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Welcome back to the Podcast! I have so many things I want to share with all of you today.
We are launching the Digital Nomad Society very, very shortly.
This new membership is going to be for those of you who either want to be digital nomads and have no idea how to make it work, or current nomads traveling the world who want to meet a group of like-minded digital nomads, online entrepreneurs, and travelers.
I first had the idea for this community because as a digital nomad, it’s harder to meet people because you don’t have a physical base or location.
Having been a digital nomad for the past over five years, I realized that a lot of people don’t really understand how it works and they really want this lifestyle, but the logistics freak them out and they don’t know how to go about doing it.
We all cannot wait to welcome you inside!
How to Grow a Business From Scratch
I quit my job in 2017.
Knowing what I know now, if I started over today, I would’ve grown my business a lot faster.
I would’ve just been more successful from the beginning instead of taking all of those years trying to figure it out.
I’m going to walk you through the main components of what I would focus on instead of having shiny object syndrome and trying to do it all.
I hope that by listening to this, if you are just starting out or If you want to get started, you will learn from my mistakes and focus on what is the most important.
The Mindset of an Entrepreneur vs. Employee
The first thing that I definitely recognize the massive shifts and changes in from when I was just starting out as an entrepreneur versus a very seasoned entrepreneur is the mindset of running a business like a business and being a successful business owner.
If I didn’t have this current mindset, I would at least admit that I needed to learn new things.
The mindset of being an employee is so different than that of an entrepreneur and things like being a consumer instead of a creator, going from scarcity mindset to abundance mindset, going from saving mentality to investing mentality.
All of these things you need to learn and be really good at as an entrepreneur because you are running your own business and you need to practice these things in order to make it successful.
Another big mindset shift that I’ve noticed is running my business with different departments, having a different department for each line of business and each operation.
When I worked for Bank of America and we had so many different departments and so many different hierarchies, and it was a massive, massive trillion dollar company.
Their hierarchies are there for a reason. It’s so that they can continue growing. They have the foundations to scale, and they are efficient for the most part.
If you are running your own business, you want to model other successful businesses, so you are probably gonna need to start thinking like a CEO instead of having someone else tell you what to do every day.
If you don’t know how to do that, you can learn inside the Wanderlover Business Academy.
Focus On ONE Service
The second thing of what I would do if I was starting from scratch is to focus on one super specific thing that I can help with.
After 30 years of living, I can definitely come up with many things that I would be really good at helping other people with.
Not because I’m an expert, but because I am just a few steps ahead of them, whether that is how to record a podcast or how to edit resumes, how to use chat GPT, how to play the piano, how to use Lightroom, how to curate a cohesive Instagram feed.
Honestly, I would just spend so much time brainstorming all the possibilities and then choose which one excites me the most, knowing that it can always change. Your offers can always change.
Focus on one specific thing and create a one-on-one offer and price it at over a thousand dollars.
I would price a high ticket program where I can have that large cash injection.
If I was starting from zero audience, I would follow demand.
Go into Facebook Groups and see what people need help with.
Find opportunities and find who needs help from my circle, from my network, who needs help with what and what I can help with.
That’s what I would focus on first. Crafting a high value, high ticket offer.
How to Grow From Zero Followers on Instagram
The third thing I would focus on is picking one platform and organic social media platform that I can then start building my brand from.
It still blows my mind how social media is free. It’s such a powerful tool – you can connect with so many people, so many leads, and it’s just so powerful.
If you had this one offer, I would pick one platform.
For me, it would probably be Instagram because I just find it the most intuitive and the easiest for me to use.
If I couldn’t choose Instagram, I would probably go with TikTok, but I would pick one and I would create a Reels strategy to direct people to my page and book a free consultation that leads them into this high ticket, one-on-one offer.
Reels is the main way to get people who AREN’T already following you to your page.
If you post stories or photos, only your existing followers will see your content.
So if we are growing from scratch, we want to focus on specifically only spending our time creating reels in order to grow the quickest.
It is so easy to post a reel every single day and selling in the reel every single day.
If I came from zero audience and zero followers and zero revenue, every single reel that I posted would probably be selling something that is just strategically what I would do to get my first client.
If you’re just starting out, the first client is going to help you build so much confidence, and it’s really going to help you with reinvesting your money into other business operations.
Work ON The Business
At this point, you are the business and you need to be working on the things that’s going to bring in the most traffic.
You wanna treat it like a business.
I probably would share very little of my personal life at this point.
We don’t want people to get confused of whether this is a business page or a personal page.
The fourth thing is to work ON the business: overall business strategy, thinking bigger, making sure the foundation is there, and this includes working on the website, growing your email list.
I would create a lead magnet so I didn’t have to be only using reels to drive traffic to my page.
I would be able to then use paid advertising to create a self-liquidating offer so that I can continuously grow my business on autopilot.
Of course, when I am working on things like the website and the email list and the lead magnet, I’m not technically making money, right?
I’m not directly getting people to book with me.
But these are foundational pieces where if you want a long-term sustainable business.
You need both.
You need to be showing up on social media every day, and you need to be really clear on what it is that’s going to bring in those leads in the long run after you have created all of this so that you don’t need to rely on one strategy.
This is what I call working on the business. It’s bigger picture. It’s how do we want this to run in one year’s time, in three years time, in five years time?
I’m at a point now where I know I don’t want to be on social media every day, and I can only imagine when my life gets bigger and more busy, I’m probably not going to want social media to be the driver of my business.
So what have I done? I’ve created foundational aspects where my business can monetize. I can make passive income.
I’ve built all of these systems.
If you are just starting from scratch, focus on things that make you sales because they’re going to enable you to have the time to then build the foundational aspects.
Reinvest Your Profits
The last step is to obviously make a sale and start working with clients, but I would also reinvest everything that I make.
I would reinvest it all back into the business. I would package the one-on-one offer into either a course or a membership.
So starting to step away already, right? I have the one-on-one offer, but now I’m thinking how do I package it so I don’t have to rely on private coaching?
I can have other income streams that are more passive, so I would package the one-on-one offer into a course or membership, and then use all of that money to set up the systems and ads to scale so as to direct traffic to my course or my membership, and then start selling that on the back end as well as the one-on-one.
I always recommend starting with a one-on-one service first because it’s usually easier and faster to monetize.
You don’t have to go through creating an entire course or membership without knowing your own strengths and your own processes of doing things and guiding a client from A to B.
After working with a few people, then you can package everything that you worked with them through into something that is more scalable.
What Would I Change?
Ultimately, I have been in this industry for so long, and I would still start with the coaching and content creation industry.
It is so rewarding. You can connect with people from all around the world, and there are a lot of opportunities in the online space, but ultimately it is so scalable.
When you have a personal brand, you can introduce many ways to monetize.
You can scale as big as you would like.
You have full control over your brand, you’re not working for anyone else.
What I really am grateful for is that you’re able to do all of this with a very lean team.
You don’t need so many people to be successful. It’s not like you run a restaurant and you need a certain number of staff.
You can operate very lean, you can operate with only contractors, or for the first few months you can be a solopreneur and be completely fine.
You can even like continue as a solopreneur if that’s what you really want.
There’s just so many different directions and it’s fully customizable to how you want to live and how you wanna grow your business.
Conclusion
So again, just knowing that it is possible for you, adopting the mindset of a successful entrepreneur, knowing it is easy to make money online.
It is possible to make money online.
You just have to go through what has been tried and tested and proven.
Follow a path, If, you don’t know what the path is, I would recommend checking out the Business Academy.
Number two, focusing on one specific valuable high ticket offer.
Number three, having a strategy on one platform that you can drive traffic to.
Number four, focus behind the scenes.
Work on your business in terms of your website, your branding, email list, lead magnet, and then reinvest everything that you make from the one-on-ones and package it into a course or a membership. And then use paid advertising to scale.
That is how I would go about it. Again and again and again.
It has been tried and tested, and if others can do it, you can too.
DM me if you have any questions!
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