Starting an Online Business

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

We need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

You know, for the past you know, the better part of a decade, don't know, it's not the past decade, probably about eight years now, I've been working for myself. And, you know, I sit here now and I look around and I see so many people getting into business. And I think that's a great thing. Business has done a lot for me. It has taught me to be self reliant.

It's taught me a lot about the world and a lot about human beings. But as I notice more and more people getting into business, I'm also noticing more and more people making mistakes. For the past few years, I've been teaching courses on business through the London Real Academy. I was the lead instructor of the London Real Academy, a position I just left, not because I had a falling out with London Real or anything like that, but because it was time for me to move on. And that experience taught me so much.

It taught me so much about business, but also so much about human beings. And in this time period, where there are so many people turning toward business, turning toward trying to make their passion their way of making money, I think it's important that we understand what it really takes to start an online business. So that's what I'm gonna talk about today in today's Warrior Notes. Because I know there's a lot of you out there who have the potential to start your own businesses, and I'm gonna give you a few different resources that that you can use as veterans in order to try to start your own businesses and and places where you can get the type of information that you need. But I'm gonna talk about the basics of of laying your own foundation for what will make a potentially good and lucrative business, and I'm gonna talk about some of the mistakes I've seen people make.

For those of you who haven't been to this podcast before, my name is Chris Albert, and this is the Warrior Soul podcast. The idea behind this podcast came because over the past decade and a half of war, we've seen a really high rate of veteran suicide, really high rates of chronic disease in the veteran community, and really high rates of veteran homelessness. And there's a lot of people out there who are trying to raise awareness about these issues, but I don't wanna raise awareness. I wanna give tools, tools that are going to help US military veterans to live their best lives. My goal is not to stop veteran suicide.

My goal is to get all veterans to truly live. And so what I do in each episode of this podcast, whether it be an interview, whether it be a discussion about fitness that I publish on Wednesdays through our Fitness Notes, or whether it be these Warrior Notes where I talk about things to make you mentally stronger and more successful. I expect that you're going to get some sort of tool, a strategy, or something that you can take with you to apply immediately in order to make your life better. And if you're not a veteran, stick around. Everything I talk about here could help anybody.

Anybody who wants to make their lives better or who's willing to apply this information. I don't ask for anything return in return. All I ask is that you share these episodes out with people who could use them, that you share them with people who might be helped by a specific idea or something that you heard. And if you can, I truly ask that you pay us the highest compliment by writing us a review on iTunes? It really, really helps the show to grow, and it really helps us to spread this mission.

I also wanna mention that this podcast would not be possible without the good people at F Bomb Nutrition. They help us to pay for the bandwidth. They help us to pay for the software used in producing this these podcasts, and they're an amazing company. The product is a delicious and nutritious fat packet that you can carry around with you anywhere. They're famous for their macadamia nut butters.

They mix them up with chocolate. They mix them up with sea salt, with coconut butter, with pecan butter. And they're absolutely delicious. And like I said, you can carry around carry them around anywhere you wanna go. They're also sending boxes of this stuff over to the troops on the front lines overseas who are still currently deployed so that they can they can supplement their MREs with something that's nutritious and and that tastes really good.

If you're interested in getting your own f bombs, you can head over to www.dropanfbomb.com, and you can use the code Warrior Soul at checkout. Now I wanna get into this discussion of of what it really takes to start an online business, and I think a lot of people make the mistake at first of making it too complicated. Right? They think that they need to be working on their logo. They think they need to be working on their branding.

They think that they need to have, you know, a a perfect and beautiful website set up right away. And, you know, a lot of people might disagree with me on this, but I'm here to tell you that when you're first starting out, your logo is the last thing you should be thinking about. I've seen people drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on a logo and on branding material, and you can't be doing that until you've actually earned some money. You need to focus on what's important and not get distracted by all of the extra crap that, you know, most people try to focus on at first. So lesson one, don't focus on any of the extraneous stuff.

Don't spend hundreds of dollars on a logo. Don't spend thousands of dollars on a website. Don't spend thousands of dollars on graphic design, because you need that money to focus on other things. Right? And that's the two big assets that you have when you're starting out business, and that's both focus and money.

Right? And when I'm talking about focus, I'm obviously talking about time. Right? What types of things are you gonna concentrate on? So what should you be focused on when you're first trying to get into business?

Well, number one, you need to make sure that you have a good product. Now products can be delivered in in two types of formats. You can have a widget, and what a widget is is a solid thing. Let's say, like a a pocket knife or a carabiner or a physical product that you're using and that you're creating to physically deliver to people. The other type of business is a service business, and that is where you're delivering some piece of knowledge that you have, some thing you know how to do that other people want to learn about.

And you can actually do that fairly easily in today's economy, in today's business environment, because there are so many products out there that'll that'll allow you to deliver knowledge based products. Right? You have online courses, you have e books, you have, you know, YouTube. You have video platforms. All these different things allow you to to deliver knowledge.

You're actually consuming one of those right now, which is this podcast, and and this is what's known as a free product, and I'll get into that in a second. But understand that you have those two options out there. You can create a widget, or you can create a service. Now what should these products do? And the primary thing that you need to focus on before developing your product is to understand what problem you want to solve.

What is the problem you want to solve? Okay? A lot of people miss this. Business should always focus on solving a specific problem. Alright?

If it doesn't solve a specific problem, then it becomes a non essential item or a piece of junk or or something that people are you know, they're gonna buy maybe when it's convenient, but they will really not they're not gonna go crazy for it. Now why is that important? Why is it important that it solves a specific problem? Well, quite simply, because that's what creates the demand. Right?

If you're solving a problem, if you're solving a problem that people are having, then that is automatically going to create a demand for your product. And so you're going to be able to find people out there who are experiencing a problem. Now, on a very simple level, the first problem that I solved with Warrior Soul was the problem that veterans were experiencing when they got out of service. They felt like they weren't part of something. They felt like they weren't part of a group anymore.

And so the merchandise that I created, the T shirts, they allowed them to feel like they were still attached to their legacy as Marines, their their identity. And so that's why when I created my T shirts, I focused on creating T shirts that would appeal to a specific audience. I had a t shirt out there, and I still have this t shirt up on the on the merchandising. And it it quite simply said, keep calm and have a plan to kill everyone you meet. Now anybody outside of the Marine Corps community, anybody outside of the military community, really, is is gonna look at that t shirt.

I I I would get hate mail for it all the time. How could you create such a t shirt? This is this is completely savage. Why would you do that? But the marines loved it.

Right? And and the lesson here is this, you don't want to create a product for everyone. You want to create a product for a specific group of people. And we had a lot of success with that t shirt. And I'll give you another example with my other business, which is a online training business.

Now, you probably log on to the Internet, those of you who are into fitness, and you probably see a million online trainers out there trying to get your attention. They're trying to get you to lose fat, build muscle, look like them, essentially. Right? Now, as an online trainer, I had to focus my business on a specific subset of people. And in my experience, I had a disease, I still have this disease, it's called ulcerative colitis.

And it made my life a living hell at one time. Literally internal bleeding, I lost tons and tons of weight. I was absolutely miserable. And so, you know, I developed an expertise in the area because I was already working with nutrition programming. Had been coaching professional athletes, I've been coaching bodybuilders for quite a while.

So I put my focus on solving my own problem. I put my focus on alleviating the symptoms of ulcerative colitis, and I was able to put myself into remission through good nutrition practices. And so in solving my own problem, I developed a methodology for helping to solve other people's problems. And that's what I do with my coaching and nutrition programming now is I focus on people who are experiencing digestive issues and autoimmune disease. And so those are the types of clients that I'm reaching out to.

I'm not reaching out to everybody. I'm not putting things out there, like burn fat, build muscle, get a six pack, because everybody wants to do that. I instead am focusing on people who are experiencing a specific issue. I developed my expertise on this, and I created a product essentially for them. So that's the the the big rule here.

You guys got to be exclusionary. You can't create products for everybody. You've got to focus on a specific niche, and that niche should should be centered around a specific problem. Now, here's the next thing I really want to talk to you guys about. And that is that in order to provide a service product, right, widgets, you can you can probably, you know, either find somebody else's product out there, or you could develop something like a t shirt that that, you know, that's fairly easy to do.

But when it comes to marketing your own expertise, you really do need to make sure that you are an expert in whatever you're trying to coach people on. So if I I see a lot of people who just have good physiques, and they're trying to to market themselves because they have good physiques, and sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. But, you know, I I see a lot of scam artists out there. And I'll tell you, it's becoming easier and easier to tell a scam from something else. And I see so many people jumping into coaching and advice businesses and knowledge based businesses who don't have the qualifications in order to do so.

And they might make a little money upfront, but eventually, they're gonna get hammered. And that's because with the Internet, with social media, it's it's becoming a lot easier to unmask these types of people. And so if you're gonna do a knowledge based business, focus on an area that you either have expertise on or that you're willing to put the work in to become an expert in. Okay? Now, I also want to say this, when you're trying to search for for this, you really need to think about your own story.

And I think it's important that everybody do that. You examine your past for the lessons that you've learned. And a lot of you might not realize some of the expertise that you do have. If you've overcome a problem, if you've overcome a specific type of obstacle, then you can really go back to your past and you can think about the solutions you developed, and you can start to systematize them. Now, that's kind of what happened with me with the ulcerative colitis.

Now, had a nutrition background, I have an education in nutrition, I had certifications in nutrition. But that also I wasn't focusing on autoimmune disease up until it really affected me and then I put the work in to research the solution to my own problem, and then I developed a system for it. And that's something a lot of you can do as well. The next thing is this, and that is is throwing your hat in the ring. And this is where a lot of people get held up.

And what do I mean by throwing your hat in the ring? I mean, actually pulling the trigger and and trying to start a business. And a lot of people get held up because they think they need a massive following, or they think that they need, you know, a hugely subscribed YouTube channel or anything like that. And what I'll tell you is this, when I first started online training, I was literally living out of my car. Like, didn't have a following.

I didn't have, you know, a giant amount of Instagram followers or a giant amount of YouTube subscribers. I was just really hungry to put my services out there so I could make some money. And, you know, I had been going through a really, really bad experience. I went through a divorce, I had lost a business that I had previously owned, and I was put into a situation where I either had to act or had to kind of fall into oblivion and fall into a black hole and and, you know, stay in my situation of despair. And so I started recording YouTube videos kind of on a whim and and and just putting information out there that could help people.

And what happened was because I was addressing specific problems that people had, because I was very honest, because I was very forthcoming with my knowledge over YouTube, I started getting people contacting me from around the world. I would get people contacting me from, you know, places like Australia, and places like Asia, and The Middle East, and Europe. And they all wanted to know how they could work with me, so that I could help them help them with their fitness and help them with their health. And so I literally created a product on a whim, without a following, without without a giant following. I probably had less than 500 YouTube subscribers at the time.

I probably had less than 200 Instagram followers at the time, and I would just put information out there, and people would hear it. They'd share it with other people because it was helpful, and I'd put my email address out there for people to contact me if they had any questions about anything. And lo and behold, I would get people contacting me, asking me questions, and I started selling online training. And from living in my car to maybe a month and a half later, I was earning more money than I'd ever had in a job or anything like that. And I started seeing the power of this stuff.

And so, you know, the real thing I'm trying to slam home to you right now is that don't focus on trying to build a bunch of YouTube subscribers. Don't focus on trying to create a hit podcast or or trying to to, you know, become some sort of Instagram superstar. Focus on solving the problems. Focus on helping people first. And if you're helping people, then they'll get in touch with you.

They'll let you know whether or not you're reverberating with them or not, and they'll get in touch with you, and they'll ask you questions. And that's a way of building up a relationship. And that's a way of eventually converting them into customers. Right? So I see so many people out there, and they make this giant mistake.

And that is that they focus themselves just on becoming famous, rather than actually delivering a product and creating something that helps people. Right? And if you're just focused on becoming famous, that's fine. Right? You can create a podcast in your spare time while you're doing your job, but don't hold your breath in making money off of that.

Right? This this podcast right now, you know, it's it's pretty highly subscribed, but I don't make a bunch of money off of this. The sponsorship I get from F bomb, it pays for, you know, the bandwidth. It pays for the cost of creating this this this podcast. The reason why I do this podcast isn't to promote to people, it's to help.

It's to help for a specific cause, for a specific thing that I believe in with all my heart, and that is helping The US military veteran community to wake up and to adapt its role as a group of leadership in this country, because I think that this country needs it. And if you're going to do something like a podcast or a YouTube channel, your primary focus there should be on having some sort of specific purpose, some big reason why you're doing it, some driving force that's behind it, and that shouldn't be just making money. I see far too many people out there who are just using their platforms as promotional, and I think that's a very big mistake because in order to really sell to an audience, you have to have trust, right? And you to have to have authority. And if you're always trying to sell the people, you're ruining both, right?

So get your voice out there, put information out there that's going to help people, and then people will get in touch with you, and they'll want to buy your product. They'll want to they'll want to, you know, get your services, and that that's called the law of reciprocity. Right? Human beings like to buy things from other human beings who've helped them. Right?

And that's that's that's a huge thing to think about whenever you're trying to put anything together. You know, and and the last thing I'll cover today, because I don't want this to be like a a giant huge business course that that, you know, in one podcast, but keep it simple. Right? Keep it simple. Like I said before, you don't need a website that's going to cost you thousands of dollars.

Right? You don't need an expensive, beautiful looking website. You you need a landing page. Right? You need something that is going to allow you to collect leads, that's gonna allow you to collect contacts, and you can do that with a simple landing page.

You could do that on squarespace.com. You can even set set up a ClickFunnels ClickFunnels landing page, and you just put that up there. So you want to collect leads, and the reason why you want to collect leads is because that's going to be your major form of communication. Right? Collecting emails is going to be your major form of communication.

If you're just relying on Facebook, if you're just relying on YouTube, or any of these other social media platforms, there's a few big reasons why you shouldn't just rely on them. Number one is because they all rely on algorithms. Right? So and those algorithms change all the time. When I first started an online business, I started at a good time because Facebook does didn't have the algorithm it had today.

A single post on my personal page could go very, very far in in trying to get in touch with people. Right? Today, if I post something on our Facebook page for Warrior Soul, which has over 60,000 people who follow it, it's very hard to get a reach. Why? Because the Facebook algorithm suppresses the post.

And the reason why it suppresses the post is because Facebook wants you to pay for marketing and pay for advertising. The other thing to think about here is that, you know, I'm speaking to The US military veteran community, and many of you have a certain political ideology. And, you know, if that ideology comes out, or if it goes out there over social media, you know, it's not very popular amongst those who run these social media platforms. And so there's good evidence to suggest that if you have a conservative point of view on things, you have a point of view that doesn't mesh with what's going on out there in Silicon Valley, that your opinion is also going to be suppressed, and they're going to suppress your page with the algorithm. And so it's becoming harder and harder for certain types of businesses to get their message out there and to really influence people.

Alright, so just to recap the things that we covered today. Number one, if you're going to get an online business, make sure that you're focusing on solving a specific problem. That's the first step. The next step is decide exactly who you want to focus on. Decide on the specific group that you're going to try to sell to.

Don't try to sell to everybody. If you're trying to sell to everyone, you're going to be selling to no one. The next thing is keep it simple. Right? If you're hesitating, if you're, you know, thinking up things to try to keep yourself from getting started, like, oh, I need to focus on getting a logo, I got to start a big website or anything like that.

Don't just start. Right? You don't need a huge website. You don't need a fancy logo or anything like that. You need to focus on solving that problem and then creating a product or service that's going to provide a solution to that problem.

Right? If you're doing widgets or anything like that, of course, you got to figure out the supply chain and that kind of stuff. But if you're doing a service, you know, it's it's really as simple as just creating a platform that you can deliver the solution over. Right? So there's programs out there like Thinkific and Kajabi and and Udemy, all those different programs that allow you to do a course or something like that.

And then finally, you know, use social media and create content. But number one, don't use social media and your content to just promote your product. Use it to help people, and then people will reach out to you. People will get in contact with you. And then that is going to be your opportunity to really to to to sell.

And then from there, make sure you're collecting leads in some format that's outside of social media, building an email list. Right? Because social media is is kind of like an active volcano. It can change at any time. And, you know, like I said, a lot of the social media platforms aren't very friendly to people with certain ideologies.

You know, and I'm not really used to giving lectures like this over a podcast. I usually have people in front of me to talk, so sometimes I I ramble and sometimes I, you know, go into lecture format. And so if there's anything that you're not understanding, just get in touch with me. Let me know exactly, you know, what your questions are, and I'm happy to help. I wanna put you guys in touch with some free resources that you can use as veterans in order to understand this stuff a little bit more.

And the primary one is American Dream U. That's at americandreamu, the letter U, .org. And what they've got is a complete educational platform up there that's completely free for veterans. And there's a lot of masters of online business that that are giving classes through American Dream U, people like Tim Ferriss and and Grant Cardone, and some other people out there who are really good at teaching this stuff, probably probably a little bit better than I am right now over this podcasting format. But but definitely check out americandreamu.org.

They've got everything that you need to know there ranging from, you know, how to understand financials, how to build up your LinkedIn, but also how to do some of the things I talked about today, like creating a product or harnessing your story to create a product and things like that. And let me know if you like this. I'm willing to put more information out there like this for you guys. Truly believe that business is definitely a direction that veterans should think about going going through because, you know, you guys know how to lead. You guys know how to organize.

You know how to influence people. And those are skills that are invaluable as far as business goes. So let me know guys. And whatever you're doing, wherever you are, get out there and live your best lives while you can.