Small Steps, Big Results: Unleashing Your Online Business Potential

I encourage you to keep it simple and start small when starting your online business. 

When I work privately with clients, they often have a grand vision of where their online business will be several years later. 

I 100% support you having a big vision in mind, but on the other hand, I want to encourage you to be willing to start small. 

One reason is that if you aim to take decades of your passion and experience and package everything into various digital products and courses, it could be years before you launch. 

Even with everything fully created in advance, you'd still be at the starting line in launching your business because you won't have an audience to purchase from you. 

The other reason I encourage you to start small is that from the moment you launch; your business will begin taking on a life of its own, growing and evolving like any other living thing. 

Once you launch and start publishing content on your blog, podcast, or YouTube videos, you'll start attracting an audience. 

That audience is going to start engaging with your content. Sometimes, they'll click the "like" button, and sometimes, they'll ask a question or leave a comment.

Sometimes, they'll want to visit your website and opt-in to your freebie, or sometimes, they might be so excited by what you offer that they'll purchase one of your products. 

All these forms of engagement with your audience will inform, shape, and mold your online business. 

Once you launch, you will soon be in conversation with other people. 

You may be surprised by what you learn from this conversation. 

Sometimes, certain ideas or pieces of content resonate with people, and you may decide to lean into that topic more in terms of future content or product offerings. 

Sometimes, your audience or customers will ask you to create certain things that might inspire you. 

Over time, you may find that your audience asks the same top 10 questions repeatedly. 

This may inform how you teach about your topic, create content, or inspire new offerings. 

One of the beautiful things about entrepreneurship, particularly online business, is that it's an exciting adventure, and you never fully know what will unfold next. 

Once you launch, your business will begin growing and evolving, and you will, too. A year later, you won't be who you were when you launched a year prior. That's amazing! It's one of the reasons I love entrepreneurship so much. 

By starting small, you allow yourself to get started much more quickly, and you also allow plenty of room to grow and develop your business over time, naturally based on feedback and your evolution. 

What should you do instead?

First, just get started now. 

Create a simple digital product offering, like an ebook or a mini-course on a specific topic.

Put together a basic website with an about page, a blog, a contact page, a simple sales page for your product, and a freebie offer for people to get started with something risk-free. 

That's all you need to get started.

Then, start publishing free content and share it with your target audience. 

Keep your content creation simple, too. If you like to write, start with a simple blog on your website. 

If you prefer to talk, create a simple podcast. 

If it's easiest to make videos, make simple videos and put them on a YouTube channel or a social media page. 

You'll grow your audience as you share or teach through your free content each week. 

As I described earlier, that audience will give you feedback over time in the form of "likes" or comments. 

Some of your audience will want more from you and visit your website to see what you have available to help them. 

And that's how an online business is born and grows over time. 

While that process is happening, your audience is growing, you're growing, and you're getting the feedback; you can simultaneously create new products and offerings all along the way. 

By starting small, you have the advantage of actually starting (not something to underestimate), and you're simultaneously optimizing your opportunity for future growth. 

In conclusion, don't let the overwhelming feeling of trying to do too much hold you back from getting started. 

Allow yourself to start small. 

Most importantly, allow yourself to get started because nothing happens until you take action and start. 

- Megan