The 8-Part Blueprint For Starting Your (Online) One-Person Business
Even alongside your 9–5
Do you have an interest and want to make some extra cash out of it?
Thinking about starting a business is as far as most people go. Unfortunately, most of them give up even before trying their passion.
If you want to start your one-person business and are ready to take things more seriously, you’re at the right place.
On every social media platform, people preach about building a passive income business. Some tell you tricks about affiliate marketing only to sell you their course; others ask you to be a content creator.
They won’t tell you the exact method of pursuing what you love. But again, why should you listen to me?
I started this journey at the beginning of 2023, and in this time, I have:
- Accumulated an online presence of more than 26,000 people
- Made digital products and monetized my content
Let’s break down my strategy
1. Make the most of your resources
Go 30 years back, and you’ll see only a handful of millionaires. To start your business, you had to be on the ground to make products, have connections with people, and invest a lot of money before expecting any returns. You would have to:
- Hire a team and build a roadmap
- Take loans from banks and invest in your business
- Work tirelessly on branding, marketing, and growing your business until it becomes profitable
Fast forward to now, we have the Internet. You don’t need money to make money online — all you need are the resources.
Building an online business is all about building an online presence by targeting your niche
2. Identify your niche
Niche is nothing but the audience you’d like to target. Take a pen paper and write answers to these 3 questions:
- What do you like working with?
- Can you help others get better at this?
- Are there people who’ll pay you to learn this/work on this?
Skills + Experience + Monetization = Niche
3. Create content and attract your niche
In my opinion, this is the most important part. Building a like-minded audience might seem daunting, but it’s easier than most people think.
Think of it like a big group where you’re sharing knowledge about your interests and creating a space where people can talk about it.
Some people play the quantity game. They buy followers, asking people to engage and do everything except for creating valuable content.
Don’t be one of those people. It is better to have 15 people who truly engage with your content than 1500 who are there just for the show. You’re here to build over quality.
You can use any place to start, like:
- Quora
It just has to be a place where you are comfortable with creating content.
4. Share what you know
And don’t stress over being 100% original. People have been taking inspiration and learning from other people for ages. Nothing is 100% original. You just have to take inspiration and create your own content.
Now that you have your social account set, look for people who are similar to your niche. Study their content, their engagement, and their work. You can only implement when you learn from people.
Create a brain map of people you look up to. Start by writing 3 people. Then, connect them to more people who are similar or interact with them. Soon, you’ll have an inspiration guide.
Interact with their content and study their content. Soon, you’ll start building a new pattern by learning from these people.
5. Make more companions than competition
When you start as a creator on a new platform, you want to take over the world.
You want to get ahead of everyone and make a name for yourself. You don’t interact or network with people. It can be because you think it will be a waste of time, or you’re just an introvert.
Whatever the reason — you’ll have to change. Don’t be a lone wolf. Don’t take everyone on the platform to be your competitor.
If someone is behind you, guide them. If they’re ahead of you, learn from them. A task that takes up to 1 day to complete can be done in 2 hours when you have the right support.
You need to build in public. Share your progress and growth with your audiences, and don’t just showcase the final product — showcase the process.
Humans play around with psychology a lot. You’d rather buy something that has been made in front of you — than something that was cooking in the background.
When you share your progress, your tools, and what exactly you are building, you attract 2 types of people:
- People with the same interests as you would want to learn from you.
- People who are interested in your service and would want to work with you in the future.
6. Create your service/product
We have a niche, a platform, and an audience.
Now, you can start monetizing for your interest. You can create digital products and sell them on Gumroad.
You can start by
- selling your service to clients
- creating digital products
- creating courses
- starting 1:1 consultations
- building a cohort
The only advice — Don’t wait for the right time to start monetization. Whether you have 1K or 10K in your audience, start your business when you feel confident.
7. Spread your audience
Don’t entrust one platform to encapsulate all your business. Times are uncertain, and no social media platform can be trusted. What if your account gets hacked or banned, or the platform gets taken down?
You can do 2 things:
- Build on multiple accounts side by side (Don’t pick more than 2platforms because then you won’t be able to grow with pace)
- Build on one platform, gain high numbers there, and then dilute. (Recommended — as you can take it easy on the already grown platform and focus on other accounts too)
I redirect people from my X account to an email list.
This helped me create an even deeper connection with my audience and also dilute the people to various other platforms
8. Collect social proof and keep growing
You have your audience and even your product now. You must’ve made money, but do you stop here?
To make this a genuinely passive income, you’ll need to make money easily. It’s important that you keep creating content and keep building your audience.
After launching your product/service, collect social proof. Ask for testimonials (politely) and share those with your audience.
Create content to attract strangers to be your audience
Create products to turn these people into potential buys
Create social proof to turn these potential buyers into customers.
Let’s circle and summarize what we learned:
- Make the most of your resources
- Identify your skills and create a niche
- Pick a platform to create content
- Share with your audience and build a connection
- Network. Make more companions than competition
- Build your digital product/service
- Dilute your audience
- Collect social Proof
Want to know more?
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