Are You Ready For Your Own Nursing Business?

If you are a nurse with at least 3 years of experience, you are likely an expert in something. And maybe you have this feeling inside that you should be able to do something with your expertise, but you don’t know what or how.

If you are a nurse with at least 3 years of experience, you are likely an expert in something. And maybe you have this feeling inside that you should be able to do something with your expertise, but you don’t know what or how.

The answer is easy, yes you are an expert and yes you can turn your expertise into a business. But the effort to do so is not easy, nor is it a cheap process. You will need to decide how much time, energy and money you will be willing to spend to transform you knowledge into something profitable.

There are several layers to building a business to consider.

You need to find clarity in what you want to do, what you want to sell and who you want to sell to. Then you need to figure out if there is a niche market that will buy what you are offering.

The old adage, follow your passion and the money will come may or may not be true. If you have a passion for something but it’s either in a super tight niche or a niche without disposable income, you have a problem.

Doing your research on the front end will alleviate major direction changes in business later on if you find you can’t make money in your niche.

You need to set up your business so you can be found on the internet. If you don’t have a web presence of some sort, you are at a significant disadvantage. You must be able to leverage the internet to define yourself, your business and drive traffic your way.

When I first started out, I read a lot of articles that said you need a website, it’s easy just set it up, just do it! Well they are right, you definitely need a website, but guess what, it’s not easy to set up.

And WordPress (platform where you write your blogs) is a nightmare, unless you know CSS and HTML and how to work widgets and other crazy things. My learning curve with WordPress has been long, arduous, and expensive.

After many lost hours and a lot of frustration I had to break down and pay for a tech person twice to help me set it up (and re-set up).

Do yourself a huge favor and build the cost of hiring a tech person to build your webpage platform into your initial budget. Unless you really want to spend hours learning how to use the Editor CSS and code in HTML, this is worth outsourcing immediately.

The website is essential to your business, but don’t let setting up the website consume all your time and effort.

You need to be able to capture people who come to your website by building out your email list. The email list is single-handedly the most important part of your business, because this is your traffic.

Sales will come from your traffic, so unless an email list is set up properly, there is no point in driving people to your website. You will need to set up an email service provider such as Aweber, which will run you about $19 a month.

You need to brand yourself. People want to buy from other people, not companies. No one wants to pay for expertise from XYZ Company, they want to pay for expertise from Janie Smith.

But you have to show your market who you are through personal branding. Personal branding comes in the form of storytelling – who are you, how did you get to this point in your career, what type of person are you.

This story will be told in the blog posts you write, your about “me” section, the color palette of your website, your logos, the pictures you use and your presence on social media – what do you say, how do you say it?

I can’t stress enough how important it is to get people to identify with you and to build a relationship of trust through your communication on your website and through social media channels.

Without trust, you will not have a profitable business.

You will need to open up the lines of communication with your potential audience through expert content on your blog, choosing methods to drive traffic to your website using social media, curating content in the form of newsletters, developing lead magnets to encourage people to join your email list, and building public relations with media.

I’m sure this all seems overwhelming, but the key is to take it one step at a time. I don’t want to mislead anyone by saying if you build a website, people will come. That is not how it works at all.

In fact, you are almost guaranteed to fail if that is the approach that is taken.

Success comes incrementally for most people. This process of building your business from scratch will take several months if you work at it every single day (years or longer if it’s more sporadic).

But it’s doable and worth the risk if you have that burning desire to do something more.

I’m a big proponent of sequential steps to reach incremental milestones. I like to lay out everything that I can possibly think of that needs to be done and then organize it into blocks.

I also like to work in blocks of 12 weeks to give me enough time to complete most tasks but have some cushion if other things come up that I need to deal with.

I celebrate every time I work through my blocks and reach a milestone. The key is to allow yourself frequent wins to keep the momentum up. For instance, one of my milestones was getting the framework of my website set up; or writing the first 5 blogs.

Win! Win! By setting goals that are achievable in the short run, you can see your progress and know when you are falling off track.

There is no question around whether expertise can be monetized into a business. Of course it can. The question you need to ask yourself right now is whether you are ready to undertake the process of building your business. When you are ready, search our website to find tools to guide you along your way!