Keep Your Dream Simple (Part 4)

There’s a lot of information out there about starting your online business, I mean a whole lot. When I’m working with someone, one of the biggest frustrations is where to start?

Sometimes the advice is even confusing and contradictory. My goal with this series is to pull the curtain back, to simplify the process. To help you figure out where to start and how to do this without going nuts.

When I started three years ago, I thought I would go nuts, I had a wicked case of information overload! I want to speak to those just like me. Those that have a family and responsibilities and want to do this without ruining their life or hurting their families.

In the first three posts we talked about the basics: figuring out who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about. Then, how to put together a good foundation, a solid website, your second home Today, we’ll move forward.

Grow your online business

Once you have your foundation set, it’s time to build upon that foundation. You spent time and a lot of effort to put something nice together, something that will help your specific target audience with the pains they face.

Now it’s time to honor that effort with people actually seeing what you’ve done. Since this is a website, you must have some traffic to be successful. If you’re just starting out, start simple.

Ask some friends or family members to share a link to your website on their social media pages. This should get you a couple of clicks. There will be a temptation for you to constantly share your work on your social media profiles, don’t do it!

I mean, you will share from time to time but the more you can limit it the better. People generally ignore self-promotion, think about it. Gary Vaynerchuk writes about this in his new book. He says, give, give, give, then sell, it’s a better strategy.

Even as you build a bigger platform, try to limit self-promotion, if you’re putting out great content, your audience will promote for you. If you aren’t new, get more traffic through guest posting.

Guest posting has been talked about a lot and a lot of people do it because it works. If you don’t have that big of an audience, the fastest way to build one is to get exposed to a larger one. This guest post I did for Michael Hyatt literally put my website on the map.

Great and effective guest posting

For you to get the most out of guest posting, guest post on websites that are speaking to your target audience. When I started out, I guest posted everywhere and got some results. A guest post is a guest post, you’re getting exposed to a new audience.

When you guest post for websites speaking directly to your audience, the results are incredible. You’re speaking directly to those that are interested in what you’re saying, these are your people. You’re here to help them and if you can make that clear, they will respond.

To get the most out of guest posting, have a plan. If you’re launching a product, service or just your online business, try to schedule out your guest post in intervals. To have a guest post accepted you’re going to have to send them out early, some websites have posts already scheduled well in advance.

I get asked how to land guest posts on large websites? Let the content speak for itself. Ideally you would already follow the blog, one of the best ways to write and land a guest post is in the style of the blogger. Get a feel for how they write, how their audience responds.

Then write a post in that style, for that audience. Put the post in the body of an email and send it to the blogger or their assistant, bloggers generally hate attachments. Write a killer byline, with three quality links. Really think about where you want to send people: your about page, a social media link and a cool thing you’re doing right now is a good formula.

I plan on writing an entire post on guest posting, so I’ll end here. I’m covering a lot of basics in this series but my hope is that you’re getting great value. I’m committed to you living out your dream by the end of 2014, your online business will support you.

Have you ever guest posted? What were the results?