More sales online for building services

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good afternoon thank you for joining us for this webinar on online sales strategies this is a three-part series and today's topic is selling services online your moderator renee goodno from the new york small business development center today's host is the pace small business development center the pace sbdc is part of the new york sbdc's network of 22 campus-based centers and outreach offices located across new york state the new york spdc is a u.s small business administration resource partner our services are made possible by funding from the sba new york state and our host campuses joining us to introduce today's presenter and lead things off is pace sbdc director andrew flam andrew i will turn things over to you great thanks so much renee and uh good afternoon everybody thanks so much for joining us again my name is andrew flam i'm the regional director of the case university small business development center we're based out of lower manhattan and uh welcome you uh those new york city folks as well as folks from elsewhere in the state uh look forward to our obsession today with my colleague from pace university julie gaultier so um i want to kind of talk briefly about kind of who we are what we do for those of you who are not working with our centers already our 22 centers located throughout new york state are staffed by full-time business advisors and our advisors work on a wide range of issues based on today's topic i wanted to make sure that we kind of reference the fact that um our advisors do work a great deal kind of helping our small business clients in a very array of marketing issues whether it's access to uh you know developing a website improving your website and web presence uh social media activities um looking at uh e-commerce and other um you know online uh advertising opportunities you're really being able to kind of flesh out and build out your marketing sales efforts and um we're delighted to be able to kind of dig more deeply into the weeds i guess today as part of a three-part series with my colleague julie um we also uh our advisors work on kind of a a number of other issue areas a key one you know clearly among many of the clients we work with is access to finance whether you're looking to secure a small business loan uh be able to work on developing materials that may speak to investors or other key partners you may want to bring on so thinking about kind of what that may look like in terms of your own business development as you grow your business here in new york state a couple of other key issue areas i want to touch on briefly is access to procurement opportunities so if you're looking to do business with city and state and local and federal government sources you know we can really help you access and identify key opportunities that may be a good fit for your business and how to be able to pitch and then develop your uh put your best foot forward in terms of being able to secure those opportunities and then a wide range of operational issues you know thinking about how to you know more effectively run your business looking about you know how you may compare to other businesses in your industry and thinking about um back just a you know a wide array of of uh cova 19 related uh recovery resources our business owner the businesses we work with have have access you know tens of millions of dollars worth of um support through these programs over the course of the last almost two years now so um if you are uh keen on kind of finding out more about those programs if you have an access them already or learning about other programs that are coming out of the public and private sector where we're happy to work with you um i should remind all of you i guess all of our services as rene mentioned are offered at no cost uh through the support of a wide array of government sources as well as our host institutions and again we're based out of pace university for manhattan um so uh and the last thing i guess i'd like to touch on is today's session really is i'm kind of a good example of us really being able to um you know bring to you uh you know key industry experts can kind of dig more deeply into uh select topics you know that that are really helpful in terms of uh improving your business operations and being able to again build expand and grow your your business here in new york state so um today's uh offering is is one of a wide array of services and webinars training programs that our center and our colleagues from throughout the state are offering so once i finish my remarks which i'm just about ready to i'll add a link in the chat where you can find out more about other upcoming sessions uh we're delighted to have julia's as part of a three-part series today will be first and then we'll follow in the next two weeks to come so art center has other center other opportunities coming up as well and then i will again provide that link for you in addition to links to how to connect with a business advisor again all of our services are offered at cost as well as uh linked information about cocoa related uh recovery programming so with that that's uh kind of the you know very brief description of kind of who we are what we do and uh again i'm delighted to uh introduce my colleague julie gautier as a professor at pace university and a colleague and uh delighted to have her back to kind of walk through these key um sales strategy opportunities uh for online sales so julie it's all yours thanks so much again thank you very much andrew hi folks um i'm really excited to be giving this three-part lecture series um i the last time i gave this was in september of 2020 and honestly i've had such an interesting experience since then so there's a lot that's been added to this lecture series as well particularly for selling services online um today we're going to cover selling services online um services referring to um acts that you can do so consulting freelancing contracting um things that you can sell online um and do all that marketing so some of the things that i've sold online generally um it started with tutoring services my background is as a web developer i'm a software engineer by trade um i currently teach the web scripting class at pace university as an adjunct professor and i'm also a curriculum engineer at mongodb so some other things that i've sold online have included web development web design services community management services i've sold custom cutting boards i'm also just a crafter and i work out of my maker space an awful lot so i've been selling a lot of custom gifts including t-shirts i've sold curriculum and learning materials online i've sold my hackathon management services i've sold talks and seminars and i've sold my artwork and digital images a lot of digital files and also some business development consulting uh my first venture into starting to sell services online it kind of came about just as a weird idea that i had as a college student um during my senior year at pace university i was studying computer science and i realized that i had a lot of knowledge about web development that not a lot of people had and it's an extremely in demand skill a lot of folks particularly folks that are interested in entrepreneurship are interested in learning web development so that they don't have to hire a very expensive web developer so i was able to find a lot of people just in my immediate community even that really wanted to learn web development i decided to take that online to a website called wise ant which is a website for tutorial or for uh tutoring instructors and to meet up with uh with possible students and when i joined weisan um i saw that the commission fee was like truly insane um they wanted i think 40 percent for the first thousand dollars that i made um as a tutor on wiseand so i made some flyers so that i could find my own clients um i did take my first meeting on yzant and so they got their commission and everything and then i worked out a deal with um with my students that they would get a ten dollar discount and i would still get that extra ten dollars um if we just use paypal instead of wising it in the future so i had listed myself as a web development tutor in new york city and somebody in china found me on wyzen and they wanted a private web development instructor they wanted between 10 and 20 hours a week of personal instruction and were willing to pay 50 an hour so we set up daily skype classes um as a senior in college you can only imagine how exciting it was to be making um this amount of money and it was a really interesting experience for me as a teacher because i was able to kind of customize what i was teaching around that one particular student and also found that they had different motivations for wanting to learn from me as a web developer in new york they also really wanted to practice their english so that was another interesting factor on top of why they found me as a web development tutor some services that are frequently sold online that you've definitely heard about being sold online before are writing a lot of folks will write for different publications they'll write for blogs and get paid a little bit to write those pieces executive assistantship has also been something that i've noticed growing um more at least within my twitter sphere particularly of entrepreneurs um a lot of folks that are working as the ceos of of startups that are very busy a lot of folks that are working in venture capital are starting to look for executive assistants um so people that are just able to kind of jump in and get things done it's really awesome if you can find one of these people to partner with you can learn a lot also as an executive assistant and you can get paid pretty well bookkeeping is another thing that you can offer as a service online a lot of companies particularly smaller companies won't have a full-time bookkeeper but it's something that needs to be done for them so bookkeeping if you're great great at um a little bit of math and just keeping track of receipts and everything bookkeeping could also be a really um lucrative service you can offer online coaching is another service that i've found a lot more people trying to build businesses around if there's just something that you're really great at um be it exercising or be it business development productivity um coaching is something that that could be really valuable to a lot of people um it's also an interesting one because you never know who in your network is going to need to reach out to you i personally have recently hired a career development coach who specializes in women in tech and that's been really awesome for me and it's also been really amazing to see her grow her business um as a woman in career coaching tutoring is also a very common service that's that's sold online and um tutoring is great because you can teach so many different things um web development in particular was something that i i really am motivated by getting more people involved in tech and getting more people feeling comfortable with tech so for me tutoring in tech is is a treat it's what i wake up every day to do um i have recently moved my career in that direction becoming a curriculum engineer and teaching people about databases on a daily basis another service that i found recently has become really interesting is research i have a friend who started posting online about different snacks that she likes different snacks from different countries snacks that she liked the packaging on snacks that she thought were really unique and she ended up starting a newsletter about the different snacks that she was trying um the different packaging methods that she saw and now she's getting hired by companies like nabisco like starbucks to do research on the the landscape of these different um of this industry and she's getting paid a lot of money to do that kind of research so that's kind of a really interesting service because if you have a particular interest there's probably a need for research in that field it's something that a lot of large companies will like to hire out for anyways because they get into a kind of can't see the forest through the trees um mode of operation and so if they can hire an external contractor who isn't part of their realm um who can kind of see the whole thing then that that's really valuable research to them so if you can get really good at writing reports and doing this sort of research this can be a very fun way to work with really interesting companies so the question um to determine what kind of services might be great for you to sell online do you have a unique experience from your job that you could share um i've had some really interesting unique jobs in the last year not just in web development but also in community management um some of the volunteer experience that i have ranges from working with canada goose populations to volunteering to run hackathons so a lot of that unique experience has translated for me into opportunities to sell those services and sell that knowledge online to other people who just find that they really need that information so in determining the services that you could offer um you really want to start to think outside of just what your core career is um a statistic that i will sometimes throw at some of my students at pace is that in the u.s 26 of people with a college degree do something that's related to that college degree so that means that there are 74 percent of people with college degrees are doing a job that's not at all related to what they studied in college and the same thing kind of can be translated to you getting stuck in the mindset of what you've been doing for your whole career but you probably have a lot of other skills and a lot of other knowledge that you just aren't thinking about yet so this is one of my favorite brainstorming uh exercises the first time i did this was the day that i was leaving my full-time job to start my own business for the first time and i was really scared um i was i was sitting with one of my favorite co-workers and i was crying because i was just really really scared about what i was doing and i knew it was the right choice but it's very scary to kind of have your regular income in a compromised situation so this exercise helped me realize that i'm going to be okay no matter what whether it's as a programmer whether it's as something else so we're going to do a brainstorming activity for five minutes i actually pulled up from the last time i did this so that i could kind of see like how different um my brainstorming results are going to be this time but um i'm just going to set this five minute timer and i'm gonna pull open a google doc and i'm just gonna start writing down stream of consciousness different services and things that i could sell online and make money so i'll start that now and open up a new tab and i'm just going to start brainstorming different services that i can offer online julie i know you'll jump into this as well but i guess the thing that i love about when you do this is that it's you're focusing on both kind of things that are kind of so essential to you as in your career but also kind of creative activities that you've tackled historically and enjoy and have found of opportunities through so it's it's fun to see see the process a lot of these things are um stuff that i really like doing in my free time so i started thinking a lot about my favorite hobbies today definitely um i really love running i really love cooking um some new hobbies even that i've built over the last year are bird watching and so it's really fun for me to be able to think about those things as ways that i could possibly make money because in a lot of cases that means that i'll be meeting other people who are really interested in those topics um over the course of the last year i've started teaching a lot more classes at my maker space and a makerspace is um is a place for people who are just interested in making all sorts of things so a place for engineers a place for woodworkers a place for metal workers people who are interested in making digital products people who are interested in sewing and i'm very fortunate to have a really awesome maker space close by i got involved with their community and i started teaching classes on creative coding and classes on um design thinking some classes on building virtual reality music videos um so it's been really fun and it's been a really creative endeavor for me so these are all services and things that i can start to to think about selling online um you know should should i ever be looking for a new a new service that i can start to to sell online um another thing that i started thinking about towards the end there is how popular curated services are becoming um that's another something that i would have definitely added to this slide here services that are frequently sold online um because that um definitely like curated services are becoming really really popular so i hope that some of you had kind of a little bit of a breakthrough in thinking about things that you could possibly sell online and thinking about um different services that you might be interested in in selling either as a side hustle or as part of your business things that you could consult on things that you just love to research anyways or things that you really know a lot about like maybe you're a cheese connoisseur or a wine connoisseur and you would love to talk to people and put together a list of recommendations for them another thing to think about with deciding what kind of services to sell online are asynchronous versus synchronous services so you've probably found a lot of people are now able to have remote jobs which is awesome and a lot of these remote jobs might just be part-time things um in order to do something like data entry you might not need to go into an office anymore that might be something that you can just do on your computer at home at night if you want to if you want to make a little bit of extra money so some of those jobs would be asynchronous it doesn't really matter what time you're doing them um it's something that you can collect some information about and then you can give it back to your customer or synchronous so is it a service that you deliver at a specific time you can have a video call with somebody to deliver that service so those are just some things to think about in managing your own time and then um in a five step process to kind of figure out all right i've decided on what service i'm going to be administering here so how can we serve that skill digitally um we've definitely started thinking about things a lot more in terms of what what work can we be doing from home rather than going into the office to do so if you're thinking about how do you start your own business with just the bare bare minimum um what you need to do is you need to find your customers deliver your service and collect payment just to test out your ideas so always be testing your concept first just try to get that first paying customer before you go all in on registering your company um make sure that there that there's a market for it not all things will be a hit not a problem try something else so i do want to call uh call out one particular tool that i like to use to build landing pages um a landing page is just a place that you can point to online for whatever service that you're going to provide it can provide a little bit more information about the service tell people why you are an authority to be providing that service and give people a sense of what rates you're charging and if you have any testimonials or anything like that a landing page is just a great way to collect all of that information and present it be able to present it quickly to people so the tool that i use to build those landing pages even as a web developer there's no way that i could possibly do this better on my own than this one website card does so i love card um because there it starts with all these really nice right off the bat um demos that you can use i personally do pay for the pro version of this this is how much i just like love this product i'm not sponsored by card at all i just really really like it but you can see the demo of these websites they're really nice really modern so you can put in all of your information there and your services and they just are super nice and just so easy to get started with so um card is definitely a web a website that i recommend um my favorite website builder for single page websites the next thing um is finding your customers so you always hear the the suggestion of like really finding your niche of really niching down to find customers and finding online communities of those people and that's really good advice um so you'll find all these different online communities in places like twitter and places like reddit maybe even facebook groups and you'll find these really specific groups of people um a really specific group of people that i found that um i'm starting to learn how to do uh digitizing images for embroidery i recently got a computerized embroidery machine there's another side hustle um and but people will also pay you to digitize their images so that they can do their embroidery themselves on their own machines so a lot of the designs that i like to do are kind of like subversive uh patches um and like they look very florally and they look almost grandma-e but they like say something inappropriate and there's literally a facebook group for that for people that are just really into that um so it's it's these really specific niches um the same thing as people who are really interested in um snacks that have holographic packaging i kid you not that's exactly what my friend andrea built her snack research business on um so finding those customers in those very niche places and you can find them in facebook groups and subreddits and in uh on twitter are i think the best places to to start to find those people if you're looking for people to work with locally also um facebook is a great place to start there because a lot of towns and a lot of neighborhoods will have facebook groups so you can reach out to your neighbors kind of directly there i've gotten an awful lot of commissions on custom woodworking projects and and custom laser engraving projects through those kind of facebook groups next you're going to want to deliver your service so if it is something that you're going to just be teaching something if you're going to be working with somebody and just kind of getting to know them then you can usually just use zoom or google hangouts to deliver your service um whatever technology their your customers most comfortable with so that's something that's just pretty simple to get set up and then to collect payment so you can use um any number of different payment collection methods that you're most comfortable with but i found that paypal is is pretty reliable um and i haven't had any issues with it venmo also is a good option in this case but um you know your idea there might be really specific tools that can help you out so your goal should always be to think of what's the fewest number of tools that you can use you probably don't need a whole custom web application built you probably don't need to hire a web developer to build out your website you can probably use more simple social media pages and you can probably use website builders um your website's not going to be the biggest thing for your marketing anyways so think about how you're going to deliver whatever services you're going to deliver it could just be you're going to call somebody on the phone to deliver your service it could be via a video call it could be that you are delivering written service um so in that case an email or a google doc um dot c dot me is another delivery tool that a lot of um licensed clinical social workers have been using and a lot of therapists and doctors have been using it because it's hipaa compliant so if you need um special considerations like that at this point there's probably a tool for it which is amazing then you want to think about what tools you're going to use for marketing social media ads are great because you can get into really specific niches if you want to pay for ads on facebook you can get into really specific niches facebook really does have a lot of that data on people um and i've got to admit that even as somebody who really values my privacy i click on an awful lot of social media ads and i do find that the the targeted ads are really specific and really helpful to me so um facebook is kind of a good place to start with doing social media ad campaigns um because you can just say hey i want to spend twenty dollars on ads target these people and when the money runs out then we run out and that's okay craigslist is also a great place that you can do marketing for free um a lot of folks are still looking at craigslist locally they're looking for services like movers or services like dog walkers um craigslist is definitely still a place that people are active facebook marketplace as well um is a place that that a lot of people are still active if you're somebody who's interested in in getting into flipping flipping like antiques or collectibles um facebook marketplaces is really a great place for that if you're somebody who is interested in vintage clothes also facebook marketplace and instagram are great platforms to um use for marketing and finding your your customers so finding those online communities where your potential customers hang out is really the the most critical thing that you can do to gain customers for your the service that you're offering online um finding those online communities does take a lot of time sometimes but if you start to search around for those people on twitter you can search by hashtags you can just kind of start googling different terms that are relevant to the online community that um that you're interested in targeting and then going in into those communities and building genuine relationships with people um online communities don't like marketers they don't like people who are coming in just to sell their products so it's really important to be able to go into those online communities and form genuine relationships find out exactly what those pain points that people are facing in those communities and find a way to explain how you can help them um i personally find a lot of those online communities on twitter but a lot of my interests are kind of centered around um you know young young people in entrepreneurship and people who are starting businesses so i found that a lot of my friends are also building businesses for those same people so it's super interesting to kind of see makers building four makers and friends and family also are really important resources for finding on new customers it's worth just posting on facebook about what you're interested in in helping people with um your friends and family might know somebody who needs exactly the service that you're offering and your friends and family probably know what your skill set is and they know how awesome you are at that thing that you're trying to do um for example if i did want to start doing bird watching trips you know my friends and family know that i love birding and i'm pretty good at it um i'll know where to find the birds so um i know that my friends and family would definitely recommend my bird watching services to um to any of their friends and family that mention that they're interested in birds that's something that just kind of like comes up in conversation so it's important that my friends and family know what i'm trying to do for payment um you want to be careful about this because once your once your consulting service or in the service that you're selling online starts to make money of course you want to be mindful of taxes to just get started and get that first person paying for your service paypal is is a good option um if you want to integrate it into a website stripe is there then mo and square um and then there's any like delivery system that you might be using if you're selling online courses or something like that um they might have a payment system that's built right into it for marketing your service again you want to think small first so something that's nice about selling services is that um you don't need a whole ton of customers because selling services is time consuming and usually the payment is kind of directly correlated to how much time you're spending on it so it's selling services is a great way to get started with online entrepreneurship because you can start making money immediately and that's why even a lot of companies that are trying to sell software as a service will start by bootstrapping by just selling that service for example in college i started a company teaching middle schoolers how to code and i wanted to deliver that service as a piece of software that could be used in schools all around the country but what i did to kind of get that started up off the ground was i went to schools and i said hey i'll teach your middle schoolers coding and all of the schools said awesome and paid me fifty dollars an hour to do that so um services are great because you can just start making money right away but that's because they're so time consuming so again places to kind of start with would be with those friends and family would be with those online communities that you found um something else that i found is actually pretty useful and maybe a little bit not totally selling this online but um to put physical flyers in your community if you live in a small town or even if you live in an apartment building that has a cork board somewhere putting up physical flyers like doesn't hurt just to get your name out something else i've found is that if you are open to having international clients if you post in the online communities that are based in the major cities there you'll have better luck at finding those international clients um so if you're interested in reaching a global community um then definitely consider those local communities that exist um in those cities that you're looking to to target potential customers in um another thing that's really important if you're offering consulting services are building your brand as an expert you want to give people that reason to hire you so what you should be doing is always looking for opportunities to speak about your topic it's also to write for not necessarily well-known publications but more known publications than what you have and also to just share what you do in a really personable way online being a part of these online communities is really important and a lot of these online communities simply by joining them and by participating in discussion you can establish yourself as an expert on these things um something that i've done in the the past years i was running challenges for a platform called makerpad um they focus on no code technologies and on helping entrepreneurs develop um their products without having to write any code with using these different tools um that focus on being able to create things without having to to write code and are more design based building tools and um i'd loosely used a couple of those tools before but i got involved in the community and i was able to answer some questions i started talking to more folks and i was kind of able to establish myself as a no code expert um i taught just one workshop at my makerspace on no code tools and i shared those slides and by sharing those slides on twitter i was able to find a lot more folks who knew about who wanted to learn about no code who might as well learn from me sometimes it's really hard to decide that you're the expert now and that you you know enough to be able to share your knowledge um and something that i always remember my high school drama club teacher saying was you don't have to be confident just act like it um and that has helped me an awful lot with kind of having the confidence to build my brand as an expert because a lot of times yeah i don't think that i know enough to be the authority on something um but i sure can act like it so if that helps you at all you don't have to be confident just act like it but focus on building your brand as an expert have people in your community recognize that you're really interested in this thing and a lot of times all you have to do is just say hey i'm really interested in this thing i've been doing x y and z um work in relation to it and um and i'd be happy to help you with exactly what services i'm offering and then the most important step of course is to follow through follow through on on whatever service it is that you're offering client relationship management is so so important with services it's really important to make sure that your clients feel comfortable with um the work that you're doing that they see the work that you're doing and that you're very transparent about expectations so this can be really difficult but the client relationship management um sometimes this involves just making sure that you're finding clients that you work with really well um and it takes a lot of people skills it's definitely an extra layer on top of whatever service it is that you're offering to be able to manage those relationships well um once you start to to form those business relationships having a contract is a really good idea even if you have established trust in your relationship having a contract is is always a good idea um and always making sure to be really detailed in exactly the work that you've done when you're sending invoice statements um something that i used to really hate when i worked at a web development agency was always having to write down like down to spent five minutes replying to this email just having to track minute by minute but it was really helpful for our clients and stakeholders to be able to see exactly how the time and money was spent so just being really detailed also helps to manage expectations going forward in the future and um for scheduling sometimes that can be a really difficult part in um administering services but i found that for one-on-one meetings calendly has been very helpful and that if i just offer a bunch of opportunities for somebody to grab some time on my calendar they'll grab some time on my calendar um and then i just get a notification when the meeting's coming up for larger groups for organizing like a cooking class or something like that um doodle is really helpful and so you can offer a bunch of potential times and then you can select whatever time the most people have said is is the best for them so and then of course just making sure that that your service is really high quality um take a lot of pride in your work when you're offering a consulting service service or freelancing there's really no one that you can hide behind there's no manager that's screwing up um it's really on you to to do that project management and to um make sure that that you're building your own brand in a really great way um so i've got it looks like 14 minutes for some questions um so i'm going to open up the question tab here but um before i jump into questions i do just want to say thank you again to the sbdc and to andrew flam for having me here to give the these these lectures and um next wednesday at the same time i'll be talking about selling digital products online selling things like online courses um digital assets like images for video games music for video games um selling writing online and selling like video content online and then um i'll also be talking in two weeks from now about selling physical products online um which is really exciting for me because i'll just go through the process of setting up a store um and show you how to start selling things like t-shirts so i'll open up the questions here julie thank you so much i will recommend popping out the questions box and making it bigger all right it's going to be the arrow on the next to the xbox yep you got it thanks very much julie as well um i did have a couple things uh the the remarks were spot on and a couple things i wanted to kind of highlight in terms of um you know best practices i think that julie sort of kind of highlighted so well and i think can also be kind of talking points for you um you know our participants today if you're not working with an sbdc advisor already um you know sort of the finding customers aspect and kind of knowing what their pain points are i think it's kind of into so integral i think you know for business owners not just for folks who are looking to launch a business but also you know if you have a business you know what is it what is your product or service do and what um reasons does a customer have for kind of choosing you over others so being able to hone in on that and explain that well both digitally as julie's going through as well as through other efforts you know whether it's to stakeholders to investors to lenders i think is is so important and i think it's something that our advisors who do a lot of with our clients um formalizing your business i think you know julie was so spot on i think in terms of thinking about kind of building your customer base and making sure you know before you go through a lot of efforts but understanding kind of you know you want to make sure that there's uh a structure in place behind you that there are controls in place and that uh legally you know that you're in a position where you're not um kind of suggesting yourself personally to kind of undo exposure i think it's important to build and grow so having a formal structure in place is certainly important um and the third thing you know in terms of contacts and voices i love what julie kind of you know went through there i think you know trust is one thing but you want to make sure you have a piece of paper to kind of point to in terms of you know don't do this work uh you know with the expectation that you're not gonna get paid for otherwise it's a hobby if this is a business make sure you have some sort of contract in place you're gonna be able to tie to and the not fun part about it is chasing people down for those you know for your payments i mean make sure you have a formal invoicing structure making sure you're going to have that uh in place so i think julie kind of really identifies some great resource to be able to help accomplish these and i think you know some of these topics record you want to kind of talk with an advisor about how to incorporate that into how you operate your business you would be delighted to so um again thanks julian and i'll pop out again i really appreciate your remarks thanks andrew yeah it's really the the services that are offered um for three three for free through the sbdc is it's really incredible um to be able to have help just to figure out some of the paperwork and logistics behind starting a business generally um it's it can truly be a headache um and it's just awesome to have a little bit of help and just also a little bit of encouragement so i'm really excited about the the services that are offered here um so first question that i'm seeing come up is um can you speak to influencers and or online advertising what is the process and how does this play into selling items and services online and how do you get paid so um if you're interested in hiring an online influencer um or giving your product to them so the process is really just to go find the people that have the audience that you're looking to target um and send them a message just kind of start talking with them directly sometimes you know they'll tell you exactly what their rates are some of their rates are absolutely ridiculous sometimes you want to just make sure that you can niche down to a really small group you don't necessarily want to target those people with a million followers but they're not as engaged um you might want to what might want to target somebody who has 5 000 followers but all 5000 of those followers are really interested in that thing that you're offering so um if you're interested in contacting influencers in that way um then that's how you would go about it just start sending dms on the social media platforms where they're popular if you are interested in becoming somebody who does influencing then the most important thing of course is just to have a really active community um you can think about it in terms of your possible brand but what i recommend for people who are interested in becoming influencers are to build a community around the the things that you're most interested in so that people will know to reach out directly to you for that specific thing because you have the most active community you have the most connections julie just a heads up i did reply to all the folks who did request a copy of this presentation there was many folks that wanted to double check that they were getting the recording and you will get the recording from today as well as julie's slide deck and the follow-up email from go to webinar awesome oh this is a really good question from sabrina how do you test out the pricing of the services you sell online it can be really difficult to to figure out pricing i recommend first just finding other people that are that are offering those services and even if you don't necessarily have the same credentials as them yet um just try to offer at those at those prices so a lot of times people will still reach out to you about the service and then try to negotiate with you on the price but ultimately you know start with what you're comfortable with like what what do you need to make to feel comfortable um start there and then you can kind of start to bump up that price as you um as you build up your reputation for selling those services so um if you're interested in selling um something like uh did like embroidery digitizing service or um like a web development uh consulting rate then you just kind of look at what what are people expecting to be paid there um look at people who are offering those services from the same like country and area as you because in a lot of cases you'll find people like on fiverr for example selling those services for way cheaper than you could possibly sell them for ignore that and just start with what you are comfortable with and then you can negotiate with folks from there um the hipaa compliant one is doxie.me um it's also just got really good user experience i know that a lot of doctors use it um and they use it with a lot of like older folks too any advice for selling services like tarot readings online i'm not sure if i need a website or just use social media um i would personally just use social media for selling something like tarot readings online i actually do have one friend who does tarot readings online she uses etsy um which i wouldn't necessarily recommend for tarot services um but also just on facebook and sometimes she'll do you know like tara reading parties and so it'll just be her friends from her social media so it's also a good way to kind of build up that online community around the the thing that you're um selling in so for selling services like tarot readings or for things that um could interest a big group of people um those little online parties or things like uh just opening up a google hangouts um is a great opportunity there to to kind of get a bunch of people like around your brand um also you really for like tarot readings in particular i feel like you really want to kind of build up a an interesting personal brand around that so you know think about whatever graphics you're sharing with um your posts online about doing uh tarot readings or um particularly if you could get like uh somebody to like talk about the tarot reading that you did or why it was meaningful to them i know a lot of folks might not want to share that information but particularly for something like tarot reading where there's a little bit of skepticism around the service in general things like customer customer reviews are awesome let's see thank you all so much for all the positive comments i'm really glad that that this was a useful uh webinar for all of you um so the best way to to get in touch with me um when when this sbdc sends out the recording um i'll have them definitely share my email as well so you can just reach out to me at my email um so that would be a good time to talk about um just any services that you're interested in selling for sure what's your view on using short youtube videos as a way of getting people interested in your services awesome awesome awesome um definitely if you if you can do that if you can create engaging um video content 100 do it um video content is being consumed so much more than it used to be even um and particularly young people like um i taught middle school and high schoolers over the summer at the makerspace and they youtube videos was like the only way to get through to them um they're addicted to it they're always on youtube um and it's a great way to convey you know the pieces of knowledge that you have that you're willing to share for sure um especially you say you teach public speaking and interview prep to professionals absolutely that's a great way to start building your brand short youtube videos is awesome have you heard of and or do you use alignable i've never used alignable but i will definitely look that up there's another question i just saw about would you suggest doing your own book bookkeeping when starting off selling your services online are there any particular software programs you can recommend to keep track of your finances um i would recommend just doing your own bookkeeping if that's something that you're comfortable doing um i know some people who are just like truly atrocious at math and keeping track of stuff of keeping track of different interactions or transactions um maybe those people want to use a bookkeeping um tool or a bookkeeping assistant for particular software programs to keep track of your finances quickbooks is a little bit heavy-handed in most cases but it's also the best but i would honestly recommend just using like a google spreadsheet for the first probably thousand dollars a month or something like that um and then once you you start making enough money to be able to lose track of money then uh quickbooks is a is a good option there how do you get feedback from customers on what you can do to improve your services and are there any programs you can use to get customer feedback um i just ask in a lot of cases um what you know folks always want to to get more value from the thing that they're paying for so if folks think that they can get more value by just telling you how you can improve your services they'll certainly tell you um and a lot of people are particularly uh in the remote communication age when we have less physical cues to go off of people are getting a lot better at uh giving constructive feedback in more gentle ways sometimes anonymous surveys are a good tool there so i would just use google forms for an anonymous survey and any programs to get customer feedback um if you offer an awesome customer service then you'll get great reviews um if you offer a terrible one you'll also definitely get that customer feedback for sure so um a lot of platforms will just kind of have that that review built in um but in a lot of cases yeah just just asking is is kind of a an easy way to get the that feedback from customers thank you for that question from thomas should i create separate websites for each service um it depends on how they're related to each other if they're not related at all um and you can't figure out how to build your personal brand around all of those services all at the same time then yes create separate websites for each service um but if there's a way to kind of build all of them into your personal brand then um creating one website is probably fine thank you all for attending and um i look forward to seeing you next week again julie really appreciate your comments and obviously look forward to the sessions in the weeks to come and renee thanks so much for everything you do to help us with uh our training efforts i'll make one kind of final pitch for services for our center um i think julie was sort of spot on in terms of kind of being able to you know for your online presence and being able to look for website development so uh we do have a team of business advisors that works at the spdc helping with website development so if you're interested in getting yourself a website presence um you know i certainly encourage you to take advantage of our services that are available again at no cost really again thanks so much it was awesome and look forward to reconnecting uh for next week