I used to always dream about quitting my job and being happy because I had something else that was more fulfilling.
But that never happened.
In fact, I got fired from almost every single job that I ever had. I guess that was a big sign. But it also meant that I often had to scramble for money to ensure that a roof stayed over my head.
So I know a thing or two about putting together a business quickly that allowed me to live.
I’m going to put myself in your shoes and show you how to quit your job in 90 days.
Do I Have to Quit My Job?
Absolutely not! If you love your job or simply want to keep it for a while and have a second source of income then this post will still apply to you.
But unfortunately an article titled, “How to create a second job for yourself“, doesn’t have much appeal so you’re left with what we have here.
So by all means, keep your job. The goal of a Pocket Business is to ensure you can run it effectively no matter what your situation is so if you want to keep your job and its benefits that shouldn’t prevent you from running a successful Pocket Business.
It Starts With a Formula
Before you go overboard and think there is a lot going on it’s important to understand the basic formula that every single business in the world follows.
Audience x Offer = $$$$$
That means that every single business that you know about follows this equation and how well they follow it dictates their success. A better audience with an offer leads to more money. A great offer with an audience willing to buy leads to more money.
But you can’t money with only one of these variables. It’s just not possible.
The importance of this formula is understanding all that you need to do to build your own Pocket Business. You need a way to build an audience and an offer to sell them.
You can make this as complex or as simple as you want but with the understanding of this formula we can move on to getting the most out of each variable.
Building an Audience for Your Pocket Business
Your business is going to live or die depending on how well you handle this. That makes it sound like the most important thing there is and it is.
Without an audience you have no business and the problem is that everyone is trying to build an audience in today’s online world.
So how do you do it?
Lucky for you we’ve simplified things by creating The Pocket Business Framework. Don’t worry, it’s nothing convoluted or difficult. In fact, you can fit it on the back of a small napkin.
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
And that’s it.
The purpose of having this framework is to help you understand what is or isn’t working in your business. Too often people follow the “steps” to building a business but when things don’t work they think they are doing the steps wrong.
Strategy vs Tactics
The Pocket Business Framework is a strategy to always follow. Strategies never change. They are universal.
Tactics are the things that you do to implement the strategy and this is where people often fall flat.
For example, they might see someone say that the best place to build a business is on LinkedIn so they’ll go on LinkedIn and post 5x a week.
But nothing happens.
Does this mean LinkedIn sucks? Does it mean this tactic sucks?
What it means is that they haven’t applied The Pocket Business Framework to what they’re doing on LinkedIn. They aren’t getting people to notice them or they aren’t getting people to pay (and keep) attention.
And because they don’t do that they think it’s the wrong tactic and then go looking for something else. Maybe it’s YouTube, blogging, a newsletter, or Instagram.
Building an Audience Is an Evergreen Task
The wonderful thing about building an online business is that there are very few evergreen tasks. These are tasks that are never finished.
Building an audience is never finished. It’s why you see people say that the best way to grow on social media is to be consistent.
It’s also one of the reasons why we lean so heavily on blogging because it helps to create a passive audience building channel. It’s also a way to build authoritative content that builds more attention and trust with your audience.
Plus, it can be a very sneak salesperson for your offer.
The Two Types of Offers to Start With
There are two types of offers that you should consider:
- Low-ticket digital products
- High-ticket coaching
The reason why you only want to consider one of these two is due to economics and time. With a low-ticket digital product you can put up something that people will buy on impulse. High-ticket coaching allows you to generate a large amount of revenue from a small group of people.
And both can be set up relatively quickly.
High-ticket coaching doesn’t need any setup time if you know exactly what you want to do and you can create an ebook in a weekend if you want (or we will do it for you).
Why not a course or something similar? Time.
Business is nothing but a ton of little experiments stacked atop one another. If you take too long to create an offer you’re losing time on seeing what works and what doesn’t.
But if you can create a book in a week then you can get it out in front of people and see how they react. This allows you to make the necessary adjustments until everything is working.
The Economics of Digital Products
You might have already noticed that there is a small issue with selling low-ticket digital products (we like to call them Pocket Offers) and that is the fact you need to sell a lot to replace your salary.
And that’s okay because these products serve another purpose which is to help you segment your audience and unlock who the buyers are.
If you sell a $20 ebook and you make $120,000 a year then you would need to sell 6,000 copies of the book to replace your salary.
That’s a lot of books!
But the book should be viewed as an entry point. The book can lead to other digital products or more high-ticket offerings such as a course or coaching.
The customer who starts by paying $20 might end up paying $2,000 over the next 90 days. So just because you start with something low-ticket that doesn’t mean it can’t be the keys to your escape.
With our Odd Noodle brand, people tend to start with Your First $10k but then move on to the other offers as they complement what they’ve learned.
High-ticket coaching can get you to your revenue goals quicker if you have the authority. Low-ticket digital products can make you money sooner if you can reach the right people.
There is no right or wrong choice. You could do both if you wanted.
So now you understand the importance of audience-building and having an offer. How do you put it all together to quit your job?
How to Quit Your Job in 90 Days
As I’ve already mentioned it’s important to view business building as you would a science experiment. Each thing you do is an experiment to get feedback.
With that feedback, you’re able to make another decision which again will lead to more feedback.
Everything you’re about to learn sticks to the principles of The Pocket Business Framework. This just happens to be the tactics that we like to use for our brands and the ones we recommend to clients.
Not because they are the best (maybe they are for you) but because they do a great job of the things that we want to achieve.
Step 1. Who Are You Helping?
If you don’t know who you’re going to help then you don’t know what business you’re going to build. Are you going to help Moms? People with jobs? Children who want to learn how to knit?
Picture the ideal customer in your head and think about the traits and worldviews they have that make them so appealing.
Step 2. What Do They Want to Achieve?
The purpose of your business is to help your customer achieve their desired outcome. It doesn’t matter what your business does, your customer is going in with the expectation that after they give you money, they’ll leave with the outcome they want.
So what is the outcome that they want?
The more specific the better.
Take this post as an example. The outcome is that you’ll be able to quit your job in 90 days. That’s specific enough that you understand what’s going on.
What if the post was generic and talked about making money online in general would that be more appealing? Not at all because making money isn’t a specific outcome.
Do you make $1 or $1,000?
Step 3. How Will You Help Them Achieve It?
What’s the best vehicle for your help? A book or coaching?
Do you need to walk them through all of the steps? How long will it take them to achieve the outcome?
If it’s too long you might want to think about a smaller outcome that lies on the path to the bigger one.
For example, we can help you build a 7-figure business but that’s very broad. Instead, we might start with how to create your book to sell.
Step 4. Book Creation
You might think it’s crazy that we go right to book creation in the fourth step but it works out for us and having an offer ready before we do content creation allows us to understand what type of content we should be creating.
Because the goal of the content is to funnel people into the offer.
Step 5. Creating Blog Content
A blog? In this day and age?
Yep, a blog. Or what we like to call a Library.
The goal here is to create content that over time can do passive audience building through SEO. This post is the perfect example.
It should always remain up so it doesn’t matter if it gets just one person a day to read it, that’s an opportunity to capture the attention of one more person.
While a large bunch of the audience-building will happen through social media, it makes sense to have a resource that you own that will allow you to continue to strengthen the relationship with your audience.
And a blog is perfect for that.
Depending on the purpose of the business we might create one to five topic clusters. Obsidian Tavern started with four topic clusters and Odd Noodle began with five. Each are now filled with hundreds of pieces of content that attract new people every single day.
But more importantly, they are viewed by our audiences as resources that they can always access which gives us authority in the given topics. And every single blog post passively sells our offers.
We like to call them the Passive Salespeople.
The downside to a blog is that it can take a while to ramp up but that’s why we like to work on it as quickly as possible. There is no way to create a successful blog overnight, but it can seem like it’s overnight to people on the outside when they don’t see the work that you’ve put into it.
Step 6. Social Media Content Creation
Now we get to move onto the meat and potatoes of the business and that is social media. For much of your audience this will be the entry point into your world.
It’s also one of the few tasks in your business that are evergreen.
You never stop creating content for social media. It’s a beast that never loses its appetite so you must continue to feed it regularly.
Step 7. Send Emails
Because everyone in the world is vying for attention it’s important that you figure out ways to stay at the top of the mind of our audience.
And the best way to do that is through email. You should be sending at least one email out to your audience weekly.
Should it be a sales email? You can send those out every once in a while but the majority of the emails that you send should be nurturing emails that strengthen the relationship.
That doesn’t mean you can’t link to your offers. You should. In fact, we link to our offers at the bottom of every Odd Noodle email that we send.
These simple links generate revenue every single day for us which means that every single email that we send is effectively a sales email.
Most people just don’t know it.
Consistency Is the Key
The key to all of this is to be consistent. Once you have your foundation established then you can focus on the evergreen tasks (content creation) and that’s all you should be worrying about.
This means that eventually, you should get to a point where your daily activities are to create content for social media (unless you hire someone else to do it) and that’s it.
This should drive people to your site where they’ll either sign up for your mailing list or buy one of your offers. Every single day you’re creating content that is doing work for you.
Remember, this is a Pocket Business so it’s not supposed to be complicated.
- Create content on social media that drives people to your site
- Create blog content that people can find through search engines
- Send emails that help people solve their problems
And that’s it.
You can batch a lot of blog content at once and take a couple months off of blog content creation. You can schedule and automate most of your emails so that you don’t have to touch them.
You can even schedule most of your social media content.
You should get to a point where it feels like you aren’t even working on your business, but you know it is growing because the content is doing work for you.
Want to Save Time and Effort?
I wrote this post to help you see the steps required to do this on your own and you’re very capable of doing it on your own.
But if you want to save time and effort and get things going quickly, we can handle the beginning steps for you.
Learn how you can get your Pocket Business delivered right to your door.
