My Personal Roadmap to Online Business Success

1. My Personal Roadmap to Online Business Success By : Imtinan Ahmad

2. Few things that I see in my inbox almost every day. How can I start an online business before I quit my job? I don’t have a degree but I want to start an online business. Teach me what to do? I want to have another stream of income other than my job, what can I do? I have been asked these questions a lot. There are many ways to respond to these questions but the true one word answer to this is “Work”. Financial freedom is not a distant reality or an impossible dream.

3. It’s just a matter of execution. If you want to start an online business, then you must prepare yourself for execution, doing things and working out on a plan. One thing I just can’t stand is people asking for help but then just start procrastinate, delay things and later say, “It’s hard”. Remember, nothing is hard when you are ready to play your part. Marie Forlio rightly puts this as “Everything is Figureoutable”. You may have a deep desire to start an online business, or your personal finances may be all over the place or may be the financial circumstances say to you to make a six-figure income within a month to survive.

4. Roadmap to Online Business Success Think of a Product:   This is one of the most daunting questions that the new entrepreneurs face when planning their online business

5. What can I sell for online business? What product people buy? What am I good at in making? What are people interested in? How can I get help from friends and family in connecting me to manufacturers? That’s not all. There is another breed of questions. These are more linked with marketability. Are the mobile covers in demand? I’ve heard custom t-shirts are selling well. How about it? Should I sell clothing or women lawn suits? They seem to be in demand?

6. All the wrong questions. This is exactly how you plan to fail in your online business endeavors. Let me share the truthful answer here but a warning alert. People don’t want to hear this truth. That’s mainly because of many reasons that I’ll share in a minute. So, the real answer to the product search is ‘Find something that you are really passionate about”. Here you must feel free to ask my why?

7. Why to follow passion? The answer to this ‘why’ is that when you start an online business, there are a many steps and a lot to learn. Whilst you will be going through this all and learning a lot, the last thing you want is to lose your interest in the game.

8. This is where the passion kicks in. When you are passionate about something, you know exactly what your customers want, what their pain points are, how you can solve a problem and what to offer. This knowledge of yours in a passionate market will come handy and will assist you in running the business as you wouldn’t have to learn a whole deal about the product at least.

9. Think of the Customers Here’s another important area that you must never even neglect. When people find the product to sell they just overrate the market. You must not do that. You’re doomed when you say to yourself that I love this product, I am sure others will like this too. Stop living in hallucination. Wake up in reality & know your numbers. These are the questions that you need to ask yourself.

10. Market Big Enough to Sustain a Business Is there a market for this product? How big is the market? Is this a local market or can I sell this globally? What price are the people willing to pay for this?

11. You need to have market big enough to make a sustainable income. It happens that you sometimes find a product that you are passionate about but there isn’t a market big enough for you to sustain a business. Think About Sourcing Now you have a passion product and a market big enough that you can sell to, it’s time to find a source. It’s not wise to think that you must manufacture. In the world today, manufacturing processes are being outsourced.

12. Many nations especially China has established itself as the world’s best factory and they are pretty good in making things. It’s time for you to concentrate on your brand and marketing and let the manufacturing be done by someone else.

13. Plan for Payments This is the most integral part of online business. How are you gonna get paid? Are the customers going to pay you through Cash on Delivery of the products, are they going to pay you through debit or credit card onto your website? I have seen many questions in these areas. When starting an online business, you must plan how you are going to take orders online.

14. The best method to do is to study which online business payment gateway is suitable for you. There are dozens of payment gateway that you can work with. These payment gateways will charge a set fee for the services and process the payments on your website from the client’s bank accounts.

15. Create a Fan Group This might sound a lengthy process but it’s a time-tested method and works all the time. This method is fairly simple and suitable for people who are Facebook savvy. You can create a generic passion group for the product you are selling. On this page, you don’t have to run your product posts.

16. Rather you just create a group of people generically interested in the niche and you post items related to the niche, and not your product.

17. Get a Website Many people consider developing the website as the first step in the online business, whereas, knowing the product, understanding the market, using Facebook Audience Insight are the most significant steps to be taken first. In your online business, now is the time to develop your website. There are many ways to develop the website.

18. You can hire a developer to develop a simple WordPress site for you. If you are pretty new in the game and don’t know the steps for it, then you can take a look at freelancing sites like Freelancer,Fiverr,orUpwork to get a flare of the website development.

19. Install Facebook Pixel If you are using Facebook Ads or you are going to use them in future, there’s one key tool you should start using right away to get most out of your social ad budget, “The Facebook Pixel”. What is a Facebook Pixel?

20. A Facebook pixel is a code that you place in your website. It will help you track conversions from your Facebook ads, optimize them on the basis of collected data, build targeted audiences for future ads, and helps you retarget your actual audience, who have already taken some kind of action on your website. To use Facebook Pixel to track data, there are two different kinds of events: a set of 9 standard events that Facebook has predefined, or a custom event that you can set up yourself. An “event” is simply a specified action that visitor takes on your website. Learn about the events below as I can surely tell you that you will be using them quite often and remember, they are not going anywhere. They will be seeing your face every morning day in day out. So, one word for you at the moment, FOCUS.

21. Standard events • View content: Someone lands on your website • Search: Someone uses the search function to look for something on your site • Add to cart: Someone adds a product to the shopping cart on your site • Add to wishlist: Someone adds a product to a wishlist on your site • Initiate checkout: Someone starts the checkout process to buy something from your site • Add payment info: Someone enters the payment information in the purchase process on your website • Make purchase: Someone completes a purchase on your website

22. Lead: Someone signs up for a trial or otherwise identifies oneself as a lead on your site • Complete registration: Someone completes a registration form on your site, such as for a subscription product Create a Facebook Page To run a successful ecommerce website, you need to have a Facebook page. I have seen many Facebook pages related to ecommerce, but are left abandoned.

23. Creating an ecommerce page is not everything, you have to write a short description about it, tell people what’s the purpose of creating this page, paste your website’s url in bio and then upload high quality product pictures & write rich descriptions about it.

24. Complete your Targeting For every business, targeting the right audience is the key to success. Without targeting the right audience, the business could not run even a single day. Defining a target audience is every business’s best practice. Whenever you are selling something, you go through at least some of the steps in defining a target audience.

25. There are three type of audiences custom audience, lookalike audiences and saved audience.

26. Create an Enticing offer Find ways to boost your sales. Most of the people use business strategies like, discount offers or buy one get one free deal etc. How about you create an enticing offer, and do something unique. Let me define you, what is an enticing offer. An enticing offer is like you sell a product, having zero-price and the customer whose willing to buy the product only has to pay for the shipping price. Amazing. Isn’t it?

27. Custom Audience: Connect with the people who have already shown an interest in your business or product with custom audiences. You can create an audience from your customer contacts, website traffic or mobile app.

28. Lookalike Audience: Reach new people who are similar to audiences you already care about. You can create a lookalike audience based on people who like your page, conversion pixels or any of your custom audiences. Saved Audience: Save your commonly used targeting options for easy reuse.

29. Prepare a bait To give exposure to your ecommerce page you need to prepare bait. It means there is a customer who loves to visit your ecommerce page to see different product deals and stays in touch for updates. You can convert those visitors into customers through product bait strategy.

30. Imagine that your website is your house where guests (visitors) are already knocking on the door. You are very pleased about their visit and you want them to stay as long as possible. Also, you want them to come back often.

31. Decide on the campaign objective If you go to the Facebook ads manger and create a new Facebook ad campaign, the first choice you’ll have to make is selecting the campaign objective.

32. Your Facebook ad campaign objective determines what optimization and bidding options you’ll have through the campaign setup process. It’s like you are telling Facebook what you really want to achieve. To start any campaign, you have a pre-established mindset what you really want to achieve. Campaign objective is categorized in three perspectives: • Awareness • Consideration • Conversion

33. Plan your retargeting campaign Retargeting campaign is a marketing strategy that is done after running a specific Facebook ad campaign, which helps the user to know how much purchases occurred through running the very first ad. This gives you the data about the people who engaged with your ad but didn’t purchase the product. You can again target that audience and see if your sales are increase or not? The more you retarget, you have a higher chance of making more purchases.

34. Come up with a Creative To attract customers to have more conversions, you have to make creative for your business. Generally, we refer the term creative for any art pieces that we use in our advertising. The content text that goes with it is called the copy. Many online businesses promote their products or services with old fashioned colors, bad copies and this results in no or low sales.

35. You must ensure that you have awesome creative that attract the audience’s attention. From every experiment, you will get an experience in generating sales.

36. Follow these steps: • Use attractive themes for your website • Attractive landing pages • Create attractive deals on products • Create Free giveaway ideas Run an Engagement Ad The Facebook Page Post Engagement ads help you share information about your business with people. You can use them to extend your page posts beyond your page, and inspire people to take action.

37. With insights about your page post engagement ads, you can understand the kinds of stories and contents your audience likes so that you can create more of what they love.

38. Run a Conversion Ad The Facebook conversion ad helps you to grow business on your website. Whether you want page visits, sales etc. Website conversion ads encourage people to visit your website.

39. Have a great customer service The first rule of business is to have great customer service, don’t you think? Providing customer service can be of any type for example: There is a customer who wants to know some details about the specific product A customers has ordered a specific product but wants to ensure the exact date of delivery A customer is not satisfied from the product, solve his issue Guide customer how to purchase

40. All these factors help you to increase your online business.

41. Entertain the Orders If you are running an online business, and you follow tall the above points, then you should now relax a bit and start entertaining orders by giving customers quick response rate.

42. Prepare a bigger game plan Preparing a bigger game plan can only be done, if you’re business plan strategies are working out and making good amount of profit

43. Scale up the business It’s time to scale up the business and be part of the bigger game now. If you have been carefully listening and following all the above points, then the road ahead is looking all rosy. Prepare to scale up the business at this stage, but do remember that scaling is not as easy as you may think. There is a lost ROI here, which I have explained in my lectures of Scaling Blueprint. Do listen to them and share your feedback.

44. Bigger game plan can never work out, if you’re already facing failure in your business.

45. Want to Learn more about Facebook marketing : Skillgains • To Read More about the content: My Personal Roadmap to Online Business Success