Hi again! Are you ready for Part Six: So You Wanna Start an Online Business?
This is the final part in this blog post series. Not that you won’t have more to do after this, but once you get to this step…things will start moving along.
So for one final time, let’s review where we are now:
- You’ve your chosen online business
- You’ve done some research on where to market/promote yourself
- You have your business name & brand
- You’ve decided on and Created Your Lead Magnet Freebie
- You’ve set up Lead Magnet Freebie Email Workflow
- You Have Your Lead Magnet Signup Email Form To Your Social Media
- Promote Your Lead Magnet – YOU ARE HERE
You must be getting real excited now, aren’t you? You’ve gotten steps one through six done (or close to) and now you’re ready to get this baby going! First, pat yourself on the back…getting to this point probably wasn’t the easiest thing to do. But you did it! So take a moment to appreciate all your hard work. This is great news! You’ve done your research, got your business idea, name, brand, lead magnet freebie, set up your email signup form (to gain your audience), linked that form to all your social media accounts and NOW you have to get the word out. How wonderful!
So what’s next? Promoting yourself, that’s what.
This part does require some cost. You’ll want to advertise yourself (and your lead magnet) by using Instagram, Facebook & Pinterest ads. Create a specific ad for your promotion. If you don’t have the skills for Photoshop, etc., I would again, suggest Canva. Canva has templates already set up for Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook posts. You can use one of their many templates or purchase pre-made templates on places like Etsy, Creative Market & Design Cuts.
Whichever direction you decide to go, make sure you list your lead magnet name, show a picture and add any important text. If you’re not sure how to set it up, simply go on your Instagram, etc and see what others are doing. That will give you an idea of how to set your own promotion up. For Instagram/Facebook, you will need to have your account set up as a ‘business’ account. From there, you can add your payment details (so you can pay them for any promotions you do).
Let’s use Instagram as an example. I use their promotional tools often because it’s easy, convenient and pretty inexpensive. Once I have my promotion post complete, I save it as a JPEG and upload it to my Instagram account like I would any post. I add any text in the post section underneath the image as well as pertinent tags. After it’s posted, you’ll see a button on the bottom right that says ‘boost post’. Go ahead and click on that. From there, you’ll be taken through a series of slides that will ask you how much you want to spend, how many days you want to promote and what audience you want to use. For your first time, I would suggest doing a 2-3 day promotion schedule and choose a total budget of about $15-20. Of course, the more money you spend, the larger the audience…but you are testing the waters out…so no need to go all in at first.
For the audience, I would choose Instagram’s automatic audience selection. You can always customize this on the next promotion…but for now make it as easy as possible. Select the budget you want and how many days you want that budget spread over. Again, I usually do a 2-3 day promotion with a total budget of about $20. You also have a choice to get more profile views or website views. For your first time, I would select profile views so any interested visitors can go there and then follow the link in your profile to your lead magnet signup.
You’ll have a chance to review your promotion and if all looks good, boost that post! It generally takes Instagram 24 hours to review your post before it goes live. Most posts get approved fairly quickly, but occasionally there might be a conflict and Instagram will let you know if/when that happens. When it does get approved, you’ll see ‘currently boosted’ on the bottom right of the post. Once you see that, you can go in and view ‘insights’ which will tell you if you have any likes, saves and how many viewers your post has reached. Keep a mental track of this for the next time you do a promotion. It will come in handy.
You can also place your promotion ad on other forums. For example, I have an account Procreate’s community forums. Often, I will post this promotion ad there and link to my lead magnet signup. For you, there may be other forums to use. Basically, the point is to get the word out wherever you can and are allowed to (always check the sites guidelines first). The more you get your promotion out, the more people will see it.
This first time promoting is going to be a trial run for you. You’ll see what works and where it works best so don’t get overwhelmed or discouraged. If you start getting email signups, you’ll know people are seeing it. That’s a good thing. If not, you’ll want to research to see what you could be doing differently. It might not be a lot at first but you’ll start getting the idea of how the whole process works and what works best for you.
This is the beginning of promoting yourself and your business. There’s so much more you’ll want to do but I don’t recommend overwhelming yourself, especially at first. And again, don’t get discouraged if things don’t go as you had hoped…that will only make you think about giving up and you don’t want to do that. It’s going to take some time for you to gain traction but I promise, if you stick to it, you will.
I’m not sure who’s reading this but any of you who are, if you have any questions or comments on how things are going for you using this blog post series…I would love to hear from you in the comments!
Until then…
