How to Create A Profitable Creative Online Business

“When you start your business you quickly realize that you cannot be online everywhere. You can’t be consistent when you try to be online in 10 different places.”

Meet Squarespace website designer and course creator Paige

Digital nomad Paige is an entrepreneur from Canada She has been nomadding for 6 years and started her online business because her (now) husband is from Germany. After graduating she moved to Germany and because of the language barrier, she figured that an online business would be the best way to make a living instead of looking for a local job. Travel has always been a big passion in her life and she used to blog about her travels. Doing this, she learned how to build a website in Squarespace. Paige decided to leverage her self-taught website design and building skills and started offering Squarespace website design services.

Paige’s business has pivoted over the years and grew her Squarespace website design business into a fully booked-out gig. Even though she didn’t have professional experience or a degree in design or marketing, she build everything from scratch and even ranked for years at number one in Google Search when someone would look for a Squarespace website designer. So once she received a boatload of inquiries, something had to change in her business because she simply hit the max of her capacity.

Once you get into a scalable business model, the sky is literally the limit. – Paige

From successful website design business to course creation

Paige considered different business models that would fit her skills, personality and financial goals. Starting an agency meant managing people something she doesn’t enjoy so that was a had no. Selling templates was an option too but people would still end up having questions so it wouldn’t fit her service and quality style. However, teaching others how to become successful website designers and run an online business felt closer to her heart. This is how Paige’s thriving Squarespace website design business pivoted into a course creation model.

Aside from passion, Paige also decided to go into this model because it was far more scaleable. This would give her the financial freedom she desired simply because in a scaleable business model where you are not bound to time or people limitations, the sky is the limit.

Her income today is about 75% from her courses and the other 25% is earned from her monetized youtube channel, private coaching and affiliate income.

A profitable course creator business isn’t just about publishing a course and drinking cocktails while the money comes in. The same goes for the digital nomad lifestyle because, at the end of the day, you got to do the actual work to make it work and keep things running. We asked Paige what a typical day for her looks like:
👉 Creating marketing content like blogs and videos
👉 Writing sales content like emails
👉 Figure out all the tech
👉 The admin side of the business
👉 Coordinate a small team
👉 Update the course materials

Her business doesn’t require many meetings and she has a lot of flexibility and freedom in how to organize her day-to-day life. This a perk many digital nomad entrepreneurs like too and enough reason to start your own online business you can run from anywhere.
Just like website design, Paige didn’t know much about marketing, yet she was very successful. We asked her how she made it work and we absolutely love her tips!

Many solopreneurs, creators and freelancers deal with the same challenge, how to be online everywhere all the time and get your work done in time without going crazy. Paige shares that she experimented with many different things to understand what she like and doesn’t like doing. For example, she doesn’t like to be on Instagram and even though her ideal clients hang out on Instagram, she knew this wasn’t a good strategy for her and she shares:

Choose one 1 marketing strategy that you enjoy doing, where you can show up consistently and that matches your offering.

Paige chose a content creation marketing strategy solely focused on blogging and youtube. She also tried podcasting and while she loves it, it was too hard to talk about website design on an audio-only platform.

Today she expanded to 3 strategies, but only because she had team members and she still isn’t active on Instagram because it’s really not her vibe.

Tips for finding clients for your creative online business

Pick a niche that is specific and not broad

A niche is not vital but extremely helpful for finding clients quicker. If you focus on a broad audience, like creative small business owners, it could take longer to land clients. When you pick a small group who have one thing in common, so a niche, for example, authors in a country or state, it will be easier to find them online and showcase how you can help them. So without a niche, you can still be successful it just might take longer.

Pick one marketing strategy and be very consistent with whatever your marketing strategy is.

You already know the way but she emphasizes this one more time. Paige’s blogged her way up and published twice a week no matter what. She also shares that in her process she always works 2 weeks in advance so there is a good amount of time between the moment you create it and the time it has to go out.

Join the 3-day Profitable & Productive Web Designer Bootcamp

Paige has more to share about running an online creative business. You are in luck because she is hosting a 3-day Profitable & Productive Web Designer Bootcamp. Join her live on April 17th, 18th & 19th for three jam-packed days of educational trainings & Q+A sessions with designers who have successfully built booked-out web design businesses!

We learned from this entrepreneurial podcast episode that becoming a designer is possible for you, even if you don’t have “the right degree” and maybe also a serve allergy to coding too. So this event is for you if you are a brand designer, copywriter, virtual assistant or digital marketer dreaming of landing projects 10X the price and want to explore other services. click here to register for free

Connect with our Nienke Nina and our guests

Your host Nienke Nina

More digital nomad tips and life advice via instagram @digitalnomadsdaily

Connect with Nienke Nina on LinkedIn @Nienke Nina Keizer

Find Nienke Nina on Instagram @nienkeninatravels

Meet digital nomad enter Samara

Find her on Instagram @betterbecurly

Find her on LinkedIn @Samara Ruighaver

Other episodes you might like:

🎧  Episode #01: How to Thrive in your Digital Nomad Relationship with Anat & Orr

🎧  Episode #05: Dealing with High Anxiety While Building a Successful Online Business with The Remote Yogi

🎧  Episode #07: Overcoming Fears and Building Community with Digital Nomad Magali

🎧 Episode #21: 10 Years Of Traveling The World With Daisy