3 Ways to Turn Your Expertise Into a Profitable Online Business

Thanks to the power of the internet, practically anyone today can start an online business. However, with so many options on the table, what are the best types of online businesses to start?

One of the best ways to get started is to turn your expertise and passion into something of value. And starting an online business has become much easier to do, thanks to powerful course creation and management platforms, which allow you to create a website or blog, even if you don’t have advanced technical skills such as site design or programming.

To help you figure out how to turn your expertise into a profitable business, we will look at three different ways for you to get started.

1. Create an online course or membership site

One of the most lucrative and best ways to put your expertise to work is to create an online course or membership site which offers your content and knowledge at a premium. This type of business has worked extremely well for bloggers, content creators, and any professional who is able to help individuals, brands, or businesses grow.

In the past, to start this type of business would have required you setting up a custom site to host all of your videos, as well as creating a complex membership area and a way to manage your members and accept payments. In addition to the complexities and time required here, it would also cost you a pretty penny to get started.

One solution that has made this whole process a whole lot easier is Kajabi. Through its online course creation and management platform, individuals and brands of all sizes are able to take their expertise, bring it online, and generate a whole lot of money in the process. This all goes back to the solution of requiring the end user to have no technical skills, while also being able to have full customization and control over their site through a simple drag-and-drop system.

2. Become an established expert within your niche

With more than a billion active websites on the internet today, it can be a struggle to start an online business and brand of your own while trying to compete and stand out from the crowd. However, the world of online marketing and content generation is always open to new experts who can provide value to an audience hungry for new information. Some perfect examples of this is content that’s created through the use of expert interviews, roundups, and even interview-based podcast episodes.

Always keep in mind to include a call to action within your expert content. It’s one thing to get your name and expertise out there, but you also have to make money with your online business in the process. A call to action can be as simple as redirecting audiences to your website, blog, social media, or other website that you might be selling online courses or products through.

3. Build a business around the expertise of others

When attempting to make money online or build a brand around your expertise, it would be silly to only rely on your expertise alone. A perfect example of this would be any news or media website that continually covers the expertise of other entrepreneurs and company founders. This is valuable information that millions of people are searching for and reading on a daily basis, yet it has nothing to do with the actual person who is writing it.

With this in mind, building a business around the expertise of others and simply sharing that value with an audience is a legitimate business model in itself. A good example of this would be any “famous quotes” website on the internet that’s generating thousands of impressions daily and making a decent amount of money in the process. The expertise is within the content, the value is there for the audience, and the business model is through the advertising that can be done on the site.

This doesn’t mean that you need to create a website devoted to quotes, but you can provide a lot of information and resources from content that is already out there. Just think about the many different keywords and search phrases people are searching for on a daily basis to get answers to their questions, improve their businesses, or find a new job. To get a better understanding of how this can be accomplished, be sure to perform the necessary SEO research to see what people are looking for, how you can provide a solution, and what they are willing to pay for it.

Put your expertise to work

As you can see through each of the examples, there are plenty of ways to make money online through your expertise or the expertise of others. Since there are so many people on the internet, there is always going to be an opportunity for new authorities and influencers.

Even with the internet being as crowded as it is, the best way to make money off your expertise is to simply get started and see where things end up. The sooner you get started, the faster you will have an established audience to not only trust in what you have to say, but a following that will also pay for your time and expertise in the process.

How to Improve Your Focus: 6 Tactics to Stay on Task

If you aren’t focused on what you’re doing, then you stand zero chance of being successful.

“Focus can only occur when we have said yes to one option and no to all other options,” says James Clear, a writer who focuses on self improvement. “In other words, elimination is a prerequisite for focus.”

Here are a few specific things that can be done to increase focus:

1. Block the ringing and dinging

Ring . . . ding . . . you’ve got mail. Between phone calls, text messages, mobile apps, and emails, constant exposure to different notifications can disrupt your flow and prevent you from truly concentrating on the tasks at hand.

There are certainly times when you need to be notified, but there are also plenty of times when it’s appropriate and necessary to silence everything and focus on a specific task. Whenever possible, try to silence your phone, log out of your email, and block notifications. Once you complete your task, you can follow up on anything you missed.

2. Take frequent breaks

Research shows that the more you focus on a singular task for an extended period of time, the less focused you become. Your brain actually becomes numb to the stimuli and no longer finds it as engaging. One way to counteract this is by taking frequent, short breaks. The time away will recharge your brain and allow it to be stimulated again upon reintroduction.

3. Outsource draining tasks

Certain tasks are more draining than others; ironically, these tasks aren’t always the most important or valuable. If you find that you’re spending a lot of manual effort and energy on time-consuming tasks that really don’t create much value, it may be a sign that you should outsource. By delegating these tasks, you can focus on the ones that actually matter.

4. Strategically allocate time

In order to optimize focus, you have to be strategic with your time. Depending on how you operate and the way you process information, this may look like allocating specific time blocks for each task you face throughout the day. (For other people, it may look a little more flexible.) The point is that you need to create a framework for yourself; otherwise, you’ll bounce around from one task to the next without getting anything done.

5. Stop multitasking

A lot of people think they’re at their best when they multitask, but this is rarely true. You may operate under the illusion that you’re getting more done, but more than likely you’re not.
“Multitasking forces your brain to switch your focus back and forth very quickly from one task to another,” Clear explains. “This wouldn’t be a big deal if the human brain could transition seamlessly from one job to the next, but it can’t.”
For best results, stop trying to multitask; it’s better to do one thing at a time. You might feel like you’re doing less, but you’ll end up accomplishing far more by the time it’s all said and done.

6. Don’t ignore your personal life

Work-life balance is always an issue for people. In an ideal world, the two would coexist without any friction. One of the unfortunate side effects is that issues in your personal life can spill over into your professional life.
In order to prevent your personal life from being a distraction at work, make sure you create a healthy balance. When you’re away from work, spend time with your family and work through any issues that need to be handled. This will allow you to focus on work when you’re at work.

10 Best Strategies to Convince Customers to Purchase From Your E-Commerce Website

Every e-commerce entrepreneur will ask themselves this question at one point or another: How do I get people to purchase from my website? How do I effectively compete online? How do I increase revenue?

While every entrepreneur’s situation is slightly different, based on their target market, product, and objectives, it turns out that high performance websites and online stores have a number of common features that cut across industries and customer segments.

Over the past five years we have studied highly-successful business websites and online stores, and these are the most important features they share:

1. They offer something unique

That does not mean that the product itself is necessarily unique, although that also can be very helpful. However, those entrepreneurs typically offer something that no one else does, whether it be great service, a type of discount, hours of work, a good return or exchange policy, or anything else that a particular customer segment finds valuable.

2. They attract relevant audiences effectively

Successful online sites understand exactly who their customers are and what they find valuable, and then they create products, services, offers, and content that will drive that traffic to their website. They key here is attracting the relevant audience at a cost-effective rate.

3. They are reliable

The first few seconds of interaction between users and a website are crucial to creating a positive impression of the website and brand. Unfortunately many business websites take far too long to load (anything longer than six seconds is excessive) or are sluggish and slow to react to clicks and scrolling. A slow, unreliable website is an immediate turnoff for visitors and results in a high bounce rate.

4. They maintain expectation consistency

The best performing websites we have studied were very good at maintaining the expectation of their visitors as they transition from outside the website (ad, social media post or other links) to the landing page where conversion was expected to happen. This gave visitors the psychological signal that they were in fact in the right place, that they didn’t get redirected to a malicious website, and what they were looking for was right there front and center of their screen above the fold whether it was a blog post, an ebook or a product they wanted to purchase.

5. They are mobile optimized

Mobile optimized is a very different concept from responsive design. While responsive design is very good at rearranging elements of a page so that they fit nicely within a user’s mobile screen, that may not be the best way to present information to a mobile user with a small screen size.
The best-performing websites are very good at rethinking content for mobile users, and completely eliminating clutter and distractions, ensuring that the relevant content of each page is well-presented to mobile users with small device screens.

6. They are easy to navigate

When people look for products and services online, they typically have three questions that a e-commerce website should be able to answer quickly and efficiently:

1. Does this website have the product I am looking for?
2. What is the price of product or service I am looking for?
3. Can I trust this business?

7. They are secure

Today’s consumers are very tech savvy and understand that threats exist in the digital world. Having strong security features on a e-commerce website is no longer a luxury, but a necessity of doing business online. At minimum every website should have an SSL certificate that encrypts transmission to and from the website so that it is not intercepted by hackers.

8. They have conversion opportunities

To convert a visitor to a lead and paying customer, it is important to ensure that there are opportunities and ways for that conversion to happen. Conversion opportunities are not just email subscription forms inserted at various parts in the website; for conversion to happen two things are needed:

1. A compelling offer to convert (a coupon, discount, e-book or some other offer)
2. An easy way to claim the offer (email, phone, contact form, subscription form, etc.)

Strategically-placed conversion opportunities are key to growing a business’s leads, customers, and revenue.

9. They have the tools to understand customer behavior

Successful online entrepreneurs understand who their customers are and how they will behave on the website. Customer insight tools can help provide this valuable information, as well as pages have the highest level of engagement, and which pages are turnoffs for users. Knowing this information allows entrepreneurs to identify gaps where traffic is not good at converting.

10. They are good at retargeting

It is very common for users to land on your website, and then exit because they are not psychologically ready to make a decision to purchase or convert. They may want to read more, check other vendors out, or the timing just may not be right. It is therefore important to be able to retarget those individuals and remind them of your brand and offers.

Facebook happens to be one of the best mediums for retargeting. This can be easily done by creating a Facebook pixel that’s installed throughout your website. A Facebook pixel allows Facebook to match your website visitors to people on Facebook, who can then be marketed to through a retargeting campaign.

To summarize, combining a unique product offering with a compelling digital presence creates the winning formula needed to effectively compete and excel in reaching and converting customers through digital means. Small businesses that master this ability can outsmart, outcompete, and win against much bigger and better funded brands.

7 Ways to Effectively Scale and Grow Your Online Business

A common trait that you’ll find among many online business owners is that they’re never quite satisfied with the status quo, no matter what level of success they’ve achieved. Whether it’s called ambition or the entrepreneurial spirit, these business owners are constantly looking for ways to take their businesses to the next level. But doing so is dependent on whether or not their business model can scale.

The good news is that scaling an online business is much easier than trying to grow a more traditional brick-and-mortar operation; you don’t need to scout additional storefronts or worry about finding more physical space. The business is mostly virtual, so there is, quite literally, an infinite level of potential. So what are ways to achieve this kind of growth?

1. Expand your global options

When many entrepreneurs first start out, they only focus their efforts on one geographic region for the sake of simplicity. Some may only sell their products in the country they are living so they don’t have to deal with accepting different currencies, or having to figure out how to handle shipping and taxes.

Selling to the global market is actually a lot easier than you might think when you leverage e-commerce platforms. Certain platforms allows your store to display in almost any language and accept payments in almost every currency.

Your online store can integrate with PayPal, Stripe, and other gateways, with no transaction fees. You can ship internationally through integrations with many providers around the world, and the built-in calculator helps you make sure your pricing structures take territory-specific taxes and shipping fees into account.

2. Automate your manual processes

You can scale your production and you can scale your campaigns, but the one thing that you cannot scale is your time. No matter how you slice it, there are only 24 hours in a day, and only seven days in a week. There’s no sense in wasting your time doing tasks that can be done automatically.
Utilize tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to automate much of your social media management. The RSS feed on your blog can be automatically syndicated to Facebook and Twitter with ease, and similar tools exist to invoice reminders to your customers, for example. Look at where you are wasting time, and then figure out how an automated tool can give you more time that you can devote to growing your business instead.

3. Grow your content team

When you first start a blog, chances are you’ll be the only one doing the writing. And that’s fine in the beginning when you’re working to establish your brand or to solidify your reputation as an expert in your niche or industry. But as time goes on, you may want to ramp up your content production, and won’t be able to because you simply don’t have the time.

This is when you should think about outsourcing. Marketplaces like Freelancer.com and Fiverr are accessible and convenient, but they may not provide you with the long-term solution that you really need. Take the time to seek out people who you are eager to see their writing on your site for years to come.

4. Upgrade your hosting plan

Good news! Your online business is growing at a rapid rate. Bad news! Your hosting plan can no longer handle the kind of bandwidth and control that you need to keep moving forward. As affordable and as easy shared hosting plans may be, they may not be adequate as your needs continue to grow and your business continues to scale.

If you don’t feel like you’re quite ready to invest in dedicated hosting, but you want to have a greater sense of control, then VPS (virtual private server) web hosting could be a great step up.

5. Pursue media exposure more actively

To scale your online business, you will need to explore new markets and reach out to new people who can potentially become new readers, subscribers, and customers. There are many ways you can do this, including writing guest posts and sending out press releases.

One service that you might also consider is Help a Reporter Out, also known in many circles simply as HARO. Over 50,000 journalists and bloggers are constantly looking for expert sources for their varied content. When you add yourself to the HARO database, you may have writers reaching out to you for your comment or opinion. This could land you invaluable media coverage that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to get.

6. Identify your bottlenecks

How you plan to scale your online business will obviously depend on the current status of your business. Maybe you’ve already gotten yourself a strong team of professionals on your side: content creators, a marketing team, a production team, someone handling logistics, and so on.

A big problem that you may face is with so many moving parts it can be difficult to identify the inefficiencies in the system. The pace at which your business can operate will be dictated by the slowest “cog” in the machine.

Some solutions use what is known as a Kanban board. This workflow visualization technique aims to progress tasks from left to right, limiting the number of items that can exist in a column. When you see things start to pile up, you’ll know where things are moving at their slowest.

7. Recognize the Pareto principle

The Pareto principle states that 80% of output is generated by 20% of input. This is definitely true when it comes to business, and may mean that in order for your business to grow, you may have to make some cuts.

Let’s say you have 10 products that you sell through your online store. A couple of them may be real superstars, bringing in the majority of your revenue. But at some point, you’ll need to take a look at those remaining eight items and get rid of the underperformers. Doing this will free up resources so you can either focus more of your marketing efforts on the two superstar products, or develop potentially awesome replacements that will hopefully perform better.

And continue to focus on what is working and discard what isn’t—remember, this cycle never ends and it’s a mindset you’ll need to reapply over and over again.

Give Your Content a Visual Boost: 4 Tips to Designing More Visually Appealing Content

Using the right language and long-tail search terms in your content is critical for SEO purposes, but are you paying enough attention to the visual aspects? Your readers want to engage with content that’s not only informative, but also aesthetically pleasing.

Social media has changed content marketing in many ways. One of the more significant developments has been a demand for content that’s both functional and visually stimulating. Here are some tips to get your content on the right track so you not only generate clicks, but also boost conversions.

1. Think strategically about color selection

Color scheme matters more than you may know. Many marketers arbitrarily choose a color scheme that looks good to them, or default to company colors, but more attention should be given to the color facet.

For example, did you know that women tend to prefer blue, purple, and green, but dislike gray, orange, and brown? Men, on the other hand, prefer blue, green, and black, but show a disdain for purple, orange, and brown. Blue is often used to cultivate trust, while orange encourages impulse decisions.

If you aren’t giving color selection enough focus, you could miss one of these important details and do your content a disservice.

2. Balance between visuals and information

Balance is huge when you’re creating engaging content. You want the content to be informative and persuasive, but you also need it to be visually pleasing and easy to consume.

This is easier said than done. Sometimes content is rendered ineffective because it moves too far toward one extreme.

This page from RISE, an online lending platform, is a sterling example of how to do it right. Notice how there’s plenty of textual content and valuable tidbits packed inside, but the color, imagery, and charts provide enough visual relief to keep you engaged.

That’s exactly the sort of balance you should aim for.

3. Image selection matters

Images are often an afterthought for content marketers. They spend all their time coming up with content ideas, fleshing them out, and selecting headlines. When it comes time to publish, they realize they could use some images, so they run a quick search for stock photos and paste in a few convenient shots. Such images clearly fill space, but they don’t necessarily add any value.

You have to be more conscientious about the images you choose, down to the last detail. Two images with people, for example, can produce very different emotions in readers, even though they look very similar.

Ellen Desmarais, former VP and head of marketing at photo marketplace 500px, says, We did some research on this at 500px, and the data was surprising: 60 percent of our best-selling images with people had a single subject, while only 20 percent contained two or more subjects. Candid photos sold nearly twice as much as posed images. And 85 percent of the sold photos we analyzed featured a subject looking away from the camera.”

These are just a few examples of how vital image selection can be. Spend some time investigating and plan ahead. If you really want your content to be engaging, you need to select images as you develop the written content.

4. Make it skimmable

Effective content is easy to skim. Whether a reader accesses it via a desktop browser or mobile phone, the experience should be simple and seamless. This means using subheads, images, and other visual relief elements to keep the user reading as long as possible.

Give your content a visual boost

The mark of a good contemporary content marketer is one who is able to develop engaging visual content that complements the text. As you work on improving your content marketing strategy, make sure you’re addressing this critical element of the equation.