The Fearless Marketing Show

What I would do to launch an online business quickly

• Nicole Davidson • Season 2 • Episode 3

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Are you ready to start an online business but not quite ready to launch a course or signature program just yet? In this episode, I walk you through the exact steps I’d take to get visible, build trust, and lay the foundation for a successful online business—fast.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or relaunching with clarity, this episode will show you how to get your business up and running without all the fluff.

Here’s what I cover:

  • How to create a simple, aligned brand without spending a fortune
  • What your first website needs (and what you can skip!)
  • How to grow your email list before you even launch
  • Why blogging is still relevant—and how to start today
  • Building a social content strategy that won’t burn you out

If you’re ready to stop overthinking and start building, this episode is for you.


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Connect with Nicole on TikTok @thefearlesscollective, on Instagram @thefearlesscollectiveco or Facebook @thefearlesscollectiveco

Intro (00:00):

You are listening to the Fearless Marketing Show for fearless entrepreneurs ready to grow a thriving business with smart digital marketing from websites and SEO to email and courses. I'm Nic, your marketing mentor here to help you turn your ideas into income without the tech overwhelm. Let driving.

(00:21):

If you are thinking of starting from scratch and launching a business fast without overthinking, overspending, and honestly just overcomplicating things after many years in business, here are the exact steps I would take to jump go from idea to action in just a few weeks. Hi, and welcome back to the Fearless Marketing Show. I'm your host, Nicole Davidson. If you are new here, welcome. If you are returning, thank you so much for your support. I am a digital marketing strategist and consultant. I also run a website, designer marketing agency, Picasso Media, and I'm the founder here at the Fearless Collective. I'm also a mom to four amazing children and I have a really big passion with anything online and anything to do with websites at all. So if you are feeling to, if you are feeling called to start an online business and you're really not quite sure, or you're not maybe not quite ready to launch a program or a course yet, but you want to get started in setting up those foundations to really get going so that when you're ready to launch whatever program and course you are dreaming of, you then have everything in place so that you can get started and keep going and get results fast.

(01:46):

Now, before we jump into this week's episode, feel free to find me on TikTok, Facebook or Instagram. You can find me under the Fearless Collective on all of those. I would really love to connect with you. So here's the truth. A lot of people will wait way too long to launch their business because they honestly think that they need to have everything perfect. They need to have it polished, a perfect brand, everything mapped out, ready to go before they start. But the thing is, you don't have to do that, right? The best thing that you can do is to just start showing up, start serving people in your audience and really start building your community. So I've helped a lot of people over the years set up their brand. I've helped people set up their websites, I've helped people set up their programs right now when it comes to doing this.

(02:41):

So many people like to overcomplicate things and they think that they need to have so many things ready to go. Over the years, I guess the things that I have learned that to refine are going to be the five steps that I'm going to share with you today. And it doesn't have to be complicated, especially in the beginning. As you grow, then absolutely you can start looking at building things and bringing more things into your offers and, you know, building out your website, but initially you don't need anything too complex to be able to start showing up and to be able to start selling things online. So if I was starting again, you know, I started my business back in 2007,  which was a really long time ago. But if I was starting a business today, here are the five things that I would set up before I was ready to even launch a product. So let's dive in. There are five steps that we're going to be talking about today. The very first thing is going to be around your branding. Everybody needs a good brand.

(03:50):

The second one is going to be your social media and the strategy behind that. The third one is going to be a simple website. The fourth is going to be setting up like an email marketing and a freebie. And the fifth step will be building that out around blogging or content creation. Now it sounds like a lot, I promise that it's not, but let's jump on into the very first one. So your brand, if you don't have a brand and you're really starting out, you do not need to over complicate this, right? You do not need to have a crazy, detailed logo at all. In fact, I would go the opposite way. The most simple logos are the most effective logos are the ones that are really simple, right? You do not need anything crazy and out of the ordinary. What I would do before I'm going to create the logo, I'd really have a look around and just try and look up some really basic logos with some really clean modern fonts.

(04:58):

You can jump onto Pinterest or you can go onto Google and you like look up. There's also creative market. They will have like fonts and things like that, but, or even just look at your favorite brand online and see what fonts they're using. Okay? I'm not saying to copy, but you can always look at what brands and fonts that they're using, what colors they're using, and maybe emulate that as well. But I definitely find Pinterest has some really great inspiration around color palettes that you can do. And again, the more simple, the better stick to one, two maximum three colors, and that's going to then map out your branding. And then when with the logo, I would go even more simple and just have a very, very simple text logo and start from there. You could build on this later when you're ready.

(05:49):

But the, the aim in this is getting set up quickly so that you can take fast action, right? It's not perfection. You just want consistency and you want a cohesive look across your platforms that is more than enough to get you started. When you are looking at websites and you're really trying to have a look at what fonts, things like that, that you like, you can have a look at, uh, there's a, a Google Chrome add-on and it's called what Font. What you can do is you can like go onto any website, you activate that add-on, you activate that add-on, and then what you do is you can just click on fonts around a person's website and it'll give you a breakdown of what font they're actually using. So I would use super simple fonts, maybe like Montserrat, uh, Poppins Playfair Display. They are pretty standard fonts, but they're going to do the job.

(06:44):

They're pretty simple and they're, they're going to make your website look good. They are also web font friendly, so people, no matter what device they're going to access, they'll be able to see your fonts as well. And that's really, really important. The next thing as part of the branding is just creating that simple logo. I would honestly highly recommend just using Canva, just using something really, really basic just to get going. Again, when you are further on down in the design, you can find designers that will do, you know, cheaper logos. Like we, our packages sort of start, they're reasonably affordable when we are working with our clients in Picasso Media. But if you're really, really trying to keep things simple, I would definitely just look into Canva, set up a really simple logo, don't use their templates, because everyone uses them. But yeah, you can literally jump on in there and design something pretty basic to get going.

(07:42):

The other things that you would need to also make sure that you have, when you are setting up your brand, you obviously should have decided on your name. You want to make sure that you can get the domain name for your website. Now we actually sell domain names as well through Picasso Media. So I'll share a link in here and you can have a look. And if you want to register a domain, it's pretty straightforward to do you. If you are based outside of Australia, then I would go down the road of getting a.com or a.co. If you're within Australia, then I would recommend getting both a.com au and a.com. Uh, if you can all add the.co. If you can't get the.com, this is just to ensure that you have both, you don't necessarily need to use both. Although what we do recommend is to, uh, redirect one to the other.

(08:35):

So you would set one as your main, normally your.com, and then you would redirect the.com au over to your.com. That way if anyone types in either variation of the domain, you aren't losing any traffic at all. So I can cover that off in like another podcast if that's something that would be of interest to you. We do actually also cover a lot of this in our WordPress course. So again, if that's something that is of interest to you, you can have a look onto our WordPress course. It like walks you through exactly what you need to set up the website. But while we're talking about branding, all you really need to do is just make sure that you have these things. So your business name, your logo, and your domain name. They're the three things that you're going to need. Step number two is going to be around your social media profiles and your strategy.

(09:20):

This is all about how you are going to be generating traffic into your website. It's, we are kind of looking at this as a funnel, right? So we're going to be going from the top down to your branding, your social media, and then we're funneling people into your website from here. So before you build the website though, I want you to make sure that you are locked in your social media handles. I would choose one to two platforms where your audience hangs out. I rec highly recommend Instagram and TikTok. They're the two that I do really enjoy at the moment. And the two that I guess I see results from I in terms of, you know, Facebook, if you're going to go to, I would always set up a Facebook just to make sure that you have it. Because in terms of Facebook and Instagram, you can like link those up and whatever you post on one will go out to the other.

(10:13):

So you may as well do both of them at the same time. But, yeah, working out whether it could be, if you are really going down the business to business, then potentially it could be Instagram and LinkedIn, they would be the two that you would choose. You get to pick what ones you think are better and also pick based on your strengths. So for me, I mean I have all of them but in terms of, for me, I probably primarily use TikTok at the moment. Instagram being second and then the Facebook, I kind of just have everything pushing from Instagram into Facebook. It's, it's not somewhere that I really generate a lot of traffic from at all, but it is handy to have, we do use Facebook, around the community. So for our, you know, courses, we have Facebook groups for those.

(11:00):

But they're a little bit different and they will come later on down the track. So, but if, when I'm very, very, at the initial point starting out, I would set up one or two platforms working out where your audience is going to hang out. And then what I would do around this, I would even honestly, before you have the website, once you had this going, start posting content <affirmative>, you may as well get out there, get comfortable while you don't have a large audience and get comfortable while you don't have anything in there that you'll need to promote. Just start learning how to use the platforms, start learning what to post, start learning to get comfortable in front of a video. If that's something that you're looking at doing, say a TikTok or reels, you want to make sure that you're starting to be comfortable.

(11:45):

I would say if you can to start posting daily, obviously if that's doable for you, you get to choose though, what is going to work for you. Uh, but if you can try and work out something that you can post daily, it doesn't have to be anything crazy in TikTok and reels in particular, you can really start just using trending sounds and like create something really, really simple. They don't take long to create. If you are going to go down the road of, say, educational posts where you are talking on the screen, they, they generally do take a bit longer or you could do like a lifestyle vlog where you really just take short snippets of your life and, you know, you can create like a bit of a chat over the top or you can talk over the top of that video.

(12:28):

I would recommend doing all of those if you can, if you have time. So po posting on trending sounds, creating some educational content, which is going to be, I guess build on what you are, what you want to be known for. And then the final one would be that lifestyle. So just share or behind the scenes, so maybe behind the scenes of your business. It doesn't have to necessarily be your life if you want to keep that private, absolutely. But really sharing like behind the scenes, you could start sharing like behind the scenes of building your business out with what we're talking about here. That's what I would do. I would set these profiles up and I would start posting and really getting used to things so that over time as you get used to them, when we can really build your strategy out.

(13:11):

Okay, so step one is all around branding. Step two is all around your social media. Now, step three, we're going to look at building out a simple website. And this is going to really just where we're going to create a digital home for everything to do with your business. But what I don't want you to do is start creating a really huge website and overcomplicate it to the point where you just don't start, you don't go live, okay? So what I would like you to do is we are going to start with three simple pages of a website. The first one is obviously going to be your homepage. The second is going to be a services page, so how people can work with you. And the third is going to be a blog. That way you can really start. So over time, eventually as you get going with this, you're going to really want to start pushing traffic to the website a little bit more than what you would be now, but a blog is going to help you do that.

(14:09):

So we, again, I will touch on how a blog can help your website in another podcast episode, but for now, all I want you to do is worrying about these three pages, your home services and a blog. Okay? You do not need to go any more complicated than that. Your home and your services can have a contact form. If you want to go four pages, you want to create a contact page, no problem at all. They're pretty simple to set up. Now, I am probably going to be extremely biased towards WordPress. Uh, I think that it is the best platform for online business owners to use. it it's what I've used for a very long time now it's what we put all of our clients on. But in saying that some people are not comfortable in using WordPress, so I want you to use whatever website builder you are comfortable with.

(15:10):

I, if you're not going to use WordPress, I'd probably recommend looking at Squarespace. If you're looking to sell products online, then maybe Shopify. The reason why I love WordPress is it's, it gives you the ability to do all of those things. You can have a basic website, you can have a blog, you can eventually set up a membership platform. You will be able to, at a shop, you can do all these things within WordPress themselves, and you can also do it in a staggered way so you don't have to do all these things at once to get going. That's what I would recommend. We actually do have a WordPress, a free WordPress starter course, which is just walks you through what word WordPress is. It also just walks you through how to get going with WordPress. A little bit of an overview as to what you need to be looking for in WordPress.

(16:08):

So, what plugins you would need, how to add pages, how to,  add different functional different functionality to the website. So if you wanted to get a co, access to that, you can do so over@thefearlesscollective.co. And you will find our, under our program section, there is a, or under the freebies section as well. you can jump on into the free course. We actually have a larger paid course, which, we'll show you how to build your entire website if that's of interest to you. it's pretty affordable. We've kept it pretty affordable because, you know, we we're really trying to help people get going with businesses, but if you, the free WordPress one will get you started initially anyway. So, but yeah, I, I, again, I would like to stress not to overcomplicate things. Even with your homepage, I want you to get a really nice photo of yourself.

(17:08):

Maybe a couple, you can generally take some decent photos on an iPhone. You can use Canva to remove backgrounds and overlay photos onto things. making sure you have a bit of an intro section as to who you are and a few little blurbs around how they can work with you and testimonials. Ideally, if you can get testimonials, that would obviously be fantastic. If you don't have those, then we can work on that and add them at a later date. The other thing that I would really like you to have on here is going to be a section for your email marketing form. This is going to be where your freebie will live. It does sound complicated. It is really not that hard and most email systems make it pretty simple to set up a basic form, and we will touch on that in the next step.

(17:58):

But I definitely want to ensure that you have a section on your website for people to sign up. Now, if you, if that really overwhelms you, uh, feel free to reach out. My team are pretty quick with doing these things, so, you know, generally it's just a half an hour, one hour task to jump on in and just integrate your website with your email marketing platform. So don't be too stressed if, if you feel like it is something that's really going to stop you, feel free to reach out. We would definitely be happy to help you out. Uh, if not, uh, you can definitely get some help on places like Upwork or just finding a local VA. They would also be able to help you. Okay, so we have been through the first three steps. The first one is your branding, the second is your social media, and the third is your website.

(18:47):

Now step number four is going to be your email marketing and creating a lead magnet. Now, this is where I think that the real magic happens, and this is probably the one step that I think that everybody should have. I would highly recommend looking at a free tool. Mailer Light is a great,  free email marketing tool. Or you could look at Kit, which was previously ConvertKit. So both of these are really great platforms for beginners and they generally will have like a, you know, simple checklist or a guide to sort of walk you through how to do this. And it's pretty much as simple as like setting up your account. And in here they will have options for you to set up a form. And all I want you to do is collect first name and email address. That's all you need to collect in order to send out a freebie.

(19:44):

And in here you can set up, both of them will have option to set up a really small automation. Okay? This automation is going to email people the freebie that you have created. I would just recommend in terms of a freebie, you could just create something that is going to be of high value, but it's pretty easy for you to create straight away. This is probably not going to be the freebie that you eventually use, but it's definitely going to be something that's just going to get you started. Okay? So these, these are the things that you're going to be using and promoting on your social media platforms. So anytime you're talking about you, your main goal would be to get someone to head over to your website and sign up to this email list. That's going to be your main goal for now, because once we get people in, then you are free to market to them at all times up until they decide that they may not want to hear from you anymore.

(20:45):

I use MailerLite. I think that that's probably a pretty easy platform for most people to get their heads around. And it will walk you through all the steps that you need to do to be able to send an email. And then in here you're going to set up what's called an opt-in form and connect it to a quick welcome email. And now you are going to be well on your way to building a list of warm leads that want to hear from you. A lot of these tools also are integrating ai, so you generally won't even need to be writing up too much of the content that you really need to be using. I would even recommend using chat GPT to just come up with a really simple tell chat GPT, what your freebie is, who your target market is, and get it to just write up a simple welcome email or a simple, you know, email automation.

(21:33):

It might be say, three to five emails just to introduce people to who you are. And then within here, you can then use that to send out weekly newsletters to people as well. Now we're onto our final step, and that is content creation and your blog. Now content creation can mean many things. it could be around your social media, but one of the things that I would do, and I, what I recommend is Google does really like content, okay? It is, it's been a thing for a really long time and when you set up a website, it, it can be really hard to start generating traffic. And what I would like you to do is to start creating blog posts just around your topic right now. Okay? You can jump onto Facebook, you can jump onto Instagram, and you go on to find creators that are really doing really great work in your industry or your niche that you are looking at doing.

(22:31):

And then you could jump in the comments and see the kind of questions that people are asking, and you can use that to then write blog posts around your topic. I would then pop all of those questions into ai, into chat GPT, and you could use that to really speed up a blog post. And you can even ask chat GPT how, what type of blog posts you should be writing, what articles, what topics it can come up with around your niche as well. That's going to really speed things up. Now, when you have done this and you've created up, you've got a bit of an outline of what posts that you want to do, I would really start looking into what, who is ranking quite high for those topics. And I generally will pull out sort of the top five articles that are coming, you know, ranking one down to five.

(23:18):

And I will pop those articles into chat GPT and get chat GPT to write out a blog article or outline around what they have written. And then from there, I then personalize that blog post and really give it that personal touch around my own ideas, my own experience, my own results that I have from clients, because that's really going to give your content a lot more by rather than just using, you know, like an AI blog post. Okay? So that's what I would do. The reason that we would do this, because Google just loves content. And over time the more content you have, the more chance you will be to rank. Now you can repurpose these articles into short social media posts or email newsletters. So you're kind of going to be using like the, the blog to really create out your content on all your platforms.

(24:18):

So for example, you might write a blog post around, so for example, this is actually going to be a blog post. Okay? So what I would do to launch a business quickly before I launch my program, of course that's going to be my topic, okay? I'm going to get Google to write up, sorry, I'm going to get AI to write up a blog outline around this topic. And then I'm going to, like I said, personalize it around my own experience. And then in there I'm going to put that into my website as a blog. And then from there, I'm then going to ask chat GPT to write out a few snippets for my social media and that I can then use and create some PO blog posts and content on my, on my Instagram or my TikTok. It could be that I might need to record on like a reel or a TikTok that I might actually talk about the topic as well.

(25:08):

The other thing that I would then do is get it to write out a newsletter. And again, I would personalize that you don't want to just be sending out AI content constantly. You want to make sure you're adding in your own personalization. But that's how I would go around creating that content. It, like I said, jump onto other creators and see what questions people are asking because they really kickstart ideas and it gives you a bit of like a leeway into what to pop into chat GPT to start creating some content ideas for you. So I hope that has helped. The things that I'm would recommend if you're really starting out as a business is getting a really simple branding set up with your logo. I would then make sure you have your socials and while you are working on steps three to five, I would be posting out content, getting started, getting used to being in front of the camera and getting used to, and getting a feel for all of those platforms.

(26:02):

Step three is going to be your website, setting up a really simple three to four page website, keeping it super simple, having everything that you just need on there helping. I would get, again, get AI to help you write the content so you can really speed that up. step four is setting up that email marketing system. Again, I recommend Mailer Light, but there's so many platforms out there that you can use. I, it really doesn't matter what one you use. and get your lead freebie or your lead magnet, which is a freebie all set up and designed and into your email marketing software. And then the fifth step is starting with the blogging, the content creation, and really working out and padding out your content ideas. Some key takeaways from today's episode is you do not need a full blown course or offer to launch your business.

(26:54):

You just need to get started. These five steps are really going to help create visibility, credibility, and consistency. And the best thing to do right now is to start building your audience. Now when you are ready, and once you've really started building that audience out, you can start launching your offers later on. And that's going to then make, make everything so much easier because all these things are already in place. And then when you're ready, you can really start making these more, you know, larger in scale. You can maybe set up some more freebies, you can set up some more, you know, email marketing automations in terms of building out the sales of the website. You can then from there then you can start launching all of your programs. I do want to say thank you so much for tuning in today. This, if this episode has sparked something in you, I want you to do just one thing today.

(27:42):

One thing, and honestly, I did say at the beginning that you could do this within weeks, but I really don't think, like, I think that if you were organized and really, really wanted to do this, you could get it up and running probably within a week. I would just do one thing today. So choose your branding colors and set, choose your branding colors and maybe create your logo, register and register your domain name. So just work on step number one and then maybe day two you can work on your socials and getting all of that set up. So stepping it out, make it really, really easy for you. Do not try and do every single thing at once because it's going to feel really overwhelming. But if you're ready to go deeper or you want to stay in the loop of all things around fearless marketing, be sure to find me at TikTok at the Fearless Collective.

(28:29):

Or you can find me at Instagram and Facebook at the Fearless Collective Code. Again, we do have some freebies around helping you set things up. We have our free web WordPress course that you can jump on and do. We also have our larger course that you can do around WordPress as well. And we have a few other freebies on the website that will really help you with your marketing. One of the modules within our membership, which is, the monthly modules that get re-released every month. We do have one around creating your own lead magnet and setting all of that up too. So if you've loved this episode, feel free to share it with a friend who's getting started too. Maybe you could do things together. I actually can't wait to hear from you about,  how you get going with everything. Until next time, stay bold, stay kind, and keep being your fearless self.