How to Run an Online Business in 2021

hey guys hecking upon each other and sharing what's going on because my business my core business language rep has changed completely so write a comment down below what's going on with your company well I'll tell you what's going on with mine so basically two months ago our core revenue was driven by people who traveled abroad to learn languages to take their university courses to take part in different certificate programs in March that revenue was zero we will break even on travel in April we're actually in negative because people are canceling the trips they've booked before and there is nothing we can do about it because the majority of countries closed their borders the majority of schools are closed I would say actually every school is closed right now everyone is struggling but at the same time the online part of our business where we teach people languages where I record courses where we hire tutors to record courses and do live streams this part has actually been growing I think it doubled in March and it's already performing really well in April so there are certain things that we've done in the past few months in order to transform our business because I was already expecting recession we were expecting crisis and I've been through a crisis with my company before back in 2014 and I was sitting with Dima who's my husband and our CEO and I told him you know we have to make sure we're ready for this because I anticipated crisis and he was anticipating crisis everybody was talking about it but we could not predict it would be global because I thought it would be only for certain countries now we see that the whole world is affected but I'm super happy we still have the online part and in this video I'll share some tips and things that you can do with your company right now in order to survive and thrive because you know what's gonna happen in hopefully couple months when this is all over maybe three months we don't know maybe in a year but you know what's gonna happen when this is all over the strongest are gonna become even stronger even larger there are gonna be so many empty spaces on the market and if you survive this you're gonna thrive in normal economic conditions [Music] so my number one advice if your business was offline and you are now trying to build something online don't hire developers by the way Silicon Valley people don't really struggle and I'm gonna release a blog about us trying to find a new home which will come out on this channel and there is still waiting lists for the best houses in the market but yeah don't hire developer use a tool to build a landing page and your goal right now is to start selling as fast as you can please don't make your product perfect it's okay to make mistakes for the first couple of things you're gonna improve them later for you the most important thing right now is to generate this cash flow to keep your business life to keep yourself alive to keep your employees and contractors happy as happy as they can be and these circumstances in linguae trip we have a whole team of developers but what I feel is that we're still better off using tools that are available online they're available almost for free to create landing pages instead of using this expensive labor and developers are better used at you know creating something that's on the backend creating all the magic that's going on but in terms of creating landing page you can use the tools that are online by the way this video is sponsored by get response I'm gonna talk a lot about them and we use them in linguae trip I use them for all of our businesses because they are this all-in-one solution where you can do a lot of things as well as creating landing pages so if you need to start selling something right away create a landing page ask people their email ask people their contact details or maybe you give them something for free which you can totally do through get response so you create a landing page maybe you sold flowers or maybe you were a massage person I don't what like in these days I'm sitting down and thinking like what if I was a massage therapist what would I do in this circumstances and I would totally start a YouTube channel teaching people how to do self massage and I would create different checklists and courses on how to give massage to your loved person or how to give massage at home and so if I were that massage therapist I would create a landing page where I would tell please leave an email and I would send you a free video of - get yourself a neck and shoulder massage because we're all sitting right now in front of our screens and we need our body to thrive we're still needed in a couple years so this is the simple massage technique that's going to help you relieve this neck and shoulder stress this is what I would do and I would create a landing page with get response ask for people emails and then I would create a drip campaign which you can do and get response as well where I would educate people about the massage and in the end I would sell them my massage course where I teach them all of the techniques that I know that would be my solution the next thing really important and really unfortunate yes if you have some people on your team you might need to get rid of some of them if you don't have enough money to pay them but if you don't have anyone on your team yet I would not hire anyone right now because you need to be sure you're as flexible as possible so if you have small tasks I would just outsource them and pay people by hour and you can use different tools to track their hours you can just ask them to provide a spreadsheet where they would log in their hours but please don't hide anyone for a fixed rate because you never know what's gonna happen next month you never know what's gonna happen in two months and I really like this a thing when I work with my contractors based by hours because if it's a busy month and they get more money if it's a more relaxed month they get less and this scheme totally reflects their input in their work and another thing that I wanted to tell you especially if you're based in the US or Canada where we have to pay a lot of money per hour to a contractor so you can also hire international contractors lingo trip has a lot of international people on the team and the way it works in terms of taxes you hire a contractor and for these international contractors you don't pay any tax in the u.s. that person pays his own income taxes in his home country and you don't even have to file a 1099 and because we have a lot of contractors in the US I know that every year it's like maybe 50 or 60 1099s to file because fluent Express we use a lot of native speakers and we'll use a lot of native speakers for other services but for international contractors you don't have to file 1099 the are really really low for a lot of jobs it's less than $10 an hour and in the US you would pay something like 25 or 30 dollars so it's a lot cheaper easier to maintain and in terms of taxes you don't have to pay anything extra if you have more questions about it I'm not a CPA but I'm trying to give you the most information that I have right now if you have any questions comment down below we'll try to answer them number four this has been a game changer for us in terms of marketing because people are sitting at home and they want to consume content yes pre-recorded videos work really well but what we've seen is that live streams and webinars work perfectly well I've done a couple of webinars two weeks ago they were the exact same live streams I just wanted to repeat to repeat the live stream once again because I wasn't happy with the first time I did it but each time I had 2,500 people watching me live and the retention was amazing because normally when I would do a live stream people would come and then they will just gradually drop off and that webinar was around two hours and by the end of the second hour I still had over a thousand people watching that was amazing this just proves my theory that well theory this is obvious people just want to hang out with other people and they want this sense of community they want to be in a group so if you can do live streams for your clients that will be amazing do them for free and then in the end you can upsell them with a course what I say during my lectures I say so you've seen my way of teaching if you want to continue learning English with me those two lectures were about English if you want to continue learning English with me here are a couple of courses that have pre-recorded for you and I'm giving a special discount because you're taking part in this live stream that's a completely different video I can teach you how to sell cheer and webinars but this is something you can do first for clients second for your team if you have a team and if you're used to work in an office and now you need this face-to-face contact please create a webinar for your team go out there and prove that you're a leader tell them everything is going to be fine we're pivoting from this product to this product that's gonna perform the market really needs this new product that I'm thinking about to be there for them in a video format and again you can hold webinars with get response and it's especially useful for your clients because get response actually knows which client took part in your webinar and you can create special email campaign for those people who actually were there on the webinar and for those who just registered but never saw your webinar and it's really important to make this tailor-made for your customers because that converts a lot a lot better for example if a person wasn't in webinar you tell them like hey thank you for attending here's your discount and for somebody who wasn't there on your webinar you say I'm sorry you missed it here's the recording so you know it's all event based and this is why I love it if you're still using slack to communicate with your team and you pay I remember what they charge you but ten or twenty dollars a month per person I would switch to telegram which is free which also has an app it doesn't have that many features but I feel that you don't really need all of them because what I would do right now with all your business expenses I would just sit down and cross out everything that you could replace with a free feature so telegram is something that we've used for three or four years was created by a fellow Russian so was one of the first to hear about it and try it out and we decided to adopt it in linguae trip and we use it all the time so tell your messenger is your free alternative to slack in addition to keeping in touch with your team you can also keep the conversation going with your customers via newsletters once again you can do that with get response you can treat beautiful responsive emails which will land in the inboxes of your customers at the right time or the perfect timing and time travel delivery tools and the last but not the least guys there is a 2.2 trillion dollar package going on here in the US and we're exploring our options together with our bank and banks would be the ones who are distributing 2.2 trillion dollar package and we're working closely with our bank and they are giving us guidelines on how we can apply and this baggage looks really really generous so if you're in the u.s. I would totally go out there and explore what you can get from it if you are outside the I know what's going on in your country but I would like to wrap up this video with tips on how to be productive these days always do your 10 to 15 minute yoga or whatever you're doing stretching in the morning that really sets the mood for your day second always dress up don't work in your pajamas because that doesn't work always dress up and if you're a golfer it's put some makeup pressure here just make sure you look nice as if you are actually seeing people thank you guys so much for watching this video and thank you so much get response for sponsoring it love your product and love working with you and I hope you guys would benefit from watching this video and we'll start using the tools that I mentioned if you're not yet subscribed to Silicon Valley girl and you have a business then you're missing out on learning new tips and tricks on how to boost your revenue and boost your productivity as a business owner hit subscribe.