As with most things in life, when you help others you are helping yourself. Being a good leader includes the willingness and desire to help others.
I know asked this question in an earlier post but it bears repeating.
Why do you want to start an online business?
Many people respond “To make money of course”. Well, any business needs to make money to survive, but why do you want to start this particular business?
Businesses that truly thrive long term, either online or offline, have a desire to help people improve their lives in some way.
If you want to succeed online, you should enjoy the process of helping others. You’ll be addressing what’s known as their “pain point,” and it doesn’t have anything to do with health or actual pain in many cases.
A pain point is something that your audience wants improved. That could be something like literal pain, but it can also be something as enjoyable as wanting to improve their knitting skills or learning how to ask a woman out on a date.
Helping others is one of the most rewarding aspects of launching your own online business. You’ll have people contacting you with their issues and asking for help. Not only will you get to help them, but you can make products out of those ideas that help many others in the same boat, too.
Sometimes, you’ll be helping people with serious pain points. Maybe their bills are out of control and they need debt relief and credit repair advice so that they don’t live every hour of every day in despair.
Helping people like that, who turn their lives around thanks to your advice, is very rewarding on a personal satisfaction level. You’ll wake up every day eager to help others and go to bed each night satisfied that someone is sleeping better because of what you have to say.
Sometimes, this part of the job can be difficult for some people. Depending on what niche you get into, it can be heartbreaking opening yourself up to that type of topic day after day.
For example, if you were in a niche for depression, you might feel sad interacting with heavily depressed people on a continual basis. So consider that very carefully when you pick your niche.
You might flip the concept and turn it into a happiness niche, teaching people how to pursue more happiness in their lives, rather than, “how to treat depression.” Slanting it is key to the type of audience you’ll attract and be interacting with regularly.
Make sure you have the type of personality that doesn’t belittle others and their concern for their problems. Sometimes, you may not personally realize the depth of your subscriber’s pain, but if they reach out to you, assume that it’s a big problem for them, and gently guide them to a solution.
It takes a lot of courage for them to seek you out and put themselves out there by reaching out and putting themselves out there with a request for help to make things better. Respect that.
The desire to help others is one of the reasons we often suggest that you pick a niche that you care about or one that you are willing to learn about and keep on learning. That is the reason I have chosen this niche. I am learning all the time and I hope to help anyone else on the journey who is looking for someone who also struggles but keeps on going.
In the next post in this series, I talk more about being a leader.
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