How can you make money online and what on earth is a profit bicycle? I’ll cover that in this blog post or you can watch the video version below.
Who am I?
But first you may well be asking yourself why should you even listen to me?
My name is Amy and I have a corporate background in products. I have a degree in product design. Many years experience in retail buying and product management. I take that knowledge and apply it to the online business space.
What is a profit bicycle?
If we start by looking at this, it will help answer the other question of how you make money online. I created this framework as a way to break down my approach in a way that is recognisable to people.
So, if we start with the wheels, both wheels are of equal importance. The product wheel is at the front and the sales and visibility wheel at the back. I put the product wheel at the front because we need to have this wheel ready before we move on to the back wheel.
What is a product?
I’ll get on to the details of both wheels in a moment, I just want to explain what I think of as a product first.
A product is what you are selling (whether that’s a digital product, an online course, a membership or a service).
The product wheel
So, let’s look at the two wheels and then move on to how you cycle this bike.
The first wheel is the product wheel and it’s split into three sections.
Clarity
The first part of the product wheel is clarity of your life goals. You need what you are selling to fit into your life goals. Thinking about what you want your life to look like now and in the future can help you to shape your product brief. Knowing what is non-negotiable will help you to create a product that fits in with your life. So it doesn’t become the self employed version of a soul sucking job.
For example, it doesn’t make sense to work 80 hour weeks to try and make a million. If your top priority is to be there for your kids whilst they are young. Maybe you don’t need to make a million and a smaller goal would suit your life priorities better.
Prioritise what’s important to you. Rather than striving for a goal that you are told is desirable by other people online.
Competitive Edge
The second part of the product wheel is your competitive edge. This is essentially your business strategy. A lot of people think strategy is planning and implementing business activities. It’s actually knowing your competitive edge. There is a fantastic 10 minute video that explains this so well. It's on the Harvard business review YouTube channel.
There are many ways you can develop your competitive edge. By looking into your past experiences, your passions, your skills and your values.
Knowing what makes you different can be tricky. That's because it’s hard to see yourself in that light. Which is why I made a course called Stand out to Sell. To help you explore these elements and make sense of them from a product creation point of view.
Customer
The third part of the product wheel is the customer. Knowing your customer is vital. This is the last part of the product wheel, because often you need to go through the other two steps first. Before you really know who you want your customer to be.
In some cases though, this could be your first step.
If for example, the reason you want to start a business is to help a particular kind of person. Once you know who they are or what problem you are looking to solve. You need to do customer and market research to understand exactly what they want. So you can give it to them in your products.
The sales and visibility wheel
So that is a very simple explanation of the product wheel. Next up we have the Sales and visibility wheel.
Choose tactics
The first step in this wheel is to choose tactics. I made the mistake of trying too many tactics and spreading myself too thin. So I recommend you choose a main tactic with perhaps 2 or three elements at the most.
So as an example, my current tactics are to grow my list in the short term. I do this by participating in collaborations so I can get in front of other people’s audiences.
I build trust with those people by sending a weekly email newsletter. I also build trust by creating Youtube videos. The YouTube videos are also a visibility tactic. But it is a longer term growth tactic as YouTube takes time to build up.
My email newsletter is a sales tactic as well as a nurture tactic. By picking just three tactics, I have more chance of implementing them on a consistent basis.
Pick tactics that are going to fit in with your lifestyle. I chose YouTube over Instagram. Because I don’t have the time to make the quantity of content needed for Instagram. I wanted the time I spend creating content to work for me in the long term, which YouTube does. But, everyone is different so think about what you enjoy and what you have space for.
Commit
The second part of the sales and visibility wheel is commit. By this I mean commit to the tactics you have chosen for a decent period of time. Like a year so that you have time to get really good at those tactics and start seeing results.
Consistency
The third part is Consistency. Which is why we picked only a few tactics. We need to be doing them consistently, to improve, to grow and importantly to get feedback. So we have good information that tells us what to do going forward.
Peddling the profit bicycle
So those are the two wheels, but how do we cycle this bike? We use the pedals to move the wheels round and round and we do that with CEO actions.
CEO Actions
You are the CEO (the chief executive officer or the big boss of your business). The CEO actions are:
- To plan so you can implement your planned actions,
- Measure the results of those actions
- React to the results so that you can improve.
You want to do these actions for both wheels.
Plan, measure and react to your product wheel. So that you are always improving your product offering. In relation to what you customers want and the feedback they give you.
You also want to do it for your sales and visibility wheel. So that you are embracing the tactics and topics that are working in your sales and marketing. Dropping things that aren’t working.
How do you make money online?
This framework will help you to stay focused on the things you need to do to sell products or services online.
I am naturally prone to do things impulsively. But the truth is that sometimes you need to be disciplined and do things on repeat to see results.
But it’s also inevitable that some things won’t work. The good news is, that when things don’t work, you can use that as valuable information. To react and improve until you find something that does work.
If this framework seems overwhelming, start with the first wheel. The product wheel. And start with you and what you want.
You can use this interactive framework to find tools and trainings in my shop that will help you further.
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