“There is nothing unique about any one individual. What is unique is their passion, their ability to execute, to meet targets and exceed them”. ~ Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank
Having you on this page means that you likely have ideas and passion for how to improve some things in your world AND you are now ready to go out there and reach out to as many people as possible!
Good news is that it has never been easier in human history to reach billions of people with just the click of your mouse! Bad news – it is often easier said than done. It takes time, consistency and diligence to build a successful foundation of your business or cause online.
This free course -like website is for all of you who want to find job online or progress with new job or career opportunities. Stick along, join our mailing list and we will be sending you resources to help you develop your startup marketing strategy, shape your ideas and make the best website.
It doesn’t matter if you want to work from home, if you have start up ideas, if you need to boost your marketing skills for your own ideas – you need to continuously learn – and there are numerous free courses to help you with your job hunting. As a long-time freelancer I have to assure you that work from home has it’s benefits, and it also has it’s drawbacks. Freelancing is a way of thinking and a career opportunity that is transferable to any startup business if you decide to not work online from home any longer.
Creating a modern, user-friendly website is just a small step into this process. Believe it or not some people get so consumed into perfecting this step that they get completely carried away and forget the 3 utmost important essentials for any project/idea to live up to its brightest future online.
- Have a bulletproof business model
No matter how bright your product or service is, no matter how great of an impact your cause potential is, it will simply not last IF you are not clear on how a steady and sufficient cash flow will come into play.
Let me give you an example. A friend of mine got overly inspired about creating an online magazine focused on arts, culture and the environment. She did ALL the hard work – beautiful website, partnerships with great guest writers, tons of great new content daily and over 10,000 followers on social media. Problem is, for the last 5 years, she has been only investing her own time and money without seeing a dime in return. When she finally realised she needs a business model, she decided that the best thing to start with is, guess what, a redesign of her website! Five months past already and she is still investing in perfecting the design and not willing to make even the smallest step toward implementing a business model or executing any marketing strategy at all!
Don’t get overwhelmed by the term “a business model”. It simply means you need to know the way your website will be generating value (money) for you.
If you want to run a blog or magazine your source of income could be any display ads from existing advertising networks. Simply type “advertising networks” in any search engine and find the one that works in your country. You can also display ads from affiliate partners. There are plenty of affiliate opportunities to look for online. Simply think of what your main blog/magazine topics are and think of what relevant products/services you could offer to your audience. Then, reach out to potential partners in your city or countrywide, arrange an affiliate percentage and get going!
If you are like me and prefer clean looking blog/magazine pages then you could think of setting up a store in your website where you can list all the affiliate partnerships that you already have created ( I am referring to other web projects I run, not Ideas Optimized, which is purely educational web platform). You can as well contact and invite local or national businesses to display their products (always relative to your topics!) and charge them a fee for every sale. Nowadays it is fairly easy to setup an online store without much knowledge in technology. Just search for “best” shopping cart solutions or e-store solutions.
Selecting to run your site with open source CMS opens huge range of integrations through plugins – easily customizable by non-technical people.
All this brings us to online project essential number TWO.
- Generate sufficient traffic
It would be a shame having this amazing looking website and thoughtfully crafted business model IF no one ever went to visit it. A lot of people out there still think that once their website is done and they share it with friends on social media or in some groups once in a while, somehow people will magically start popping over all the time! WRONG. It takes, time, consistency and patience to keep new visitors landing on your pages.
Obviously social media is supposedly the “best” channel to get “free traffic”.
And please don’t ever, EVER, fall into the trap of buying traffic to your website, or likes to your social media accounts (unless you are paying for legitimate advertising, but i’ll talk more about that in a bit). There are certainly sweet sounding deals of quickly boosting your followers by the thousands for almost no time and financial investment. BUT all this does not bring any new cash flow to your business or cause. It’s like bragging on going to the moon on a hot air balloon, it will never happen!
Mastering all existing social networks at once could be a daunting task! Do your research and find out what network works best for your country and for your audience, then start from there! If you are offering a product or a service, don’t get annoying with your offers. People are flushed over with offers all the time and have developed a skill to masterfully ignore them. Keep up with the 20%-80% rule, only 20% of your social media posts should be about your business and 80% should be about giving an important piece of information to your fans. It could be a piece of advise, piece of inspiration or motivation, a value you care about etc. Get creative here.
If you have been on social media long enough – you will start seeing a gradual decline in your free content posts reaching to your fans.
Note: It could be lucrative to explore traffic opportunities on new networking sites or the upcoming decentralized platforms being built on the blockchain. (more on this in another article)
At some point you should consider paid advertising. This is a whole new topic in itself and for the purpose of this article I will keep it short and concise. First and foremost you need to prepare yourself mentally that online advertising requires a lot of testing and tweaking of your target audience, your message and your landing page (the page people will see when they click on your advert.) This is exactly the reason why people often get disappointed by the “cheap ads” promises you can stumble upon in the online marketing community. It is true that ads can get fairly cheap over time BUT only when and after you have the perfect recipe for the overall ad campaign. Be patient and ready to spend some money.
An alternative and favorite technique of mine is generating traffic through strategic partnerships and cross promotional ventures.
This could be anything, from guest blogging in an already established magazine and appearing in podcasts to more sophisticated strategies like doing online summits or other collective projects. The basics behind a successful strategic partnership are:
- To find a partner who is relevant to your business/cause and has an established audience already.
- To create a win-win offer for them that they cannot resist.
The next natural, and of course essential step, for your online success is:
- Build your tribe
The last thing you want is to have visitors to your website who just browse or even worst leave right away. Unfortunately that is the case for most of the websites that are out there! Imagine you worked so hard to drive all those people to your magnificent looking website and NONE of them cared for your product, service or a cause!
Did you know that for most people it takes about 7 times to see an offer before they decide to chip in their money. Not to mention, for the majority of web visitors it only takes 6 seconds to decide whether they will keep looking at your page or would rather leave!
SO, Keep calm and grow your email list!
It will not just happen overnight when you put a “subscribe to my newsletter box” in your sidebar or page” This approach might work as well to a certain degree BUT if you are looking to create a real impact you need to follow a more smart approach.
After all, just having the email address of a person who subscribed for “just the next random newsletter” will not do much for your project or cause in the long run. What you truly need is to offer these people something of real value in exchange of their email. It could be an important piece of information you researched or one that falls under your expertise; it could be a digital book, report or anything related to your business/cause that will provide value to the visitor.
If you are thinking about working from home, finding freelance online jobs or simply starting a start up – join our newsletter for more free course -like materials, marketing strategy ideas and tools to improve your career opportunities.
I will stop here and let you digest all of the above. Spend some time contemplating on those steps and see if you have a clear idea on how to incorporate all 3 into your own online project! Good luck!
Message from the founder:
