After completing levels one and two, you should now know what your vision and mission is, as well as developed a clearer understanding of what industry you’ll be operating in, and begun researching and developing your product, as well as your competitor and customer analysis.

You should also have a personal growth plan in place to help you improve your focus, habits and mindset.

All of this is absolutely foundational to your business, and to at least some extent the exercises within these first two levels will always be a work in progress.

Now with that stable foundation in place it’s time to start building your business.

In this lesson we’ll be covering the key building blocks to help you grow your business.

This includes:

• Having a monetisation strategy.
• Having a basic understanding of key legal issues.
• And last, but not least, creating a sales funnel.

Firstly, lets discuss, how your business will make money. 

When it comes to building your business the two most important things is to have a monetisation strategy (which means knowing what products and services you plan to sell).

And secondly to have a sales funnel in place (which is basically the step by step process you plan to take in order to attract and convince customers to visit your site and purchase your product). We’ll be expanding on this later. But for now let’s focus on your monetisation strategy.

There can be different ways to make money, and each of them has unique advantages and challenges. Many businesses are monetised in more than one way.

For example, you could offer both a B2C product (such as an online course or app as we’ll discuss in Lesson 21), or set up your own freelance B2B service (as we’ll discuss in Lesson 22), while also promoting affiliate products (as we’ll discuss in this lesson). 

However it tends to be best to focus on one thing, and then expand your revenue stream over time.

You will want to begin by outlining what your customers will pay you for your product, including a breakdown of all your different business start-up costs. 

Regardless of what type of business you’re building, it’s always a good idea to at least estimate how much starting and running your business will cost.

So, the first thing you’ll want to establish is your financial goal, as you may have already done in Exercise 12.

Then make a list of everything you need to get your business ready, for example: 

• Hardware
• Software
• Design services
• Human resources
• Your website
• Payment processing
• Your email marketing service
• And how much you want to invest in paid advertising expenses

You can use the ‘budget template’ in Exercise File 28 to help you with this.

Lets now talk about affiliate marketing, as it can be a valuable tactic to include into your monetisation strategy to help you earn extra money.

With an affiliate commission, you're not selling a product or a service. You're providing a recommendation. 

You can earn a referral fee for getting people to click on a promotional link or code to buy one of your affiliate’s products.

The key to successfully earning an affiliate commission is to find like-minded partners that have a similar audience to you and that you think your audience will find their product/ service useful.

In terms of searching for potential affiliate partners we’ve already covered that in quite a bit of detail in level one.

Once you’ve shortlisted a few prospects that you think would be a good fit, start engaging with them on social media before you message them to propose and affiliate partnership.

Typically, it's better to create one or two successful affiliate partnerships, than to join loads that just sit there and do nothing. 

When done right, affiliate partnerships will complement and multiply your other business efforts, but that’ll only happen when they're in some way relevant to your business. 

Our recommendation is to build your business first and then seek out passive income streams via affiliate partnerships later on down the line.

Another thing you’ll want to do when building your business is to determine your legal structure.

However, it’s advisable that you do this after the large majority of the product development, market research, and branding has been done.

Once you’ve confirmed the name of your business check GoDaddy and social media channels to see if your business name is available. Then you’d need to buy the domain and link it to your website, secure the social handles, and register yourself as a sole trader. 

A sole trader is an unincorporated business owned and run by one individual. The process for filing income tax here is the same as if you were a freelancer.

If you’re just starting out, this can be a great option because it requires the least amount of paperwork and expense. There is very little set up required and you can easily do it all yourself. 

As a sole trader you can hire employees or freelancers. However, you can’t have a business partner (that’s a different business structure).

You also need to be mindful of your trademark.

Your trademark is your brand, i.e. your business and product name.

It’s important to bear in mind some of the fundamentals of copyright law here. 

The key thing to understand about copyright law is that it doesn't protect the idea behind the work. 

So for example, you could write a book and protect the specific elements found within the book, but you're not going to be able to protect the idea behind the book, or stop somebody from writing a book with a similar idea.

The same thing applies to data management. Data in itself is not protectable. Databases as a whole can be protected. So if someone steals an entire database, they could get in trouble. But the data itself isn't protectable because it is not an original work of authorship.

So, just because two trademarks are similar it doesn’t mean that there is infringement. 

There are a wide range of factors that will define if one trademark infringes on another including, are they competing within the same industry. To what extent are the marks similar. Are customers actually reporting the confusion. And are they being marketed in the same way.

There can be a lot of confusion about trademark and copyright infringement, but these are the fundamentals you need to know.

We’ve outlined more detailed instructions on how to register as a sole trader in Exercise File 29.

However, as mentioned don’t worry about doing this until a bit further down the line, once your product and marketing initiatives have been fully set-up and you’re 100% up and running.

Now we’ll come onto the important part of this lesson. And arguably the most important part of the whole course.

How are you going to go about attracting and convincing people to buy your product.

Essentially you can break down the sales funnel process in two stages.

• Stage 1 is to attract.
• Stage 2 is to convince.

The first stage of the sales funnel is to attract your target customer.

The goal here is to simply get your target customers to follow you on social media. This is done through your branding, networking, and paid advertising.

The second stage of the sales funnel is to convince your target customer.

The goal here is to build trust around your brand and convince people to buy your product when they’re ready. This is done through how you present your online profile and website, as well as your content marketing and email marketing.

Let’s take you through our 9-step sales funnel to give you an idea of how to go about attracting and convincing your target customers.

So the first thing you’ll want to do is optimise your social media profiles. This would include things such as:

• having an attractive brand and logo
• a summary of your business vision and mission
• a link to your website
• your promo video pinned to the top of your account. This should help quickly educate your audience about your brand and product when visiting your channels for the first time.
• and last but not least, having a steady stream of excellent content.

The idea here is that whenever anyone does want to find out more about you, you’ll have all the relevant sales info and content on your profile for them to see and be impressed by.

We’ll be talking about content marketing in more detail soon.

If you’re creating a physical product then Shopify is a professional, and easy to set up site that provides a positive experience for your customers. 

If your product is a service, then Squarespace tends to be a popular choice.

If your product is an online course, then we’d recommend Teachable as a good fit.

Generally, the simpler and more user friendly you can keep your website the better. 

You’ll want to create a strong About Me section, which tells your story and explains who you are, as well as your vision, mission and values. 

While also having a strong product page with a simple payment processing system.

When it comes to branding you have two choices, either do it yourself or pay a professional designer to help you. 

We actually recommend a combination of both.

A strong brand could very well be the key differential point that’s going to help you stand out from your competitors, clearly communicate what is unique about you, and help you attract your ideal customers. So it’s important to get it right.

If you’re on a tight budget, which you most likely will be in the beginning, then it can be a good idea to get the core structure of the brand done yourself, keeping your design concepts relatively clean and simple.

Then you can assess and prioritise what areas of the brand are most important to get right and then hire a specialist freelancer to assist you in elevating those specific areas.

It may be your logo that needs refining, it may be video editing, or it may be you want to hire a unique illustrator to help take the look and feel of your brand to the next level.

Generally a good tip when it comes to branding is to leave it until the very end of the business development process. This is because hopefully your vision for the product and brand should be far more clear to you after you have fully completed your customer, product, competitor, and market research.

Here's a quick checklist of useful things you’ll want to highlight when it comes to creating your brand brief:

1. Firstly, highlight some background information such as a summary of your business vision, mission, and values. Also clarify who your target customer is using your customer research, as well as what you believe your USP is. And then highlight some of your top competitors too. (As essentially your goal here is to make your brand standout ahead of your competitors)
2. Secondly, get really specific on the different marketing elements that you want to focus on, for example this may include
3. Your business name
4. Your logo
5. Your brand colours
6. Your brand font
7. Your PowerPoint slides
8. Your promo videos
9. What illustrations and icons you may need, etc

As mentioned if you’re on a budget it can be a good idea to take responsibility for some of these assets yourself and then outsource the priority assets to a professional freelancer or brand consultant.

Thirdly, it’s a good idea to highlight specific examples of other brands that inspire you and that you’d love to do something similar to.

This can help give you a really clear focus on what approach you want to be taking. The clearer you are regarding your vision for the brand, the easier this whole process will be.

As well as your premium product, you’ll also need to streamline a series of valuable free content to attract traffic, and build awareness and trust around your brand and product.

This is known as content marketing.

How much free content should you give away?

Generally, when in doubt, give away more. The more you give away, the more people will talk. They’ll share your stuff and you’ll get more traffic. And more traffic means more sales.

In a nutshell a good content marketing plan should be a mixture of: 

• Posting thought leadership content (This is important and we’ll be discussing it in more detail later)
• Re-sharing your stakeholders content (as we’ll discuss in more detail later too)
• Commenting on current news and trends
• And of course, every now and again, promoting your product

We’ve already covered commenting on current news and trends in Lesson 9. This is probably the trickiest part of your content marketing plan as it requires you to keep your finger on the pulse of the news, and keep your eye out for when one of your hot topics is trending and to then quickly post and comment.

Additional things to keep in mind include the volume of messages you post, and ensuring you post messages in line with the platform’s best practices, for example: one message a day is fine on Facebook and LinkedIn, but on Twitter you could do several tweets a day (you can also use a scheduling tool such as Hootsuite to help with this).

Typically it’s best to focus on building up a strong social media following on one platform, and once you master one platform you can then leverage that audience and authority onto other platforms later.

Ten thousand followers on one platform is much more powerful than ten thousand followers divided across three or four different platforms. 

Another thing to be mindful of at this point is your tone of voice. Typically there are two different tones you can take:

• A ‘start-up’ tone of voice, which is typically aimed at a younger demographic, in which you perhaps use a slightly more casual and fun tone. This tends to work best if you’re selling a B2C product.
• And a ‘corporate’ tone of voice, which is more aimed at businesses who value professionalism. The idea here is to keep the tone as professional as possible. This tends to work best if you’re selling a B2B service.

We’ll be touching further on tone of voice later on during Exercise 31.

In terms of creating thought leadership content, we’d suggest focusing on the following:

Firstly, a short and exciting promo video of your product. The goal here is to introduce your product and business mission.

This should be under two minutes long. This needs to be slick, on brand, and exciting. The goal of this is to quickly introduce, educate and hopefully excite new traffic to your brand and product.

Secondly, a value packed sample video. This introduces your product and business mission in more detail than the promo video (this is your “lead magnet” since it not only attracts leads but it’s also the key sales pitch that aims to convince people to buy your premium product).

This could be an online presentation, which helps explain your vision, mission, and product in greater detail. This should be less than one hour. You want to pack as much value into this as possible in order to get people genuinely excited about your product and your brand.

We’d recommend that you wait until after you’ve fully completed creating the entire product before attempting to work on this.

Thirdly, there is then thought leadership posts. A lot of people will say that you have to have a blog on your website. That’s up to you, but if you’re just starting out we’d recommend focusing primarily on creating social media content. This is massive, and we’ll be discussing it in more detail soon.

You might also want set-up your own YouTube channel (this might be something you do later on down the line once you have more time and resources. We won’t actually be covering this, but YouTube can be a really powerful way of creating a personal relationship with your customers).

As a part of Exercise 31 you can begin drafting your thought leadership social media posts by setting up your content marketing planner.

The way we recommend you structure this is dividing your planner into different tabs.

These tabs should be split up according to your core values and the different core sections of your product. Within each tab you can then divide them according to:

• Short thought leadership tweets (designed for Twitter)
• Longer thought leadership posts (designed for Facebook and LinkedIn)

To save yourself time you can use the same content on Facebook as you do for LinkedIn as both platforms work in a similar way.

You can also consider re-using your Facebook and LinkedIn content as longer Twitter threads.

You may also find it useful to split up and organise each tab within your content planner according to the narrative structure within your eBook.

It’s important that the tone of your content marketing is consistent with your product and personal brand story, this not only helps establish trust with the customer but will also help give your content marketing a consistent and unique tone, which is vital in order to help you stand out as a unique brand in an ultra-competitive space.

For example if your eBook is divided into chapters, then you may want to organise your content marketing planner in the same way.

You can therefore repurpose a lot of the content from the eBook into lots of different social media posts, and add them to your content marketing planner.

Additionally, from your industry research you should also be keeping your eye out for content boosters who already post great content. When you do come across something that you like (or something that seems to be getting a lot of engagement) you can make a note of it by cutting and pasting it into the relevant section of your content marketing planner.

You can then repurpose that content to fit into your own unique narrative and tone.

By consistently adding more and more content ideas into your content planner, and repurposing it into your own unique narrative and tone, over time you’ll build up a bank of brilliant and relevant content marketing ideas.

Which means whenever it's time to comment or post about a specific topic on social media, there's no need to scratch your head and attempt to create something on the spot, as you will now have an organised document of brilliant and relevant content idea that you can simply copy and paste from.

This will allow you to become far faster and efficient when doing your social media activity.

The next tactic is to use the long list of industry influencers you would have built up in Exercise 8 when building your CRM, and send them all an email.

This will help you get the word out about your brand and product.

When it comes to building relationships with industry influencers we recommend starting off by focusing on smaller stakeholders. You’re likely to have more success this way.

It can also be useful to engage with them on social media before you contact them.

When sending an email we’d suggest you create a unique message to each person you message.

Although you can use a similar template for each message, take the time to customise it a little bit to the specific person you're speaking to.

There are a few different approaches you can consider when it comes to establishing partnerships with influencers.

• Firstly, you can offer to give them your product for free and ask them if they would review it and feature it on their platform.
• Secondly, you can ask to be featured as a guest blogger or podcaster on their site
• Thirdly, you can give them an affiliate link, meaning that if anyone buys your product using that link they will get a percentage of the sell. This can be a powerful motivator to getting influencers on board. The more influence they have, the higher the percentage you can propose to give away.
• Finally, in some instances if the influencer already shares relevant and great content you can consider proposing a straight swap in which you promote their product/ content to your audience, in return for them promoting your product/ content to their audience. If they have an affiliate link you can use then even better as it means you can earn an affiliate commission each time someone from your audience purchases a product using that link.

We’ve included a template networking message you can use in Exercise File 21 to help you with this.

The next step is to find relevant online communities, where your target audience hangs out.

Typically you want to be selective in what online communities you choose to focus on. We’d suggest focusing on around 10 online communities. Consistency is important here.

A useful tip to keep in mind when searching for where your target customers hang out online is that they should be following your top industry influencers.

We’d recommend checking out the following online communities:

• Firstly, there’s Twitter. It’s a good idea to comment on a relevant industry influencer’s Twitter threads. This is not only a great way to develop a relationship with a specific influencer on Twitter, but by commenting publically you’ll be raising awareness of your content and brand to everyone else following the account too (who should hopefully be your target customers). It’s a good idea to not only get involved in the conversation on thread, but also like and reply back to other people’s comments too. So make sure to keep your eye out for relevant Twitter influencers and when you do feel as if you’ve stumbled on a gem account make sure to add it into your Online Groups folder in your bookmark bar.
• Secondly there’s Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit groups: When choosing an online community we’d favour choosing one that you can see a lot of engagement in, rather than the number of people in the group. If you find a group that is relevant to your mission and engaged, then you could be onto a winner.

Finding great online groups might not come to you immediately, it might take a bit of time and luck until you stumble upon the best groups. Again, once you do find a potential gem make sure to add it into your Online Groups folder in your bookmark bar.

The secret to successfully growing your side hustle is in the name, it requires you to hustle like crazy.

Once you’ve found and saved your online groups in your bookmark bar you can then schedule time into your calendar to check in on each group semi-regularly and share your content marketing posts on there, as well as contribute to the latest discussions being had.

It’s a good idea to browse through the people who are liking and commenting on the thread, and then send them a private cold message.

A good approach when sending a potential customer a private cold message is to introduce yourself, show an interest in who they are and what they do, explain how you can be of benefit to them, and finally ask them to follow your profile to check out your free content.

Also welcome any questions and be open to starting a conversation.

Be a good listener, aim to connect, not to sell. 

People will only be interested in connecting with you if what you are initially proposing is risk free and beneficial to them.

The goal here is to attract their attention to become curious enough to click on your profile and follow you.

Later on down the line, once they’re following you, your content marketing will hopefully be able to convince them into becoming a buying customer when they’re ready. 

Once your product and website is ready, and you’ve created a way for customers to easily purchase it, and you’ve got a solid stream of valuable free content, while actively engaging in relevant online communities and networking with key stakeholders, the final thing to look into is paid advertising.

In Exercise File 33 we go into paid Facebook advertising in more detail, so make sure to check that out.

Another important marketing tool you’ll want to use to grow your business will be email marketing. 

Email marketing is basically a communication tool to help you grow a loyal community of customers who are interested in staying up to date with your brand's news and updates.

When it comes to email marketing, typically most companies use it for two purposes:

• automating consumer activity
• and creating a regular newsletter

Our advice if you’re just starting out with email marketing is to keep things simple. Perhaps focus mainly on key automation tasks, and sending out a monthly newsletter at the beginning, and as you become more familiar with things then you can begin adding more complexity. 

Our email marketing top tips include:

• Firstly, purchase a subscription to an email marketing service such as MailChimp or Convertkit. These services allow you to automatically collect and store email addresses of hundreds or thousands of subscribers and effectively send out mass emails that won’t end up in people’s spam folders.
• Secondly, set up a simple form on your website that allows visitors to subscribe for more information and receive your free lead magnet. You can also help drive traffic to your online form through your social media marketing activity too.
• You will of course need to have a lead magnet already made at this point. The lead magnet should be one of the first emails that a new email sign-up receives. It’s essentially an introduction and free sample to your product. Your lead magnet is the vital piece of content that is going to promote your product and mission, so you really want to invest a good chunk of your attention and time to creating it.
• Also make sure that you're segmenting your subscribers as you grow. For example you may be targeting students, and mums. Two very different types of people. Once segmentation is in play, this will then allow you to personalise your campaigns.
• You’ll also want to make a note of relevant dates, so as you can create more focused campaigns. For example if your business is a flower delivery service you may want to flag Valentine’s Day as a relevant date to create an email marketing campaign around. This can also be a part of your social media strategy too.
• As mentioned lready you may want to create a monthly newsletter, giving away some of your best free content each month to help your brand stay top-of-mind to potential customers.
• You should also be using email marketing to offer special discounts and referral opportunities.
• Finally, you also want to be thinking about using an automation tool, such as Zapier. If you have an online course for example, this will connect your online course platform with your email system. There are lots of things you can do with this, but the two keys things to do would be to:

- Firstly, send your customers an automated welcome email and a link to your course after they have made a purchase.

- And secondly, adding new customers to your newsletter mailing list.