How to Start An Online Business in 30 Days or Less
In this solo episode, John walks you through 8 simple steps to start an online business in 30 days or less, including:
- Make a list of painful problems in the lives of other people
- Teach what you already know, and charge at least 2x your clinical rate for it
- Make a simple landing page that speaks to the before and after of your offering
- Start posting somewhere every day for 5 days per week and give them a call to action (stake your claim and don’t apologize for it)
- Gather testimonials from your first customers and add them to your landing page
- Grow your email list, double your content and start thinking about scale
- Do enough consulting or done-for-you services to eventually scale into a product or course
- Teach someone else everything you just learned
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You’re listening to The John Clarkecast and in this episode I’m teaching you how to start an online business in 30 days or less. I’ve got eight concrete steps for you. It’s going to be a really fun episode. It’s a solo episode and it’s going to be highly informative and action packed. So without further ado, let’s dive in.
If you want to grow a highly profitable private practice, get fully booked and get clients consistently, then I can help you out and I’d love to help you out.
So all you need to do is go to thejohnclarke.com and click on work with me to find out more and a walk through the next steps. That’s www.thejohnclarke.com/workwithme and I look forward to talking to you very soon. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Welcome back to the show everybody. It’s another solo episode. I hope you’re excited about it because I am. Done less solo episodes recently or until recently I should say, and I’m excited to do some more of them. I did a poll not that long ago and asked you which style of episodes do you like the most? And the answers really leaned more toward the interview episodes, which for some reason surprises me a little bit. Maybe because I enjoy the solo episode so much. I do enjoy interviews a lot as well. But again, sometimes it’s just really nice to sit down and talk and kind of follow what’s coming out. But also kind of exercise my own knowledge in a way. So it’s nice to do both and you’re going to keep getting both. So that’s the good news.
Now in this episode, I’ve got eight concrete steps for you to follow to start an online business in 30 days or less.
That’s a pretty cool idea, right? I think so. What do I mean by online business? Well, I mean a business that is really outside of your practice, what you’re currently doing, it’s not another in-person business. It’s not another practice. It’s not a group practice. It’s an online business. I’m going to start talking a lot more about this sort of thing very soon because I think it’s on the rise, like never before. I think most therapists want to start an online business or a side hustle or a course, a podcast, consulting, whatever it is. And I think most therapists just don’t know where to start or how to do it.
So I’m going to give you eight steps to do it if you’re one of those people. At minimum you could just try this for 30 days and see what happens. So in that regard, you have nothing to lose. I think the reason most or a lot of therapists can fail when they try to start an online businesses is again, they don’t have a roadmap and they don’t stick with it long enough. So don’t let that be you if you are going to go for it. With that being said, let’s get into it.
So step number one.
Make a list of painful problems in the lives of other people that you see…
…and again, this is not just clinical work. So let’s say for example, you want to become a consultant of some sort. Well as a consultant, you want to figure out ideally what are the most painful problems or the most painful problem in the life of someone else and how can I help solve that?
Okay, so for instance, if you want to help, let’s say another therapist and you want to help them with their onboarding process for their new clinicians because you’re really good at that. And let’s say that’s an extremely painful problem for another group practice owner, then start there. So you can also start by just asking people what their biggest, most painful problems are. That’s another way. It’s really not advised just to assume. We really need to ask. So do a little bit of “market research” and this can be as simple as a Facebook poll or a Google survey, a Google form survey or a type form. There’s a hundred ways you can do this. But what’s important is that you think about or make a list of painful problems that you see in the lives of other people. In this case, let’s say other business owners and then ask them about it, right? Or just ask other business owners, for instance, what are your most painful problems? Make a list of them and then pick one to solve it. It’s really that simple.
From there step number two is basically solve that problem for them by teaching what you know, teach what you know. And I believe you should charge at least two times your clinical rate or more. For the reason being, you have unique knowledge and special skills that you can and should really leverage that are really valuable to people. And when you charge what you’re worth, people value it for what it’s truly worth. They’re more invested, they take it more seriously, you weed out people who are either “tire kickers” or people that are not going to put in the work once you help them figure out what the work is, et cetera. So there’s a lot of reasons to charge more into and to not be sorry for it, right? So teach what you already know and charge at least two times that, two times your clinical rate for it.
Again, so if it’s your HR consulting fee and you’re going to help a group practice owners set up their onboarding process over the course of five consulting sessions, then do that. And again, charge what that’s worth if you’re solving a really painful problem for that person.
Now from there, so let’s say you start to firm up your offering and figure out what is it I’m going to offer. So well I’m going to offer maybe a done for you kind of HR onboarding process, I’m going to an automat it, set up the trainings, the worksheets for onboarding, the checklist for onboarding. Put it all in one cool place, one cool automated place, et cetera. Once you have an idea of your offering and your pricing, all you do is you make a simple landing page for that offering. Now you can do that either on your current website, if that makes sense.
Or you could create a different website or you could do what I would do, and this is what I do whenever I’m launching a new idea, new product, service, whatever, and I go to leadpages.net. I don’t have an affiliate with them or anything. So this is not an ad. leadpages.net. These are highly engineered, kind of pre-designed landing pages that are designed to get people to click. So I’d go to leadpages.net and I would create a simple but beautiful landing page that speaks to the before and after of your offering. That’s how you create the copy.
Again, I’m giving you a very straightforward way to build an online business.
I wish someone had taught me some of this stuff like three years ago when I was just piecemealing it altogether and it was quite disjointed and quite overwhelming. Had some really long nights trying to understand all this stuff. So you create that landing page and in your copy, use plain language and you just speak to the before and after of your offering. So a bullet list for instance of what life is like right now for this group practice owner who needs help with their onboarding process. And then you speak to the after of your offering. What’s life like after you’ve gone through your product or service? It’s that simple. Have repeating calls to action throughout that landing page. Nice imagery. If you want to state your pricing, state your pricing. If you want to focus more on just getting more people interested in the service, don’t stay your pricing and wait to do that. Once you do like a discovery session with them on the phone.
From there, start posting everywhere you can online. I would suggest you do it five days a week for the next 30 days. So five business days a week for the next 30 days. I know that’s a lot, but this is a sprint. This is an experiment. This is a 30 day launch strategy that I’m giving you. So choose one platform in post there every business day for five days at a time, for 30 days. Okay, so let’s say it’s Facebook, post every single day to Facebook. Create a content calendar, post every single day even if you feel like you run out of stuff to talk about. Through your content, all you’re doing is just educating or inspiring or entertaining. That’s really kind of the rule of thumb, right? It’s very commonly known. So through that, you just think, how can I educate my audience, entertain my own, inspire my audience? Really you’re just trying to provide value.
So what you could do is like over a five day series, do one tip per day on why most therapists don’t have a good on onboarding process for their group practice? Or what you could be missing in your onboarding process for your group practice? And you just do a little bite sized piece of content and you just do it consistently and you pair every piece of content with a call to action. This is a very commonly overlooked thing is that people who even do great content or do content consistently, they forget to call people to action at the end of it. This is a pet peeve of mine, but in yet something I didn’t do early on either. So lesson learned.
So after you go through that one tip, for setting up your onboarding process, then tell them where to go. Go to my website.com/onboarding to learn more about how I can do this all for you. Right? That’s really it. So your content strategy is essential here. You’re using content to build trust and authority with an audience. If you’re really smart, you’re using it to also build an email list. And from there you’re also using it to funnel sales.
Through your content, one more thing I want to say is:
…stake your claim and don’t apologize for it.
Okay, let me update my notes here, not my nose. Geez. Stake your claim and don’t apologize for it. A lot of people used to ask me when I first got started in this stuff, like how did you become a business coach or consultant? Or how’d you start helping therapists? Or what gave you the right to start a podcast?
Well part of it is really, it really is you just stake your claim and you don’t apologize for it. You look for things you really believe in and you’re vocal about it. You say whatever it is that’s on your mind that you feel passionate about and you don’t apologize for it. That’s how you build authority and expertise around a content area. So that’s all there is to it. Really from there it’s just repetition and refinement and getting better at your platforms.
Number five, gather testimonials from your first customers and then add those to your landing page. So this is an essential part of the process, but once you have your kind of proof of concept and you kind of firmed up your offering or your service, you deliver your service, then you ask your customers for a quick little testimonial. If it’s a video testimonial, that’s pure gold, that’s even better. If it’s just a three sentence, not three words, just do it. A three sentence testimonial, that’s still really good and ask their permission to post also their picture and a link to their website or whatever. Okay. So get those testimonials from your first customers and then add them to your landing page. If you want to charge less for these people, go for it as a way to get testimonials and to work toward your proof of concept. Okay?
From there, you’re going to essentially grow your email list, double your content, and start thinking of ways to scale. So let’s say you’re toward the end of these 30 days and you think this is something I want to keep doing. This thing has legs to it, et cetera. Well then what you do next, you start growing your email list, you use that for that content to funnel into your email list, you double your content. So you do more content either on the same platform or ideally on a few platforms and you really get ready to scale. Obviously start thinking about scale.
Okay, that’s really it. So I have two more steps here at the end, but that’s really it in a nutshell. That was six steps. I’ve got two more, but just run it down again. What we did is we started with number one, we made a list of painful problems and how we might solve them. Number two, teach what you already know and charge at least two times your clinical rate. Number three, make a simple landing page that speaks to the before and after of your offering. Number four, start posting somewhere for five days a week and give them a call to action. Stake your claim and don’t apologize for it. Number five, gather testimonials from your customers and add them to that landing page. Number six, start growing your email list, double your content and start thinking about scale. That’s it. So how do I scale this thing?
Now how do you scale this thing? Well, over time, once you’ve done enough consulting or done for you services or one-to-one services, et cetera, then you think about scaling it into a product or a course or like yeah, software, an online training program or course, a membership site, et cetera, and that’s it. That’s how online business really works in a nutshell. That’s it in 13 minutes. That really is in a way enough for you to get started.
Number eight, teach someone else everything that you just learned.
So again, that’s how you get better as a consultant. That’s how you scale up as a consultant. Charge more, have more credibility, et cetera, is you do what you’ve done through this process and then you teach other people to do what you’ve done and that further helps establish as you as the expert in this area and it also helps solidify and cement your own learning. So there’s a dual benefit there in that regard.
That’s it guys. I wanted to just do a really kind of quick and straightforward informational episode this time. Just something I wanted to do. Your time is important. My time is important. So I didn’t want to waste any of it on either end today. So I wanted to give you a really straight forward plan that you could follow to start an online business in 30 days or less. I hope this was helpful. If I can help you with any of this stuff, I would love to. I’d love to work with you and help you make this a reality. You can always head to thejohnclarke.com and click on work with me. That’s thejohnclarke.com and click on work with me. Otherwise, please do me a favor, rate, review and subscribe to this show wherever you’re listening and please, please, please share your favorite episode with a friend or two. That really helps me get the word out. Otherwise, take care of yourselves. I hope to see you again very soon and have a great week. Okay, cheers.
