Starting an online business or even an offline business requires you to actually put in some work (and effort!) in to in order to make it happen.

Think of it like rolling a snowball up a hill, you have to put in the effort to push the snowball up the hill before you can get the pleasure of watching it gain momentum and go, not only down the hill but up the other side.

“There are no shortcuts or get rich quick schemes that will magically make things happen when it comes to starting an online business”.

 
Spoiler alert: The internet is not some magical place where you make millions overnight.

There are scammers who sell you the promise that they can make you rich quickly if you follow their old and often outdated advice but nobody with a successful, and by successful, I mean profitable business, got there overnight or by taking shortcuts.

Before you even start to think about how to start an online business from scratch, you need to accept this truth… you will have to put some work into making it happen. There will be times when things go wrong or don’t go according to plan or at times it may even seem like nothing is happening at all, and your route to profit will never be a straight line to the top.

You can make it straighter by buying in the help you need in the form of coaches and consultants but if you are going to do it alone you have to accept the fact that it is normal to fall down a few rabbit holes and make mistakes. This is the biggest learning curve in starting your online business and one most new starters make mistakes with.

“Where you are seeing an overnight success, what you are actually just viewing their highlight reel, usually it consists of a few years of hard work that is rarely seen by consumers.”

Once you’ve accepted this then, you are ready to take your first steps into online business

Ready to start… Great!

Hopefully the tire kickers and overnight wanna be’s have now left the room and now we can dig into the nitty gritty.

Starting an online business from scratch

Now the route to starting an online business can be complex, mainly because most of the advice out there when you Google ‘how to start an online business’ is written by software companies who are trying to lure you in.

It has been the job of some clever *employed* copywriter to make starting a business sound insanely simple and often they miss out loads of key steps to make sure that their ‘copy’ looks good on the page (or maybe because they aren’t being paid enough to write about them all!). Either way, they did get paid to write and usually don’t care about how exact they are, often because they haven’t done it for themselves either, so they have no idea of the actual steps involved!

Some people speak to their local business advice centres on where to go and what to do when it comes to starting an online business from scratch. Again, I repeat, this is somewhere where it is someone’s job to meet a quota of ‘startup’s supported’ and give you out of date or sometimes advice has just simply always been wrong. They get paid, whether you make money with your business or not.

To start a business online, where you actually get to the stage of making healthy money comes in the form of 10 simple steps.

Yep, I said 10 steps. Don’t worry though, it is not some fancy copy writer or bored employee giving you this advice, it is me Lyndsey and that means we are going to talk about what you need to do to start an online business from scratch and we are going to do it properly!

1. Get super clear on what it is that you want to do.

Decide what makes you happy, what skills you have and what ideas you already have whirling around in your brain. If you need help with that – check out this free dream business planner to help you get laser focused.

2. Set some goals for yourself

Plan what the business will look like in the future, work back from there.

3. Get your head straight

Normally at this stage people have mindset issues pop up like ‘they aren’t good enough’, ‘they don’t deserve this’ or my personal favourite ‘I don’t know anything about XYZ so I won’t try just in case I fail’

4. Decide what the business will actually be and how you will fund it

Now that you’ve unpacked your brain and started to think about things properly, decide what the online business will be that you want to start from scratch. You also need to think about how you will fund the business in its early days.

5. Create a client avatar

Work out exactly who the clients for your business will be and why they should want to spend money with you instead of the competition.

6. Get specific about what offer or service you are selling them.

Nobody likes vague offers or products get specific if you want to make sales.

7. Start with a lead magnet and creating an audience who trusts you.

Create a lead magnet and market it to an audience who trusts you. If you need to build that audience first, then don’t be afraid of spending money to do it.

8. Choose the technology you are going to use to actually start your online business from scratch.

Often, people try and do this part first but if you want to make money with your business and want to keep things simple, only decide on the technology you are going to use to run your business when you reach this stage.

9. Create some quick cash flow and bank boosting sales offers and promote them online.

This will help bring in some important early stage cash that you can use to help scale your business. Connect these up to your lead magnet.

10. Create assets

Now that you are making money, work on building up the assets in your business and making sure that you have a long term plan of how to use those assets to make more money.

And there you have it, the 10 step blueprint on exactly how to start an online business from scratch.

These steps are a quick overview of exactly what you need to do and it should help you get your mind racing with ideas.