Successful business ideas most often involve selling products or services.

And most often successful business ideas allow high leverage of scaling effects.

I’m about to reveal a new case study on this kind of business ideas:

The WP Store

On this website, I’ll be selling WordPress services as products, using a WordPress site.

I eat my own dog food.

You’ll soon see a series of posts on this business idea, teaching you how to set up online stores in WordPress to sell your services or products.

Sounds good?

The idea came from my friend David Craige, during a conversation about scaling my business.

He runs a website that 25 million people visited, and he’s supporting me for quite a time now. When he says something, I’m listening.

Let me explain the idea:

I’m constantly working on new business ideas, always with one goal in mind: create $10k of income per month by the end of 2015.

The more residual that income is, the better.

Dave encouraged me to build an online store for my WordPress services, to package them like products and sell them.

Selling services as products combines several benefits:

• The clients know exactly what service they get, as they buy a product.
• I get to implement standard routines for each service, ensuring high quality every time.
• When I implemented those well-defined processes, I can outsource the execution of this business idea to professional developers.

The essence of business ideas like this is as follows:

1. You need to build an audience and drive traffic to your website.
2. On that WordPress site, you build trust with your audience.
3. Then you start driving traffic to your online shop, and those people who are a good fit will start buying your offer.

Executing Business Ideas: Just Follow This Case Study!

One thing that most entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs struggle with is executing on business ideas.

If you’re like me, it’s easy for you to spend hours and hours thinking about business ideas.

Dreaming of what you can achieve feels great, but it gets you nowhere.

That’s why I’m challenging you to follow this case study!

My goal is to help you validate business ideas, set up a website that automatically generates leads for you, and help you build an online store to sell your products or services!

Don’t know where to start?

Stay with me for a second, as I’ll walk you through the structure of this case study.

1. Finding Profitable Business Ideas

I’ve written about this several times on this blog, but this topic never gets boring.

You can’t build a profitable business if you’re not executing on a valid business idea.

But instead of thinking through too many options and too many different ideas, my advice is just to get started.

To get a sense of what makes good business ideas, read this post: 50 Internet Business Ideas: The Ultimate List

Once you decided what idea you want to execute, start doing market validation.

Market validation means that you make sure people will pay you for your offer before you actually create it.

It usually involves three phases:

1. Gather insights on the market, competition and potential customers.
2. Create a first product, following the minimum viable product strategy.
3. Start bringing attention to the product and see how people respond.

If you want to dive further into the lean startup mentality, I highly recommend the book 7 Day Startup by WP Curve co-founder Dan Norris.

After you’ve done the market validation, it’s time to build your online platform.

On next Monday, you’ll learn how I validated the WP Store business idea and how you can adapt the principles for your upcoming business.

2. Presenting Your Business Idea Online

The business ideas we’re talking about in this context will need a website, as most of them will be either executed online or at least generate leads online.

That’s why the second phase of this case study will be all about building the first website for your business idea.

In fact, I’ll walk you through WordPress themes you can use to build a landing page for your offer.

This landing page will serve several purposes:

1. It will collect email addresses of people interested in your business idea.
2. It will allow your website and business to grow over time.
3. You will position yourself as the authority in the field and build up trust to potential customers.

When you’re executing on business ideas, you have one primary goal:

You want your website to convert visitors into leads and customers.

And in this case study you’ll see how to do exactly that.

I’ll show you how to turn website visitors into leads and finally into customers for your offers.

3. Setting Up Automated Sales Processes Online

The beauty of executing business ideas online is that you can automate them to a high degree.

In step 3 I’ll walk you through configuring an online shop that sells your products on autopilot.

We’ll use free WordPress extensions for this purpose so that you keep the upfront investment as small as possible.

We’ll also talk about email autoresponders, which build up trust with your audience and make your subscribers believe in the quality of your service.

4. Testing, Measuring, Improving

You’ll want to measure and improve your business ideas as often and consistently as possible.

By that, I mean that we’re about to install split-testing plugins on our websites, track the clicks of our visitors, measure the engagement in our email sequences, and lots more.

Caution: measuring and tweaking can be addictive.

No worries if you don’t know what exactly these terms mean.

When I started out, I didn’t know either.

But you’ll learn over time!

Conclusion

This will probably be the most epic case study I’ve ever published.

I want the WP Store to become a fundamental income stream for my business, which is why I’m working vigorously behind the scenes of this case study.

You’ll learn how to execute on business ideas.

I want you to either build a business from scratch or take your existing business to the next level.

If you’re interested in joining this case study, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter to stay updated.

You’re also invited to join my Facebook group called I Use WordPress.

It’s a buzzing, global, community of 100+ passionate WordPress users and online entrepreneurs.

Talk soon,
Jan