040 - Three Ingredients to a Thriving Online Business

What's the best way to build a thriving online business?
According to Shane Melaugh, CEO and co-founder of Thrive Themes, there are three key ingredients.
At first glance, they seem deceptively simple, and in many ways they are.
You need to have a great offerYou need traffic to your websiteYou need a website that convertsYet actually focusing on them and implementing them is where most entrepreneurs fall down.
This has been something Shane has tapped into from the get go, helping and teaching entrepreneurs how to do these 3 things well.
In fact he's done what so many entrepreneurs do, which is to create a solution to a problem they're having, since no one else seems to be doing it well.
Often our biggest frustrations are the best source of a new product or service idea.
Not that you're your own ideal customer, but typically, and once you validate your assumptions, many other people often are having the same struggle or problem too, and want it solved.





Not an Overnight Success StoryFor Shane, he realized early on when he was taking courses and learning as fast as he could, what it took to build an online business, that most courses he was taking sucked.
He also felt the people teaching them weren't sharing the right information, or what they were teaching was out of date.
So he created his own online course back in 2010 about SEO which he sold 2,000 copies of and made six figures of revenue from!
But he's quick to point out, it wasn't an overnight success story.
This actually happened over the course of 2 years with the first launch of his course only making a few dozen sales.
What I appreciate most about Shane, is he's one of the few male online marketers who's not a BS artist and really tells it like it is.
That is, that the reality of building a successful business usually takes years and LOTS of trial and error before actually reaching your big lofty dreams and goals.





Problem Solving is the Best Way to LearnBack in 2010 when he launched his course, Shane didn't have the awesome platforms we have today that are all-in-one and let you create, sell, and host an online course without the technical headache like Podia.
Instead, he built his first course on a WordPress website that he had to heavily customise to act as his course area with added membership access.
He knew that in order for his business to thrive, he had to overcome obstacles and DO the complicated and difficult stuff.
Once he had, he was in a much better position to create his own solution to his problem in the form of, the highly successful Thrive Themes, which includes blazingly fast WordPress templates and plugins, built to get more traffic, more subscribers and more customers.
From there he's gone on to continue to build excellent products to help online entrepreneurs thrive, and release fantastic free content as well as regular and amazing courses.





In this episode you'll learn:How to grow your business onlineWhy it's better to be stumbling forward than to be sitting paralysedWhy overnight success isn't realistic and what you should be aiming for insteadShane's 3 ingredients for a thriving online businessHow Thrive Themes can help you build a high converting websitePodcast ResourcesLearn more about Shane and all the ways he gets paid to be him.
Check out Thrive Architect, which I use on this very website and start making high converting landing pages and beautiful websites.
Check out Podia - a great platform for creating online courses
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