What do I do first? Sprinting to Success
Since there are so many online assets to create, it is easy enough to get stuck in the analysis paralysis of what do I do first? Where to start?
When you’re starting up, it is natural to want to minimize expenses, so free sounds good. It’s also natural to want to focus time on meeting people online on social media, build a website, and move forward through the customer journey with them, eventually getting to your sales offers.
Unfortunately, this natural and intuitive approach has the drawback of requiring lots of time and effort, but not producing any sales revenues, so even though it’s free, it’s easy to get discouraged.
Step 4. Sprint to Success
The counter-intuitive approach to building your online assets is to start from the end and work backwards through the customer journey.
Start with having a service to sell. It could be your coaching program or a live event workshop, whether virtual or in-person.
Create the payment page first. This supports you with offline sales process, where you schedule your conversations, make offline sales, and then take your payments online. The automated email purchase confirmation email you that send after the purchase provides confirmation to your client, and provides additional information to them about your sale, e.g., the purchase contract, or live event details.
Next, create the sales page to support your offline sales. This sales page would describe either your live event or your coaching program. The button on the sales page takes people to the payment page and the purchase confirmation email that you already created. Now when you are talking with people offline, you can take them to an online sales page that summarizes your offer so that they can review your offer before they purchase.
As an alternative to one on one sales offline sales conversations, you can scale up your conversations by talking to more than one person at a time. This is the point where you can set up a live online seminar or the live event workshop where you teach your expertise and invite people to the sales page you previously created. Typically, you will need to have a registration page, a confirmation page, and a complete set of reminder emails both before and after your live event to encourage everyone to show up, and to follow up with them after the event.
I will pause here and ask you to notice a few advantages of using this approach.
- You are creating your online assets as a series of small projects, called “sprints,” that can be done rapidly. The result of each sprint is the creation of a working online asset that supports a specific business need, e.g., taking a payment and sending a confirmation email.
- With each sprint, you are incrementally layering your assets into your full system – payment page first, sales page second, live event third. Your system is building up incrementally, using what you already built in the previous step.
- You are supporting your offline sales process with online assets.
- Each time you build an online asset, you are leveraging your time through automation, enabling you to scale up to serve more clients.
- You are making sales revenues along the way to help pay for the automation systems.
The four steps in the Online Business Success System is the roadmap I needed when I started as a new author and a coach. I needed a systematic way to put all the pieces of a complex puzzle known as an online business together. That's what this book is about - providing you with a systematic way to create visibility and impact through your online systems.
To your online success!
If you want to get started now learning about my online business success system, you can start here for free: Accelerate Your Online Success.
I’m currently authoring a book about Online Business Success, and I am sharing excerpts of that book here. You can subscribe to this full set of book excerpts as they are published by visiting www.onlinebusinesssuccessbook.com.
If you want to get a “quick start” on learning how this approach can save you loads of time and frustration, please come to my live workshop – Accelerate Your Online Success 5 Day Challenge. You can save months, if not years of time, effort, and frustration by joining me in this 5-day challenge.
