When I wanted to start a spiritual business, there were a lot of mistakes I made, and unnecessary paths I led myself down. This wasted a lot of my time, and inevitably, my money too.
So I would like to save you the trouble I went through, by providing a step by step guide to set out on your journey as a spiritual entrepreneur the right way, from the start.
The following steps may sound simple, but they’re not easy. If you want to start a spiritual business it will take a lot of time, effort, and energy to complete these steps. Especially when you’re starting from scratch (or re-starting, as I know some of you are).
But starting and running your own business as a spiritual entrepreneur is worth that time, effort and energy.
So, let’s begin.
Step One – Who Do You Serve?
You will see a lot about this step in all the best basic business advice; talking about your target market, or your niche. All of that is well and good, and useful to be aware of when seeking guidance. But when we start a spiritual business, first and foremost we need to be working from a place of community service.
Thus, the first step is to figure out who are the people you want to be of service to? Answering the following questions will help:
- Who are you? Do you want to serve people that are like you?
- What are you most interested in, and passionate about, and who shares those interests and passions?
- Who do you relate to, and empathise with?
- What experience do you have to share, and what sort of person would that be useful for?
- Who have you been able to help previously, even just as friends or family?
- Who in your life has already looked to you for guidance or support?
Sit with these questions, journal about them, seek guidance from your own spiritual advisors, and even ask your friends and family directly if you feel they will be supportive and honest.
It is best to come up with one ideal person, real or designed as your ideal ‘avatar’, who you can think of and even imagine yourself talking to when you move forward with your business messaging and community service work as you start a spiritual business.
Step Two – How Will You Help Them?
This is what regular business advisors will term ‘solving your client’s problems’. When we start a spiritual business, our focus is on problem solving too, but we remain focused on how we can help them rather than how it will help us.
This is an important distinction to keep our own ethics on track from the get go, but it also has a practical application.
One of the issues a lot of new entrepreneurs face is that they decide what their customer’s need, and put a lot of work into solving that problem.
This sounds well and good, until they realise that people often resist what they need, and go for what they want – often in the sense of short term gratification rather than long term goals.
To work around this, we have to listen to what people want, and become a part of the conversations they are already having.
This is why it’s important at these early stages to really get to know the ideal person whom you wish to serve, and make sure we are focusing on them as we start a spiritual business.
- Where do they hang out, online or in person?
- Do you know them in person, well enough to simply ask how you may help them, or what sort of content they like to engage with, and listen to their replies?
- Is there a group or organisation you could reach out to with a simple survey?
- What are they watching, or reading?
Later on, you will be able to communicate with your community directly for clearer information, but for now you will be in a general process of watching and listening.
Join their Facebook groups and Discord channels. Read their magazines and blogs. Subscribe to their YouTube channels. Travel to their events (or engage with online events). And of course, communicate with any of them you already know personally.
Keep notes on what you find. Be consistent.
In time and with some effort, you will start to see patterns emerging – frequent questions or complaints. The same topics arising again and again in different ways. Phrases and ways of framing things that become familiar.
All of this is invaluable for finding out how you can help people when you start a spiritual business.
First and foremost, you can provide answers and solutions to what they want. As you build trust, you can even begin to lead them towards what you can see, based on the big picture view, that they truly need.
Step Three – Finding Your Community
This is the bit where we start a YouTube channel, Blog, or Podcast, to begin creating valuable free content as we start a spiritual business.
Each option has it’s own pluses and minuses, and which you choose will really depend on your own inclinations.
Please note, I didn’t say comfort levels, because this bit is going to make most of ye a little uncomfortable, especially at the beginning of this journey.
That’s just something we need to be aware of and work to overcome, while remembering that this stage is about practice not perfection. That’s why we’re starting it so early, before most of the traditional ‘essentials for starting a business’ are brought into play.
This is how you will begin to gather your community, and get them to know, like, and trust you. So you can truly be of service to them.
YouTube might be the easiest one to get started with, and that’s a definite bonus. If you have a mobile phone, you can make a YouTube Video. There are some extras to improve the quality, for sure, but they can be picked up relatively cheaply to begin with. Maybe get a basic ring light, a tripod or phone stand, and a plug in microphone once you’re up and running. But you honestly don’t need any of that to just get going.
The downside is that ultimately, you don’t own the content you host on the YouTube platform, and it could be possibly be shut down for something outside of your control. However, that is relatively rare on YouTube (compared to Facebook, for example, who shut down whole businesses built on there seemingly randomly every day).
A blog can be bundled in with creating a website (Step Four below) when you start a spiritual business, but ideally only if you’re going with the YouTube option as your main content creation strategy, and a blog as a secondary port of call. If you’re not at the website creation point yet, but want to go with blogging as your primary community service engine, then you’ll need to start writing those blog posts right now, in word or google documents, and have a file of them ready to go so you can populate your blog once it’s structurally set up.
Podcasting is maybe the option that takes the most technical insight to get going, but there are services like Anchor which can make the process a little easier for sure. It’s a good one if you have an inclination towards chattiness but don’t want to be on camera, but does have the downside of not being as searchable as the other two (Google and YouTube being the first and second largest search engines in the world, respectively). Honestly, you’ll still need to start a blog anyway for show notes, links, and searchability, at least.
Once you’ve decided how you’re doing this, the next thing is to figure out what you’re going to create content on. Luckily, you’ve already done the legwork for this in Steps One and Two!
Consult your notes, think about those frequently asked questions, those common complaints, and figure out which bits of them you can address.
If you want to dive a bit deeper, there are some excellent techniques here – How to Come Up with 93 Blog Ideas.
How often you create content will depend on you, and your current commitments. This is important, and should be prioritised if you want this spiritual entrepreneur thing to get a good grounding.
You’re definitely going to want to be creating 1-2 pieces of content per week, at least, but if you can push to do something every day, or every other day, please do.
Step Four – Building Your Community
Whichever content delivery method you choose above, you’re going to need a website. The reason I suggest starting your content creation before your website, is to get you practicing and learning by doing. It takes a long time for traffic and traction to build up on any of those platforms, so when you start a spiritual business, it’s best to begin that part of it as early and as often as possible.
Your website is home base for your business.
If you’re thinking of booking a consultation with a spiritual business, or buying a product from them, and you go looking for a website but find nothing… would it inspire confidence? Personally, I would be looking elsewhere, immediately.
While it’s important to have a functional and professional looking website to give a good first impression, and make sure people are finding what they need, I don’t want you to get hung up on sleek branding or professional graphic design.
I’ve seen people stall out their business set up for a year or more because they’re pursuing the perfect design package, or business loans/grant funding to get it all done professionally. You don’t need that right now.
Hosted WordPress with a quality theme is the best long term solution for any business, I believe, but it also comes with a bit of a steep learning curve. If you’re up for it, go for it (my top recommended tools are available here), but again – you don’t need that right now.
You can get started today on a website (and blog) with an Drag and Drop builder option like Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace. I started on Weebly, many years ago, and always found it easy to use and reliable. Use this link for a discount. I’ve also been hearing really good things about Squarespace lately.
Whichever you go for, it’s important to spend a bit for a domain name and properly hosted plan. For one thing, it just looks unprofessional having a subdomain .weebly.com or whatever. Nobody wants to do business with that.
You’re also going to need an email address @YourDomain.com so your mailing list has the best chance of deliverability (see below). You can even set this up to forward to your regular gmail address, if you like.
You won’t need any design skills to build website with the options linked above, just pick a template you like the look of, then drag and drop.
Keep it simple too.
You’re going to need a homepage – ideally one which showcases your blog content ‘below the fold’ (visible once you scroll down a wee bit). Otherwise you just need an About Me/Us page, a Services/Publications page to be clear about what you do or services you offer, a Contact page, and a Blog.
Even if you’re not blogging as your main form of content creation, this is where you put a post for each YouTube video you create, with a description and link to the video, or the show notes and links for each of your podcast episodes. You really want a nice bit of content ready to go to fill out the website as you create it.
So, that is where and how your potential community members can check out your credentials, but it’s also where they can access your email list, because that’s next in the set up.
There are any number of email service providers, both free and paid. I’ve had success with Convertkit and AWeber, but tend to avoid MailChimp like the plague these days. There are free and paid options for ConvertKit, which you can check out in the Toolkit Here.
The email list is your number one business asset for the long term, and please don’t let anyone tell you different.
Social media is great – by all means set up a Facebook Business Page, an Instagram, a Pinterest, or whatever the hot platform of the day is as you’re reading this. Link them from your website so it’s easy for folk to find them. Post on them once or twice a day to get yourself established there, but not get sucked in with ‘busy work’ social media posting.
But do not spend a lot of time on them, and don’t ever make the mistake of thinking you can build a quality long term business just through a social media profile.
It’s a simple fact that any social media account can get shut down or taken away from you literally any day, with no warning or appeals process (please believe me, I have lost admin access to a Facebook business page with over 6,000 subscribers for absolutely no reason).
Besides that though, when we start a spiritual business, we want to to be building trust first and foremost.
Would you really trust that ‘Instagram Influencer’ with your spiritual well being? Or your hard earned cash?!
When you want to figure out if a business is legit, don’t you google them, check for a website, maybe even join their mailing list to see what’s going on?
I mean, if you don’t, you probably should… before you hand over any cash to them certainly.
Facebook Groups are a slight exception to all of this, and can actually be quite useful for community building when they’re run right. But do that AFTER your website and mailing list are up and running, as a priority.
Step Five – Community Service
This is where we find out exactly how we can best be of service to our growing community, and do that.
Until this point, there will probably be a lot of guesswork, then trial and error, to figure out who your community is and how you can serve them. And that’s ok.
We learn to be successful by failing. A lot. It’s important to understand that and just keep trying things, you’ll be narrowing the focus each time, and getting closer to your goal.
In this step, we’re going to make our first offer to the people who have begun paying attention to you, and even to those who you think could benefit from what you have to offer, who may not know about you just yet.
This is not, unfortunately, the bit where we get to start making money just yet, because this first offer is a free offer. Some call it a Lead Magnet, or an Opt-In incentive, or even a bribe!
You will be creating something of value, that you think your community would want (not necessarily what you think they need, you have got to start with what they want first). You will be sending it out as a free gift to anyone who has already joined your mailing list, so they don’t miss out.
You will begin offering it as the CTA (call to action) that you add to the end of every blog post, podcast, youtube or facebook video, and all across your social media platforms, and in return, they just need to give you their email so you know where to send their cool free thing.
FOR EXAMPLE: Click Here to Sign up to my Mailing List and Join our Community! (and that leads them to an email service provider sign up form. Try the link sure and see how it works) 😉
You can set the email service provider to automatically deliver the item you’ve offered once they confirm their registration, that will look different for each provider (I use ConvertKit, check it in the Toolkit Here), but will be automatic so you don’t have to hand deliver their gift.
And then they are on your mailing list, and you can begin to nurture that contact by sending them lovely, chatty emails as often as you like (at least once a week), with links to the great content you’ve been creating which will be of use to them, plus anything else interesting and relevant you come across.
What should you create as a lead magnet, you ask?
I’m glad you did. You’ll have some notes and resources from the early stages above (I told you not to skip that, as it would come in useful!), as well as some trial and error findings on what sort of content is doing well for you so far, and what’s not. So, those are your first clues.
Think about what sort of things make you sign up for a mailing list – is it videos, free classes, a downloadable PDF report, a free eBook, step by step checklist, guides, case studies, or infographics?
Have a mooch around to see what other people are offering, and even sign up for their free stuff to see what they’re doing, and how they’re delivering it. (To model some of it in your own way though, not to copy mind you – please don’t plagiarise anything!)
See if you’re getting comments or questions on your content, and what the most frequently asked questions you’re seeing are. That will give you a starting point for what your people want.
With all of that in mind (keep a journal and brainstorm lots of ideas in there), see if anything jumps out at you for an obvious opt in offer or lead magnet.
And if you’re still stuck – honestly – just take your best guess and make something that feels manageable to you, to get started with. Done is better than perfect.
Create a sign up form and set up the free gift to deliver with your email service provider, and start sharing the link!
Step Six – Solving Their Problem
Ok, so at this point, you’ll have been going for a wee while, with the content and the email list, social media shares, and the community service freebies.
Things will be slow to start and gain traction, so please don’t worry about that.
Exactly how long it will take you to build up to your first, say, 1000 subscribers on the mailing list will vastly vary depending on your niche (for example, financial stuff is always going to be more popular than crafts or hobbies), your content creation (both quality and quantity), your social media following (sometimes your stuff gets shared to bigger audiences, or even goes viral), and the popularity/usefulness of your community service offer (Step 5).
There is a popular theory that you only need 1000 True Fans to make a good living from your business.
To get there though, I suggest that at about 300 mailing list members, you offer something for sale. Something incredibly useful, based on all of the previous work you have done to build and serve your community.
To figure out exactly what this first product or service should be, you will need to survey your community. This can be as simple as an email which asks them to ‘Hit Reply’ and let you know how best you can help them, or can get a little more detailed with a dedicated service such as Google Forms, or a paid provider such as Survey Monkey.
Once you get some responses back in, you can figure out your ‘Minimum Viable Product’ – a concept I first learned about in a book called The Lean Start Up by Eric Ries, but which has now started to show up in pretty much every internet marketing guru’s teaching.
Because it is effective.
The key is to set up a product or service for sale, before you actually create it. Then you can make sure that it is going to sell, and deliver it if (when) it does. Compare this to creating an entire course, designing a whole service, or manufacturing a new product, only to find that nobody is actually willing to buy it.
Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) can be a short class that you block out topics and learning outcomes for, then offer to your mailing list for enrollment. You then run it live on the specified date, record it then and there, and then you have a product to sell after the fact.
It could be a membership programme that delivers weekly or monthly sessions (in person or online). It could be a product sample (please be clear that you will be refunding the full cost if you don’t reach X amount of sign ups) or a kickstarter campaign for a product.
You know your business and your own skills and talents best, and therefore what you can offer to the community that will truly serve what they are telling you they want.
Don’t over commit, and get in over your head, or run the risk of letting people down, for sure. But also, be confident that you are the person who can meet the needs of these folks who have shown interest in what you can provide.
Now is the time to get direct and honest feedback on their most pressing problem/s, design and outline a solid solution, and offer it for sale.
Step Seven – Increase Your Reach
Once you start a spiritual business, you’ll then need to grow it by increasing your ‘reach’. What, exactly, is reach?
“Reach is the potential number of customers your business can reach through any marketing channel or campaign. For instance, when you’re using a TV commercial to market your business, your marketing reach is the number of people who will see the advert.”
https://customerthink.com/7-simple-marketing-techniques-that-will-increase-your-customer-reach
First off, everything that we’ve talked about above will be contributing to the growth of your business, as well as the set up and foundations for you to build it strong. Please don’t skip steps because they seem like hard work.
IT TAKES TIME AND EFFORT TO BUILD AND GROW A BUSINESS!
Sorry for shouting, but it seems like some folk are a little hard of hearing when it comes to this, and get awful distracted by the next shiny thing that promises a quick fix. That is not the way.
At this point, you’ll want to be focusing on a healthy combination of push and pull methods, or what’s known as inbound and outbound marketing.
We’ve talked already (Step Three) about the inbound, through consistent quality content marketing. With this, you pull people into your community environment.
It can also include social media marketing; really, it’s any organic content that you are putting out there to lead people in towards the heart of your community.
Push marketing is, well, a little more on the pushy side of things, but still necessary to have in the mix. This is the outbound marketing, and can involve advertisements, promotions, special offers, sales, sales calls, directly contact people by email or direct message.
Traditionally, inbound marketing is usually the ‘free’ option, though it does cost in time and building skills such as writing or video making. While outbound marketing is the paid option, though anything from billboards or tv, to pay per click online ads.
This isn’t hard and fast though, as I would view a boosted post on facebook as inbound marketing (that it costs to get in front of people, due to how that platform has gone), while reaching out to people on Instagram through their DMs is an effective but time consuming ‘free’ version of an old fashioned sales call. So, some grey areas.
In all of your marketing messaging, you really need to make the purpose of your business really clear.
The clearer it is, the better they can understand it, and the quicker they will be to join the community, and even make the purchase.
At this stage, please focus on that clear messaging, improving all the time so you have a great offer both in your lead magnet (Step Five) and your first sales offer (Step Six), that solves the problems you know your community are facing.
Then pick one or two forms of inbound marketing, some examples of which are:
- Topical blogs, YouTube Videos, Podcasts
- Social media campaigns (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
- Publishing paper or eBooks
- Search Engine Optimized (SEO) website text
- Facebook Live Videos
- Web-based seminars (Webinars)
And do the same with outbound marketing, so you have a good mix going, some examples of which include:
- TV commercials, radio ads
- Print advertisements (newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards)
- Direct print marketing with flyers, brochures, catalogs, etc.
- Stalls at tradeshows or events
- Conference/event speaking or presentations
- Guesting on other peoples podcasts, YouTube channel, or blog
- Outbound sales calls (AKA “cold calls”)
Get going on what your resources allow (both time and money, please be realistic), and get them growing your business.
