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How I Started My Online Business | My Story · Marketing For Tradies

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just four years ago, I had nothing but a big dream to be self-employed.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Fast forward to now, and I have my own digital agency and am 100% financially and location independent.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Shannon and I am the owner of Eastbound Digital.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I am a website designer and online business coach, and my mission is to help ambitious people build a life and business based on freedom, fulfillment, and financial independence.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: In this video, I'm going to tell you my honest and partially unscripted story about how I was able to start my business.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And while I'm not any kind of guru and I'm definitely no one special, and in fact, I actually don't think that I've achieved much at all, only because I have such big goals and expectations of myself.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: But in saying that, I have been able to quit my job, go full-time online, and now run a business that allows me to choose when and where I work.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I often get questions about how I was able to do this.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember before I had my own business and was working online, I would see people doing what I'm doing now, and I would have so many questions and confusion about how they were able to make that happen.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if I can provide any type of insight into my journey and how I was able to do this, if this is something that you are interested in or something that you want to pursue, and I could help inspire or um just motivate or um make anyone who is wanting to pursue something or achieve a goal realize that it's possible for you as well, then I think this video may be useful.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I officially started my business in April 2020, but for years leading up to this, I had a big goal of wanting to work online.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The main reason was because I wanted to be able to travel and adventure, and that was really what drove me.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to be able to work from my laptop from anywhere in the world.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a huge traveler, I have traveled to five continents and 43 countries and counting, and it's a big part of who I am.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: But as I said, that was really what drove me in the beginning.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: So for about six years before actually starting my business, I had tried so many different things that would allow me to fulfill that goal.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: I had tried becoming a virtual assistant, starting an e-commerce store, forex trading, blogging, affiliate marketing.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I even had a protein ball business at one stage, and I went and studied health science so that I could become an online nutritionist and health coach.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like no matter what I tried, it never really felt 100% right, or maybe it just wasn't the right timing, and obviously none of those things worked out.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But what I decided was really to commit myself to my own personal and professional development in the hope that if I kept trying to better myself, eventually I would achieve what I wanted.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I started to sign up for different courses, coaching programs, and just kept trying different things.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: But during all of this, I also had a full-time job that I really put all of my heart and soul and energy into, and it's quite demanding on my time.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But what I realized now is that I needed to go through that because what it did was really help develop my skills in all of the areas that I needed to refine and grow and develop in in order to run my own business.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I remember one day someone that I worked with, um, and it's funny because you never really know how much your words can impact people, but he came up and said to me, you know, if you put half the amount of effort that you put into this role into growing your own business, you would be really successful.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And those words just really stuck with me, and they stuck with me for a long, long time.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I didn't start my business for about two years after that.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it was always something in the back of my mind, and the fact was that I knew that he was right.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Fast forward another two years in time, and it is March 2020, and we all know what happened then, obviously, COVID.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was working in the health and fitness industry, which was a part of the lockdowns, and so we were all everything was shut down, we were on government assistance, working in a smaller capacity, and as I mentioned before, I was doing courses and programs trying to um better myself and develop different skills, and the one that I was doing at the time was all about digital marketing and um had an element of website design as well.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember as I was going through this course and before COVID, I would like to beg people to make let me make them a website, even if they didn't need it.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: People I worked with, just people in my network, um, I just absolutely loved the process of creating a website and really what it represented for someone to reinforce the authority of their business and um take their brand and business to that next level.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: But about one month into all of the shutdowns, um, I realized that I needed to go all in on this dream that I'd had.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I knew that it was now or never.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did was take all of the skills and experience that I learned in the five years of the job I had been in, combine that with all of the skills and experience that I'd learned through all of the failures trying to start a business in the past, and combine that with all of the skills, knowledge, and experience that I was learning in this digital marketing course that I was doing, and decided to launch a business.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And through completely random circumstances, I landed my first client a week after I told my closest friend that it was what I was going to be pursuing.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: What had happened was I had told her what my plans and goals were in a way that I had already made the decision that that was what I was doing.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: She had a conversation with someone in her network only a few days later who was looking for exactly what it is that I told her I was going to be offering.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: We connected and it was a health coach that needed a website to help start her business, and I charged her$500 for a website, dedicated all of my waking hours to building it for her, and honestly, everything after that just happened really, really quickly.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: That reinforced that this was possible for me.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that I'd I'd made$500, but I had made$500 online, and I was like, oh my god, like this is actually happening.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was honestly the most exciting thing ever, but it just reinforced that I could do this, and I knew that I had to take the leap right there and then uh to tell my boss that I was going to be resigning, um, put together all of the things that I needed to officially launch my business, like a template logo from Canva.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I named my business Shannon Bane Digital because I didn't want to hold off on trying to think of a name or something else creative.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Built a really um basic website, put together some packages, and started an Instagram page, and um I've really kind of never looked back from that point.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Even though I tried so many different things, as I mentioned before, nothing felt 100% right.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when I started this business, it just felt different.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it was the timing, um, but I also think that it was a matter of um nothing was being forced anymore.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was just right.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think what it was and the timing was just exactly as it was meant to be.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I sometimes say that website design isn't something that I chose, it chose me because even when I launched the business, website design was always an offer, but I would also always try and add different things, and they never really worked out.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Website design was always the most successful and consistent service that the business was providing, and so after about a year or a year and a half of running it, I decided to remove everything else and just focus in on website-related services, which has been a huge advantage for my business, and um now we're going, yeah, three and a half years strong so far, um, going into our fourth year very soon, which is something that I'm really proud of.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of things that I could tell you about the business and how I've approached things in the past three and a half years, but I'll probably have to leave that for another video.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: But if there's something specific that you wanted to know, please reach out and I'll um try and do a video about it.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: What I will say now though is that I have made plenty of mistakes, but as you can hear from my story, as long as you stay committed to trying and stay true to the vision for your life, you're almost guaranteed that you're going to achieve some level of success because the only thing that I didn't do was ever give up.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know how I was going to fulfill this big dream, but I was really convinced that as long as I kept trying hard enough for long enough, it was just a matter of time and it was just when, not if.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I also think that one of the biggest reasons why I've been able to do what I've done is because I've always had a purpose or vision behind what I've been trying to achieve.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So as I mentioned at the beginning, all I wanted at the start of this journey was to be able to work online, and that was my drive or my purpose at that time.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now this has evolved a little bit more to be that I want to have a life and do work that is personally and professionally fulfilling, in that it gives me freedom, unlimited earning potential, and helps and serves others.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: This has always been my guiding star or vision for the decisions that I make in my life and business.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I really think that that's helped me stay on the right path or at least going in the right direction.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll finish this video just by saying this.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: If this is a path that you want to walk, just remember that you are the only person that can create the life that they want.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: With a lot of hard work, the confidence to start, and the discipline to stay consistent, honestly, anything is possible if you just believe in yourself and really believe that you can make it happen.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, you just have to decide what you want, commit to the plan, and take action.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this video has been helpful in giving you a little bit of insight into my business journey and perhaps even inspired you to go after your goals as well.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: If you did enjoy this video, please be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment to let me know if you have any questions and also what else you'd like to see on this channel.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: For now, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.