 How to start an online business without wasting time and money. Hey, if you wanted to start an online business, but you had no clue where to start, well, this video's for you then. Because in this video, I will show you all the steps you need to take to save yourself a lot of time and a lot of money, not to mention hassle. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you do so. Hit that subscribe button down there. Only take your second and don't forget, smash, smash that notification bell. You need to turn on all notifications so that you know every single time I do a new video. Give me a thumbs up, I would appreciate it. Okay, let's jump right into this. The first thing you need to do, number one is you need to pick the right platform. Now, when building a business online, I think we all know that you need a website. However, and I wasn't told this in the beginning, you need an email provider more than you need a website because with an email provider, you can communicate with people. A website is gonna take you some time to get some traffic and I'm gonna cover the website thing in just a second but I'm gonna suggest that you get Kartra because you're gonna need this in conjunction with your website. When people come to your website, you want them to opt in, you want them to buy stuff but you can use Kartra along with your website. Now, I know you may not know what Kartra is. Kartra is an online marketing software that does everything for you from sales funnels to emails to sales pages, sequences, videos, memberships. It does it all, okay? And it does it at a really cool price. And matter of fact, if you click my link below there, you can get a $1 trial but there is a video that you don't have to opt in for absolutely freeing, watch the video and you can see what it does. So now we wanna choose a platform because I just wanna get that out there because even though we're choosing a platform, even though we know we have to make a website, you know, choosing a platform is very important. Now, I have different platforms based on my business. Now, the first platform I have is Magento. I do not suggest Magento. No, it's not for you, okay? If you don't have a business established, Magento is a very high-end software that's for e-commerce and it's just very intricate, it's very expensive to work on. However, I need it because in my survival food business, we have retailers who actually sell our survival food. So they have to be able to log in there and see different pricing structures than a regular retail customer because they get discounts, they're wholesalers and they have to be able to enter their orders and so forth. So that is one of the platforms I use. I don't recommend. What I do recommend is WordPress. WordPress is one of the simplest ones to work with. It integrates really well with Cartra. It's one of the largest platforms in the world, one of the simplest to work on. There's a lot of other ones out there and I get that, but I would start with WordPress. I don't think you'll ever have to go back and go, hey, I'm so sorry, I got that WordPress website, you won't, okay? You're gonna love WordPress. It's gonna be something you're gonna want to have from this point forward. Once you've chosen WordPress, okay? You're gonna wanna choose a really functional type website with a cool design. Now the cool thing about WordPress is that they have a lot of themes in there that you can pick from. They're really nice, they're responsive, mobile responsive and what I mean by that is when you look at a website on your screen here or on your laptop, it's gonna look a certain way. When you pull it up on your mobile phone right here, it's gonna look different. So you wanna make sure you have a theme that actually integrates with any mobile device, whether it's a laptop or it's a tablet or it's a cell phone, you wanna make sure it looks good on all those platforms. You gotta choose the right design. Number three, make it easy for people to contact you. You don't wanna have a website where people can't contact you. Now I've seen people build websites and they don't have phone numbers on there, they don't have addresses on there and I just, I think they're a little edgy. I'm like, well, why don't they have all that stuff? You know, why isn't that stuff there? Do they not wanna talk to their customers? And I think that is the case. I think a lot of people wanna start an online business and they wanna have no way for people to get in touch with them. Now here's the truth that I found over the years and we've served, you know, probably millions of customers at this point and what I figured out is if you have a lot of ways for them to contact you, for the most part, they don't. They don't, they don't contact you. What they wanna know is that if they have a problem, can they contact you, okay? And sure, we have some customers contact us but it's so rare because we have all the information they need online. We have frequently asked questions on there. We have tutorials. We have all the stuff they need to get their questions answered. And for the most part, I think people don't wanna pick up a phone and call you anymore. They just don't wanna do that. They may have to be on hold, you know, the conversation's longer than what they want, whatever the case may be, they don't wanna do that. But if you don't have a way for them to do that, they're gonna think that you're not reputable. They're gonna think that you're not a real business. So make sure you have easy ways for them to contact you. Number four, start building an email list from day one. I didn't do this. I didn't know, I didn't do it. I didn't know, okay? I thought, well, why do I wanna collect a bunch of names and emails? What am I gonna do with them? Make money, but I didn't know that at the time. So I didn't collect emails. So I'm telling you right now, the very first thing you need to do is have some type of opt-in where people can put in their email and offer them something of value, okay? Don't just say, sign up for our email list, sign up for a newsletter because nobody wants it. You know, in the beginning, it was exciting. I remember, gosh, and I'm going back to probably 1993, something like that, when I got online, and I would log in and I think I had AOL online and they had that thing, you've got mail. And I never heard it because I never had mail. There was nobody emailing me, but it was exciting when I finally did. It's not so exciting now. In the mornings now, we mostly wake up and we click delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. We just wanna get rid of stuff so we can get on with our day because there's so much garbage in there. So make sure whatever you're telling them to opt in for, it has value because they're not gonna give you their email. They're not gonna do it, at least you give them something of value. Super important. Get more traffic organically from SEO, search engine optimization. Now you say, well, I don't even know what that is. Then you need to learn, okay? Search engine optimization is basically a way to index all your pages so that they come up higher in the search results, okay? So that when somebody searches whatever you've written about, whatever you've done a video on, whatever your product is, it can actually come up in the search results. So SEO is super, super important. You need to learn it. It doesn't mean you have to do it forever. You could assign it to somebody else and let them work on it, but you do have to understand it because if you don't understand that component of selling online, it's gonna really hinder you and hold you back. And of course, that was number five. Number six, plan content marketing strategies. Now, you're listening to this YouTube video right now and the title of this video has been optimized, okay? So the title of this video I know is something that people are searching for that they want more information on. You need to do the same thing, your content marketing on your website, whether it's a blog, whether it's a video, whether it's a product, you need to optimize that particular thing. You need to have a strategy. So that also means that you need to come up with content. You need to email people content. You need to give them content that's gonna be useful for them. And for you to do that, you have to have a content marketing strategy. Number seven, use Google for data-based decisions. You cannot make decisions online based on what you think. Based on what you think does it work, okay? Based on true data and what people want, well, that works, okay? You can put out a lot of content, but then you need to stop and go back and look at that content to see what the people really liked it. And the best way to do that is through Google Analytics. It's free. Why not set it up? Why not hook it into your website? Why not check out the data and see what's going on with your website? It's absolutely free. You gotta hook this into your website. If you don't know how to do that, you can hire somebody to do it. You can search my channel on how to do some of those things also. But bottom line is, you wanna make all your decisions based on data. Now, when I do videos, some of the videos I do because I know people want that content, some of the videos I do because it's interesting to me, but nevertheless, no matter what the video is, I go back and I look at those videos and I say, what is it that people liked? And I can tell by views, I can tell by interaction, I can tell by clicks, like you right now need to subscribe and you need to also ring the bell and you also need to give me a thumbs up. So do those things, but the interaction, okay, that's what I'm getting at. That interaction means so much. And if I'm getting a lot of interaction on a video, I know there's a lot of interest in it. Number eight is leverage social media to drive more traffic. Why not use it? Social media is free, whether it's Facebook, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, whatever you got out there, what, I hear you say you don't have anything out there? Oh, you need to get it. Oh yeah, yeah, you need to get it. You gotta have social media because if you don't have social media, you don't exist. You know, what's funny is people will come to your website and they'll look at your stuff and then they go to social media to see what you're doing on social media. That's what they do nowadays. So if you're not there, and that's not to say you gotta be on every single social media platform. I'm not, I'm not on every single social media platform. I probably have accounts for most of it, but I'm not on Instagram every day. I'm not on Twitter every day. Generally, I'm on Facebook and generally I'm in YouTube, okay? Because that's what I'm doing. I'm making videos here. This is my main thing. This is my main content is YouTube, but you gotta be there. You gotta be there. You gotta be there because people are gonna look at your business and if you're not there, they're gonna wonder why not. Number nine, be an active participant in online communities. This is super important, guys. Now, a lot of people say, well, I just wanna have my channel and I'm on YouTube and I want people to comment and then I'll comment with them. Doesn't work that way. You've gotta go to other channels. You gotta comment on other channels. You gotta be helpful in other channels. Do not, do not, do not go to somebody else's channel and ask them to subscribe to you. This is a big beginner mistake. You will never, ever build a following doing that, never, ever. You're wasting your time. You might as well do nothing. You might as well just go watch a soap opera or go watch Netflix because you're wasting your time. They aren't gonna do it and the people that would do it, you don't want them as a subscriber, okay? What you want is true subscribers. The best way if you wanna interact with people online is find some blogs you like that have a lot of interaction and comment on that blog. And don't just say, great blog liked it because they know that you didn't even look at it. You didn't even read it. You need to actually comment on something in that blog. Same thing with videos. Go to other channels that are similar to yours. Find some content that you like. Comment on their videos and say, hey, I liked where you talked about this. This is interesting. I'm gonna try this and call out some of the things they did in the videos and that way they're gonna know you're real. Now, how does that help you? Well, it helps you because every now and then, not all the time, every now and then, somebody's gonna click on your name and they're gonna end up at your channel and they're gonna start watching yourself and they're gonna become a subscriber. And if you get enough people doing that, you can start building your channel. The problem I see is that a lot of people say, well, gee, I need like 100,000 subscribers. You don't get 100,000 subscribers overnight. Or they say, well, I just need a thousand so I can get monetized. You don't get a thousand overnight. Nobody is granted subscribers. Subscribers are earned. Like right now, if you subscribe to this channel, I earned it, okay? I gave you information and you said, hey, that's good information. I wanna hear more of this information. I wanna learn more from this guy. Hey, he sold millions of dollars of products online. He must know something, okay? So when you're building your channel, when you're building your social media, put something out there of value, okay? Be active with other forms of social media so that you can get back after you put out. But you're gonna have to put out first. It only works that way. You never get first and then put out. You gotta put out first and then you get. Number 10, you wanna convert website visitors into customers. Now, how are you gonna do that? A lot of people are gonna visit your website. Maybe they get to the checkout page and they get busy and they get called to dinner or the kid falls down or they get a phone call and they don't complete it. You need to follow up with those people, okay? Also, the people that come to your webpage, you need to have some pop-ups with some opt-ins so that you can give them more information. You're gonna have the majority of the people come to your website and never buy. I mean, that's just the way it is. They just don't buy, but they came there. And if you don't follow up with those people in some form or fashion, you're missing out on business. So I hope that helps you out some. I hope that gives you kind of an overview of what you need to do to succeed online. If you liked this video, do me a favor, comment below. If you've got some questions about anything I covered in this video, put those comments below. Or if you've got an idea for a video, something you'd like to see me cover, feel free to put that in the comments below there too. Feel free to ask me anything in the comments below. You can just do it, okay? Don't forget to subscribe. 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