Million Dollar Micro Business

How to Turn Your Expertise Into a Digital Online Course

Tina Tower

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780730392088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmertum

Discover how tolauncha profitable online course from scratch

In MillionDollar Micro Business: HowToTurn Your Expertise Into A Digital Online Course, entrepreneur and author Tina Tower deliversa new and smarter way to do business that avoids huge overheads and large capital investments. Fueled by recent innovations in technology and shifts in consumer behavior, the accomplished author shows you a new way to have a big impact with few resources.

You'll learn how to create a digital course based on expertise you've gained through your life, business, academic work, and career. The book is a practical and tangible guide to getting started and offers a proven framework and case studies of people who have scaledcourses into seven-figure ventures.

This important book teaches you:

• How to turn your passion and expertise into profit, using what you know to create a global, online course
• Why bigger is not always better, and how less overhead and investment is often a good thing for a scalable business
• An alternative to the 9-5 hustle and grindof a traditional workplace
• Real-life case studies from people who have been on this journey before

Perfect forentrepreneurs, seasoned professionals, educatedexperts, and anyone else interested in sharing their knowledge with the world around them, MillionDollar Micro Business is an indispensable guide to creating a lucrative online course from scratch.

Part I
How it begins

01
Start small

Often it's not coming up with an idea for your first digital course product that's the challenge; it's choosing just one. People I work with constantly tell me about all the different, sometimes overlapping courses they're going to create. I've shared my first steps already, so you know I started three completely different businesses while trying to discover what I really wanted to do. But I gained traction only when I finally picked just one, starting small and allowing it to grow and evolve.

You've picked up this book, which means you're already interested in online courses and have probably been looking around at them. Maybe you've listened to some podcasts and heard some success stories too. My goal with this book is to persuade you that it's possible to create a million dollar business based on your existing expertise and to show you how to put it all together, ready to launch it out into the world. But I don't want to give you a bum steer. I don't want you to think that when you go live with your gorgeous new website the dollars will come rolling in so thick and fast you won't be able to count them.

Overnight success is possible, but my gosh it's rare. What a digital business does is it allows you to scale and leverage, and it absolutely accelerates your success, enabling you to reach your goals way faster than anything you'll see in a traditional business.

I was talking to someone who runs a course teaching people how to do gorgeous hand lettering. She put everything together in under a month, launched it out into the world … and got 23 people to buy her product. She was devastated. She'd wanted 100 people for her first course launch. Where that particular goal came from I don't know, but let me tell you, 23 clients for a brand-new online business is something to happy dance about. Once you've started, you can take that experience and build on it.

A digital business gains traction and compounds fast. When you first launch, people who don't buy will at least know about you. Thanks to social media, word spreads rapidly, so, from your first year's performance, if you maintain consistency and keep showing up and adding value for your audience, you'll continue to grow month on month.

If you're looking at how to begin, my advice is to start with what you know. Ask friends and family, ‘What do you think I'm best at?’ If you're going with what you already know, your credibility in that area is probably already established.

So start small. Your business, like the chapters that follow, won't stay small for long!

02
Personal branding

What follows may trigger some resistance, because if you’ve never put yourself out into the world before in a big way, man oh man it can be scary! Building a digital business through content marketing and a personal brand is the most effective way to accelerate your growth and reach your goals faster.

‘Online’ can prompt the misconception that the transaction isn't as personal as shopping in a traditional bricks-and-mortar business. Actually it's more personal. In order to buy from you, your prospective client needs to:

• know you
• like you
• trust you.

You will be able to achieve this so much faster if you step forward and own your expertise rather than hiding behind a brand name. If you never want to show your face and be the one talking about your business, then I suggest creating an online course may not be for you. You may create the most valuable product that the world absolutely needs, but if no one ever sees it, you've totally wasted your time. The way for your products to be seen is for you to be seen. It's time to step into the light.

We all feel like we're not good enough in some way. Everyone is unique, but having hang-ups is far from unique. So rather than let it stop you, embrace what makes you uniquely you. This shift in perception can sometimes take time. I know that when I first became a franchisor I had an idea in my head of what a professional woman looked like and decided that was the image I should project. So I marched into Portmans womenswear store and bought a suit and some terribly uncomfortable high heels and practised being more ‘professional’. Thankfully, gone are the days when we needed to ‘look the part’. That was the old way of doing business. You're now more likely to find the wannabes in designer clothes and the successful ones in jeans and a t-shirt.

A few years ago, after a long day of speaking on stage, I went to the end-of-conference social event to chat with the participants, but soon had to excuse myself and go home. I wasn't overtired or feeling unwell; the problem was my feet were killing me! Trying to look the part meant suffering excruciating pain. I would never show up for an event in flat shoes because I thought it looked disrespectful, and I didn't want the organiser to think I didn't care enough to ‘dress up’. But that night I vowed that henceforth I would always wear clothes I was comfortable in. Now I wear an array of gorgeous flat shoes that I can literally bounce around the stage in and have standing conversations for as long as I like! Embracing who you are and what clothes you're comfortable in will always help you perform better. You may love high heels — all power to you (and your feet). Just go with what's right for you.

The clothes we wear do matter. As a projection of ourselves, they affect how people perceive us when they make that initial snap judgement. We may as well let people judge us on who we really are, because we're going to be judged anyway. I love colourful clothes and wearable art. I'm sure some people will see me and think I look like a ridiculous walking rainbow, but others will think how wonderfully colourful and happy I look. Attract (or polarise) your audience by showing up as you really are. You'll be much happier for it, because your clients will be people who are attracted to the same vibe.

Having a personal brand doesn't mean having no privacy. This is one of the most common objections I hear. When we think of personal brands, we may think of Instagram influencers flooding the world with selfies and model poses. By ‘personal brand’, I mean showing up as yourself, allowing the world to see the massive value you offer, and not dimming your light.

Decide now, as you embark on building your personal brand, what parts of your life you're happy to share and what parts you'd prefer to keep private. What works for someone else might not work for you. It's up to you to decide how much of yourself you want the world to see. Back in 2016 I had to deal with a cyber stalker. The experience totally shifted my relationship with the internet, social media and how much of my life I shared. I am very open and will share pretty much everything about my business and happily answer anyone's questions. I make myself readily available online to talk about business and some of my hobbies. I have two children but they're rarely in my social media. You won't find a tour of the inside of my house, or where I'm on holiday until I've left the location, and you'll very rarely see me sharing my experiences with friends or family. My social media is for business and I am very purposeful about that. People buy my expertise, and they need to know I have credibility in that area before they do, but at no point in our transaction do they buy me. Building a personal brand does not mean you need to show your personal life. It means you can decide which parts you're happy to share so your clients can get to know you, leaving everything else for your wonderful private life.

For example, I show all around my office; my dog frequents my account because she's always at my feet; I share what I'm working on and what roadblocks I come up against so I can also share how I overcome them. I share my goals and sorrows where they relate to business, but not the rest of my life. Your clients don't care about that. They care about how you can fix the problem they're trying to solve and how equipped you are to do that.

I've talked about the merits of starting small and starting with one thing. This is easier not only for you but for others too. If family, friends and colleagues want to recommend you, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. This means understanding exactly what it is you do and who you do it for, so you need to communicate clearly and explicitly who you serve and what you stand for.

When people speak about you when you're not in the room, what will they say? The personal brand you've crafted and projected — that's what will do the talking for you.

03
Time management

Perhaps the seed to start your own online course was planted long ago, or maybe it's a new idea. Either way most likely you're not someone with a surfeit of time and no idea how to use it.

‘I'd love to do this. I just don't have the time’ is the number one objection I hear. In reality, you have time for everything that's most important to you. We're all time poor because we humans always want to do more than the time we have available, so we find ourselves in this perpetual cycle of disappointment, running faster and faster as we try to do everything, yet our goals keep eluding us.

To master time you need to spend it...