Step 1 - Clarifying Your Business Strategy
The foundation of building any software system, i.e., your online platform is to first understand what the business needs. For thought leaders seeking to help others with their knowledge and expertise, the primary requirement here is to understand who your audience is, what their problems are, and how you can help them solve their problems.
Next you need to think about the best ways that you can engage your audience online. Your challenge is to get their attention, and then interactively engage them in a series of both online and offline conversations about their problems and how you may be able to help them. This series of conversations is called a “customer journey.”
The customer journey is a process where you meet and get to know people over time through a series of online and offline conversations. They need to get to know, like, and trust you before they will buy from you. Similarly, you need to get to know, like and trust them as well, so that you know how you can best serve them, especially if you plan to work together one on one in a professional services relationship. Along the way, you are progressively building and cultivating relationships with people. You create a series of steps where they receive value from you, and you serve and support them with your knowledge, experience and perspective.
The business part of this relationship is that along the customer journey, your customers and clients will pay you to help them solve their problems. And your job as the business owner is to provide value by helping people get what they want and need at each step along the way.
Your customer journey provides the backbone of your business model and your business strategy. This journey includes defining a clear set of product and service offers and value delivery systems for those offers. You need to set up an offer pricing structure that allows people to progressively get to know, like, and trust you at low risk for them, until they discover the value of what you provide to them. In designing this customer journey, you will progressively serve your clients in the most effective ways to meet their needs, and to help them solve specific problems at whatever stage they are in at the time.
To your online success!
If you want to get started now learning about my online business success system, you can start here for free: Accelerate Your Online Success.
I’m currently writing a book about Online Business Success, and I am sharing excerpts of that book here, but if you want to get a “quick start” on learning how this approach can save you loads of time and frustration, please come to my live workshop – Accelerate Your Online Success 5 Day Challenge.
