The New System To Launch an Online Business: The Ultimate Guide

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

Whether you’re new to the game or a seasoned entrepreneur, there’s a lot that goes into launching an online business.

From choosing an offer to sell to growing your online presence, there is a myriad of things to consider.

Add to that a staggering amount of eCommerce options — from marketing platforms to analytics tools — and the task seems almost impossible.

Luckily, here at systeme.io, we’ve found a new proven system that you can use to start and grow a thriving online business.

Plus, we’ve decided to share the whole thing with you for free!

Throughout this 4-part guide, we’re going to provide you with the ultimate step-by-step framework that will walk you through all the components of our new system.

All it will take from you is a little bit of dedication, hard work, and tenacity.

So, without further ado, here’s the new system that will help you create, manage, and scale a successful online business!

1. Introduction: The New System to Launch an Online Business

1.1. The Business Model

Understanding the problem that you need to solve for your customers is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when starting an online business – or any business for that matter.

Another important aspect is figuring out how you’re going to make money. This is where your business model comes in.

At its core, our new system’s business model revolves around the change industry — which is focused on experts, coaches, and consultants.

So, what do you want to do for your customer?

You want to help your customers go from point A to point B.

For example:

If you own a restaurant, your customers want to go from, “I want to have a great time and eat delicious food ” (point A) to, “I’m having a great time, and I’m eating delicious food” (point B).

Your offer is your promise of change to your customer. Its intention is to take your customer from point A to point B.

It is the most important aspect of your marketing.

Sadly, most newcomers who start an online business focus on other, less important things.

We’re here to tell you that you should start by focusing on your offer.

If you have a good offer, you’ll be making sales within a few days of your initial launch!

1.1.1. Advantages of This Business Model

One of the best things about this business model is that it will stay profitable over the long term.

As your confidence grows, your customer base will grow; and the more offers you have, the more traffic you’ll generate.

To implement this model, you can start with as little as $100 to get it up and running.

Plus, you’ll start generating a profit quickly, as the offers you’ll be selling will have very high-profit margins (50% - almost 100%).

In the long run, you want to feel good about what you’re doing. You also want your customers to be happy. In other words, you want great testimonials.

With this business model, you’ll be making money while helping people. The best of both worlds!

1.2. The Old Way to Launch an Online Business

To understand why our new system works so well, it’s important to first understand the old way and why we believe it’s outdated.

When Aurelien Amacker, the founder of systeme.io, started building his online business in 2010, the best strategy was:

Build an email list of 1000 subscribers
Survey this list to find their biggest problems
Create an online course that solves this problem

Don’t be mistaken, this system worked well in the past.

When Aurelien started a blog about learning English in 2010, he built up an email list of about 4000 people, created a 2-month online course about learning English, and made €3052 ($3500) at the first launch!

Over time, he used this strategy to generate over €2 million in sales.

However, he soon realized that it had quite a few disadvantages:

It takes time to build a big enough email list
You need to write a sales page
The conversion rates are low (1%-5% for a product that is priced less than $200)
You need to create an online course
The price tags are low, so you will need a lot of customers to make a living out of it.

1.3. The New Way to Launch an Online Business
(Faster and More Efficient)

Aurelien discovered the flaws in the old system and started developing a new system over the last few years.

Using this new method, in just a few months he was able to scale his business’ monthly income from €30 000 to almost €70 000!

Compared to the old strategy, this new method works a lot faster.

Here’s how it works:

Create a premium offer ($497 - $997)

There’s no need to create an online course or a sales page – just an offer (a promise of change and a price).

When deciding on a price for your product, it’s not about how much time it takes to create it, but rather about how much it helps your client.

Sell it face-to-face while delivering a ton of value

You’ll be selling face-to-face via Skype, a phone call, or any live interaction.

By selling face-to-face and delivering a lot of value, you’ll get insanely high conversion rates!

Using this method, Aurelien was able to convert a third of the people he was talking to on the phone for a $6000 coaching program.

You will be surprised by how much you learn during these interactions.

You also won’t need to make hundreds of calls to be good at it, after just a few calls you’ll have learned so much already.

Build a team to delegate

Once your business is established, build a team that handles the work for you.

This means that you will have more time and resources to scale your business.

Usually, you’d need a huge client base to be able to make a living with an online business, but with the new system, you can easily change that.

You’ll be able to make a living with just a couple of clients per month!

I know what you’re thinking.

“This sounds great! Where do I begin?”

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

In the rest of this post, we’ll be providing you with an in-depth guide that will show you everything about our new system and how you can use it for your business.

After completing these steps, you’ll be equipped with all the tools and knowledge required to start an online business that is bound to succeed!

Ready to start your journey to success?

2. Step 1: Launch

Launching an online business in the current landscape won’t be an easy task.

The competition is fierce. There is an increasing demand for convenience, and product markets are saturated.

You’ll have to make sure that the foundations of your business are rock solid by picking the right niche and making sales from the start.

We’re going to show you how to do just that.

2.1. Pick a Niche

The first thing you have to do is decide on your niche.

In all honesty, with today’s online product market, it’s difficult to find a profitable niche.

Luckily, we have outlined a strategy that you can follow to ensure that your offers are a success!

To ensure that you find a profitable niche, you have to ask yourself: “Are there already people making money with this niche?”

If the answer is yes, then that niche is profitable.

If there is no competition in the specific niche you're considering, it usually means that someone has already tried this route and has failed.

This is a massive red flag. It implies that there is no money to be made.

Aurelien has started 3 businesses and they have all been successful.

Why? Because he only launched businesses in industries where there were already people making money.

When Aurelien decided to start his blog about learning English, he knew that there were people spending money in this market. All he had to do was come up with a good enough offer.

Be careful to pick an industry based only on its profitability.

To be sustainable, you should also pick a niche that you like.

Think about it — without passion, what’s the driving force behind your online business?

By being passionate about your niche, you can better deliver its value and mission into the market.

It should be something that you can see yourself being passionate about for a few years.

When you’re doing something that you love, it will never feel like a day of work.

It will also be beneficial if you choose an area in which you have some special skills, training, or experience.

However, don’t think that you need to be an expert to go into a specific field. You can easily learn a new skill by dedicating time and doing a bit of research.

With our method, you’ll be able to bring a lot of value to the market, even without being an expert.

Don’t be afraid to make decisions. Pick a niche quickly and move on from there.

Remember: Failing is learning!

2.2. Run Strategy Sessions

After you’ve decided on your niche, it’s time to create an offer.

You’re probably thinking “How can I create an offer without having an audience?”

The answer is simple: Run strategy sessions.

Start by publishing content on social networks with a clear call to action for your target audience to book a strategy session with you.

During these strategy sessions, you’ll be talking to your leads live, meaning that these interactions will be able to convert customers very quickly.

You can use tools like Ringover to get access to unlimited phone calls for a small fixed fee of $30.

Before you book live strategy sessions with your leads, use a form to filter out those who seem to lack motivation.

In the form, ask questions that will help you understand the lead’s urgency or pain points. For example:

What is the biggest problem you’re struggling with?
What will happen if you don’t solve this problem? How will you feel?

As a rule of thumb, you should measure your lead’s motivation by gauging how much they write.

The more people write, the more motivated they are.

When you’re just starting out, you can go ahead with most people regardless of the information on the completed form.

It will be a good way to practice your skills!

So, what do you do on the call?

It’s really easy. All you have to do is ask 3 simple questions.

When asking these questions, you’ll deliver a ton of value by helping prospective customers identify their goals and figure out the best way to achieve them.

Importantly, asking these questions will help you discover whether you’ll be able to help your prospective customer. If you think you can, make an offer!

Question 1- Define the goal

If we were to have this conversation 3 years from now, what needs to have happened in both your professional and personal life for you to feel completely happy?

This question aims to identify the dream. You want to find out what your prospective customer’s goals are.

This very powerful question was first proposed by the visionary Dan Sullivan. Just by asking this question and really listening, you’re going to add so much value.

Plus, you’re doing it for free!

Question 2 - Define the plan

What steps do you need to take in order to reach your goals?

Once you’ve identified the dream in the first question, the second question asks, “how do you get there?”.

Sometimes, the customers themselves are unsure of the path they should take.

By asking this question, you’ll help them realize what needs to happen for them to achieve success.

Question 3 - Assess obstacles/transition to the offer

What are the obstacles that could prevent you from reaching your goals?

This is where your prospective customers are drawn back to reality and realize that they need your help to reach their goals.

This is the perfect time to transition into your offer.

Here are a few important things you need to keep in mind while you’re on the call:

Always be 100% focused on what your prospective customer is saying. Restrain yourself from talking to the point where it gets uncomfortable. In fact, it should get uncomfortable!
When the person has stopped talking, just wait, don’t say anything.
Every time you’re 100% sure the person has completely stopped talking, repeat their answers, and ask, “Is there anything else?”. People will most likely add more important information.
Take notes. Write down the EXACT words and expressions that carried emotion. This will help with your marketing during the call and in future calls.
Every person you interact with has a natural guard. After a while, they will let their guard down, and you’ll notice a shift in the conversation.

If you think the person is a good fit and that you can help them, then present them with the offer.

Keep in mind that you’re not trying to sell like a sneaky salesperson — it’s actually the complete opposite!

If you feel like someone isn’t a good fit, don’t present them with an offer. If you do, it might cause unwanted problems in the future.

Remember not to go too crazy with the price, try to be reasonable.

Start with lower prices and increase them as you get more clients, but NEVER do it for free.

Here are a few platforms that you can use to receive payments from your customer:

Direct wire transfer
Paypal
Sales page created with systeme.io

We know it can be a little scary when you first have to announce the price, but you’ll have to get used to being outside your comfort zone.

The only way to validate your business model is by making sales.

Remember, the more offers you make, the more sales you’ll make.

With this method, you’ll be able to convert up to a third of all the prospective customers you present with your offer!

After you’ve validated your business idea and have made a few sales, it’s time to take your business to the next level.

In the next step, you’re going to learn how to grow your business by building your audience, a stellar team, and your winning sales machine.

Ready to start increasing your profit?

3. Step 2: Grow

Once you’ve validated your offer, it’s time to grow from a business that generates $2000 per month, to one that generates $10 000 per month.

So, how do you start growing your online business?

You’ll need to:

Build your audience
Build a team to delegate some of the work
Build your sales machine

Not to worry, we’re going to provide you with all the necessary know-how you’ll need to effectively build these channels and grow your business.

Let’s dive right in!

3.1. Build Your Audience

To grow your business, you’re going to need to get some more exposure.

A common misconception is that social media is the most effective way to grow your audience.

However, making use of email lists has been proven to be far more effective.

In fact, you are 6x more likely to get higher click-through rates through email marketing compared to social media posts.

Additionally, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

An email list is a list of emails that your business has gathered from visitors/customers that would like to receive information, discounts, and other details about your business sent directly to their inboxes.

Your email list is the core of your business. Aurelien has been using email lists to build an audience since 2010 and has used his list to grow 2 successful, profitable businesses.

One of the best ways to get people to subscribe to your email list is by setting up a squeeze page.

With systeme.io, you can easily build a squeeze page by creating a sales funnel with the goal of building your audience.

Simply create a 2-page sales funnel with a squeeze page and a “thank you” page that pops up immediately after someone opts into your list.

On your squeeze page, you’ll need a unique value proposition (UVP) — this is a free offer that you provide in exchange for someone’s email list.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a bait offer, it’s simply a valuable free offer that will encourage people to subscribe to your list.

The content that you provide can be in the form of a video presentation or PDF, as long as it is of some value to the lead.

You can even start selling right after someone has opted into your list.

After the squeeze page, you can display a sales page and start making sales.

Aurelien tried this method on his page about learning English, and it was very effective.

To generate traffic to your squeeze page, you should publish free content containing a clear call to action (CTA) with a link to visit your squeeze page.

This content can be in the form of a blog post, a Facebook or Instagram post, or a video on Youtube with a CTA in the description.

By doing this, you’ll be generating free organic traffic to your squeeze page — which is high-quality traffic.

However, this doesn’t mean that you’ll convert everyone who opts in to your email list.

You’ll probably be able to sell to up to 15% of the leads on your list.

Even though organic traffic is a good source of free quality traffic, it takes time to scale.

The best way to effectively make use of this traffic is by publishing content regularly.

By publishing consistently, you’ll gradually be able to attract leads and convert them into customers.

It won’t happen overnight — there’s a lot of competition, and your initial posts won’t have a lot of engagement.

But, if you publish free content frequently, it can be an easy way to grow your email list and will really yield some excellent results over time.

You should aim to publish free, valuable content to your target audience.

This will demonstrate your expertise and inspire trust among your prospective customers.

You can publish how-to content or inspirational content (success stories, case studies, or interviews).

This type of content will inspire your audience, as they’ll see that it’s possible to reach their goals.

You’re probably thinking, “If I give away my best content for free, what can I sell?”

It’s important to understand that publishing free content helps by providing value, but the real results come in the form of your online products.

By giving away valuable content for free, your online products (such as online courses and coaching programs) will have a higher perceived value. This will encourage those who really need helpto purchase your offers.

As your email list grows older, it will get colder and less responsive.

This means engagement rates will go down, so it’s important to get new fresh leads every day.

The number of new leads you get daily will be an accurate indicator of the potential revenue you can generate.

If you don’t have new leads every day, you’re not going to make as many sales.

3.2. Build a Team to Delegate

As your business grows, you’ll start realizing that your resources and time are very limited.

You won’t be able to productively grow your business if you’re spending most of your time handling the day-to-day activities of your business.

Once you start making about $2000 a month, we suggest that you hire a virtual assistant (or a virtual receptionist) paid by the hour.

They’ll be able to handle some important tasks that would otherwise be very time-consuming if you were to do them yourself.

These tasks include:

Customer support (answering questions via email)
Running manual promotions on your email list
Maintaining your sales funnel and other technical tasks

It’s a good idea to hire individuals residing in countries where the cost of living is cheaper.

You’ll be able to provide them with a reasonable salary while keeping your spending to a minimum.

Here are a few helpful tools that you can use to manage your virtual assistants:

Slack for communication between you and your team.
Hubstaff or Time Doctor to track the time your employees spend working.
Lastpass to give others access to your accounts without revealing your private information.

When you’re selling a premium offer, you can hire salespeople to constantly work on making sales while you’re busy with other tasks.

This will help you save a lot of time, as you’ll be able to focus on scaling your business.

Salespeople are usually paid a small fixed fee depending on their experience.

However, most of their income comes from the commission on the sales they make (10%-20%).

If you’re selling online coaching programs, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with your clients on the phone. Luckily, you can hire consultants to do the coaching for you!

Don’t be afraid to hire people to do the job for you.

Even though you’re the expert, this isn’t what your customers care about. They only care about results.

As long as your consultants help the customers get their results, they’ll be more than happy to pay for your offer.

It’s a good idea to hire consultants from your customer base.

They’ve already paid to be trained by you, so they’ll be up to date with your content and your methods.

Usually, you’ll pay consultants a commission of around 15% - 30% depending on the amount of the offer and the time they spend with the customer.

So how can you make sure you’re hiring the best people for the job?

Here are a few tips:

Some of the best sources of talent are people from your email list.
Your team members can recommend good hires for your team. However, make sure that your team member is confident in the prospect’s abilities.
Don’t make the hiring process too complicated — if you think they’re a good fit, give them a try.
Hire fast, fire fast. It won’t always be easy to find a good hire, but you have to assess your available options.

Most successful entrepreneurs have people working for them to handle the more technical and time-consuming tasks.

You should focus on the tasks that matter the most.

These are:

Marketing: You want to focus on marketing, because you want to be selling more!
Strategy: It’s important to focus your attention on the goals of your company; you want to be in control of where your company is heading.
Management: You have to manage the people who work for you. Besides, it’s great to work with your team and build a successful business!

When you scale your business further, you should delegate the marketing and management facets of your business.

To successfully manage a growing business, you need to hire people to handle these operations.

As an entrepreneur, you need to have a vision for your business.

You should be focusing on strategy: The plans, actions, and goals that outline how your business will successfully compete in the market.

3.3. Build Your Sales Machine

The first way to build your sales machine is by setting up an automated email sequence.

This is a series of emails sent to your email list based on pre-set time intervals or trigger-based automation.

The goal of your email sequence is to either sell a low-entry digital product or book a strategy session with you.

It’s very important that you only focus on one CTA in your email sequence.

It’s been proven that people are less likely to purchase something if they are presented with too many options.

If you want to create the perfect email sequence, you should keep the following in mind:

Don’t overcomplicate it. Set up a list containing the subjects of each of the emails in your sequence. Remember to only focus on one CTA.
Tell stories. Market your offer by telling stories about your success, how you discovered the solution, and how your solution has changed a client’s life.
Every email must provide value. You can send how-to content to add value. This will ensure that people keep opening your emails.
Done is better than perfect. Take 1 or 2 days to set up your sequence and move on to something else.

Once people are on your list, and they’ve gone through your email sequence, they’ll stay on your list. If your list isn’t receiving any more emails, you’re not making any money.

So how can you still use your list to make sales? It’s quite simple — just run a scheduled manual promotions campaign.

When you run a promotion, treat it as an offer. It can be a strategy session, an online course, or even free content.

To start your manual promotion, you provide value in your initial sales message. This message can be in the form of a video, a sales page, or simply an email.

Then you present a reduced limited offer.

For example: Normally this course costs $199, but, for a limited time only, you can get it for $49.

Not sure how you’re going to run your manual promotion?

For some inspiration, here’s how Aurelien structures his manual promotions:

On Tuesdays, we send a very short email informing our list about the opportunity.
2 days later, we send a value offer (usually the first video of the course or a testimony).
After another 2 days, we send a final email that says, “this is your last chance”

On the very last day of your manual promotion, send two emails, in the morning and then again at around 7-8 pm.

The second email should inform the customer that these are the very last hours of the promotion.

This method is extremely effective, Aurelien once made 180 sales out of 365 in the final hours of a launch!

The first time you launch a new offer, don’t hesitate to send emails. People can unsubscribe if they want to.

Don’t cater your marketing according to people’s complaints — focus on those who want your offers.

When setting up your manual promotion, try to:

Define a promotion’s schedule. Professionals define a schedule and stick to it. The promotion can run once a week or once a month.
Run the promotion once, then delegate it to your virtual assistants.
Alternate between free content and strategy sessions.

Follow the instructions in this guide and you’ll be able to substantially grow your business and start generating loads of profit!

Once you’ve successfully grown your business, it’s time to start scaling.

4. Step 3: Scale

Scaling is defined as setting the stage to enable and support growth for your business. It means having the ability to grow without being hampered.

It’ll require some planning, the right systems, and a good team. Luckily, we’ve shown you how to acquire that, so we’re going to continue that trend and show you how to scale your business!

4.1. Scale Your Traffic

Remember, as your email list grows older, it becomes colder and less responsive.

Therefore, you need to make sure you’re getting fresh leads to keep on making consistent revenue.

Running an affiliate program is a very effective way of maintaining a constant flow of new leads.

Just setting up your affiliate program is not enough; it’s not a magic bullet.

It’s like any acquisition channel, if you want it to be successful, you have to dedicate the necessary time and effort.

To better understand how valuable affiliate programs can be, take a look at how systeme.io’s affiliate program works:

systeme.io logo

We use systeme.io to run our own affiliate program. We have a feature where everyone who opts into an email list automatically becomes an affiliate.

Other businesses have separate programs to manage all the facets of their business.

This makes it much more difficult for them to manage the integrations between software.

Luckily, our all-in-oneplatform seamlessly integrates all the different elements of systeme.io, and it can do the same for you! The best part is, you can try it out for free!

We also have a Facebook group that we use to promote our affiliate programs to our affiliates.

Facebook groups are a very effective way to build a community, and we use our group to teach our affiliates how to make money with our affiliate program.

Our affiliate program pays out 60% lifetime commissions on the sales of our software and our training programs.

We also pay out an additional 10% commission on sales of high-end products.

Our affiliates are very happy — they make up to €10 per sale, which is a very high amount in terms of commissions.

Why do we do this?

Because we want our affiliate program to be a long-term opportunity for our affiliates. We want to prove to them that by working with us they’ll make good money.

This approach has yielded amazing results. We generate about 60% of our revenue through our affiliate program.

To have the same success with your affiliate program, it needs to have strong foundations:

Pay out lifetime commissions to your affiliates
Pay affiliate commissions on every sale
Have good commission payments for your affiliates

If you want to make sure your affiliate program is effective, you should ensure that you have a variety of free offers that your affiliates can promote.

You can do this by creating multiple free guides, such as how-to guides and other valuable content.

By creating more free offers, you have a better chance of drawing more people to your email list.

Look at it this way, if someone doesn’t like offer X, they might like offer Y, and will likely subscribe to your list.

However, don’t overdo it. If you have one affiliate program, that’s already a great start!

Try to focus on one thing at a time.

4.2. Scale Your Conversions

The key idea when attempting to scale our conversions is to launch more offers.

When someone has already bought from you, they are more likely to purchase something else.

Try looking at it this way:

If you have a working system (like the one we’ve shown you throughout this series) that brings in X amount of leads, you know you’ll convert X amount of them into customers.
Therefore, if you increase your revenue per customer, you’ll increase the amount of revenue your business can bring in as a whole.
The more offers you have, the more revenue per contact on your list. Once again, if someone doesn’t like offer A, they might like offer B, which means more sales per customer.

How do you increase your revenue with more offers?

The first way that you can do this is by launching more premium offers.

For example:

You can have a cheaper coaching program for new customers, but, for more advanced customers who want more results, you can offer more expensive coaching packages.

Other examples of premium offers include seminars, workshops, and even business retreats.

Remember that you have limited time and resources. It’s better to keep it simple — one or two premium offers are enough.

You can also increase your revenue by launching more information products.

Information products are a great offer for you and your customer.

They’re easy to make, have high margins, and provide great value.

Plus, you only have to make them once, and they can sell for years!

How do you go about creating information products?

You simply survey your list and create an information product that solves the problems they have identified.

When you’re creating your information products, don’t spend too much time trying to craft the perfect product.

People want good, practical content which they can use to get results in their life — they don’t care about fancy videos.

When you’re running manual promotions, you must optimize your email list. You can optimize your list by running different promotions for clients and non-clients.

At systeme.io, we promote online courses to our non-clients weekly.

With our existing clients, we run live webinars where we ask them to book strategy sessions and offer them premium individual coaching packages.

How can you optimize your email list?

You should focus on promoting your information products to non-clients while promoting high-end offers to existing customers.

This is a really powerful method. When someone is new to your email list, there’s a very low chance that they’ll purchase a premium offer from you.

Those who have purchased from you before are more likely to buy a premium offer.

By allocating different offers to clients and non-clients, you’ll be able to optimize your offers to reach those who are most likely to purchase them.

Your assistants should run the promotions on your list, while a salesperson can run live webinars, talk to clients live, and sell premium offers.

The promotions you’ll be running will obviously have varied prices and schedules.

If you want to compare the profitability of your promotions, a good KPI to focus on is the revenue per click. By comparing the revenue per click, you’ll be able to see which of your offers bring in the most money.

Usually, new offers bring in the most revenue per click.

Premium offers also generate a high revenue per click; you can make use of reduced price offers to make more sales.

5. Conclusion

And there you have it! Everything you need to know about how to launch, grow, and scale a successful online business!

If you put in some hard work and dedicate yourself to making your business a success, then we guarantee that this new system will help you set up a profitable online company in no time.

When launching your new online business, keep these essential points in mind:

Done is better than perfect. Finish the task and take massive action, you’ll get some results, and you’ll learn so much!
Fail fast, learn fast. Don’t be afraid to fail — the more things you try, the faster you’ll be able to uncover the winning recipe.
Focus on strategy. You’re the entrepreneur, the only one with the vision to lead your business to success.
This is the best industry in the world! There are so many people making loads of money, so it’s entirely possible. Plus, you’ll be able to work from home!

If you’re ready to begin your journey towards launching a successful business, check out systeme.io, an affordable all-in-one online marketing platform to suit all your business needs.

We have all the tools you’ll need to implement this strategy and start the online business of your dreams!

So what are you waiting for?