We're here to bring you an honest, unfiltered take on what it takes to build a thriving online business. We share our own trials and challenges to shed light on the rocky road to success, and warn you about the pitfalls of unrealistic expectations often sold in online courses.
But we're not just stopping at identifying the problems. We're here to bring you the solutions. We've put together five strategic steps to help you reshape your business when it's not quite hitting the mark. In this episode, we equip you with the tools to turn your online presence into something profitable.
Sign up right now for the Digital Nomad Kickstarter beginning May 6th and learn what you need to get started as a digital nomad!
https://austinandmonica.com/digitalnomadkickstarter
-----------------------------------
Join our Facebook Group Digital Nomad Start-Up Circle if you're interested in living nomadically, growing your online business, and forming a community of like-minded people.
Get our FREE 85+ Ways to Make Money While Traveling guide!
Connect with us on Instagram by following @austinandmonica
Visit our website: AustinandMonica.com
Enjoyed this podcast? Subscribe to our show and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast. Your feedback means a lot to us, thank you!
We're here to bring you an honest, unfiltered take on what it takes to build a thriving online business. We share our own trials and challenges to shed light on the rocky road to success, and warn you about the pitfalls of unrealistic expectations often sold in online courses.
But we're not just stopping at identifying the problems. We're here to bring you the solutions. We've put together five strategic steps to help you reshape your business when it's not quite hitting the mark. In this episode, we equip you with the tools to turn your online presence into something profitable.
Sign up right now for the Digital Nomad Kickstarter beginning May 6th and learn what you need to get started as a digital nomad!
https://austinandmonica.com/digitalnomadkickstarter
-----------------------------------
Join our Facebook Group Digital Nomad Start-Up Circle if you're interested in living nomadically, growing your online business, and forming a community of like-minded people.
Get our FREE 85+ Ways to Make Money While Traveling guide!
Connect with us on Instagram by following @austinandmonica
Visit our website: AustinandMonica.com
Enjoyed this podcast? Subscribe to our show and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast. Your feedback means a lot to us, thank you!
Hello and welcome to the profitable Nomad Couple podcast. This is a show where we share all of our secrets about building a sustainable location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:We're Austin and Monica. We're a digital Nomad couple here to help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset, ignite your passions and develop a purpose-driven online business.
Speaker 1:Get ready for weekly insights and inspiring stories to empower you to live life on your own terms.
Speaker 2:So are you ready to unlock the Nomad mindset and embrace a life of limitless possibilities? Let's dive in. Hey, what's up everybody? We are tackling one of the biggest mistakes that we see new digital Nomads and new online business owners make, and so we want to clear the air and help give you an honest take on what it takes to build a business. So today we're debunking the myth build it and they will come. This comes from the movie Field of Dreams. I've never actually seen it myself, but it comes from this idea that this guy built a huge ballpark, a baseball stadium, and he said build it and they will come. All he had to do was build it and then the crowds would come running because they're so happy to have this new baseball stadium.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Definitely go watch the movie, because I don't feel like that did. The movie Justice is actually a really, really beautiful movie.
Speaker 2:Have you seen it? Yeah, it's a fantastic movie, the first in the movie. Yeah, you just trashed it really bad. I wasn't trashing it. I was just giving my limited knowledge about what the movie is about.
Speaker 1:So this topic is something that I was actually just talking about with a really good business friend of mine, and we were talking about how we both kind of had this misconception when we started our business, that we would start a business and then we'd say, hey, guess what, guys, I started a business and then people would just come to you and you wouldn't have to do any outreach or anything and it would just. Everything was going to be Hunky Dory is going to be huge success. In fact, I was laughing about when we were talking to our financial advisor about us starting a business and how it's like, yeah, it's going to be so great, we're going to make so much more money than we are right now, like all these things, and that's not what happened.
Speaker 2:Well, when we first started, our very first thing that we did online to make money was we were virtual assistants, and I remember one of the first things that we did maybe a few months into this is we put out a post on our Facebook. It was a spring sale. Well, that's the thing. It was a spring sale and we're said we offered a discount for our VA services. We posted it on our Facebook. It was one post that we made. We only talked about it that one time. We never talked about it again. And like that was my thought. My thought was, once I put this post out and all my friends on Facebook see it, our business is going to be booming. And I was so excited I put it out there and I waited, and I waited, and I waited and waited. No one ever came from that one post. Literally, my mentality was because we're offering VA services now, once I say that to people, we're good to go. That was not the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is so. I mean, I really think this comes from a good place of not wanting to be too salesy, not wanting to be too pushy, not wanting to be super annoying. I mean, we all get those emails in our inbox, right, and we're like, oh my gosh, this is the fourth email I've gotten from this person today. Unsubscribe, right, and we all get super annoying. So we really don't want to be pushy, we don't want to be that used car salesman, we don't want to be over the top.
Speaker 1:But the thing is that we don't realize is that the algorithm moves so quickly. People see so much content that it's not sticking. So you do have to create more and we're going to go later in this episode we're going to talk about actual, like strategic things that need to be happening so that people are absorbing your message and so that you can actually bring people into your business. But it is so damaging. We have this kind of mentality that like, okay, I created a little post and people are going to come from it and then they don't like, oh well, they must not be interested in my business, nobody cares about my business, Nobody's ever going to hire me, and we see so many people who are getting frustrated and disappointed and they're giving up too early before really giving their businesses and themselves a chance to thrive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then I kind of think that I think that stacks on. You know, we, we build on these negative experiences. You know, we put out a post, nothing happens. We put out a post, nothing happens, and these negative experiences pile on, and then that can be really hard to overcome later down the road. So we want to I mean, we don't. We don't want to sound like Debbie Downers, but we do want to give you a little bit of a reality check.
Speaker 2:And the other place I think this comes from is people who are trying to sell their courses and telling you oh, it's so easy, just do 123 and you've got it. So people buy their course, they do 123, and it doesn't necessarily work out that way and, like I said, we don't want to be discouraging, but I think it's really important to have to go into starting an online business with your eyes wide open and to know what's down the line and to know what to expect. The truth of the matter is, just creating something does not guarantee success in that thing. So creating a business alone just, unfortunately, is not enough in and of itself. Your services, your products, they're not going to sell themselves. There's work that you have to put into selling these things. Unfortunately, the market is just not going to automatically care about something because you care about it or because you're passionate about it or because you've put in so much hard work to make it.
Speaker 2:Another really good example of this is the online course that Monica and I tried to make. We use this as an example lot because it's a good example of a bad thing to do. Monica and I spent like so we had these, we were web designers and we had our web design business going, but we wanted to build a course for people who wanted to start a work online and travel. So we've put our entire web design business on hold and for three full months we didn't do anything but plan and record our course. And then we put it out to the world and we thought we put so much work into this, we put so much time into it. Once we let people know it's here, they're going to come buy it. We just all we have to do is finish it and then people are going to come knocking, and that also didn't happen. Like I said before, it was discouraging, it was disappointing and it was a little bit frustrating, but it takes more than just having put time into something and being really passionate about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think our, our main marketing strategy for that course was going out there saying, hey, we worked really hard on this, come buy it. And Unfortunately, that's not enough to bring people into your business, to have people buy your products. But in fact, austin, you keep saying you don't want this to be just scourging, but I actually think that this is meant to be Encouraging, because there are so many things you can do to invite people into your business and to invite people into your world. And if you're in a place where it hasn't worked yet, we're about to give you the strategies that you need to invite people into your world, to Bring clients to your business and to eventually get to the point where where you have a thriving business. Okay.
Speaker 1:So the number one thing that I would recommend that you change right now in your business and in your marketing to Catch people's attention and to really help your message sink in is to start to add more value to people's lives. So start to think about your ideal client what do they need from you right now before purchasing and start to add that value. So, for example, when Austin and I were web designers, our marketing was talking a lot more about. Well, we were doing a lot of education. Okay, so we were educating people here's how you can use your website, here's why a website is valuable. But then also we were talking about here's how you use social media to grow your business, here's how you know you can do target market research, and things like that, because we were trying to help business owners Get to the point where they are confident in their business and ready to invest in a website.
Speaker 2:People buy things because it adds value to their life. It makes their life better in some way, shape or form. Generally, there are 10 reasons why people buy things. One, it saves them money. Two, it makes the money. Three, it saves them time. Four, it saves them effort. Five, it helps them avoid physical pain. Six, it eliminates mental pain or worry. Seven, it helps them feel more comfortable. Eight, it helps them achieve greater cleanliness or hygiene. Nine, it helps them feel more healthy or alive. And ten, it helps them feel more loved. So those are our big buckets, but if your product or if your service can do one of these 10 things, then that's going to add immense value to somebody's life and they're going to be much more inclined to buy it. So think about which of these 10 things can you capitalize on and offer as a value add to what you do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think right now, in the current digital space, there is so much content always being pushed at us. We're seeing so much, we're always doom scrolling, we're always seeing so many different creators and we're watching YouTube videos and we're watching Netflix and we have so much input coming in that the more value you can add to someone's life, the more you can show them why they should care about your business, then the more they're going to pay attention to your content and the more it's going to start to stick with them. I don't mean this to sound rude, but people are inherently selfish, right? We're constantly seeing things through our own lens. We're constantly worrying about our own health, our own safety, our own loved ones. So if you can step into their world and be like, hey, like I see you, I know what you're thinking about, here's this value add that I can give to you Instantly. People are going to grab onto that and be more attentive.
Speaker 2:So another thing that you'll need in order to get people to buy is you need some sort of competitive advantage. So what I'm about to say might be a bit of an unpopular opinion. A lot of people will tell you that you want to create a business that no one else is doing. You want to be the only one doing something. People are afraid of competition in the marketplace, because then how are you going to stand out? I actually think it's really good to have competition in the marketplace, because that means that you know that what you're offering is something that people want.
Speaker 2:I would be a little bit nervous to start up a business doing something that literally no one else is doing, because if no one else has done it before, then you might want to ask yourself why. But that being said, if you're going to be offering something that's already out there, you do need to stand out in some way, shape or form. So how can you make yourself different? Is it by the amount of time that you've been in the business, the experience that you have, the skills that you have? Maybe you have a different packaging in what you offer. Maybe it's your personality, maybe it's the way you present things or the way you offer it, the way you talk about things. There's lots of different ways to put your own spin on something, but you do need some way to make you stand out from your competition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I will say that so many people, when they're building their business, are trying to copy and paste their business from someone else that they've seen be successful, and that is not going to work for you. You need to step out and you need to embrace what makes you unique. Okay, the next thing that I want to talk about is that you need to be talking about your offer more. This is something that we all have a hard time doing, because we just assume we put it out into the universe and that everybody's going to see it, and so that the more we put it out, the more they're going to see it and the more they're going to get annoyed with you. But here's the thing is they're not seeing it when you put out your content. I mean, I don't know what the actual statistic is right now, but I think it's around like 10 to 15% of your followers are seeing your content when you put it out. So that means that there's like Potentially 90% of the people who have followed you who aren't seeing your offer. They're not hearing it. So you need to be talking about it more. You need to be talking about it on your social media. You need to be talking about it in your email. You need to be talking about it on your blogs, on your website. You need to be showing people what you are offering and what value you can bring to them.
Speaker 1:I had a really good conversation with somebody online recently who had just started their business and they put out a post on Facebook that they had started their business and they were looking for people to be their first clients and to go through their whole process with them first, and they were actually gonna give their service away for free and they also had a friend or two share that post. And then they were sitting and waiting and they're like why hasn't anybody come from this yet? And the reason is that not enough people have seen that content. You need to be talking about your offer over and over and over again. You yourself are gonna feel like a broken record because you know how much you are talking about it. I guarantee nobody else knows and nobody else is gonna notice.
Speaker 2:That is such a good point. There's a classic study that showed that a client doesn't buy from you until they've had exposure to you or your business on average seven times. So if you're putting out one single post for your virtual assistant, spring sale services and you're only doing that one time, that's not gonna be enough. That's not gonna be close to enough exposure for your clients to know, like and trust you to buy anything from you.
Speaker 1:Okay, the next thing that you need to be doing is employing good marketing strategies into your business, and I know this is really broad and really vague, and the reason for that is we don't know your specific business. I cannot tell you you need to be making four reels and six TikTok posts and two YouTube videos to be successful. I don't know what your business is. I don't know where your audience is, but you need to know that. You need to figure out who you are marketing to and where they are and what kind of content they like to see from you.
Speaker 2:This is also gonna change depending on the platform that you're using. Your marketing strategy is gonna be a little bit different. If you're doing social media marketing on Instagram versus Facebook, maybe you're not even doing social media marketing. Maybe you're doing email marketing or any other dozens of ways to market. The platform that you're using and your specific industry is gonna change this. This is where having a one-on-one coach can come in a lot of handy, because having a coach to help you figure out your best marketing strategies can help cut back on a lot of time and a lot of trial and error.
Speaker 1:And finally this might be my favorite one is to adapt, learn and to pivot based on your research and your market demands. And the reason I love this one is because I think of business like a game. I mean, if you've listened to us for long enough, you know that Austin and I are big game people. We love the strategy, we love the technique, we love the social aspect of it, and you need to bring all of that into your business as well. Try something new, ask how your audiences is responding to it, pay attention to how they're responding to it and then adapt from there. Pay attention to your numbers. Your numbers are really important. I am not a numbers person, but I do recognize the value in seeing the trends. So get the trends of your business. Know what people are reacting to, know what they were responding to, and then be flexible, be willing to adapt, be willing to try something new.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the numbers is my job. When you create an offer or if you create a business that you think people are gonna be raving about and it just doesn't pan out that way and you need to offer something different, you have not failed. You have learned very valuable things that you can then apply to however you change, whether it's creating an entire new business, creating just a new offer, even if it's something as simple as tweaking the words on a post that you've made or on an ad Anywhere in between those two things, big or small, it's not a failure. You have learned something very valuable that you can then apply to the next time you do something.
Speaker 2:I can't tell you how many times Monica and I have, especially when we were web designers. I feel like we did it a lot in that business. We created different packages and different offerings. Some of them offered website maintenance. We had different cute names from. We tried naming all of our packages based off of couples, like popular couples, and then we had a different phase where we had like a gold, silver and bronze packaging and we tried all these different things and we were experimenting and playing with it until we found something that worked for us and worked for our clients.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, to recap everything, if you have built it and they are not coming, you have not failed. Okay, don't give up. It's not too late. If you are in the process of building it, make sure you are employing these strategies. Okay, number one make sure you are adding tons of value to people's lives. Number two make sure you know your competitive advantage and that you are talking about that more and you are showing people what that advantage is. Number three talk about your offer until you are blue in the face. You're not talking about it enough. Trust me when I say that. Number four know your market, know what your good marketing strategies are and run with those. Number five adapt, learn and pivot based on the numbers, based on the trends, based on how your audience is reacting to your content, and that's it for today.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for joining us here on the Profitable Nomad Couple podcast. We appreciate you listening to us today.
Speaker 1:If you've enjoyed this episode, share it on Instagram and be sure to tag us at Austin and Monica. Together, we can inspire others to embrace a location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:And while you're there, we'd love to connect with you, so make sure you follow us for more tips and inspiration on living your dream location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Until next week. Remember that you have the power to shape your own path, so stay curious, stay adventurous and stay connected. I'm