starting an online business can be a daunting task but with the right systems, you can turn your passion into either a thriving side hustle or a full time career. Hello and welcome. If you're new here, I'm Jonah from teachable teachable is a powerful platform that gives you the features and tools you need to start to build and grow your knowledge based business. From coaching products to digital downloads to online courses, the future of the Creator economy is teachable. Anything you can teach can be packed into a product that your audience will be delighted and thrilled to engage with. Now let's dive in. If you're an online entrepreneur, or content creator, understanding your ideal customer is the first step to building a successful online business knowing who it is you want to help and what problems you're going to help them solve is going to define your audience, it's going to define your niche and it's eventually going to define the products you've built. Whether you're trying to build a side hustle or a full time career likeliness is you're going to be doing a lot of the many elements it takes on your own. So it's important to make sure whatever business you set out to create, it's something that you love and enjoy and can do every day. If you're passionate about this work and passionate about helping others achieve the transformation you're set out to provide them with, then you're on the right track to knowing who it is you're going to help and how you can help them. Although you are likely interested in building a knowledge based business because you want to help a lot of people, it's important to be specific about the person you want to help. The next step is visualizing and understanding the exact person you're trying to help and what problems you're trying to help them solve. At first, this person may be fictional a persona that you are serving time and time again. But as you grow your business, you'll get feedback from actual students and your audience. And you'll be able to refine this persona based on actual people's experiences. If you already have an understanding of your audience and the problems they have. That's great. But make sure with everything you do from the content you create to the products that you build, that you have a clear vision of who it is you're helping and how you're helping them. You'll hear a lot of talk on the internet about finding your niche, but not a lot of instructions on how to do it. This is how you do it. Here at teachable we have seen 1000s of creators build successful online businesses and time and time again, we notice the most efficient and impactful ones aren't focused on their niche. Their niche is a product that results from focusing on helping their ideal customer. Their niche is the community of people that develops around them helping someone solve a problem. So if the idea of knowing your niche feels daunting, or like a roadblock for you to start building your business, stop worrying about it help one person solve one problem. And there will be a community of people around that person that also have that problem. Over time as you solve problem after problem after problem for that person, you'll have developed a wide variety of solutions, very wide variety of people. And that will become how you build a thriving business. And yes, at any point along this journey, it is valuable to use the tools available to you, it's always a good idea to go to the places where your customers are hanging out to understand what problems they're facing and how you can solve them. So go hang out in relevant Facebook groups join other creators communities, the internet is full of people complaining about the problems they have and the solutions they found to those problems. So when you're doing your research, just make sure that you're going to the places your ideal customer hangs out and you'll uncover a wealth of resources and ideas you can use to build powerful products, you will likely at some point feel like the industry is oversaturated or like someone else out there is just doing too good of a job that you can't compete. However, check that feeling for a minute and hear me out the beauty of the Creator economy and knowledge based products is that customers aren't just buying products because of the product itself. They're buying it because of you because you who you are your life experience your vulnerabilities and the way you represent yourself out in the open is powerful, it's valid, and it draws the your ideal customer to that is the beauty of the Creator economy and why we a teachable are dedicated to helping creators build knowledge based products. In most cases, your ideal customer isn't going to buy an online course or a digital product or even book a one on one coaching call with you. Because you're the only person who's teaching what you're teaching, or you're the best at what you do. So if you're ever intimidated by the followers this person has or how beautiful this person's content looks. Switch your brain into a different mode. Stop looking at these people as competitors and look at them as your community model your content after their content go way back in the history of their social media and look at their growth and how they learned over time to refine what it is that they've mastered it is simply unfair to compare Korea bidders who have been doing this for many years and have a team behind them to yourself, when you're just starting out or in the early stages of your business, use it as inspiration. This is where you could be in one year, five years, 10 years, think about it and let it drive everything you do. Now, once you're pretty sure who it is you want to help and how you want to help them. You've done a little research to know what problems they have, and you have some ideas on how you can solve them. It's time to experiment. And the only way to experiment is to get started, you could sit there for days or weeks or months or years just thinking you know the answer to what would happen if you did this. But in the end, you have no idea until you start creating content, making products and putting them out one of the beauties of online products is you can always pivot and refine them over time. So putting something out is the first step to creating your dream product. And you don't have to start with a product, you can do this on social media or with a newsletter or on a blog, start writing, start filming, start creating the solutions and identifying the problems you know, your ideal customer has, you won't get results on your first video or your first post or your first product. And you'll hear this from any successful creator, they'll say, come talk to me on your 100th video on your 100th post on your 100th blog article. And you have to keep that in mind just every time do something better, put it out, evaluate, maybe it's just the title you change, maybe it's the SEO, you make a little better. Maybe you don't like your lighting. So you would just that there are endless ways to improve. And if every time you make a new piece of content, you improve just one of those. Eventually, you will have refined all the elements and you'll know what it is you do best. So if you're a perfectionist, or someone who really likes to refine something until it's just the way you want it, this is going to be scary. But that's part of what being a successful online entrepreneur means developing your platform in a public sphere. If you get used to putting things out listening to the feedback and refining over time, you will always have a community of people helping you build your business and you won't be doing it alone. This applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams opinions, is make 100 videos and approve something every time do that. And then on your 101st video, we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views just start making stuff and you will figure it out. Don't be one of those writers who says I don't know what my best seller book is going to be about. Therefore, I'm not going to write a single word who cares if you don't know what your niche is, your niche will change over time. The videos that I know will do well, are the most interesting to me also, because they're about probably a piece of tech that is so cool that I want to check it out anyway, it's really just about like focusing on what your audience is. Sometimes you might not know what your audience is, but just listen to them. Before we move on to the next section, make sure to download the free PDF that's linked below. It's all about how to become successful in the creative economy. The more you interact with your audience, the more connected they'll feel to you and the brand that you're building. The best way to ensure your audience trust you and your brand is to engage with them. Keeping that engagement consistent helps develop loyalty between you and your audience. And eventually we'll build the trust a customer needs to buy your products down the line. Plus, having that honest and personal connection with your audience allows them to feel that your success is their success. You're building a community of customers who will go on to champion your brand and future products. And at some point you won't have to sit and wonder what it is people want. They'll just be telling you and you go and create it. Things like social media, blogs or other public facing tools are a great way to build an audience and develop that connection. But make sure that whatever platform you're using, you have systems in place to capture emails. This is typically done with a lead magnet of some sort a PDF a webinar or any other additional value you can offer that is gated in exchange for an email address. This is the best way to develop sellable products is by giving away bite sized pieces for free, getting feedback, refining them over time until you are confident you have a product that will resonate with your audience and they're excited to buy. And before we move on to the next section, please like and subscribe. Not only does it help us reach more people, but it also helps us understand what problems you face and how we can help you solve them. So let's get to the next section. Now that you have a product that you're ready to sell, it's time to market it. This is where all those emails you've been capturing will really begin to show their value. You can absolutely directly Promote your products on social media. But in general, this will fatigue your audience if it's all that you do. So in the marketing world, we like to refer to this as the 8020 rule. That means that 80% of your content is primarily going to be building trust and providing value where 20 per sent can actually be trying to make a direct sale, you can try and directly Promote your products to your customers more. But generally we see that doesn't work as well as the people who offer free value, capture emails, and then do the real selling over email. In order to capture emails or market to those emails, you're going to need an email service services like ConvertKit or MailChimp are built exactly for this. They allow you to capture people's emails and create automated sequences of emails that will nurture those people and help them get to the point where they're excited and thrilled to buy your future products. teachable also allows you to natively integrate with these services. So every time you get a new student, they can be added to your email list and vice versa. partnerships can come in many forms from collaborations to affiliate opportunities. But the important thing to know is that your community of creators is equally as powerful as any tool for growing your audience and getting your products to them. Often the creators we see growing large communities in a short amount of time are utilizing their community of other creators to do so once again, it's important not to think of other creators or services within your industry as competitors, and more opportunities for collaboration. These partnerships can look like anything from trading spots on newsletters to raise awareness about your brand to actually collaborating to create and launch products together or share affiliate code. So you both make money when you make sales for the other. The beauty of a good partnership is it's a win win scenario. So even if you're asking a creator or business to collaborate that you think is a bit out of your reach, it's still a win for them to get exposure, it's a great way to start that relationship that overtime may build into something much more robust. So take the time to consider what creators you would like to collaborate with and what services you already use that may benefit from access to your audience. Reach out to these people on a regular basis, make various offers for kinds of collaborations, and be kind but persistent. And regardless of what partnerships or collaborations might come into being utilizing affiliates is a powerful way to maximise on every partnership opportunity with the affiliate tools within teachable you can make your students powerful drivers of your business and give them financial motivation to do so in most cases, your students or your community is going to be recommending your products Anyways, if it has the impact you promise, but what a great way to show that you care about your audience and your customers than to give them a little money for doing so. Which leads us to the last point we're gonna make today. And that is community building a community in whatever form it takes is essential to thriving in the Creator economy. Beyond social media, thinking of your community as an activated group of people who care about you, your journey and your products is going to lead to bigger and faster growth for your business and open up a wealth of opportunities you could never imagine exist. So make sure not to think about your audience as simply followers or potential customers. But someday they might be equally powerful collaborators and pivotal to making your business grow, activate your community, ask them what they're doing, reach out to them and provide opportunities for them to reach out to you as well. And don't forget that community itself can be a product, your ability to inspire and interact and keep a group of people motivated is a product itself and many creators are building powerful communities that are the lifeblood of their entire business. We've seen many creators utilize communities in a variety of ways from free communities where they foster an audience that then they can later promote to at teachable, we recognize how powerful community is. And that's why we allow you to integrate with a variety of community platforms. But all of that said, the point we want to hit home is that community, whether it's sold free or just the way you think about the audience you're building is absolutely essential to keeping your opportunities open and building a business that is far more powerful than anything you could do on your own with a few freelancers. That is what we love about the Creator. Economy creators are out there building communities that they can serve and that will serve each other as they grow alongside a thriving business. And at this point, if you're wondering how you can take your coaching or content and turn it into a sellable digital product, that's where teachable comes in, you can create powerful coaching products, digital downloads, and online courses all within the teachable platform. And if you don't have a website or one that functions for selling products like this, you can also create all of those pages in teachable and create a place where your audience can see all of the incredible products you're offering both free and paid. So in the comments below let me know who it is you're trying to help and what problems of theirs you're solving No Forget everything is teachable we'll see you soon
