--- title: 'How to Start and Grow an Online Business in 2025' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=0GbmUM7l6IE' video_id: '0GbmUM7l6IE' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # How to Start and Grow an Online Business in 2025 > Source: [How to Start and Grow an Online Business in 2025](https://youtube.com/watch?v=0GbmUM7l6IE) ## Summary This video provides a step-by-step guide to starting and growing an online business in 2025, focusing on organic strategies before paid advertising. The host emphasizes mastering a few core skills: identifying target avatars, building a website, leveraging local search, capturing leads, and choosing one social media platform. ### Key Points - **Avoid Paid Ads First** [00:00] — Paid advertising is a waste if foundational steps aren't done first. Build organic systems before running ads. - **Identify Your Avatars** [01:00] — Create detailed personas (demographics, personality traits, concerns) for ideal customers. Name them to personalize content. - **Set Up a Website** [03:00] — Own your online real estate. Keep design simple, focus on steering visitors to desired actions. Use Cloudways for hosting. - **Create Helpful Resources** [05:00] — Publish content answering common customer questions. This supports SEO and lead capture. - **Get on Google Local Search** [06:00] — Create a Google Business listing to rank locally and signal legitimacy. Also set up Bing and Nextdoor. - **Capture Leads** [08:00] — Use an email marketing platform (e.g., Brevo) to collect emails. Offer a valuable giveaway or discount to incentivize sign-ups. - **Pick One Social Media Platform** [10:00] — Choose the platform where your avatar spends time. Focus on building trust, not virality. Options: Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, podcast. ### Conclusion Build your online business step by step: avatars, website, local search, lead capture, then social media. Only after these foundations should you consider paid ads. Progress, not perfection. ## Transcript starting and growing an online business can feel overwhelming trust me I know but it actually just comes down to mastering a few simple skills today I want to walk you through what those skills are all the way from identifying the right people down to how to use social media properly especially if it's just you or a small team this video today is being brought to you by cloudways if you're at the point of needing to build a website for your business which is something we'll cover here in this video cloudways is who I use to host all of my websites I've used a ton of different hosts and different platforms to build websites there's only one way I do it now and I always do it with cloudways we'll talk about that a little bit later when we get to that point in the video for now though I need to start by talking about one thing that we're not covering in depth in this video but that some people are going to wonder why I didn't because it is a valuable step in getting traffic and getting people to your business and that is paid advertising yes that's a valuable skill but paid advertising is a huge waste of time and money if you haven't already done all of these things and that's the problem that most people get wrong they do this totally backwards they're like hm I have something I want to do something I want to sell let's run some paid ads and get people there do this stuff first and any AD campaign you do is going to work way way better let's get back to the skills you actually need for growing your online business in 2025 the first one identify your avatars what we're talking about here is figuring out who are the right people people that you should be targeting with all of your content and all of your advertising now you may not be super picky about what customers you're going to have for your business but there are people that are better suited for whatever product or service it is that you're trying to offer than other people and identifying avatars starts with figuring out who are kind of those ideal people maybe starting with ideal demographics but also then what are ideal personality traits What gender and age and social status and all these different things but but dive in a little bit deeper what concerns what cares do the right people have that are going to want or need what it is that you have to offer so we can start to kind of group those together but let's take it a step further as we go through the rest of these steps it'll be really helpful if you're able to keep these people in mind and the easiest way to do that is to not view them as a big group of people but to view them as a person so for a group of people that are all fairly similar let's say I've picked one of the groups that I want to Target because we're all going to have more than one but I pick one of those groups that is a good fit for me and I create a single person a single Persona a single Avatar we can even give this Avatar a name we do this here when we create video content if I tell my team hey this video I feel like it's really well suited for Eric they know who I'm talking about and then when I'm making the video who am I thinking about as I make this video I actually have a specific person in mind and so as I'm talking to you that's who I'm thinking about and that makes it a lot easier for me to talk to you in a way to create content in a way in the future even to make advertisements in a way where I'm talking directly to you and anybody who kind of is closely related or kind of fits that Persona is going to feel like they're the one being talked to so start with that before you do anything else start with that once you have an idea of at least one but probably more like three to five avatars for your business then we can start doing some more of the actual building up of different things which is what we're going to get to right now the second skill you need or the thing you need to get done to set up a website there are lots of different platforms that people are using where they're like well my business is kind of on this platform but it's not their own website and they have very little control over what's on that website how it looks and how it functions you don't want this what you need is a place of real estate on the internet that is yours that you can control this is actually going to legitim your business a lot in the eyes of a lot of people especially younger people these days most people don't want to have to call a business to ask basic questions they want to be able to find that information they expect to find that information on the internet so if you can provide that to them in a very easy simple place on your own website the odds that you're going to win their business go up compared to all of those other people who still don't have one which is a lot of people now some important tips for a website one keep the design very simp simple building a website does not have to be hard again there are lots of platforms that make this really easy but many of them are also very limiting that's why I actually created uh something called amplify amplify is actually a membership that we have that has a ton of course content that walks through step by step by step by step literally all the things we talk about in this video we're talking about how to build a website the design literally I built it in a way that you could hire a summer intern and they could follow the steps and you could have a good website in a summer internship period in addition to social media and other things that we're going to talk about in this video if that's something that you think would help you and your business again something that you could do yourself or that you could put a minimum wage employee working on then I encourage you to go check that out I'll put a link in the description of this video and I'll pin it in a comment below but when it comes to building your website keep the design very simple what we really want to focus on is steering people toward the right actions the information that they want to find make it easily available the simple questions that people are likely to ask you or that you get asked all the time about your products and offerings and your business itself make those easy to find and the homepage of that website should very clearly steer people toward exactly where you want them to go pretty much everything else is just noise now like I said earlier cloudways is the sponsor of this video cloudways is the hosting provider I use for all of my websites you can start a WordPress website you can start a non-wordpress website on cloudways 2o but I use WordPress on cloudways so that I have ultimate flexibility but also a platform that makes it really easy in my experience cloudways provides the very best value for what they charge I spend a fraction of what I used to spend with other hosting providers and I actually get better service better support just last week actually I had an issue on one of my websites and it was a big deal because it brought the site down for a little while which is a big deal when you're in business you need people coming to your website and all I had to do was I went to cloudways I tried to trou shooted a little bit myself I did some quick searches I opened up a chat the chatbot tried to guide me through some things and I just said this isn't helping give me a person and in just a few minutes they found and fixed my issue and I'm not even paying for like some high tier premium support I'm just a regular user on some of the hosting providers I've used before I would have had to submit a ticket and potentially wait a full day to hear back and that doesn't work very well when your whole livelihood is on the line and it's down I'll also say that your site going down it happens way less on cloudways than it happened to me with other hosting providers so like I said I've been with them for a long time because they're so good and the value is so high enough about cloudways let's get back to the website building on your website what we want to do is we want to create really helpful resources for people we don't need to write hundreds of blog posts but content on your website this is a key starting point for more of what we're going to be doing in the rest of this video so if there are questions that people are likely to ask things that would be helpful for your Target customer for your avatars you want to go help create some resources that you can put on your website and make available for these people it's going to set you up really well for the next stuff speaking of which the next one is to get on Google Now specifically what I'm talking about is Google local search you just create a Google my business or a Google Business listing just Google Google my business and you'll be taken to exactly how to do that for this all you need is a Google account it can literally be your personal Google account but I recommend setting up a Google a Gmail account it can be a free one but it should just be one that's kind of dedicated for your business I think it's good to keep business and personal a little bit separate and then it's actually really simple we're just going to provide them with the basic information about our business including our business website you're going to put in a little description of your business what your hours are how people can reach you what sort of offerings you have the area that you service all that stuff and you know what that's going to do it's going to allow you to rank when people do a local search for people that offer the services that you offer this is a great starting point it's by no means an end point but it's a great starting point but setting up this Google Business listing also has other benefits what it does is it cues to Google that you are a real legitimate business and if you're a real legitimate business your actual website is also more likely to rank for searches that are relevant for all that content you just made and for the services and stuff that you offer it's going to take a little bit of time but the Google ecosystem is going to pick all this up now the other cool thing is that everybody knows that Google's first and Google's top right so once you've created your Google Business listing you can go to Bing which is Microsoft search engine it's the number two search engine in the world well after Google and YouTube but outside of the Google infrastructure it's the second biggest one and then you create a bing business listing and you know what's cool since Bing knows that Google wins they can literally just copy over you can just say I already have a Google Business listing you can connect it and they can copy everything over and sync it with your Google Business listing it's so easy business reviews are going to be the biggest thing to drive your rankings in local search so once we have this Google Business listing we need people to start talking about you so any client or any customer you've ever worked with if you have any rapport with them at all reach out and ask them for a review I highly recommend this is actually depending especially on the type of business you have but another great platform is nexo nexo is another one that's very local based and you can say what your service area is and stuff and people will talk about your business you could potentially get a lot of business through next door you don't need to spend a lot of time on any of these it's mostly just set them up so that there's a place that people can talk about you that's all we want I don't want you to waste a lot of time curating those from here on out we're going to spend more of our time on the next things the next one is to capture leads what I mean by this is as you start to get people who are warmed up people who find your website people who come across your content wherever it is you want as many of those people as possible to get on a list that you can then follow up with so what we want to do at this point is create some sort of very simple lead capture system now there are a lot of easy ways to do this using an email marketing platform is great I recommend brevo which right now is actually having a Black Friday sale they're having a big discount on their annual plans but if you're just getting started you can actually create an account for free and start capturing email addresses what we need though at this point is we need some sort of resource or some sort of offering that makes people want to give you their information their email address their phone number because if you have this information then you can follow up I don't recommend doing what a lot of businesses do which is sending out way too many emails way too often what I do recommend though is sending out something of value that your potential customers would benefit from having a resource a piece of information not just promotional materials for things that you have to sell give them real value in emails that you send out and they'll stay in your email marketing system for the most part but start by creating something a giveaway that you can give them it can just be a piece of information or you can just promise them the value of what they're going to get maybe it's a monthly newsletter and that newsletter will have industry updates or it'll have really helpful advice for the people that would be your Target customer sell them on the value of what they're going to get and then they're going to want to sign up for some businesses I've seen this work really well retail products especially like Health supplements and things you just offer them you get 50% off your first order get it using a coupon code that you're going to get in your first email and then they sign up your email list and then the emails that you send them you just let them know every time there's going to be a sale every time there's a new product offering that kind of stuff and they're usually pretty happy with that because discounts who doesn't like discounts either way you've gone through the effort to bring people to your website or to get them to see your content and we want to capture as many of those people as possible you don't want to have to rely on those platforms to continue bringing those same people back in once somebody's in your ecosystem let's try to keep them in your ecosystem and keep them happy this is also a pretty easy thing you just once it's set up it's set up it's done then all you need to do is come up with what's the content that you're going to send out every so often and that doesn't have to take much of your time keep it simple then the last thing that we need to do at this point pick one social media platform a lot of successful businesses today they're doing some form of social media marketing that doesn't mean that you have to run paid advertisements on those platforms although that may come at some point but first what we want to do is just get involved in social media but especially if you are a small small business es especially if you're a single person operation it's too much to try to be everywhere pick one and learn that platform this is another place where that Avatar or your avatars really come into play where are these people on the internet where do they spend their time every social media platform has groups of people that are most present on that platform if your product and if your business is something that's pretty visual then Instagram is probably a good place to be or if it's something especially kind of of crafty Pinterest is absolutely somewhere that you should be if there's how to in tutorials and things you could talk through YouTube is an amazing platform if you're interested in doing YouTube please go check out our YouTube channel called Channel makers that is what we teach over there and we teach it really well if your topic is something that it would make sense to be able to talk about a lot and interview experts and if that's something that you are confident that you could line up people who are expert or wellknown or if you have a credential yourself then a podcast can be a great thing to get started but pick one and get started with one if your business is something more professional well you definitely want to be on LinkedIn I mean there's no reason a crafty business can't be also on LinkedIn and can't also be on YouTube and Pinterest and everywhere else except that your time is limited so pick one get good at it make sure it's the place that your avatar is most likely to spend more of their time and that's going to be a great fit for you now as you create content for social media for your website Focus primarily on building trust with your audience you don't need to be to have an account that goes viral what you need is to have an account that when people come to they find what they're looking for and they trust that the things you're telling them are true be helpful be trustworthy those two things they're going to win you real business so quick recap we want to identify our avatars get to know who our target audience is get your website set up get it on Google get those local listings set so that you can start ranking quickly for local searches start capturing the leads those hard-earned people that come to your website keep them there and then pick one social media platform and we're going to use that to drive more and more and more traffic to that website capture more leads you see how this all works together but we want to build them in order then with all of these in place then we can start thinking about paid ads because we have something to talk about and we have somewhere to send people and we can capture them as a lead without all this stuff again paid ads are just a huge waste of your time and money now this was a high level overview but if ready to dive in deeper on any of these things and learn how to do it yourself or somebody in your business to do it for you great you can save a ton of money most agencies are charging thousands of dollars to set up simple websites and it's kind of ridiculous that's why I created amplify I mentioned it earlier in this video go check it out the value there is IM is immense for what you get and the cost is incredibly minimal so go check out amplify because it's going to show you how to do all of this stuff and if you're setting up a website go check out cloudways I'll link to that in the description too now remember when it comes to your business when it comes to everything in life and growing and improving it's all about progress not Perfection take one step at a time and don't compare yourself to anyone else the only person you should compare yourself to is the you from the past and see how far you've come every day along this journey and you're going to recognize the growth that you're making and the growth in your business and it's going to be incredible go one step at a time you've got this the