How to Become A Digital Entrepreneur: Four Steps You Can Take Today
With digital businesses taking off, building an online career is a viable form of consistent cash flow. But if you want to infiltrate the digital sphere, how do you practically do so?
To give a clear answer, starting with a standard definition of this type of entrepreneurship is crucial. Once we lay the foundation, we’ll walk through four steps you can take to start this type of business and reach the digital market.
What Is Digital Entrepreneurship?
Digital entrepreneurship can be defined as entrepreneurial opportunities created and pursued through technological platforms and other information-communicating equipment.
If entrepreneurship is starting your own business, digital entrepreneurship is starting an online business. You do not need a brick-and-mortar front when you choose to go digital. Your online presence can sufficiently create revenue that can turn into a full-time income.
Regardless of the type of business plan you create, it’s essential to embody both definitions of entrepreneurship to obtain the best results. While the digital route usually costs less upfront, planning is critical to success.
How Can I Become An Entrepreneur In Digital Entrepreneurship?
What path you follow to reach your goals depends on your ideal business idea and specific niché. Ironically, the first step to reaching your goals isn’t selling products.
Instead of focusing on immediate revenue, focus on your long-term goals and how you can create a sustainable business.
The process for this starts with:
- Developing Entrepreneurship Traits
- Narrowing Down Your Niché
- Building Your Brand
Once you have a solid foundation, you can focus on marketing strategy and growing in your chosen lane. Long-lasting business success starts with quality traits, some unique to the business, some not.
Develop Entrepreneurship Traits
You can develop various traits when building a solid business with a focus on longevity. However, two traits, in particular, stand out as particularly important to success: Self-education and mentorships.
No matter where you are in your journey, self-starter, or owner of a multi-million dollar business, these characteristics can keep you scaling up and learning.
Enriching your understanding of business and investing in yourself through mentorship will help you lay a firm foundation. The bigger your business grows, the stronger the foundation must be. Rapid growth is possible, but continuing growth depends on your foundations.
Self Educate
Whether your traditional education ended your last year of high school or after earning your doctorate, your self-education has no end date. You can self-educate through a variety of means, such as:
- Books
- Podcasts
- Training webinars
- Conferences
- Personal research
Your method depends on your needs and goals and your preferred learning methods. However, whether you prefer to highlight a book with colored markers or listen to Audible on your way to your current day job, take your free moments to invest in your future.
Self-education is one investment that keeps on giving, growing, and inspiring those you come in contact with.
Invest In Mentorships
Mentors can encourage you to take the next right step and teach you from their trial and error, so you don’t need to make the same mistakes they did. However, some mentors offer coaching as their job, and you will need to invest financially for their time.
Other mentors offer their expertise as a way of giving back, and the only thing they require of you is your time and commitment to execute their advice.
Whatever type of mentorship you invest in, formal or informal, never underestimate the power of learning from someone who has gone before you.
Narrow Down Your Niché
Now that you know what traits you need, it’s time to narrow down your niché and determine what type of business you want to start. Digital entrepreneurship can focus on many different types of businesses, but we will focus on the three S’s.
As you narrow your passion to a specific area, remember this is not at the expense of all your other dreams, forever. Instead, finding your niché will help you brand well to grow your business and branch out into other fields if desired.
Small Business
Small businesses encompass various fields, but let’s focus on design. Let’s say you started graphic design in college, creating projects for small businesses around your city, and now you want to make a full-time income through your art.
Knowing your goals and who you want to reach helps you decide that you want a small, sustainable business that doesn’t take too much time focusing on the business side, allowing you to focus on your first passion: Art through graphic design.
Scalable Startup
But what if you want to expand your graphic design work outside your state, province, or country? If you love graphic design but create specific types of design uncommon to your area, focusing on the digital side of your career will help you upscale your business.
With this in mind, you will allow yourself to:
- Grow your reach by going global
- Focus on the type of design you love
- Scale your business with purpose and intention
If you’re willing to push limits, taking your small business to a scalable startup could be your next step.
Social Change
Continuing with the idea of graphic design, let’s say you also love fashion but are conscientious about how clothing is made. You want to bring awareness to ethically produced fashion where fair wages are given to workers.
With this in mind, your company’s niché will focus on social change. You can contract yourself out to fashion brands focusing on sustainability, transparency, and ethical practices. In this way, you use your graphic design work to contribute to social change.
Build Your Brand
Building your brand can make or break your success in the digital business world. Branding is crucial for all companies, but it is especially essential if you work in the digital world. There are four questions to ask yourself as you create your company online.
Consider these questions, use search engines to find similar companies, and see how they use the following. Of course, establishing a unique online presence helps you stand out, but knowing about other companies can benefit you greatly.
#1 – What Are The Best Social Media Platforms For You?
Your niché will determine what platform you should be on. For example, if you are a graphic designer, Instagram could be a great way to share your work. However, if you are a speaker and offer online courses, YouTube is likely a better place.
#2 – What Business Model Should You Follow?
There are many business models you can follow. However, what you sell and how you bring awareness to what you offer are determined by your business plan. So take time to browse different options, talk to others in your field, and don’t forget to think long-term.
#3 – What Should You Offer: A Product Or Service?
Do you want to offer a product customers can purchase over and over, or a one-time service or recurring service (such as coaching)? As you assess which of the two you should offer, consider your strengths, what fits your company brand, and what your potential customers need most.
#4 – What Colors And Voice Portray What You Offer?
Now that we answered the big questions don’t skip the power of your company colors and voice. If you choose to connect with your customers through email marketing, the voice you use in these emails should contribute to your overall brand. The same is true for your social media and website color palettes.
Never Stop Growing
Once you start your journey to digital entrepreneurship, there are many ways to continue growing. The more you learn, the more your business can thrive. This desire to never stop learning is one reason mentorship can be so impactful on your personal growth and that of your company.
Our new Business Accelerator course is where we teach individuals how to become successful business owners. Taylor Conroy demonstrates the importance of successful growth through multiple TEDx Talks, activating for human rights in the jungles of Uganda, and now offering his process to you.
In this session with Taylor, he shares how to start and scale a massively profitable business in as little as ninety days. If you’re not sure how to continue growing yet, Taylor’s story can help give you clarity.
Share Your Digital Entrepreneurship Journey To Grow Your Business, Fast
Sharing your journey is a significant step toward credibility as an entrepreneur. Your audience wants to see your wins and learn from your losses. The more steps you take forward, the higher the risk of some form of failure, but with failure comes progress.
While you may not feel like you’ve arrived yet, chances are high that you are further down the road than you may think. Take entrepreneur and speaker Brad Stevens as an example.
After success and failure, agreeing to free speaking engagements, and starting a podcast to get his message out, Brad still didn’t have the reach he wanted. So Brad decided to use the TEDx stage and share a portion of his story: Three risks most small businesses face.
Brad now uses his TEDx Talk as an integral part of his business email marketing funnel and is growing his business. However, sharing your journey doesn’t need to wait until you are a successful digital entrepreneur.
Like Brad, today, you can take the step to share your journey. No matter where you are in your process, sharing your story will likely grow your business faster than you realized it could. After all, you are a digital entrepreneur—staying on brand means sharing your journey in the digital space!
