Build Your Business: Turning the Pieces into a System

Starting an online business is one thing. Building one that works consistently means getting the different parts to work together.

A website on its own is not a business. Neither is an email list, a social media account, a collection of tools or even a good product. Each can be useful, but the real value comes from connecting them so that each part has a clear purpose.

That usually means understanding who you want to reach, what they need, what you can offer them, how you will attract their attention and how you will build an ongoing relationship with them.

You don’t have to create a complicated system. In fact, simple systems are often easier to understand, manage and improve.

This page will show you how the main pieces fit together and how to develop them one step at a time.

Have a Simple Plan

You don’t need a lengthy business plan before you start building. But you do need enough of a plan to know what you are trying to achieve and where to concentrate your time and money.

At its simplest, your plan should answer five questions:

1. Who am I trying to reach?

The group of people most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

2. What problem can I help them solve?

This doesn’t necessarily have to be a major problem. It might be a need, an interest, a goal or simply something they want to understand or do better.

3. What can I offer them?

Your own product or service, an affiliate recommendation, useful information — or a combination of these.

4. How will I reach them?

Search engines, email, social media, paid advertising, content, recommendations or another source of traffic. You don’t need to use them all.

5. How can the business make money?

Be clear about where income could eventually come from. Visitors and subscribers are valuable, but a business ultimately needs a way of generating revenue.

Write your answers down. They don’t have to be perfect and they can change as you learn more. A simple written plan gives you something against which to judge new ideas, tools and opportunities.

Before adding something new, ask: Does this help me carry out my plan — or is it simply another distraction?

Know Who You Want to Help

Trying to reach everybody usually makes it much harder to reach anybody. The clearer you are about the people you want to help, the easier it becomes to decide what to offer, what to write about and where to find them.

You don’t need to invent a complicated “customer avatar” with a fictional name, age, favourite breakfast cereal and life history. Start with something much simpler.

Ask yourself:

• Who is most likely to be interested in what I know, create or recommend?
• What are they trying to achieve?
• What problems or frustrations might be getting in their way?
• What questions are they already asking?
• Where are they likely to look for answers?

The aim is not to exclude everyone else. It is to make your message relevant enough that the right people recognise that you are talking to them.

As your business develops, you’ll learn more about your audience from the questions they ask, the emails they open, the pages they visit and the products or services that interest them. That information is usually more valuable than trying to guess everything at the beginning

Develop the Right Offer

Once you understand who you want to help and what they are looking for, the next question is simple: what can you offer that is genuinely useful to them?

An offer doesn’t necessarily mean creating your own product. Depending on your business, it might be:

• your own digital product, course or service;
• a physical product;
• a product or service you recommend as an affiliate;
• a membership or subscription;
• useful free information that introduces people to something you may offer later; or
• a combination of several of these.

Start With the Need, Not the Product

It is tempting to find a product you like and then try to work out who might buy it. Usually, it makes more sense to start with your audience and ask what would genuinely help them.

A good offer should have a clear purpose. Someone encountering it should be able to understand what it is, who it is for and why it might be useful to them.

If You’re an Affiliate

Don’t assume your first product needs to be large or complicated. A focused product that solves one particular problem can be more useful — and much easier to create and test — than trying to produce the ultimate answer to everything

If You’re Creating Your Own Product

Don’t assume your first product needs to be large or complicated. A focused product that solves one particular problem can be more useful — and much easier to create and test — than trying to produce the ultimate answer to everything.

The best offer isn’t necessarily the biggest or most profitable. It’s the one that provides genuine value to the right person.

Build Your Online Home

Your website is the part of your online business that you control. Social media platforms, marketplaces and other services can be useful, but their rules, algorithms and even their availability can change. Your own website gives your business a permanent home.

It doesn’t need to be large or complicated when you begin. A simple website can establish who you are, explain what you offer and give visitors a clear idea of what they should do next.

Give Every Page a Purpose

A page should normally have a reason for existing. It might explain something, answer a question, recommend a product, collect an email address or encourage someone to take a particular action.

Try not to add pages simply because other websites have them.

Make the Next Step Obvious

When somebody reaches a page, ask yourself what you would ideally like them to do next. That might be to read another article, join your email list, look at a product, contact you or make a purchase.

You don’t need a button every few paragraphs, but visitors shouldn’t have to work out where to go next.

Keep Funnels Simple

A funnel is simply a planned route that takes someone from one stage to another — perhaps from an advertisement to a landing page, then onto an email list and eventually to an offer.

Funnels can become very sophisticated, but they don’t need to start that way. A few well-connected pages with a clear purpose can be remarkably effective.

Bring the Right People to It

Once you have somewhere useful to send people, you need visitors. In online marketing this is usually called traffic — but the number of visitors matters far less than whether they are the right visitors.

A hundred people who are genuinely interested in what you offer can be much more valuable than thousands who arrived with little reason to stay.

Start With One or Two Traffic Sources

There are many ways people might discover your business, including:

• search engines;
• useful articles and other content;
• social media;
• email;
• video;
• recommendations and referrals;
• online communities; and
• paid advertising.

You don’t need to use all of them. Choose one or two that suit your business, your audience and the amount of time or money you can realistically commit.

Free Traffic Isn’t Really Free

Traffic from search engines, articles, videos or social media may not involve paying for each visitor, but it usually requires time and consistent effort. Paid advertising costs money but can sometimes produce results more quickly.

Neither approach is automatically better. The important thing is understanding what each is costing you and what it is producing.

Send People Somewhere Relevant

Don’t concentrate so much on generating traffic that you forget what happens when somebody arrives.

The page they reach should relate closely to whatever brought them there. Someone who clicks because you promised information about a particular problem shouldn’t arrive on a general homepage and have to search for it.

Measure Before You Spend More

If a traffic source is bringing visitors, find out what those visitors actually do. Do they read, click, subscribe or buy?

More traffic isn’t always the answer. Sometimes improving what happens to the traffic you already have is far more valuable.

Build an Audience You Can Keep

Most people who visit your website will leave without buying anything — and many may never return. An email list gives interested visitors a way to stay connected with you after that first visit.

Unlike followers on a social media platform, your email list is an audience you can communicate with directly. You are not relying entirely on an algorithm deciding whether people see what you publish.

Give People a Reason to Join

Simply asking someone to “subscribe to my newsletter” is rarely very compelling. Give them a clear reason to hand over their email address.

That might be:

• a useful guide or checklist;
• a short report or ebook;
• a video or mini-course;
• access to useful resources;
• regular practical tips; or
• updates about a subject in which they have a genuine interest.

The free resource often offered in return for an email address is usually called a lead magnet.

Quality Matters More Than Size

A smaller list of people who genuinely want to hear from you can be far more useful than a large list of people who rarely open your emails.

Don’t become obsessed with subscriber numbers. Pay attention to whether people read your emails, click your links and remain interested in what you have to say.

Look After the List You Build

Getting someone onto your list is only the beginning. Send useful information, communicate regularly enough that people remember who you are, and don’t make every email a sales pitch.

Give people a straightforward way to unsubscribe, and treat their email address with respect.

Your email list isn’t simply a collection of addresses. It’s a group of people who have given you permission to keep the conversation going.

Follow Up and Build Trust

Getting someone onto your email list isn’t the end of the process. It’s the beginning of a relationship. What you send afterwards will largely determine whether they continue to read what you have to say.

Start by Being Useful

Your first priority shouldn’t be to sell something immediately. Help people understand a problem, answer questions, share useful information or point them towards resources that may help.

That doesn’t mean you should never promote anything. It means giving people a reason to value your emails even when they don’t buy.

Let People Get to Know You

You don’t need to turn every email into your life story, but allowing some of your personality and experience to come through can make your communication much more human.

Explain what you’ve tried, what you’ve learned and why you recommend—or don’t recommend—particular approaches. You don’t need to pretend to have all the answers.

Be Consistent Without Becoming a Nuisance

There is no perfect email frequency for every business. The important thing is to communicate often enough that subscribers remember who you are, without sending messages simply because you feel you ought to.

Useful and relevant beats frequent and forgettable.

Automation Can Help — But Keep It Human

An email system can automatically welcome new subscribers and send a planned sequence of useful messages. This can save considerable time and ensure that everyone receives important information.

But automation shouldn’t make your communication sound automated. Write to people as people.

Trust takes time to build and seconds to lose. Treat your subscribers in the way you would want a business to treat you.

Turn Interest into Income

An online business eventually needs to generate income. That doesn’t mean turning every page or email into a sales pitch. It means having a clear and appropriate way for people to buy something when what you offer meets their needs.

Decide How Your Business Will Make Money

There are many possibilities. You might:

• sell your own digital products or courses;
• provide a service or consultancy;
• earn commissions by recommending other people’s products as an affiliate;
• offer a membership or subscription;
• sell physical products; or
• combine several sources of income as the business develops.

You don’t need several income streams at the beginning. One that you understand and can develop properly is a perfectly good place to start.

Make the Offer Clear

When you recommend or sell something, explain what it does, who it is for and why someone might find it useful.

Don’t assume that more hype produces more sales. Clear information can be far more persuasive than extravagant promises, particularly if people already know and trust you.

Don’t Be Afraid to Sell

If something genuinely provides value, there is nothing wrong with asking people to buy it.

The important distinction is between making an appropriate offer and continually trying to sell something regardless of whether it suits the person receiving the message.

Know What a Sale Is Worth

Revenue isn’t the same as profit. Advertising, software, affiliate fees, payment processing and other costs can all affect what you actually earn.

As the business develops, understand what it costs to attract a customer and what that customer is worth to the business. You don’t need complicated financial analysis at the beginning, but you do need to know whether your activities are actually making money.

The aim isn’t simply to make more sales. It’s to build a business in which providing value and generating income support each other.

Measure, Learn and Improve

An online business is rarely built perfectly the first time. You put something in place, see what happens, learn from the results and make it better. That process never really stops.

Measure What Matters

There are countless statistics you could track, but you don’t need a dashboard full of numbers simply because they are available.

Start with straightforward questions:

• Where are your visitors coming from?
• Which pages are they looking at?
• Are visitors joining your email list?
• Are subscribers opening and clicking your emails?
• Which offers are generating interest or sales?
• What are you spending to produce those results?

The figures that matter are the ones that help you make a decision.

Look for the Weak Link

If something isn’t working, try to identify where the process is breaking down rather than changing everything at once.

Plenty of visitors but very few subscribers might suggest a problem with the landing page or lead magnet. Plenty of subscribers but few sales might point towards the offer or follow-up. Very little traffic may mean the website and offer are perfectly adequate but simply aren’t being seen.

Changing one thing at a time also makes it much easier to discover what actually made the difference.

Listen to People as Well as Numbers

Statistics tell you what people did. They don’t always tell you why.

Questions, replies to emails, comments and conversations can reveal problems and opportunities that analytics may never show you. Pay attention to the language people use and the things they repeatedly ask about.

Improve What Works

It’s very tempting in online marketing to abandon something that is working because a newer and more exciting idea has appeared.

Before starting again, ask whether the better option might simply be to improve what you already have — a stronger page, a clearer offer, a better email sequence or more traffic from a source that is already producing results.

Your Next Move

You now have the basic framework of an online business. You don’t need to work on every part at once. Identify the part of your system that needs attention next and concentrate on that.

Build one part. Make it work. Then improve it and move on to the next.