If you’re asking how to grow an online business, that probably means at some point someone has sold you on the vision of making money from home while you sleep or being able to travel the world and work from anywhere. Maybe you’ve already taken the first step: you had a great idea and launched your online business, and now you’re wondering how to find people to buy your digital products and online services, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the options: should you try Facebook ads? Do you need to be on TikTok? How can you get people to sign up for your email list?
If that’s you, you’re in the right place! In this article I’m going to share with you a simple online business model that will help you grow any type of online business, including an online coaching business, online wellness business, or online service business. After reading this article, you’ll be able to see where you need to focus first to grow your audience so you can start getting clients or sales.
The Customer Journey / Client Journey
The first thing you need to understand before you can figure out the best path to growing your online business is what is known in sales as “the customer journey.” This is the path someone who is an ideal fit for your products or services takes from becoming a lead to becoming a paying client or customer.
It doesn’t matter whether you call the people who pay you clients, customers, or something else…the process is the same, and understanding what it takes to get people to move from one stage the next is the key to knowing what are the highest value tasks for you to focus on right now.
Stages of an Online Funnel
The image of a funnel is used to describe an online business model because of all the people who become aware of your business, only a few will eventually become paying customers or clients. The stages of the client journey go like this:
Stage 1: Awareness
This is the point at which people first find out about you. Maybe they hear you speak at an event or on a podcast. Maybe they see an ad for your services show up in their Facebook feed. Or maybe they see your post on social media. However people encounter you, it’s important for them to be able to easily understand what you offer and who you help.
For that to happen, you need the following:
- A defined target audience
- A message for your target audience
- A way to reach your audience and share your message
- An online presence that resonates with your target audience: they visit your social media page or website, they say, “Yes, this person gets me!”
When people first become aware of you, it’s important for them to be able to easily understand whta you offer and who you help.
-Ashley Mann
Stage 2: Lead
A person becomes a lead when you have a way to contact them. Usually in an online business this means they’ve joined your email list, but it could also mean they opted in for your text messages or joined your Facebook group. Social media followers are not leads because you can’t control whether or not a given post will show up in their feed.
How to Get Leads
To get leads for your online business, you need to have the following in place:
- A process by which you consistently share your message with new people who are members of your target audience. Examples could include creating YouTube videos, posting on social media, being a guest on podcasts, or speaking at in-person events.
- A way for your target audience to join your email list. This means having an email signup form somewhere, whether on a website or just through a link in your social media bio.
- A reason for your audience to want to join your email list (such as a free offer you told them about). This is known as a lead magnet. Common lead magnets include downloadable guides, checklists, and templates, or free online training.
Tip: Don’t create just one lead magnet. Test multiple lead magnets and see which ones get the best signup rate. If you get the opportunity to speak at an event or be a guest on a podcast, consider creating a lead magnet for that specific audience.
Keep working on increasing awareness and testing different lead magnets until you achieve a consistent signup rate and your audience is steadily growing.
Stage 3: Lead Nurture
Skipping or rushing this step of the most common mistakes made by new online business owners. I get it: you work hard to get leads, and you’re eager to start making sales. But people only buy from someone they trust to provide them with genuine value. This trust is built in one of two ways:
- You’re able to provide real value to them (for free)
- You’re able to demonstrate the value you’ve provided to others
People only buy from someone they trust to provide them with genuine value.
-Ashley Mann
That’s where lead nurture comes in. The goal of lead nurture is to consistently help, educate, and inspire your audience over time through some mix of the following:
- Written content
- Video content
- Social media content
Stage 4: Low-Priced “Tripwire” Offer
Offering a low-ticket digital product or service to your leads (often called a “tripwire offer”) has these benefits:
- It can help offset the cost of advertising if you’re acquiring leads through online ads.
- It lets people get a taste of what they might get from your higher-priced offers without having to invest a lot of money or commit a lot of time.
- It gives you the chance to overdeliver and really impress people so they recognize your value and come back for more.
- According to sales psychology, people are more likely to buy your higher-priced offer if they’ve bought something for you before.
You don’t need to have a tripwire offer in place before you start pitching your core offer, but launching and testing low-priced offers is a good way to find out what your audience is interested in without having to invest too much time developing a program they won’t buy. A successful low-ticket offer can later be expanded into a more expensive course or program.
Stage 5: Core Offer
Your core offer is the “main thing” you sell in your business. Having a core offer doesn’t mean you’ll only ever sell one thing, but success requires you to focus and not be distracted by “shiny objects,” and it’s practically impossible to focus on improving your sales of too many offers at one time.
Instead, focus on finding ONE thing you can sell on repeat. After you’re successfully getting sales on an ongoing basis, you can then launch another offer, if you feel that you want to.
To successfully sell your offer, you need:
- A product or service that delivers a specific outcome, solution, or transformation
- An audience of people who trust you because you have already helped them (or have demonstrated how you helped others like them).
Stage 6: Upsells, Cross-sells, and Downsells
Upsells and profit maximizes are products and services related to your offers that add additional value and ongoing support for your clients or customers and add revenue for you.
What is an Upsell?
An “upsell” is when you offer someone who has decided to make a purchase the opportunity to instead purchase a more expensive version of the product or service.
Example: Someone has decided to buy your online course. During the checkout process, you offer them the chance to buy a 1-on-1 coaching session along with it.
What is a Cross-Sell?
A “cross-sell” is when you offer a related product at the time of purchase.
Example: While purchasing video training on how to use Pinterest for marketing, a customer is offered a video training on how to design graphics for Pinterest.
What is a Downsell?
A downsell is a less expensive, alternative offer pitched to people after they decide not to purchase your main offer.
Example: After you close the doors for enrollment in a group coaching program, you offer a cheaper self-paced online course covering the same content as the live group coaching.
How to Grow an Online Business
Now that you understand the business model, I’ll tell you what you came here to learn: how to grow an online business. It comes down to just two steps:
Step 1: Always be filling your funnel.
One of the most important questions to ask yourself at every stage of your entrepreneurship journey is, “How are you filling your funnel?”
It doesn’t matter how great your products and services are if you don’t have anyone to sell them to. Not only do you need to find your initial customers or clients, in order to have a profitable online business you need a way to keep getting NEW leads on a consistent basis.
A common mistake new business owners make is to spend too much time perfecting their products and not enough time growing their audience and–more importantly–putting a system in place that will help their audience to continue to grow once the focus has switched to creating products and delivering services.
Actually, you don’t even need to have any products when you start filling your funnel. Think about these two options:
- You could spend six months creating the perfect online course, launch it to no one, and then spend another six months trying to find someone to buy it…
- OR, you could spend the same six months building an online audience of people who trust you because you’ve helped them for free, then survey them to ask what they want to learn from you, then immediately sell them training delivered live that you can later turn into a course (or, presell your course, offering the chance to purchase at a discounted price if they buy before the course is launched).
Step 2: Find Out Where Your Funnel is Leaking and fix it.
After all the pieces of the funnel are in place, the last step to growing an online business is to look at your business as a whole and determine where your funnel is leaking:
- Are too many leads signing up and never buying anything? This could mean your lead magnet is attracting the wrong audience, or that your sales page and emails don’t adequately communicate the value of your offers, or that your pricing is too high or too low, or a number of other issues.
- Are too many people buying your tripwire offer but not your core offer? Maybe you’re underdelivering value in your tripwire offer…or maybe your tripwire offer is SO GOOD your audience no longer feels they need your core offer and you need to find other ways to service them.
- Do people who buy your core offer fall off the map? You might want to survey them to find out whether they got the value they were hoping for and how else you might help them.
The only way to identify any leaks in your funnel is to measure and calculate how many people move from one stage to the next. A 2-5% conversion rate is considered “normal.” If you can predictably get 2-5% of your audience to move from each stage in your funnel to the next, then you have in place everything you need to make your online business profitable.
And if you need help with anything along the way, whether it’s putting the pieces of your funnel in place, figuring out where to find leads, identifying where your funnel is leaking and how to fix it, or even just managing your time, I’d love to help.
