Have you ever dreamed of becoming very rich and successful?
Who hasn’t! Have you thought up a plan on how to achieve this dream? You probably have too. But how much of your plan have you actually been able to accomplish?
Perhaps you’ve got yourself a nice degree from a reputed university and joined an office where you work a nine-to-five job.
Are you happy? Is your boss nice to you? Is your workload just
the right amount for the sum of money you’re being paid?
Very rarely can anyone answer ‘yes’ to all these three questions combined? The majority of us have been taught from an early childhood that we need good grades to get into a good university and then find a good job.
Not a lot of parents tell their children to find their passion regardless of grades and do something they truly enjoy. Children with businessmen for fathers are usually groomed to become successors. But what about those children who dream to make a difference on their own? Not just children but adults who are full of potential but are forced to do something else just so they can earn enough money.
Well, digital entrepreneurship is the one-stop answer to all these questions. So, what is digital entrepreneurship? It is the means through which one can start their own businesses and operate it through digital technology. In this day and age, essentially sky is the limit with the advancement of the internet. Anyone with an idea or skill that fulfils a need can start their own business with a little investment.
Perhaps you can bake and want to open a bakery. You don’t need to rent out a separate space and open a shop, you can just create a website or Facebook page and take orders online.
By hiring a fixed delivery man, you can have the baked goods delivered to the customers for a small fee. For advertisements, you could deploy the vast tactics of digital marketing.
Through paid listings, your website would appear at the top of the search results whenever a person would type in ‘online bakery services nearby’. Such frontline positions require ‘keyword bidding’ whereby your ad is ranked based on quality and relevance.
Once the position of your ad is fixed in a search result, the search engine would charge you a nominal fee every time your ad is clicked on. This is known as actual Cost-per-Click or CPC and is generally calculated by the formula: (Ad Rank to Beat / Your Relevance Score) + Fixed Cost. This same formula applies to social media platforms that display advertisements based on user preference. Bots or crawlers are used to determine what kind of a product or service a person is browsing for on their devices.
If someone is browsing through Instagram for hashtags ‘chocolate croissants’ and your bakery happens to be near their location, Instagram would pop an ad for your bakery, right in their newsfeed.
Unlike traditional forms of advertising such as billboards and newspapers, you could track the success of your advertisements through various analytics and pay only for the conversion rate of impressions vs. clicks on your advertisements, i.e., every time a person not only views your adverts but performs the Call to Action or CTA of ordering through your page.
These are just some of the ways through which one can exploit the potentials of the internet technology. Before starting your own online venture, you need to just keep the 3 M’s in mind: Mindset, Monetization and Marketing, a mnemonic suggested by Hemi Hossain, a digital entrepreneur coach.
For more information on how to successfully transition from your job to a business, you could read his No# 1 bestseller book, “Fire Your Boss”. With the right mindset, you will never need to chase money but chase happiness instead; with the right monetization of contents and marketing strategy, you too, can become your own boss and run a successful business online.
