If you’re just starting an online business, the whole idea of it may seem overwhelming to you. You search online “how to start an online business” and you read blog posts and articles on the things you need to do to start an online business. You need to have a website, an email list, a shopping cart, learning management system (if you want to sell courses and trainings), payment gateway, lead magnets, email marketing platform and the list goes on!

All of this gets too confusing and overwhelming for you that you just don’t start. So you put your plans aside and think that creating an online business is only for “techy” people, not for normal people like you (and me!).

Have faith, my friend. The great thing about starting an online business in this day and age is that setting one up has never been easier. In fact, it’s getting easier every day as more and more amazing applications and software are being created for laymen (or laywomen) to set up their infrastructure and just focus on creating the product.

In this post, I’m going to be talking about the three things that you need to focus on first to get your business up and running. These are the most important aspects of your business. Remember, the key is to build a sustainable business – so build it slowly to avoid burn out.

1. Your email list.

Yep, this is the one thing you should be focused on. Your email list will be the people who are your potential customers – the ones you should be nurturing, giving value to and constantly communicating to. These are people who have willingly given your email address to you because they want to hear from you. I’ve already talked about the importance of an email list in this post here, so do check it out if you haven’t yet.

You can start off by signing up for a MailChimp account – it’s free for the first 2,000 customers. Once you feel you’re ready to upgrade, you can purchase their plans or choose other email marketing platforms like ActiveCampaign (we’re using this for My English Matters), GetResponse or ConvertKit.

Once you have that set up, it’s time to start getting people on to your list! Write awesome content, create a lead magnet or a freebie to entice them in giving their email address to you.

2. Have a real website and blog (not blogspot.com or wordpress.com)

Now the main reason you need to have your own website with a dot com is because you can create an email address with your domain name. This is important because when you send an email using the email marketing platform such as MailChimp, your sender address should be your domain name. If the sender’s address is a gmail addres, example yourname@gmail.com, it’s likely going to end up in people’s spam folders.

I’ve written a blog post about creating your website here if you haven’t read it yet.

Your website should also be a place for you to showcase your product, services and expertise. It is highly likely that people want to know more about you before hiring you or buying from you. You must also update your “About” page – this is something a lot of people overlook, but this is the next most important page to update after your front page. People will be curious to know more about the people behind the brand.

You’ll also need to put your “subscribe” form on your website so that you capture their emails before they leave. As mentioned above, come up with an awesome freebie or lead magnet to entice them. I’ll write about freebies and lead magnets in a future post.

Write a few blog posts first before you share your website to the world – it’s all about first impressions. You’ve got to look like you’ve put some effort into your website before you reveal it to the world. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be good enough.

3. Your product!

You’re only in business once you’ve made your first sale. So if you know what you’ll be selling, talk about it in your blog posts and emails that you send to your subscribers.

Don’t know what you’ll be selling yet? Ask your email subscribers what they want from you! If you’re able to get at least 1,000 subscribers, it’s likely that they’ll even tell you what they want. For our business, My English Matters, we’ve had our subscribers telling us to create an online course for them. That was always our plan, but we wanted to build an audience first before starting it. Nothing is worse than creating something that your audience doesn’t want to buy.

So there you have it. The three things you should be focusing on first to start your online business. That’s how we started – with just the basics. All the other stuff will be added on later as you grow your business. What about things like SEO, weekly content, pop-up boxes, landing pages, payment gateways, shopping carts, etc that you hear so often on online marketing blogs? Those are things that you should be aware of, but you’ll know when you need them. You’ll know you’ll need them because as your business gets running, you’ll want to make it run better with all those apps and software.

But for now, you just need to focus on getting started. You also probably don’t have much money to spend on your business yet, so you want to keep your costs low. So I hope this will help you to put things in perspective so you focus on what matters in the early stages.

Leave me a comment with what you’re struggling with in starting your own business and I’ll see you in my next blog post!