Because I want you to succeed and build your very own wildly profitable and successful online business, in this article I’m going to lay out the six vital parts of a successful online business.
Before I explain each in better detail, here they are in no particular order:
- Producing orders.
- Building your list.
- Generating traffic.
- Growing your income.
- Creating content.
- Working less hours.
I’m going to start with number six on the list which in my mind is the most important part of an online business. This is what most people want in life and it is the one thing people should make a priority in their online business.
Working Less Hours
Working less is the goal, but without actively focusing on it as part of your online business plan, you can overlook it and before you know it, you have simply swapped one job for another.
An online business selling digital products is all about one thing.
Automation.
With automation comes freedom.
By setting up automated systems selling digital products online, you should be left with more free time to enjoy each week.
An online business selling digital products should only ever give people more free time.
If you run an online business selling digital products and are not enjoying more free time, you are either doing it wrong or you love it so much you are working more hours by choice.
It’s as simple as that.
Here’s an example of automation in action in a simple sales funnel.
- Facebook ads sending people to cheap eBook on your website
- Purchase is automatically processed on your website and the product is delivered automatically by email
- Second product is shown to person who purchased eBook at time of purchase
- Purchase of second product is automatically processed on your website and the product is delivered automatically by email
- Third product is show to those who bought one or both products through an email set to automatically be sent a day or two later
- Purchase of third product is automatically processed on your website and the product is delivered automatically by email.
As you can see, the processing and delivery of products are completely automated. Unlike a shop that requires a cashier to process each and every sale, you don’t need to do anything!
You could be on the golf course swinging sticks around all afternoon or enjoying a glass of wine with friends while sales are being processed and money is being deposited into your bank.
There is work to be done setting up these automated funnels, but once they are all set up, any work after that is minimal and more managerial.
Creating Content
Ok, so now you know that the whole point of an online business is to give you more time and you do that by selling digital products.
Digital products need creating.
The sales pages, emails, adverts and articles that sell those products need creating too.
Truth be told, there will be quite a bit of content that needs creating when running an online business but the good news is that:
- Most of it is created once and can generate sales for many years.
- Most, if not all, of it, can be outsourced and automated giving you more time to either focus on other aspects of your business or doing something else completely such as enjoying a coffee in town with your nearest and dearest.
If you enjoy writing, or recording videos and podcast, you may choose to do all of the content creation yourself – please be warned, it can be quite an intense and timely endeavor that can slow down your progress.
The other options are to buy pre-made content such as PLR (Private Label Rights) content (learn more here: Product Licensing Formula) or pay people to create it for you).
Many people fear paying others to create content for them because they believe that it is costly and eats up any money they have to invest in the business. This is not necessarily the case as long as you have it as part of a well-defined plan.
Paying $1,000 to have an eBook written is not bad when you know that you are going to sell it for $20 and that you will be selling it for many years to come to hundreds and hopefully thousands of people.
Also, while the eBook is being written, you now have time to work on other aspects of the business which would help greatly in selling that eBook such as…
Generating Traffic
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. For every one person that buys a product, a business will need ten or more people to visit it or look at its products.
Online this means that a website selling digital products needs a healthy flow of visitors each and every day. Without site visitors – known as traffic – an online business will not make any sales.
It doesn’t matter how great your product and sales materials are, without people visiting your website and seeing your content, sales pages, and products you will not make any sales.
It is vital that you focus on traffic generation as part of your online business building because, without it, you won’t have an online business.
Traffic generation leads us nicely to the next section:
Building Your List
Every online business no matter what they sell MUST have an EMAIL LIST.
This is vital!
An email list is a database of customers and potential customers that you own and control.
It is your own source of RECYCLING TRAFFIC back to any webpage at anytime you want.
Whenever you publish a new article, video, podcast or have a product to sell or promote, sending an email to your own list is instant traffic. You can send a flood of people to whichever page or promotion you want.
You build your email list by sending traffic to specific pages and articles on your website. It is there that they ask them to ‘join’ your email list by offering them something they value – for free. A bribe if you like.
This isn’t a bad bribe; this is a good bribe because you give them something that they want in exchange for their name and email address.
We call that bribe a ‘Lead Magnet’ because it attracts (like a magnet) potential new customers often referred to as leads.
Building your list is a vital part of an online business. Just as getting traffic to your website is the lifeblood of your business, an email list is a reservoir where you store a lot of that lifeblood for future reuse.
An online business without an email list is… well, it’s not really an online business.
Producing Orders
Not to be confused with producing offers, with producing orders, I am talking about generating as many passive sales of your products as possible.
Producing orders literally means producing orders – people buying your products day and night. And as Working Less is one of our Successful Six, we want as many passive and automated orders as possible.
This is achieved through the ‘marketing based content’ you share on your website, in the lead magnets that you give away for free, and the emails that you send to your growing list of email subscribers.
Everything has to be crafted so that the people who visit your website and join your email list have an opportunity to purchase one or several products from you whenever they want without you having to do anything extra.
Some people like to call it ‘asking for the sale’, without actually asking people to buy.
There is no hard sell here; you subtly give people the opportunity to ‘make their own minds up’ and make a purchase from you by placing links to sales page, ‘buy now buttons’ and calls to action in as many places as you can without it appearing spammy.
As long as you provide plenty of decent quality and useful content which is factual and truthful, your content cannot be misinterpreted as anything other.
When the content you share helps people, they will grow to like and trust you and then they will come back for more and many will go on to buy products from you.
Quality useful content is the key to turning traffic into customers.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again because it is THAT IMPORTANT… with your content, you MUST nurture a relationship with the readers to the point that they like and trust you.
When people like and trust you, they can become loyal long-term customers or clients.
Do you often buy from people you don’t like or trust?
No… of course you don’t.
Oh… and the good news is, it really isn’t that hard to create quality useful content. I show you how here:
Growing Your Income
As you can imagine, this one follows Producing Orders because the more content you share online, the more orders you produce, the more your income grows.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Now that you have more people visiting your website buying your products and being added to your email list, you create more products which you then promote to those customers via email.
Those products will be higher priced products ranging from $97 right up to $9,997.
Yes, you read that right… you will create products that you sell to the people on your email list for $9,997… and you will have people on your email list who will happily buy them at that price.
In the article here: The No 1 Mistake That Has Newbies Leaving Huge Amounts Of Money On The Table I discuss the Pareto Principle also known as the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule states that 80% of a company’s income is generated by only 20% of its customers.
Basically what that means is that 20% of your customers buy more than one product and that those other products are higher in price giving your more income.
80% of your income comes from those other higher-priced products you offer to the people on your email list. You have to create those products to grow your income.
By not creating those products, you run the risk of not only missing out on a lot of extra income, but you could also lose customers who go looking to spend their money with those who will offer them the more expensive products.
You are actually doing your customers a disservice by not offering them more higher-priced products and harming your business.
Conclusion
Running a successful online business requires those six vital components. Each one is just as important as the next. Together they make a whole.
All six components need to be actively thought about every time you are working on your business.
To discover how you can make six figures a year running an online business that gives you more freedom, click the link below:
>> Serious About 6 Figures A Year <<
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