Posted by Nathalie Lussier is a blogger, an award-winning entrepreneur, an international keynote speaker and the the creator of a wildly popular free 30-Day List Building Challenge program for entrepreneurs ready to scale. She built her first health blog into a site that now boasts over 750,000 yearly visitors and more than 1 million page views.
As her blog grew, viewers and clients began asking how she expanded so quickly. This interest led to the creation of her second business, a six-figure consulting company offering digital marketing training products. Her current focus is on her growing software startup AmbitionAlly, which she co-founded with her husband. I sat down with Lussier, who went from college straight into entrepreneurship, to talk about how she keeps transitioning from one successful business to another.
Stay passionate.
For Lussier’s first business, her blog, she credited passion as a big factor in her success. She then transitioned into a passion for helping her clients, followed by a passion for helping other entrepreneurs.
I think it can be argued that there are founders who create in an industry they’re not passionate about, but they are passionate about something in business. They may just love building or love serving people or love creating jobs, etc. You have to have passion about what you’re doing in order to go the distance with your ideas.
Master marketing.
Lussier quickly added that passion alone is not enough.
“Learning marketing helped a ton. If nobody knew about my blog, it would have never gone anywhere. So, really learning about how to blog properly, how to actually write for the kinds of people I wanted to reach, that was the biggest ‘a-ha’ for me.”
Brendon Burchard told me the same thing when I interviewed him a couple of years ago. He is an author with a message, but to get the message out he had to become a marketer. Take the time to learn best marketing practices for your product or industry in order to follow your passion successfully.
Meet a need.
Lussier has always been very intentional with her content and her products and services, and she advises you do the same.
“The first time I tried to launch a course in that space, it was very generic. It was, you know, ‘Set your self up for success!’ … once I talked to people, and I found out what their biggest stumbling blocks were — they kept saying over and over again, ‘I have cravings, I can’t deal with those.’ And so that’s why I decided to call my course, ‘Cure cravings forever.’”
It’s not enough to have great products or ideas or content if no one wants to read, watch, or learn about it. To know the needs of your audience, you need to actually engage your customers. “I did send out a survey, but most of those came from one-on-one conversations. “
Before you start a service business or create a product, spend the time asking questions and gathering data to make sure you will have a demand for your creation.
Take care of your customers.
From her one-on-one coaching, to her web design business, to her current digital product offerings, Lussier prioritized communicating with clients. She also made sure she was managing their expectations and offering them great customer service.
“Tons of little things, like project management software, helped us a lot … having meetings with clients and making sure that they’re clear with that we’re, how things are progressing behind the scenes. And these are little details, but they make a really big difference to that client.”
Don’t be tempted to phone in customer service and satisfaction in this digital age. Online reviews and social media word of mouth are crucial to your success.
Use your existing experience.
If you’re changing industries or products or business models, resist the urge to reinvent the wheel. You can find a million webinars and online courses, but stick with what you really need and realize you already know a lot.
“Don’t discount everything that you’ve done to this point; use it. There’s probably gold in there,” she explained. “I see this a lot with people who are leaving corporate. They say, ‘Okay, I was a lawyer but now I want to start something completely different and everything I’ve done so far is not useful,’ which is not at all the case, right? There is so much — managing people, communication — so much that you can use in your new step forward in your career. It’s more of a mindset thing, but I think that that is something that has been huge for me.”
To hear Lussier discuss working with her spouse, growing teams in her business and more, check out the full interview on The Kelsey Show.
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