Having an online business completely changed my life. Before I started working for myself I worked an 8-5 administrative job that I hated.
Every day I would drag myself to work and countdown until Friday. Years passed and I kept feeling more unhappy. It was a tough time and I had a hard time seeing my way out.
At the time starting an online business felt pretty nuts.
I didn’t know anyone that had started their own business and I didn’t have any social media experience.
I spent hours researching it and trying to figure out if it was really something that could work for me. Finally, I launched my site and ten months later I matched my salary at my day job and quite.
That was over a year and a half ago and I’ve been supporting myself by working online ever since. If you are interested in making money as a blogger come join my free Blogging Breakthroughs Facebook group and subscribe to my blogging podcast.
Why Social Media?
Every business needs clients. If you want to have an online business you need to connect with people. When you first start an online business you are probably going to hear crickets at first.
Don’t panic, this is normal.
People often think they can create a website and then people will buy their stuff. This will only work if you already have an audience. If you’re new to the online space you need to build an audience.
Guess where the perfect place to do that is?
You guessed it, social media.
Social media is the perfect place to start connecting with potential customers so you will have fans that love to buy from you and actually need your services. It’s an amazing networking opportunity if you think about it.
Get To It
So you’re probably thinking “what the heck do I say on social media?”. This really comes back to knowing your ideal client. In order to know what to post you need to know what your ideal client is struggling with and speak to their pain points.
You need to understand what problems she is struggling with and offer her solutions to solve those problems. In order for someone to want to pay you they have to believe that you can actually help them with something they are struggling with.
The biggest key to growing your social media following is to post useful consistent content over a long period of time. You need to be posting content that helps your future customers and lets them get to know you multiple times per day.
Make sure to grab my social media planner below to help you get started.
Which Platforms?
I suggest when you’re first getting started you focus on just one platform. When I started my blog I just focused on adding content to that. Once I was comfortable creating regular content for that I created a Facebook Group. After that I added in Instagram and the podcast.
Figure out which platform you think will really help you grow a business and commit to posting on it regularly for the next year. It can seem daunting to post on a platform every day but after you do it for a month it will start to seem much easier.
Just Start
The best thing you can do for your business is to just get freaking started. So many people put off starting for way too long. They research strategy and plan things out for months instead of just taking action.
If you want to have an online business you have to just jump in. Make sure you focus on having a great business, a great website, a marketing strategy, SEO on your landing page, a social media strategy and great customer communication.
Go make your account ASAP and start posting on it. One of the main ingredients in growing on social media is time. When you’re wasting time you’re really throwing away tons of opportunities you could be using to grow your following and business. Time is one of your most valuable assets so don’t waste it.
Tools
These are the tools I use to stay on top of all my social media. Without these tools and systems, I wouldn’t be able to be on all of the platforms I’m on.
Planoly: Before I started using this app I struggled to stay consistent with Instagram content. I would find myself scrambling every day to think of something to post and write a caption. This app makes it easy to put all your Instagram content together on your computer but there’s also an app which means you can easily post one of our drafts whenever you want. This has worked great for me and I’m up to 17,000 followers on Instagram.
Tailwind: One of my main sources of traffic is from Pinterest. This has been a game changer for my online business and I get 100,000 page views per month from free Pinterest traffic. Tailwind lets me schedule a good mix of my content and other peoples content to go out on Pinterest so there is always activity on my account.
HauteStock: For a long time I would just use whatever free stock photos I could find. My entire blog and all of the pins I make look so much better now that I’ve invested in quality stock images. I like HauteStock because it is affordable, there is a huge library and they add new images every week. If I could go back in time I would have invested in this way sooner.
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