So they must know what they're doing. And basically the whole book gives you like a step-by-step guide. It's pretty cool. I'll leave a link below this video for that. But yeah, that's a great book that any beginner, even intermediary or advanced person can learn from. So there you have it, you know? So let's kind of summarize this. First, really understand what you're getting yourself into, what business you're getting yourself into, the margins, are you working on this on the side, full-time, you know, the basic bare-bone fundamentals. Then do your homework on your competitors and indirect competitors. And then build it out based on their inspiration and then start pushing traffic to it. That's pretty much it. Okay, if you guys have a question for me, whether that is about marketing, whether that is about life philosophy, whatever, even religion, leave a comment below. And I'll be trying to make these daily vlogs a little bit more frequent. And oh yeah, make sure you subscribe to my channel. All right, guys, peace.