079: How to Start a Full-time Online Business with Zero Startup Capital (w/ Daniel Scott)

Summary: Daniel Walter Scott is a certified Adobe instructor (ICE) in Ireland, an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) and he completed the Adobe Certified Associate training (ACA). He has been teaching for more than 14 years and is the founder of Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL), an Adobe Certified Training Centre in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and online.<br> <br> He has over 16,000 students on the Udemy platform with over 1,000 reviews and over 16 courses.<br> <br> Period in full-time business<br> <br> He had always been doing little businesses on the side in his evenings and weekends, but he went into it full-time business in 2009.<br> <br> Core revenue streams<br> <br> He has two main streams that are both based on training. One is a sit-down classroom where people book a course, come in and learn from an instructor. He has such training centres in Australia and Ireland.<br> <br> His other stream is online video training on Udemy and other platforms.<br> <br> Starting out in business<br> <br> Daniel used to work for other people but he was always curious about doing it for himself and when he decided to move from the UK to New Zealand, he also decided to start an online business. He started by building a sit-down classroom courses website and promoting it through SEO. He had to borrow some money from his grandmother to cater for his personal expenses so he could focus on building the website and getting customers.<br> <br> Getting the first set of clients<br> <br> He got his first customers through search engine optimization (SEO). He learnt everything he could about SEO because he wasn’t a good salesman so he needed the website to do the selling for him. Through that, his website ranked well and because there were people looking for courses, he was able to get customers.<br> <br> Working with zero budget<br> <br> Daniel says the one crucial thing he did that can work for anyone now, is content marketing. He says content marketing offers the best value for money. He makes his content in form of videos and in the beginning he used to write a lot of blog posts about his work. It was easy and free for him to do it because he wrote them himself.<br> <br> Number of videos<br> <br> At the beginning, he used to write a lot of blog posts and then he did one or two videos a month as a test. When the videos started doing well, he narrowed his content marketing down to videos.<br> <br> He says if he could get a do-over, he would have focused on videos from the very beginning, because progress on getting the website ranked would have taken place ten times faster. He says the content marketing through blog posts was very slow.<br> <br> Growth strategy at the beginning<br> <br> The sit-down classroom courses were more locally targeted so he worked with local businesses like blogs that existed around what he did. He also used to reach out to companies that complimented his work, to see whether he could do free stuff with them. That was the easiest way for him to market the business since it was targeting the local market.<br> <br> Tip: If you have something local, you have to focus your marketing (including SEO) on the local market<br> <br> The fundamentals that worked<br> <br> He says some of the things that really worked for him that can work for a local business include Google local listings (now known as Google Places, Goog Business, or Google Local) which get a business on a map that easily puts a business on top of searches for local products. The other thing, he says, is finding other websites that are linked to the business one is doing (these are mostly professional listings)<br> <br> Other things that may take some time and effort include relationship building with other businesses, going to conferences and meet-ups organized by businesses that are related to what one does. That way,