Aqib Khan
8 min readNov 20, 2020

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7 steps to starting an online business in 2021

By Silicon Valley Girl

1) Figure out the product that you’re gonna sell

I know you want to over complicate everything because i all want to change the world and build something really exciting like the idea was to build an Expedia for booking.

All of those experiences but the problem was that i was still studying at the University.

I was 21 years old and i had $300 like building an Expedia with that budget and that experience is impossible but what i thought is that i needed to start with something really really basic like something that i can sell tomorrow and something that i could sell tomorrow was actually our expertise.

I was traveling to learn languages before and I thought that I can just start helping others and i decided to build like a basic landing page and start helping other people and $300 was spent on actually registering the company getting a bank account and building that landing page a lot of beginner entrepreneurs make this mistake when they’re like.

I cannot roll out the product tomorrow I need a sit-down like really write down a business plan and calculate everything and then maybe create a great website and then you know talk to friends and pitch my idea but before rolling it out to the market.

I need to make sure it’s perfect that’s super wrong like don’t do that because the problem is you might spend like 2 years building something coding something working on something and then you roll it out to the market.

The market is like i don’t need that like i never needed that because sometimes i just come up with really bad ideas or sometimes i just trying to solve the problem that only i experience so my advice to you just go ahead roll it out to the market.

Hear all the bad words about your idea pivot change it but this is the only way to build a great company.

You don’t have to go all fancy and hire an expensive developer there are so many tools online that you can use I love to use Click funnels to build landing pages and now it takes me like 20 minutes to build a landing page.

There is a FREE 14 days trial to click funnels, just sign up and you can Start building your landing pages in few minutes

2) start collecting people’s emails

You are gonna thank me for that because when i started like oh our landing page is just gonna be selling a product.

That’s the end goal right but the thing is you’re gonna start paying for ads you’re gonna start paying for influence or product placements.

You don’t want to just lose that money.

I would build the business in a way that the first step you’re collecting an email or a phone number.

second step yourselves something cheaper.

The third step you up sell them to something bigger and like collecting emails is a crucial point.

what I use is Getresponse it’s a very very powerful platform that allows you to create drip campaigns and a drip campaign is that something happens on different events in different dates like somebody signed up there’s an email somebody bought there’s an email somebody didn’t buy.

3) figure out how you’re gonna collect payments

Guess what the goal of your business is to actually make money.

There are a lot of services you can use my recommendation would be PayPal and stripe.

stripe is super easy to connect if you’re from Europe or the u.s. PayPal is really worldwide there’s also Braintree but I don’t really like them because i used to use them.

Once asked them for like from better terms to use it and they said they’re gonna give them to us and they gave us some different terms and i ended up paying 20% more so but that’s a different kind of story but I would recommend stripe and PayPal for collecting payments.

4) pricing your product

if there is a thing that i entrepreneurs tend to underestimate what you’re doing and I had this problem but then I actually realize that the things I’m talking about it like private consultations on my courses.

I actually worth so much because I’m saving so much time to other people and it took me like years to learn that so don’t under price yourself but also if you’re doing like if it’s your first business.

If you’re just trying out different digital marketing tools I would stick to a price $20 to $30.

This is way you’re gonna be able to become profitable faster because if you’re selling like a $5000 product again this is something that happened to us.

our average trip is like $2000 and it took people ages to convert.

If i invested like a $100,000 straightaway it would have taken us years to get that money back so i started to roll out really basic products like a landing page where I sold my own consultation and stuff.

Really start with $20 to $30 check and this way at your unit economics are probably gonna work.

You can always raise your price like you’re starting your Facebook Ads you see that unit economics works that you are spending less money.

There you’re actually making you can start raising your price until the demand is still there.

5) How to attract your first customer

Start a Facebook campaign start targeting people who have the same interests for example you’re starting an agency that helps build websites for entrepreneurs go ahead and target Gary these followers or at I love as far as like.

you know where entrepreneurs are already and Facebook,YouTube & Google allows you to target them another way is to actually go to influencers like if you know some smaller influencers you can always just DM them on Instagram or just shoot them an email that you want to collaborate.

This is how influencers make money so they want to collab with you.

Interest depends on whether their prices are reasonable or not.

But I would say like I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs they said that 30% of their traffic is coming from their own social media 70 % is coming from with targeting & retargeting Google ads or whatever.

so I would recommend if you don’t have your own community start with targeting and retargeting.

6) Free Training

This free training will help you start your online business.

I know sometimes you’re like oh my god I’m not ready yet I have I don’t have that experience I haven’t studied economics.

I want to do my MBA first and then maybe I have an idea of starting a business you don’t have to do an MBA or you don’t have to do a master’s degree in economics to start a company.

You just need a great idea and you need this mindset you need to be ready you need to be ready to risk to dedicate your time to spend.

Your time for free because i worked for free for like first couple of years i didn’t get a lot of money with our first client.

I got like 300 Builder back basic website with a second client that i enhanced the website.

It got more money and i got a third client in six months after studying the company so like 3 clients and six months which is not a lot but she int to Australia for like eight weeks.

The commission was really good because the way i work is i get commission from schools and i was able to rent a table in a co-working space for $200.

It’s all like crawling but it’s really slow at the beginning.

Just be ready for that and again you don’t need some extraordinary knowledge you just need to be passionate about what you do.

I found this Free Training that’s called the Super Affiliate system which actually teaches you every single step like how to find the right idea what’s the methodology how do you think about what idea is gonna work for you how do you identify the market how do you market your product like every single step is discussed there.

7) Building your own community

I am hanging out with so many bloggers homemaking hundreds of thousand dollars a month not because they’re great entrepreneurs but because they have a great community.

they’re great entrepreneurs but the community came first so building a community around yourself if you’re a professional at something like maybe you are a CPA , marketer , developer , photographer like there are so many things you’re probably doing.

start sharing your knowledge to your community and you can do it on Instagram.

Instagram is the easiest platform to start but it has less organic reach.

YouTube is a little tougher in terms of like you need to edit videos and stuff but it offers amazing organic reach there is Facebook there is LinkedIn there are so many platforms start something.

Now start building your community and imagine if in six months you have like a thousand people following you you.

Already have your potential customer base to whom you can market with whom you can test your ideas.

You can be like all guys if I created this product would you buy it and they will give you instant feedback and it’s gonna be free you wouldn’t have to pay for it .

start building your community now it doesn’t matter if you have an idea it doesn’t matter.

If you have a company it doesn’t matter if you have a business that was it from me for today guys and I know at the beginning you need a lot of support and you need a lot of like moral support and marketing.

I hope this was helpful for you and I wanted to offer it one more thing.

Attention :

There is free training on how to start your online business and make 6 figure side income online without leaving your job and just working for 1 hour a day.

Sign Up For The Free Training : Click Here To Get Instant Access

Disclaimer: I have used some affiliate links in this article and I may earn a small commission from the services I’ve recommended. This just keeps me motivated on my research to learn and write about more ways to be successful online.

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