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Online Business

How to Start a Service Based Business

How to Start a Service Based Business

I’ve been speaking to a lot of people lately, students and followers within my community, about getting started with a service based business. Service businesses are a little different than product businesses because it’s not all about creating something and putting it out there, you have to develop your own personal skills first, organize your offer and then seek out clients that need the skills you have. If you want to start a business as a life coach, stylist, personal shopper, professional speaker, designer, photographer or any of the other thousands of possible service based businesses, this article is going to teach you how to get one up and running and how to get started promoting it!

Step #1: Get the Experience

I’m often asked how one goes about getting the necessary experience to start a service based business. Depending on the service, you may have to go to school or get a specific certification for it, like being a lawyer or a health coach. But if your service doesn’t require schooling or any specific certification in order for you to practice it (which you find out by researching the field and the norms associated with it) then you need to get yourself some real world experience. A web developer or designer could gain experience by getting a job in the field and practicing their skills, or a life coach or public speaker would want to find some clients (perhaps friends or family) to test their skills on. In this period of time, you are either working for someone else, working for low cost or no cost at all. Think of this as your intern stage where you are gaining the skills you need to eventually earn an income from your service.

Step #2: Put Together Your Offer

Once you have some good experience under your belt and feel like your trial clients are happy with their results with you, you can develop your offer. Your offer is whatever your specific service will be, in some form of packaged form. For example, a public speaker would put together some speeches on topics they have experience on and develop a price that they can offer to businesses and events looking for such speakers. If you’re a wedding planner, you will want to work up all the services you will perform for a customer and price them out individually and as a packaged deal so when you meet with engaged couples, you have a clear outline of what you can do for them and how much it will cost. A photographer may work up an offer that’s based on an hourly rate with examples of how many usable photos will result during the time frame. Whatever your service is, work up the offer, do some market research for other similar services in your area and use your trial clients to help you determine a reasonable price for your offer.

Step #3: Brainstorm Opportunities

Once you have experience and an offer worked up, you then need to start thinking about who needs your service and where you can find them. Depending on your business you will want to understand your ideal client and research where you can make contact with them, either in person or online depending on your offer. Once you have a list of people, other companies or places where you can find opportunity, you then need to start making cold calls. Cold calls are when you approach someone about an offer that did not seek out you or your services. Cold calling can be tough, it really can be, there is no way around that. But, it is necessary for you to build up your network of contacts. You can always work with your trial clients to see if they have contacts for you and work on a referral basis, but you also need to put yourself out there and find opportunities for yourself. Your goal for each cold call should be to present your offer to a decision maker with the ability to hire you, hopefully closing a deal with them, or getting the contact information for someone who may be interested in your services. If you have done your research, the person you pitch your offer to should have a need for your service so if they don’t hire you for one reason or another, they should at least be able to direct you to a new contact. From there, you will continue to make cold calls and develop a network of contacts, closing some deals and growing your list at the same time. This is one of the reasons why having an active social media presence can be a lifesaver, especially if you run a service based business. It makes finding opportunity much easier. If you are in this boat, with a service based business you want to get off the ground and you want to make the road a little easier for yourself by developing your presence online, I would highly suggest checking out my online business program, Empire Building. In Empire Building, I teach you the 5 pillars to successful online communication using the exact strategies I used to build my website page views to over 200,000 a month, and gain a social media presence of over 50,000 followers! Most of this growth happened within a six month period of time, that helped me to replace my income after I left my day job, so no matter where you are starting, Empire Building can help you grow if you apply the information to your business and execute! Thankfully, Empire Building is packed with worksheets that help you take the lessons and apply them to your scenario, so you don’t have to build your own success blueprint from scratch, I give you the tools that streamline everything for you!

I hope this information helps you get your service based business off the ground and if you have any other questions for me, I’d love to help you work through them, so leave me a comment or send me an email!

xoxo,

Online Business

The Essential Skills of a #GIRLBOSS

The Essential Skills of a #GIRLBOSS

So, you really want to start your own business and claim the title of #GIRLBOSS for yourself, but you aren’t sure you have the required skill set. While starting your own online business doesn’t require a specific resume, I’ve found that their are a few essential skills that tend to separate the successful from the average. Here are the skills I have found to be the most crucial as I run my own business.

Communication

Great communication skills are a very valuable asset for any #GIRLBOSS, but especially for one that deals with online business. In the real world, having strong speaking and writing skills are a necessity but online, they can mean life or death for your business. It’s so hard to communication online. Yes, it’s easy to send a tweet or leave a comment, but it’s hard to get your messaging across on noisy social platforms and through the hustle and bustle of ads and other constant interruptions on websites. You either need to have great public speaking skills so you can kill it on video platforms OR you need to have impeccable writing skills if you want to carve a name for yourself via a blog. If you have the complete package, you are golden, but if not, don’t fret because you can always improve either!

How to Improve Your Communication Skills: If you need to work on either of these critical communication skills, I have some recommendations for you. To improve your writing, I love the book On Writing Well. It’s a simple guide that can help anyone at any writing level clean up their written communication and start crafting better messages. If you need to improve your oral communication skills, I would suggest joining Toastmasters, which is an international organization that helps people improve their public speaking.

Graphic Design

Design skills are another complete must for a #GIRLBOSS with an online hustle because everything online is driven by design. Your website, your content, and even your products need to have a great design to them in order to turn heads online. Yes, you can always hire out a designer to do this sort of work for you, but if you don’t have the basics down, you are leaving the design, and really the direction of your business, in the hands of a stranger.

How to Improve Graphic Design Skills: When it comes to improving your design skills there are a few things you can do. First, you can get a sense of what your ascetic is by searching through other websites, magazines, and through sites like Pinterest to understand what you like and what you don’t like. Next, I would put together collages via Pinterest to see how different images and design elements work together to create on cohesive vision. If you have a specific project you are working on, like a website redesign or you’re trying to research design for an upcoming project, you can make a board on Pinterest for the project and drop all your inspiration there. Be careful of what you curate because much of understanding good design is knowing that less is more and that a good designer knows how to build a great design with the fewest possible pieces.

Photography

Photography is another skill that is invaluable for a #GIRLBOSS to have in order to run a successful online business. Images are so much of what compels us to connect and purchase products and services online and so any serious #GIRLBOSS should be comfortable behind the camera. Styled photography is a key element of branding that is necessary for a variety of platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, not to mention how crucial it is for your website or online shop!

How to Improve Photography Skills: If you need to up your photography game, I would highly recommend my Digital Styling Lightroom Course. It’s a video based course with 5 modules designed to teach you how to shoot, style and edit great photography for your brand. It’s currently on sale for a special price, so click here to take advantage of it!

Sales

I know the average #GIRLBOSS hates thinking of herself as a salesperson, but you do need to have a basic understand of how “sales” works, in order to close the deal with your customers. The thing you need to know as a salesperson, however, is that sales isn’t really about selling your product. Rather, it’s about selling yourself. A good sales person can sell any product to anyone, they don’t really need to know much about a product, they just need to have confidence in themselves and a charismatic personality.

How to Improve Sales Skills: I know it’s probably not the first book that would pop up if you did a search for tools to help you become a better salesperson, but I’d recommend the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book is super old, but stands the test of time, even in the modern online marketplace because it isn’t about the products you are selling, its about the basic principles of selling yourself to another human being.

I’m sure their are other skills here and there that would benefit and savvy #GIRLBOSS, but these four are the crucial ones you need to have under your belt in order to really have what it takes to stand out in business, especially online business. If you’re lacking in a skill, definitely prioritize honing it because all of these skills are learnable!

xoxo,

Online Business

How to Prep Your Business for a Vacation

How to Prep Your Business for a Vacation

As a solo entrepreneur, everything rests squarely on your shoulders. It’s a lot of pressure to manage on a day to day basis, but that pressure exacerbates whenever we take time out from work. I know how important it is to take a vacation every now and then as a business owner- mostly from my own lack of vacation time. Self-care is ridiculously important to help you keep in tip-top shape to face the challenges that each day brings, and vacation time, too, is a requirement to help you relax and recharge your batteries. But, how do you prepare for taking the necessary time away from your business when you are the business? This is a question I’ve been forced to ponder since I have booked my first week long vacation since my business began to take off, and this is what I’ve come up with after taking a look around to see how the best solo entrepreneurs and small businesses manage prepare.

1. Communicate your absence: If you work for yourself, by yourself, the first step to preparing for your much needed vacation is to communicate your time off to your customers. If you have clients, you will want to give them notice of your time off and make sure that you are able to properly schedule your work for them around this time period. If you run a shop, you will want to consider letting your customers know via a newsletter and then post a site-wide notice that let’s people know when you will be away and how that will affect order fulfillment. Whatever you do, just don’t say nothing! Customers are incredibly understanding when they have notice that there is going to be a change in routine, so let them know as soon as you can!

2. Create your vacation protocol: Depending on the type of business you run, you may be able to manage some items of your business while you are away. For example, perhaps you run a digital shop like I do, then your shop doesn’t need to close while you are on vacation, you just won’t be able to respond as quickly to customer service emails. Set the protocol for what is going to happen while you’re away. Will you respond to emails while you are away or will you be some place where you don’t have reliable internet? This will need to be communicated to your customers. Do you have stock that can be sold while you are away, but you just won’t be able to fulfill orders until you return? That should also be decided and communicated. It’s very hard as a solopreneur to step fully away from your business and if you feel like you would still like to be tethered in some way, make that decision and set your protocol. Perhaps you will respond to emails while you are away but not be able to troubleshoot issues or play tech support. Whatever you decide is fine as long as you define it and communicate it before you leave!

3. Pack only what you need to take: Once you have defined your protocol and communicated your absence and plan for managing the business while away, you will want to make sure you pack the specific items you will need, no more, no less. For example, if you know you will have internet access and might want to send emails, bring your smartphone to limit the amounts of emails you will send. If you know you will need to play tech support while you are gone, bring your laptop. Don’t bring more than what you need, “just in case” because you will most likely put yourself in a situation where you end up working more than you need to.

4. Pre-schedule content as needed: If your business revolves around content, you may want to take some time before you leave to pre-schedule some content for the time you will be away. Write your blog posts (or find a guest poster- even better!), take your Instagram pics, and schedule your tweets or Facebook updates as needed. Apps like Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule your content out across multiple platforms so you can ensure promotions are running smoothly while you are away.

5. Close up the office: The final way you can prepare yourself for vacation mode, is to close of your office before you leave! What I mean by this is to make sure your office space, whether its a desk in your bedroom, a home office or even a rented office space, is cleaned up, everything is put away and your equipment is shut down. A simple act like this can go a long way to help your mind turn off from work and turn onto vacation mode!

I hope these tips help you prepare your business for your next vacation! There is one more thing I wanted to mention to you all since I have received some questions about it. I am going on vacation in a few weeks to Disney World in Orlando Florida, and it has been brought to my attention that some of you are in the area and may want to do a meet up with me. If you are in the Orlando area and would like to see if we can make this happen, send me an email and let me know! Can’t wait to hear from you!

xoxo,

Online Business

How to Build an Inexpensive Professional Website That Looks Like it Cost Thousands

When it comes to your online presence, whether you are a business owner, blogger or simply a social media fanatic, nothing is more important to your overall success than having a professional website. In many ways, your website is like your first impression on the web and so it’s crucial that your website be a reflection of yourself as well as a unique and well thought out experience. While many people spend thousands upon thousands of dollars creating a unique yet professional website with the help of professional design firms and web coding experts, I have managed to create a website that received hundreds of thousands of views per month spending a fraction of that! In all, my website cost me under $250 dollars to build myself using free resources and tutorials online, plus a few little web hacks that I would like to pass on to you today! So here are my tips for creating a professional website that looks like it costs thousands of dollars!

Go Self Hosted

Although there are plenty of free website options online, using a free service doesn’t hold a candle to a true self hosted website. Although you can certainly create a very decent user experience on a Blogspot.com account, the fact of the matter is that when it comes to your site’s SEO or search engine optimization, a website that is ran from blogspot will never pull in the rankings the way a self hosted site will. This is because your site will always be a subdomain of a larger site, even if you purchase your own custom URL. In order to get the highest rankings for your site and the best SEO, you want to have your website self hosted. Yes, this option costs money, but usually not more than about $100-$150 a year for your domain URL and hosting fees. I use a hosting service called Bluehost, but there are many others out there and I suggest doing a little research for which service and price point works for you!

Use Trusted Website Building Software

I personally use WordPress on my website and I love how reliable, easy to use, and versatile the platform is for my needs! It gives me professional results without actually needing to be a professional web designer! I don’t need to know how to code or even understand HTML because WordPress allows for you to download special plugins to your site that help you create nearly anything you could imagine. Because it’s used by so many professionals, there are so many (free!) resources available to help you build the site of your dreams, and WordPress is constantly updating and adding new functionality!

Buy a Professional and Responsive Theme

Your website’s theme is basically the design that is seen by the end user and although you can get many free themes online for your site, I highly suggesting spending a little money and buying a theme that is perfectly designed, responsive and full featured! I personally purchased my theme from BluChic.com which specializes in responsive WordPress themes for female-centric businesses. Although my theme cost slightly more than your average WordPress theme, I love that it is responsive (which means that the layout of my site optimizes depending on the screen or device that is viewing it), with a clean-cut editorial design that I was easily able to tweak to fit with my own branding. My theme is also backed by a customer service team so that if I ever run into issues or have any questions, I have a professional on call to help me!

Now, I’m not a web design professional by any means, but I am one smart cookie and was able to build my website for a very reasonable price by myself in less than a day and I know you can too! Yes, I was nervous to do it at first, but after Googling some quick how-to’s and watching a few YouTube videos on website building, I was quickly able to learn the basics for setting up my site and follow step-by-step instructions that helped me to create it. It may have seemed overwhelming at first, but in reality, all the information I needed to create my own professional website was available to me for free online, so if you want to create an inexpensive website that looks like it cost thousands of dollars to code and design, I suggest using these tips and doing some research and Googling of your own so that you can get to work!

xoxo,

P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out my Blogging Resource Guide or How to Build an Online Business without an Email List!

Online Business

How to Build an Online Business without an Email List

I guess somewhere in Online Business Marketing 101 it must say that in order to have a successful online business you need to establish an email list and focus a good amount of time, effort and money into growing that list by any and all means possible. Of course, I skipped Online Business Marketing 101 and figured out a long time ago that much of the traditional marketing practices constantly touted as business essentials online are nothing more than mere suggestions. If you have started a business online or want to start one but get intimidated by the jargon and fancy lingo that the usual online marketers use, or get confused when you hear about SEO, Leadpages, Hooks and Facebook Ads, well, guess what? I am here today to tell you that you don’t need any of it to find success for your business online!

Why? Well, because building a successful business online doesn’t have to be about marketing, endlessly selling yourself and your products online. or even knowing some secret formula for generating leads through advertising. You can make the intentional choice to focus your business strategy on growing a community and finding that audience of like minded individuals who really need that product or service that you have. Let me ask you a question. Would you rather do business with a company online that spammed you with emails, constant product updates and click-bait sales methods or would you rather do business business with a company that took the time to get to know you, was there to answer your questions and support you first before they ever asked for a single penny? I know which I would choose! No one wants to feel like they are being sold to, and for many online entrepreneurs, it feels icky when we have to resort to basic sales tactics. Although I run a business online, I don’t consider myself a sales person, I consider myself a creator and I don’t want to waste my creative energy focusing on business principles that don’t align with my values and interests. I don’t run my business based on antiquated marketing principles, developed at the start of the dotcom era, and I’ve found more success than I could have imagined just by being myself, truly trying to connect with my customers and providing a source of helpful information for my community everyday!

So, you are probably asking yourself, “Alexis, how did you learn how to grow a community online? Where did you learn from? Which program did you take?” The truth is, I learned all this information the hard way, through trial and error. I’ve been at this for over six years at this point and it’s only been through testing and trying new things that I have slowly but surely uncovered the knowledge and information that I now know and which has led me to grow my blog, YouTube and Social Media feeds to numbers far beyond what I could have expected! In just the last year alone, I have grown my blog from just over 10k page views per month to nearly 150k, and my YouTube from 1k subscribers to over 20k! Oh and did I mention, all that and I never spent a single dollar on advertising, nor did I have an email list to communicate with my followers. Instead, I harnessed the power of social media and my own creativity to naturally attract an audience and community for my work who then turned into my customers!

Now, if you are interested in replicating my success, I will tell you, it’s completely do-able! I don’t believe that I was some one-off success story, I know that my success is repeatable for those who know and use the lessons and information that it took me years to figure out on my own. The best news is, that I am not just keeping this information to myself. Like all other great things I learn about and experience in my life, I want to share this with my community! That is why I developed the Empire Building Program, my personal e-course designed to help other creative business owners build a community of customers online using creative methods of communication instead of old-school online marketing tactics! If you want to build an online business, but you’re not interested in learning all the ins and outs of business strategy, this is the course for you!

The great thing about Empire Building is that I created a few different levels for the program to help people learn at the rate and style that works for them. You can sign up for my Empire Building Architect Path to get one-on-one coaching sessions with me as well as a Custom Content Development Action Plan that I create for your business, and of course access to the full Empire Building Program of 5 digital workbooks and a private Facebook group for members. Or, if you want to join the program, but don’t have the time for one-on-one coaching, you can join the Empire Building Blueprint Path and get group coaching through the private Facebook group as well as full access to the 5 digital workbooks so you can work at your own pace and check in with me for additional resources and guidance as needed. Finally, if you prefer to go it alone and select the digital workbooks and topics that you need specific help with, you can purchase my Empire Building Workbooks* individually! Each digital workbook is filled with all the information you need to know on the subject, as well as numerous worksheets that you can print out and use to build a custom plan for your business!

If you want to start your online business but aren’t sure where to begin, let me guide you! If you have an existing business but are having trouble gaining traction online, use my knowledge to your advantage! You don’t have to spend years testing every trick in the book just to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I’ve done all the heavy lifting for you in Empire Building! I can’t wait to work with you!

If you have any questions about Empire Building please do not hesitate to send me an email so I can help you decide which path of the program is right for you!

xoxo,

*Currently, the first two of the five workbooks have been released and the remaining workbooks will be published once a month through July.