There are more and more digital nomads these days, and I’m one of them! Today I’d like to write about how to start an online business with a small budget.
- Find the right mentor.
You can go to MeetUp.com and join a group of business owners in your local area. In this way, you will be able to meet someone who is slightly more successful than you in business and you can learn from this person by spending some time with them. The reason you don’t need to spend lots of money and hire Jeff Bezos as your mentor is that extremely successful businesspeople are the wrong mentors for you. Please let me explain. If you look at Jeff Bezos’ schedule, his day could look like this:
- Have brunch with Tom Cruise;
- Play golf with Elon Musk;
- Have a meeting with other investors….
None of those is relevant to your reality.
In contrast, if you are hanging out with someone who is a little bit more successful than you in business, you can easily imitate what they are doing because they are only a few steps ahead of you. The local business owner Joe’s schedule probably looks like this:
- Generate leads online in the morning;
- Work with clients in the afternoon;
- Do admin work at night.
This is something that you can easily learn and immediately imitate. It turns out that the right mentor usually teaches you things for free because you can hang out with this person and ask them questions!
- If you start an online business….
Frankly, even if you aren’t starting an online business, you still need to have some kind of online presence in this day and age. But of course, if you are starting an online business, you may want to take some notes now. ?
First of all, you need a website. You may think social media is more important than a standard website, but that’s not true in reality because although people spend more time on social media nowadays, you can’t control your content on social media. In other words, what you publish on social media belongs to social media platforms, whereas what you publish on your website belongs to you. If you are a computer-savvy person, you can use WordPress to build a website. Nevertheless, if you aren’t very computer-savvy, you can use Squarespace or WIX to build a website because both Squarespace and WIX offer user-friendly templates for you to build a high-quality website. That means you don’t need to know coding at all and can have an amazing website! When it comes to your website’s domain name, .com domains are the most trusted domains; .co domains are pretty good as well. Ideally, you need to avoid the following:
- hyphens and unnecessary numbers in your domain name;
- extensions with a bad reputation (e.g., .info & .net);
- generic word extensions (e.g., .club, .london, .accountant).
Basically, you would be well-advised to try a .com domain first. You may consider adding a word to your desired name to get the .com domain. You might consider extensions such as .co and .org. Of course, you need to consider country-specific extensions if you serve a specific country, e.g., .co.uk and .com.au. Now speaking of choosing a profitable topic, please remember that a bad choice of topic will make it nearly impossible for your business to succeed. As a result, choosing a great topic for your online business is the most crucial decision. Here is how to find a great topic:
We take what we know for granted; hence, it’s time for you to write down everything you know more than your friends or the average person about – perhaps you know more about fashion, dating, social skills…? Write out all of them.
Next, please answer this question: What are all your passions and interests that you don’t get tired talking about? Maybe you can talk about mental health all day? Or you can talk about human dynamics forever?
Another question for you: What do your friends ask you for advice on? Relationship advice? Career advice?
After writing out all of these, you can see which topic should be the theme of your business, and then you need to do some research and find out whether you have any competitors or not. Don’t forget that competition is good because if you have an existing competitor who is already successful, it means this business idea can work very well. Also, when people are looking for advice or information to solve a problem, they buy from multiple sources.
When you decide on the best topic for your business, you’d better choose a subcategory, as getting specific is really important – being specific increases your chances of success. Remember: you can eventually expand into more topics within the big category, but do start by being specific!
“Are you interested in becoming a digital nomad?”
