Startup an Online Business and Become an Youtuber with Gillian Perkins

Online businesses are making everyday people like us very wealthy.

Having a website, youtube channel, podcast, courses, memberships, etc., Gillian Perkins shows us how to be successfully unemployed with her online business. She will show us the step-by-step process to creating an online business with her startup society business model.

Millions of dollars are being made by those who know how to startup an online business serving and helping others. It is now easier to startup your own online business than ever before.

Expert online business owner, and founder of Startup Society Gillian Perkins is here to teach us all the steps to startup a successful online business.

Step-by-Step Process to Starting Your Own Online Business

These are the steps you need to startup your own online business as Gillian has taught thousands of others. We layout the steps, benefits and strategies for these and equip you with some Pro Tips and tricks along the way.

Starting an online business or working on becoming a YouTuber, can be easy especially following these simple steps.  

Other than being an intern, Gillian has never had a real job. She taught music lessons with certain times, locations, just like a 9-5.

A lot like having a job but instead of having 1 boss, you would have 40 bosses.  Strict specific schedule, location dependent and she wanted more time for her family and to be her own boss.

Targeting a specific idea, Gillian got to work and started an online business and successful YouTuber. Here she lays it out for us. 

Why You Should Start An Online Business

You want to be your own boss and you want to work less hours, you want more time freedom to do what you want. So instead of working for someone else, you decide to start an online business.

Working for someone else and working too many hours can be exhausting but with the right passion and focus, you can funnel this into starting an online business and begin making money from multiple streams. 

What Gillian Does to Provide For Her Family

At the beginning Gillian Perkins started to blog. She started more of a passion business, where you research and learn about one topic and share it with others. Gillian began YouTubing about the multiple business ventures that she had started that failed. Her first videos were poor quality and she didn’t have a lot of followers but was passionate about the content so she kept going.

Pro Startup Tip #1: Be Very Consistent

Keep being consistent, keep putting energy towards your passions. Stay the course and stay focused on your work and learn from failures. This will drive you to learn more and get better.

Transitioning From a Blog To YouTube 

In order to have a successful business, you need to use successful marketing efforts. You need to understand how important marketing is and I found that this is the skill that I need to master.

So Gillian became a student of marketing, experimenting with the marketing tactics for the different businesses. She became someone who knew about marketing in her social circle.

People would reach out and ask for help on marketing, things like building a website for them or even creating some Facebook ads. Gillian gained even more knowledge about marketing as she did this for other people.

Before this, Gillian started a lifestyle youtube channel that was not successful at first. Video quality was poor at the time. Even though the channel itself wasn’t successful, some videos were and a couple went viral. She kept growing and changing until something took off. 

Pro Startup Tip #2: Be Confident in Your Content

Stop asking yourself why would people watch my videos and ask yourself why are people watching my videos? Be confident in yourself and the content you are releasing.  

How the Amount of Followers Translates to Revenue

Gillian has about 350,000 subscribers currently. For the first couple months, she didn’t make any money and then month three, got her first check for $113.

By month 7-8, the checks had grown to about $2,000 in YouTube ad revenue alone. From there it grew more slowly but eventually grew to about $5,000-$8,000/ month for ads.

Pro Startup Tip #3: Don’t Discount Your Success

Don’t discount any success you have, it is still an honor to speak to any amount of followers, so be proud. 

Making Money from a Membership

Some Advice From The Pros about Online Business

You do not want to leave money on the table, so instead of giving YouTube a cut of your earnings, start a membership option with your business. Move away from a patreon and start making more money for the content you create.

You can then create premium content for your members and earn money from that passively on a larger scale.

Your premium content would be your membership, courses, group coaching, etc. This is where your customers will pay you to help them get to where they want to be.

YouTube is great marketing and it is nice to have multiple, diverse streams of income. However, you don’t want to spread yourself too thin so take on things one step at a time. 

Where Gillian Perkins Makes Money

Currently there are four main ways Gillian Perkins is making money.

1. YouTube ads
2. Revenue from courses
3. Memberships 
4. Affiliates

At other times, she has also made money from rental properties but recently cashed out the properties because they had appreciated so much and it just made sense to cash them out. 

The biggest chunk of income is membership from her business, Startup Society, a how-to on starting an online business. At the time, Gillian noticed there was a gap in the market.

A lot of courses are talking about what is working for them right now, but not necessarily how to start from the beginning.

All great info but it wasn’t sequential. There definitely isn’t an order that is going to work for everyone but mine is a basic framework: 7 or so things to do in order to startup.

The program has 550 members at $50/ month for training, access to community aspect, and a once a month coaching call.

Your income is more stable with a membership program and everyone wins; she gets to do her best work and they get the training they want and need. 

Key Components In Having A Membership

The key components to having a membership are:

1. Teaching
2. Community
3. Coaching

A small downside to memberships is the customer support can be more intense but a benefit of that is the members are much more involved. People are paying for it, so they are using it.

You don’t necessarily need all three, however, some of the strongest and most helpful online programs do. 

Things to Consider About A Community Forum vs. Facebook

StartUp Society runs the community side on Facebook as it is one less thing to maintain. The other reason is that so many more people are on Facebook already and it gives them one less place to log into such as a separate forum platform.

They are seeing the content and discussions in the news feed even if they don’t log into the group.

Although, if your membership program is the main component, you might want to have it on a separate platform so people don’t think they are paying for Facebook.

Most engaged members like the facebook group best, and that’s why some stay in the membership. Facebook is so much more accessible to most as it is an app already on their phone.

Balancing The Two And Ensuring Both Are Making Money

There CAN be a lot to do to launch a membership, and the content creation. The strategy Gillian came up with was to create a master class/workshop every month and launch them individually.

She would tell her audience about it then launch the membership. Gillian would then have the 5 workshops she created and also proof of concept.

The problem she ran into was she over delivered and made it more complicated than he needed it to be.  Gillian set the standard too high for herself  in the beginning and released a course every month. She was working around the clock but making a lot of money.

She realized it wasn’t helping anyone and it was too much for the members. So, now she has an action plan model: every action plan is focused on achieving a specific result ie. create your website, launch your business, hire your first employee.

Four lessons only, one per week. She broke all courses out of the membership so you can buy big courses or you can be a member with access to 25 video courses, roughly. 

How to Convert Courses Into A Membership

Dustin has recently converted his five courses into membership form. The five courses are:

1. The Ultimate Real Estate Investing System
2. Real Estate Foundations
3. Your First Investment
4. How to Invest Out of State
5. Advanced Investor

The main course being The Ultimate Real Estate Investing System where he combined all the courses into a membership. All available here

Dustin built all of these because he also saw there were so many gaps in the knowledge available. So you can buy the course and gain lifetime access to group coaching calls and the community forum.

The Types of Courses 

All of that being said, you can join the membership and have lifetime access to all the courses for a $600 upfront cost and then $189/ month. 

Tips to Having A Well-Rounded Business Plan

Generally it depends on your membership startup costs and the cost of your courses.

Gillian suggests you keep the courses separate in terms of content and position the membership as the continuity program, not have a buy in. She suggests keeping it under $200/month, with coaching and the community.

You could use the membership program as your intro program. Gillian suggests you break out content, transition the product from it as a course to a membership and include the coaching and the community.

It makes it easier for people that are just getting started and possibly enables them to invest in the other courses.

Other Topics to Consider

Premium pricing is key but you have to consider the reality of people’s circumstances and if they can they reasonably afford it. You don’t want to price yourself out of the market, but also not be too affordable.

There is no reason why you wouldn’t do both, premium membership and a lower tier membership.

You could even offer the fundamentals course and the investor as a package as a monthly cost instead of upfront cost but make sure it is whatever serves your audience.

Pro Startup TIP: Don’t Be Afraid To Test Different Offers

You can have a “sale” or offer as a payment plan one weekend. Businesses do this all the time so why can’t you? For example, this weekend only you can get this course for X amount or offer it as a discount and just see how the audience responds. 

Successfully Unemployed Rapid Fire Round

How Gillian Perkins is Giving and Serving Others

Her first service area is her family. Sometimes she feels guilty but first she should be spending time with her kids and family. Gillian homeschools her children and wants to spend that time with them. Beyond that, Gillian volunteers at her church.

The Advice Gillian Would Give Someone Who Wants to Start A Business Helping Others

Besides getting started, commit to putting out content on a regular basis and work on improving your content to be better than the last. Don’t assume to be successful immediately.  

One Piece of Advice Gillian Would Give Her Younger Self 

There are job opportunities besides what you read about in career books. 

The One App or Tool Gillian Suggests for Day-to-Day Use

Asana. Gillian Perkins loves pen and paper but she has been using Asana. Despite the pen and paper being tangible, the to-do list was always too big and it got stressful.

Gillian has an operations manager who she brought on and with her came Asana. It has changed everything about her business. It organizes to-dos and you can assign and delegate tasks.

It is a free service and it reduces her stress level and increases her productivity. It has changed her business and my life. 

Gillians One Non-Fiction Book That She Recommends We Should Read

The most recent, best book is Start with Why by Simon Sineck. Gillian put it off for a long time because she thought the title was so obvious, and why read it. 

It is well written and Simon had a lot of good thoughts and it really helped her reevaluate the mission behind her company and the reason why she was doing things and having a tangible grasp on her “Why”. 

Where People Can Find Gillian

Google her name. Go to Instagram @gillianzperkins or look her up on YouTube, or you can head over to gillianperkins.com.