How to Launch an Online Business

Lesley Clavijo (https://lesleyclavijo.com) is our special guest on today's episode of Traffic and Leads Podcast (http://trafficandleadspodcast.com/). Lesley is an expert in the art of teaching small businesses how to learn. She’s been in this game for 8 years, and she loves creating products. Lesley teaches people how to figure out how to validate product ideas and then successfully launch them. Let’s get started!

IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN:

* Who Lesley Clavijo is, and how she got into the game of business launches. She started out as a DIY blogger, odd enough, and quickly found that her passion was with marketing, and creating her own products, rather than fixing things. Since then, she’s been helping small businesses launch successful start-ups and validate their products through trial and error.

* Lesley talks with me about the various ways to validate an idea, and stresses the importance of making sure your idea is validated before you try to market it to anyone. Most of them revolve around the content you’ve already written and curated yourself, and using it to your advantage in order to expand your knowledge to create a product that people are inherently asking for! Lesley reminds that you should especially be paying attention to what people are asking on social media, and through e-mails. Those are the questions you want to think of when you’re creating something!

* Lesley talks with us about her “reverse engineering” process when it comes to building up an audience, stating that you can start from scratch by creating an incentive—an irresistible offer—and putting it on a landing page. From there, you can attract people to your e-mail list, and start asking them what they’re struggling with in order to find a place to start brainstorming for your product!

* Lesley discusses her Facebook group, The Launch Room, where she can engage and ask people what they’re struggling with. It’s an awesome community where she can connect and work on things to launch with people together, earning everyone passive income by making usable products to sell online.

* Lesley discusses the multiple ways to launch, and gives me the details on what it means to validate a product through presale. Together, we go through the different steps involving a pre-sale, starting with simple advertising and building a foundation to market your product on, and going through the motions that will bring you to a beta testing phase.

* Lesley shares a story with me on how she built up and sold her own idea! Without any ad spend or traffic, she sold 40 spots of her product, and based her faith in a generated e-mail list she cultivated from offering a group she formed on Facebook of 300 interested clients a 5-day challenge. In exchange for relevant content, they signed up for her testing, and it’s been history ever since!

* Lesley leaves us with common mistakes people can make when attempting to launch, and warns us to be wary of making them ourselves. You must validate your idea before going public with it, otherwise, the chances of success are going to be very minimal. Make sure the public wants what you’re offering before you sell it! She also encourages the use of e-mail, as that’s where she makes her deepest connections to people.

* Briefly, Lesley also gives us an insight to her weekly newsletter, Happy Mail! It follows a specific three paragraph format, where each one focuses on something different. The first is a personal paragraph where she speaks of lessons learned from online business/marketing, the second paragraph is a newer piece of content, and the third paragraph is sharing content outside of the website, such as a workshop from a friend, or relevant blog posts that are not her own.