I've been reflecting a lot on the growth of my business these past couple of years. There was a time when I was stuck and had no idea what to do next. I felt I had done everything right, but nothing was happening. I wasn’t seeing any growth, I wasn’t getting many sales, and I felt like I was wasting my time—and I mean a ton of time, too.

Month after month, I was feeling less and less motivated to continue going on as a creator. I really felt like giving this all up after nearly a year and a half of not seeing any meaningful results for the thousands of hours I had put in. But it was at this moment I realized that I was putting so much time into the business, but I wasn’t doing it the right way. I was just running with every idea that popped in my head, with no direction, no plan, and no true validated idea of what my audience actually wanted.

So, in the following 12 months, I decided to do things differently. To go about building this little one person startup business the right way. So, I'm going to share with you the simple strategy that helped me build a profitable online business in just 12 months.

When I first started, I had no system in place. I was randomly posting content, throwing together digital products I thought people wanted, and hoping something would work. Sometimes, I’d get a few sales, but most of the time, nothing happened. It wasn’t until I broke everything down into four phases—researching, building, testing, and scaling—that I started seeing real results.

Now, my system brings in thousands of leads every month, and I’m going to walk you through how I built it in under a year.

Months 1-3: The Research Phase

Before I started creating any more content or marketing anything else, I spent three months studying what actually works. I didn’t just watch what the big creators did, though—I analyzed why they did it.

Here’s what I discovered:

* Focus on one topic and build content pillars. If your content is all over the place, your audience won’t know what to follow you for. Stick to one niche and go deep.

* Post daily and engage with others. The fastest way to grow is to show up every day and interact with people in your space. You need to be social on social platforms.

* Repackage and reuse content. Your best ideas should be used more than once. Turn a blog post into a thread, or turn a thread into multiple short posts. Good content should be reused.

* Read through forums and community chats. This is where people share the exact problems they have. You can learn what those pains are, the words they use, and the key phrases.

Most people skip the research phase and jump straight into creating. This is a mistake because they don’t know what they need to build and who they are building it for. By studying what works, you’ll save months or years of trial and error. You don’t want to find out five months later that no one wants the products you spent several months building. You’ll spend a whole year of building and marketing a failed product. So don’t skip this step.

Month 4-6: The Creation Phase

Once I realized what was working and what my target audience wanted, I had a solid idea of what I needed to do. I needed to put together content in a document, label it as a guide, and ensure it provided a solution to my customers' problems. This is where I spent the next three months creating digital products (both free and paid) and building the marketing funnels.

This is what I learned:

* Your marketing funnel needs to be frictionless. Confusing landing pages, messy checkouts, and weak CTAs will kill your conversion rate. Make the customer’s journey easy for people to buy.

* Your content should sel