Finding Your Home in the Online Jungle
Do you ever feel like an explorer trying to find your way while building your business? Being an online entrepreneur is hard and finding good coaching for entrepreneurs is even harder! I know. There's alot of hype out there that says it isn't.
It takes work. It takes commitment and there's no magic button.
Not even when you see online "entrepreneurs" teaching how they made $20,000 yesterday in a business they started last week.
What's fact? What's fiction? Who can you trust?
There are so many pieces to creating a business that focusing in one area can mean ignoring another. But ignoring any area of your business is detrimental to its success as a whole.
It can feel like a never ending merry go round spinning so fast you can't get off. Until you get some solid ground under your feet.
So how can you create a solid foundation for your business?
You have to find support. You have to have someone you trust to talk to about issues and how to fix them. But this can't just be anyone. You wouldn't talk to a roofer about a problem with your car, right?
Having different levels of peer support is essential.
Why is that?
Have you ever been to a workshop or a class and you were scared to ask questions in front of the room. You felt a little embarrassed or unsure because of what you didn't know? (By the way we've all been there). It felt alot easier to seek out someone who you felt was in the same place as you, right?
You just created an alliance with someone else and things feel a little less scary.
But two people who are inexperienced still need the right answers. You still need some direction but you aren't going to walk right up to the teacher and ask for one on one help yet. That's ok.
Coaching For Entrepreneurs
Now you find someone who's at the next level and willing to lead you to right places. You still have to do the work, but they're showing you which door to open. These are the best people to know. These are the people who make the introductions, the people who "know people", the folks who are really working in their business and creating something successful.
Next, you have your mentors. These are the people you resonate with. They have your same values and you see their business as a model for how you'd like your own to run. Now remember, your mentors aren't necessarily people in your own niche. Any business owner regardless of their product can fall into this category. This is someone you follow and you've become active in their community; enough that you can ask a question and get an answer, a trusted answer.
Then you have your coach or strategist or consultant...whatever the term is in your industry. These are the people you pay to be part of your support team. You want to pay someone to help you elevate your business. Believe me, if someone is paying me to be on their team, it's in my best interest that they succeed.
This group is important because as your business grows, it becomes necessary to have a solid strategy for your future in place. A strategy based on your core values, beliefs and vision long term. These are the people who see "outside" your business and who can help you stay on the right path. These are also the people who help you reach a place where you are working "on" your business, not "in" your business. There's a really big difference here. Every successful person I know has someone they pay to coach, strategize or consult with.
I think belonging to a community is the single most important thing you can do for yourself and for your business. As we sit behind our computer screens, we are isolated and many times overwhelmed. Your community becomes a sounding board for your ideas or problems, as a place to find testers, a place to find specialists to do work for you, or sometimes just a place to goof around and have fun.
We all need that. Even the most introverted and shy people can come out of their shell a bit in an online setting.
I've spent alot of time talking about community but there are also two other required areas when trying to establish a solid business foundation.
You Must Have Trusted Training
Everyone needs training in something. No matter who you are. But the challenge is figuring out if you need training on an a concept or business strategy or if you need specific training on a technique. For example, building a long term social marketing plan for your business is conceptual. Why is it a concept? Because things change quickly in this area. Once you understand how the marketing plan works, you then start tackling the techniques to make that happen. What if you built your entire marketing plan around Instagram for example? Then Instragram made major changes to their business structure and all of the sudden that platform was no longer where your customers were. Now what do you do?
If you have the conceptual understanding of how a social marketing plan works, all your eggs wouldn't be in this one basket. In fact, you'd easily be able to scale your efforts in another area to make up for your losses.
It's easy to become overwhelmed with all the things you need to do for your business. But having basic business foundations allow you to build and scale your efforts easily because you know the processes.
Here's an example - every business owner regardless of their niche has to know how to build a list, how to drive traffic, how to manage business operations, right? Once you have mastered the concept of building a list, you can then apply those concepts to learning different techniques. The technique for building a list on Facebook is different than building a list using email. But the concept is the same. The structure, the pieces you need to do it are the same.
I know this can be hard to wrap your mind around but building foundations based on concepts and strategies allow you reduce the bright shiny object overwhelm.
Your Business Needs Tools
Tools are the things that allow you to operate. Your hosting platform is a tool. Your video player is a tool. Your auto-responder is a tool. Merchant services, graphics editor, page builders, advertising tracking solutions...
All these things are tools. They are what allow your business to operate day to day and should be something that pushes you to be more automated. But alot of us have tools we just knew we needed and have never even opened. Having someone test tools for you and give you honest opinions about them is priceless ( look, we're back to community).
Coaching For Entrepreneurs
If you’ve been putting off building your online business, STOP IT NOW!
There’s no better time than right now to get started. Online business coaching courses are readily available and as an online entrepreneur, this is where you should begin.
The key is to finish what you’ve intended to do for years - build that online income stream that protects your assets in uncertain times.
And get it done - fast.
I read something by Gaylon McDowell in Science of Mind magazine this week that hit me like a ton of bricks:
“Results matter because I believe human beings can and often do create self-delusion around intention, action and results. Sometimes people lie to themselves about where they are in consciousness because they don’t want to evaluate the results they are getting.”
...evaluate the results they are getting...
You can’t think yourself into success. You must act to be successful.
If you’re not willing to act, then this course is not for you.
But if you understand the importance of taking action in the right sequence with the right guidance on the right opportunities, then I want to introduce you to Fast Business Start Up. Click now and take a look at the immediate results our members are getting from this coaching for entrepreneurs program!
David Perdew is the CEO and founder of NAMS - the Novice to Advanced Marketing System. He’s a journalist, consultant, and serial entrepreneur who has built one of the most successful and fastest-growing business training systems online today called the MyNAMS Insiders Club.
The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.
He took a year off in 2003 to personally build a 2200 square foot log cabin in north Alabama where he and his wife and two dogs and a cat live on 95 acres of forest with four streams and 60-foot waterfall.
The NAMS team includes his daughter, Jen, who is an email marketing and automation specialist. Jen runs the day to day business and is one of the primary trainers in our MyNAMS Insiders Club.
I agree on the value of community! Recently, I was interviewed online and the interviewer asked me for book recommendations. I said, no book, I recommend joining an online community — that’s the best value you can get.
I recently joined the NAMS community and am looking forward to being a part of such a great community. I’ve been trying too long to do things on my own, so I now look forward to getting the help I need from people that have the experience I need to succeed.
It’s so easy to feel isolated especially if you’re a solopreneur. Add working from home and online to the mix and the problem is compounded. Finding a community of like minded people who “get what you do” is like finding an oasis in the dessert – it’s essential to nourish and sustain you as you move forward toward your goals.
You can get very lonely as an entrepreneur. It makes a world of difference to have peers to talk to, get ideas from, and to be able to go to for support. You don’t have to do it alone.
NAMS really rocks with the best of friendships! So many from the NAMS Network have encouraged and motivated me, beyond myself, for years now! We cannot do it alone. I can get into anxiety-mode with an online issue or decision — and stay that way for weeks. OR I can bring it to NAMS Insiders and BAM, answers arrive!
I don’t do Jungles well. My former community, SBI/Sitesell told us to keep our blinders on, they had resources for everything we needed. I did that until I needed to grow a bit further and NAMS does that perfectly for me! I need a Community of action-takers who don’t judge others who aren’t quite there yet. I also need to help people, those who are a bit newer to the online world compared to me. I help many and love to pay it forward.
p.s. I am retired and could easily live a nice relaxed lifestyle, but that’s not enough for me. I need some action and challenges in life — and working online, in a community, is perfect for a retired introvert like me!
We need people to support us. Most entrepreneurs are in this without anyone else supporting them where they are. That’s where on-line support comes in. You have to be involved with a group who you can trust to give you honest feedback, support you with accolades when appropriate and suggestions of change in direction when needed. You need a cheerleader. You need someone offering direction because you are too close to your business to see what needs to be adjusted.
That’s what NAMS is for me. I have to mentors providing direction, David and Jen, and a host of supporters in the NAMS Insiders group.
I am blessed and thankful.