In the 21st century, there is no shortage of ways to optimize earning while minimizing expenditure. There are many options available to online business owners. “Work smarter, not harder” is the mantra of many successful entrepreneurs, and it has a very specific application to online businesses.

Streamline Your Processes

Automate Your Workload

One of the best shortcuts to free up your time is to make use of automation tools. You can automate your social media posting and reputation monitoring, link building and analysis, meetings and appointments, marketing efforts, email lists, sales, and customer support.

If you find yourself stressed out over the amount of work you have to do, consider that there is an automation tool available for it.

Outsource

Every person has unique strengths and weaknesses. There are some things you are going to hate doing, and some things that you will enjoy.

This means that you can hire people to do the things that they love to do, but you hate. Freelancers and outsourcing agencies are available, and they can massively assist in reducing your workload.

Hire a Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is a low-cost freelancer that completes all the jobs you need to get done such as data entry, meeting scheduling, emails and so on. You can hire them on an hourly basis to complete simple tasks.

Finding the right one might take a while, but it can definitely turn out to be a shortcut to success in the long-term.

Collaborations and Networking

Connecting with people in your field is a quick route to growing your business. You can promote each other’s products and services. By leveraging the power of multiple platforms, you will be able to grow far faster compared to doing it alone.

You can also network with people face to face. There is a growing number of digital nomad hubs across the globe, and you might find a group of them living near you.

Schedule Some Down Time

Rest and relaxation are vital and are a necessity to ensure success. One of the reasons you are creating an online business is to enjoy the benefits that it has to offer, such as flexibility and enjoyment.

So, make sure you take at least one day a week where you don’t do anything work-related. You can then come back to work on Monday morning completely refreshed and will see things from a clear perspective.

Working too hard will not benefit you or your brand.

Powerful Ways to Promote Your Business

Marketing and promotion are vital for the success of an online business. Without a strong marketing strategy, then nobody will know about your brand. Make sure to try out at least one of these ways to promote your business so that you can direct traffic to your site.

Google Ads

Google advertising is one of the most well-known forms of paid advertising. Marketers bid on keywords and these ads show up on Google when a user searches for a particular search term. The advertiser will pay Google when a user clicks on one of the sponsored ads.

This is a great way to promote your business. It also works far more quickly compared to typical SEO methods, though it requires a little more expertise to pull it off.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is becoming more and more like a search engine, and people are listing their products and services on this site. Facebook offers a large variety of advertising types to suit every business model. It also offers something called sponsored stories.

These stories are a kind of organic marketing technique where advertisers can highlight what users are saying about the brand.

Quora

Quora is a question and answer site that is extremely popular. It is a great way to get your brand out there. All you need to do is answer questions on this site in relation to the topic at hand.

So, if you have a blog about personal finance, then you could answer questions surrounding this area. Aside from people seeing your logo and brand, you can put in affiliate links or links to your blog.

Collaborations

Collaborating with other businesses is still as important as ever. This is a technique that freelancers and small online business owners do not use often enough.

For example, it would be much easier for 5 independent bloggers to examine ways they could collaborate together than for every person to do it all alone.

Meeting Face to Face

Meeting people face to face is also a key aspect of online success. It brings an increased level of trust and authenticity to the business relationship. You can get to know people on a personal level.

While hiring freelancers is great for efficiency, you are going to need a few people to interact with on a tangible level. It can also make the whole process of achieving financial freedom far more enjoyable as you can talk with people face to face instead of messaging platforms.

How to Scale Your Online Business Successfully

Most people have no idea as to how to scale their online business. There is a big gap between a startup and a medium-sized business. Scaling is an art that needs to be done carefully.

Acquiring the wrong partner or business deal can have severe consequences. But scaling does not have to be expensive and there are many free and organic methods of scaling an online company.

Online businesses have an advantage in that scaling the infrastructure often only requires a new hosting plan for a web site.

Outsource

Most solopreneurs think that scaling involves acquisitions or significant partnerships. But scale can be on a much smaller level. If you hire a virtual assistant to complete the tasks that you don’t want to do, such as social media or email marketing, then you have effectively scaled.

You will now be freed up to do more of what you love to do and can expand the business in whatever direction you see fit. There are many freelancers available on sites such as Upwork who can deliver high-quality work for a very reasonable price.

As you build a network of reliable freelancers, you only pay them for specific tasks that need to be done.

Collaboration

A good way to scale is to collaborate with people in your industry. Solopreneurs often fail to see the value of joining forces with other people in the same sector, often preferring to do everything by themselves.

But establishing a network of associates within a particular field is ideal for long-term success and effective scaling. They might have skills that you do not possess or have a different way of looking at things. You can link to each other’s sites and perhaps even form your own company down the line.

Automation

Automation is another great way to scale your business. You can use an automation tool to complete tasks such as social media posting, email marketing, customer support, search engine optimization, and sales.

Automation is one of the best ways to increase your output and it can free up your time to focus on the things that really matter. For example, Hootsuite and Buffer are among the better automation tools available in terms of social media management.

You can see how your brand is doing across a large variety of social media platforms on one easy dashboard.

Strongest Online Business Models to Ensure Success

The choice of online business model can have a huge impact on future success. So be careful when starting out that you select a model that matches your lifestyle.

The following are 5 of the best online business models you can make use of to secure financial freedom:

Blogging

Blogging is still one of the best ways to make money online. Blogging takes consistency to work, and the results can take a while to materialize. But blogging is still essential.

Even if it is not going to be used as the primary form of income, having a blog is a good way to promote your other business or to bolster your reputation. Once a blog generates enough traffic, it can be monetized using affiliate links or paid advertising.

YouTube

In many ways, videos are taking over from written content. Customers like videos more than written content and video content has the potential to go viral.

YouTube is the biggest video streaming platform and it is easier to create a video than is commonly believed. You can use YouTube to build up a following and then market to them. This method is far quicker than blogging in most instances.

Physical Products and Amazon FBA

It is also possible to sell physical products online with the help of other services. With the Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) service, you simply ship your goods to Amazon. The sale and processing occur through the Amazon platform, as does delivery of the product itself. Amazon even takes care of the customer service.

In other words, Amazon does a lot to complete the business. However, they do take a large share. Other methods of selling physical products online include drop shipping and third-party logistics companies.

Create an Online Course

If you are an expert on a particular topic, then you should consider creating your own online course. This is not as difficult as it sounds, but you will still be responsible for marketing and promoting your course.

Udemy is one of the most well-known online course platforms. With the increase in the price of third level education, more people than ever are turning to online courses for instruction.

Freelancing

Freelancing is a great way to earn money on the side. You can work from anywhere and leverage your existing skills for compensation. You can also use freelancers to enhance your business and quality of life.

Virtual assistants are available and can complete menial tasks such as data entry or email management for as little as $5 per hour.

Online Automation Tools To Free Up Your Time

Automation is going to be the way forward for online businesses of the 21st century. Those that automate are going to be the most successful.

There is an automation tool for all possible tasks, from email marketing to paid advertising models. The trick is to find the automation tools that fit into your lifestyle and business model. Here are 3 of the better automation tools out there.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an email management service that can assist in streamlining email campaigns. MailChimp is a favorite email automation tool for startups and digital nomads. It is known for its ease of use and is the biggest email automation tool out there.

Email marketing is still a very lucrative business model. This is because while people may change their social medial platforms, they tend to stick with the same email address.

So, building up an email list is a great way to keep in touch with potential customers over the long term. Even aside from pure email marketing, it is always a good idea to maintain an email list to keep customers regularly engaged.

For example, those who are creating a blog will also need to maintain an email list and MailChimp can assist with this activity.

HootSuite

HootSuite is the perfect platform to automate social media strategies. It can be used to monitor how your business is doing across different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

You can see how your brand is performing through the simplified HootSuite dashboard. It is also possible to schedule and update posts as well as to create social analytic reports.

The ability to schedule posts is a powerful feature that many freelancers and business owners are starting to take advantage of. It can significantly free up time. HootSuite is free for a basic personal subscription, though there are upgraded premium options.

Hubspot

Hubspot is an inbound marketing and sales automation tool that is extremely popular within the online business community. Marketing and sales are a difficult part of any business enterprise, and Hubspot can help to ease the burden.

It comes with a free customer relationship management (CRM) system and is free to use.  It allows for email marketing and automation, lead generation, analytics, meeting scheduling, customer feedback, and ticketing.

Hubspot has a massive online community who are very active and this is a very well-regarded automation tool that can streamline marketing campaigns.

Influencer Marketing is the Very Best Growth Hack Around

If you’re looking to give your website the biggest boost possible in the shortest amount of time, then you’re looking for a growth hack.

A growth hack is any technique that can be used to give a website an instant boost in terms of its visibility and traffic and the best of these can help you to ‘skip’ a lot of the grinding that’s normally necessary for good SEO.

And what is by far one of the best growth hacks is influencer marketing. When done right, influencer marketing can help you to go from 0 weekly views to hundreds of thousands. Here’s how…

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing essentially means that you are working with big ‘influencers.’ An influencer is anyone who has a large audience and very often that will mean someone on YouTube or on Instagram that has managed to amass a large following. These people don’t only have an audience, they also have the trust of that audience and the ability to sway opinion.

Thus, if you can get them to recommend your website or to link to it, then you can find that a large proportion of their audience heads over to your channel and gives you an instant and impressive hike in readership and sales.

Imagine if you could get a link from Tim Ferriss. Just one link from his website, along with his recommendation, would bring you hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, many of whom would probably subscribe on the spot.

The SEO benefit would be huge but that would pale in comparison to the gigantic surge in direct traffic and the shares that that traffic would create.

How to Find and Work With Influencers

So how do you find these influencers and how do you get them to post your links for you?

The answer is not to start too big. If you email Tim Ferriss, then chances are that you’re not going to get a response. Likewise, you probably won’t get much of a response if you email someone with a million subscribers, or even 500,000 subscribers.

Instead, aim for someone who is just starting out but who has built something of an audience already. These people will be more flattered by your interest and more likely to respond to you.

When they share your link, you’ll then see your own subscribers go up by a few thousand, which puts you in a position to reach a slightly bigger influencer next time.

Better yet though, you should think about creating relationships with people first. Spend some time familiarizing yourself with the people you want to work with and if you can, meet in person.

This is one reason why networking events are so useful for internet marketers. Another tip is to think about your existing contacts, are any of them influencers who can get you started?

Finally, consider hiring the services of influencers – even just for consultation. Once you do that, you’ll be sure to get an audience with them, which will make them more likely to read your subsequent emails!

Consider Creating an Online Course For Your Business

There are a wide variety of marketing methods at your disposal, such as blogging, video marketing, email marketing, Amazon FBA, SEO, and more.

But an online course can be as profitable as any of them, possibly even more so. And they can be easy to create if you already have an eBook or educational material at hand. There are plenty of valid reasons to consider an online course for your business.

Return on Investment

Online courses can deliver a very impressive return on investment if they are done properly. Once you have the course created and uploaded to a site such as Udemy, then there is not much else to do aside from promoting the product.

Ideally, the product will have been promoted before it is released. Online courses can be sold over and over and can deliver an income for years without much additional enhancement. However, it should be noted that creating a course is a little more difficult than it appears at first glance.

They Are Increasing in Popularity

More and more people are turning towards online courses to receive their education compared to other methods. Online courses are far cheaper and often contain a wealth of information that cannot be obtained anywhere else.

While the online course niche is becoming saturated, there is still a lack of high-quality courses that deliver original content not available anywhere else. If you can give this to your target audience, then your online course will be a massive success.

If you find yourself giving the same advice over and over again, then a course is a good way to streamline your efforts.

Build Authority and Credibility

If you do sell a course effectively, then you will have a built a reputation as an expert in the field. Even if it does not sell that well, creating your own online course is going to be a massive boost to your brand.

As your business grows, you will be able to point your customers towards your course.  You can use the course as an upsell or as a downsell with associated products and services.

In many ways, it can be like having two separate kinds of business. While there can be considerable work involved in creating an online course for your business, it is definitely worth it.

Choosing an Online Business Model

Setting up and online business is becoming known as the best way to achieve success quickly. Using other models often involves more risk with longer time horizons.

There are numerous advantages that an online business has over other models, and here are seven of them.

It’s Cheaper

By setting up an online business, you have almost no upfront costs. It is free to create a website using a service such as Wix, and all that you pay for is hosting. In contrast, setting up a physical business requires significant expense and possibly even a loan.

It’s Easier

With online businesses, you can make heavy use of automation and software tools to make your life a whole lot easier. You can automate email responses, social media posts, and marketing efforts. You can also let freelancers do the work for you.

It’s Open 24/7

Unlike physical businesses, online outlets are open 24/7. This means that customers can purchase from your site or read your blog at all times. You can also work whenever you want, on your schedule.

The site is never closed. The people you hire to complete projects can also work while you are asleep or relaxing.

The Audience is Global

With an online business, people can look at your site from anywhere in the world. According to all the latest statistics, more and more people are going online for purchases. This means that you have a massive audience and many ways to reach them.

It’s Easier to Scale

Online companies are often far easier to scale compared to physical outlets. The site capacity can be easily increased to accommodate increased traffic.

You can also use paid search methods to gain traffic. And with eBooks, courses, and software products, it does not cost anything to duplicate them and keep selling.

Speed

Online businesses can grow very rapidly with the right marketing methods. Once, it would take decades to become a millionaire or years to simply acquire a good income. But it is possible to earn a good income using the online model is a respectable time frame.

Freedom and Flexibility

Online businesses are so much easier to manage as there are more options available. Brick and mortar companies are limited to the people in the immediate vicinity in terms of customers.

And they are limited to the skills of the employees that they hire. With online businesses, there is more that you can do to expand the business and it is possible to hire freelancers on short term contracts.