If you lost your job or your business during the pandemic, you might be struggling to find another job or start another business when the economy is even worse than before.
Ironically, sometimes the worst of times can also be the best of times. For instance, some of the biggest family dynasties started during the Great Depression. But unlike any other time in history, you have a unique advantage: the Internet. You can now do amazing things with the latest technology at your fingertips. For, instance, you can record a marketing message on audio while commuting in your car by using an audio broadcasting platform like Anchor, funded by The Chernin Group (TCG). Later, you can add this marketing message to the end of a podcast.
By creating an online business, you can reach millions of customers at all hours of the day and night from many parts of the world.
Now that you’re more aware that some of the best things can happen at the worst of times, here are four tips to help you launch your online enterprise:
Tip #1: Find a profitable business idea
Research what other people are building online and brainstorm what you like based on your own knowledge, skills, and experience. Once you’ve got your shortlist of great ideas, do some more research to identify the most profitable of these ideas.
Tip #2: Build an audience
After you’ve got your big business idea, don’t rush to build a website or create a product just yet. The first focus is on building an audience. It’s more than enough to just build a landing page to get subscribers to your free newsletter, and it’s more than enough to just create a few free social media profiles. Here’s why this idea of building your audience before building your business works: You can test out your idea before investing your time or money in building it out. If your idea is a flop, simply start afresh with another idea. As you build your content and grow your email subscriber list and as you interact with your audience on social media, you will understand your audience better. This will help you build a website that appeals to them and develop products or services that interest them.
Tip #3: Develop multimedia content
You can create content by guest posting articles on other people’s blogs, by launching your own YouTube channel, and by creating a podcast. The reason for creating written, audio-visual, and audio content is to reach a larger audience. For example, creating a podcast to share your message to an audience will appeal to people who prefer listening to audio on their mobile phone to reading a blog or watching a video. Moreover, you can use your podcast to create content for your blog. All you need to do is have an audio recording of your podcast which you can transcribe by using an audio-to-text converter. The final product is your podcast in text form that you can publish as an article. Melon has the right podcasting tool to ensure your podcast turns out exactly the way you’d like it to.
Tip #4: Build a beautiful website
Once you understand your audience better, build a website around your new product idea. The better the quality of your website, the easier it will be to win people over as soon as they land on your website. While there are many ways of building a website, such as using a website builder, figuring out how to customize a template, and hiring someone cheaply on a freelance job board, the best way is to hire a top design company to do it for you. Although this might be the most expensive way to create a website, you get what you pay for. Rather than compromising on the look and feel, navigability and functionality of your website, go all out in the beginning and earn higher profits through a more robust platform.
Following these four tips will get you off to a good start.