1 business advice I’m glad I ignored

There are thousands of ways to start and market an online business.

Because of all the noises out there, many people lose focus and make mistakes right from the beginning.

It’s not their fault, quite often they do things in certain ways because they were “advised” that “this is THE way to go”.

I’d like to share 1 “advice/strategy” that I ignored + why I ignored it + what you should focus instead.

I must admit that it was scary to ignore it at first, because it was directly from self-claimed “guru” or “industry leader”.

I thought I was crazy and lost…

Fast forward, I’m really glad that I ignored it – by doing so I’ve aligned myself to my true calling, created more time, space and energy in my life, and generated results more easily.

If you feel confused, overwhelmed by the sea of information, or losing the joy from your work, please don’t beat yourself up. You just haven’t been shown the full picture yet. Please read on.

The truth about “You need 1000 subscribers to START a viable online business”

Don’t get me wrong, having 1000 people on your mailing list is actually good advice, it is far better than asking you to dive straight into SEO, creating social media accounts that you barely use anyway, or logo, or fancy business cards, or some flash themes on wordpress.

Yes, 1000 is a nice number. Once you reach 1000, it doesn’t matter if you are doing a soft launch or a hard launch, info-product or service based offering, you will indeed get sign-ups.

Growing your list IS important.

But it is NOT important to grow your list before you even have an OFFER.

There is a time and place for everything.

So many people started to blog everyday, investigate into SEO, Google Ads, guest blogging and interviews before having a clear vision. {note: “clear” – I didn’t say “perfect” vision}.

They work really hard to reach out, attract a wide audience, but later on when it comes to conversion, things aren’t rosy…

You all know that our human nature wants us to feel motivated.

When you don’t see results, it’s tricky to stay motivated.

Don’t make that mistake.

Don’t make it more difficult for yourself – You deserve a simple and achievable way.

Before you consider any kind of marketing, make sure you have an offer first + confidence to put a value on it.

It doesn’t have to be a perfect, sophisticated offer, full of fancy fonts on a squeeze page that you just spent thousands on.

But you do need a compelling offer which can solve a specific problem that your ideal clients have.

Once your experience grows, you can tweak it more, and if you do want to make it fancy like the above, you can CHOOSE to.

When starting out, you only need 1-3 paying clients, not 10, 100, 1000.

Having a list size of 1000 doesn’t guarantee you paying clients of 1000, 100, or even 10 anyway.

So what should you focus on instead?

You must communicate with your prospects.

What do they really want from you?

You see, it is a lot easier to sell people something that you already have, which they desire; instead of making something up from your head and chasing people around.

I guarantee that you don’t really see your gift (and what people desire from you) clearly – because it is such a natural part of you.

Talking to them can close this gap for you though.

It’s tempting to cover up the hard stuff with the easy stuff.

• It’s easy to set up a fb page, twitter account, talk to a provider to do your logo and business card.
• It’s a lot harder to work on your offer and get into your clients’ head. Overcome your shyness, talk to them and understand where exactly they are stuck.

But I promise you that once you pass your internal-hurdle, really start to talk to people, things will fall into place for you.

You will be more focused and come up with a viable offer.

Then you can spend sometime on social media marketing, growing your list to 1000…and you’ll do it so much more effectively because you have a clear intention and attention.

Now, let’s compare the different scenarios.

Example 1

Jane is a life coach, she does have a desire to serve people but is not sure what exactly she can do. She is only doing her business part-time at the moment and wants to make the full-time transition quickly.

Jane heard about growing your list, online marketing strategies etc. So she decided to write guest posts, or even contribute to magazines.

It has been working, as her list is growing steadily. People liked her and joined her list.

But her message is scattered.

She has put a life coaching offer on her website. Because she targets a wide range of audience, there is just something missing… the average conversion rate is 0.2%.

It takes her about 1 year to get 1000 subscribers (by doing guest blogging, interviews, free webinars, social media marketing).

And she has 2 paying clients by the end of year 1.

It might improve to 4-10 paying clients in year 2, depending on how quickly she grows her list. She is still not sure if she can make the full-time leap yet.

Example 2

Jenny starts off in a similar situation.

She knows that growing list is important, but she also understands that she has limited time while doing her part-time day job.

At the beginning stage, she spends most of her time communicating with her targeted audience, doing survey, focus groups, forum Q&A…

After knowing their biggest frustrations, Jenny becomes more confident to come up with one SPECIFIC offer, although it’s not perfect.

Jenny’s message speaks to her audience straight away. And she started to get her first-ever paying client very quickly.

In the meantime, she finds ways to grow her list. Her list size reaches to 60 in 3 months time. A small list but she has an impressive 5% conversation rate (ie. 3 paying clients).

As her experience grows, she keep tweaking her offers. She also getting more and more clear who exactly she can serve the best, based on her first-hand experience.

Her time is still limited, so she only guest posts on certain websites where her ideal audience hang out.

By the end of year 1, her list size is not quite 1000 yet, but she manages to keep the conversation rate at 4-5%.

Now despite the fear of uncertainty, she can see that her business becomes self-sustainable and she is ready to take the full-time leap…

The examples above just shows the power of quality, and the importance of building the ground work of your business first.

Contrary to common belief that when you start out you can’t afford to be fussy, I’d say the opposite:

When you start out, your time and resource is very limited, as a result, you can’t afford to be NOT choosy how you spend your time.

I hope this post can help you get some clarity and avoid this classic mistake.

Don’t worry if you are making this mistake – we all do – you probably just got mislead.

It’s OK to make mistakes on the way, but it’s NOT OK to beat yourself up about it.

Enjoy the rest of your week + I sincerely hope that you can pick up the momentum if you’ve lost it.

In the comment area, we’d love to hear from you: Did you ignore anything that in turn has paid off? Any lessons you learnt that you want to share with the community?

If you find this post useful, please “like” it. Thank you!

With love,

Yiye

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[Related post]: Use 1 kick-ass mindset to attract more customers

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