If you're an entrepreneur, freelancer or business owner, you know it's nearly impossible to escape the pressure of social media and online marketing these days.

On any given day, you can be flooded with scores of people who claim to be making crazy amounts of money in their business using social media whether it's influencers, marketers, or people who just have a cute dog with 1 million followers.

As an entrepreneur myself, I often struggled with the feeling that everyone had some secret formula to online success that I didn't have. Or perhaps I could have the formula if I was willing to pay $10,000 for some course to discover it.

After spending a lot of time reading books and implementing what I learned, there are a few keys I discovered that will unlock that growth in your business.

The Key to Growing Your Business Online

Take Your Time

It's so easy to fall prey to the mindset that success or rapid growth happens over night. If you've ever tried learning business advice from someone online who has made it seem like it happens over night, they were just using a catchy title to get you to click on their content.

Go ahead and decide right now to extend your time horizon.

Don't think it terms of weeks or months. Decide to think in terms of years and decades.

It will help you take so much pressure off yourself and be able to think clearly and practically.

Set goals for where you want to be a few years from now, and reverse engineer what it takes to get there into small, actionable steps you can take every day.

Prioritize Creating Value

It's so easy to get distracted by the shiny object of a specific platform or recent trend. The focus shouldn't be on getting more followers or going viral.

If you want to actually get more customers or clients through social media, focus on consistently providing as much unbelievable value as possible.

Think about the problems your customers may be facing and help them overcome those problems. People will be drawn to you because you're helping them, then they will follow you, and as you keep helping them, they will buy.

Invite Them Into a Story

Use social media as a platform to invite your followers into a story.

Post content showing who you are and what you do.

Share stories of previous customers telling how you solved their problems and changed their lives with your product or service.

Create videos that highlight the problems your customers are facing and show them who they could be after you've solved that problem for them.

Stories speak to the emotions as much as to the mind, and it will help build a deeper connection between you and your customers.

Be Consistent

It's not enough to create one valuable post or to tell a couple of compelling stories to your audience.

You need to consistently show up week after week and be top of mind to your following. More than likely, only a very small amount of your followers are actively looking for what you provide right now.

Because you're going to consistently be inviting them into a story and solving their problems, you will be top of mind and the first person they call when they're looking for what you do.

Staying consistently on top of their mind after they purchase is also a great way to get referrals.

Some Practical Next Steps

A social media plan really boils down to two things: the visual content and the written content.

You need to decide what types of photos and videos you want to share, and what you want to communicate with written or spoken word to create value and tell stories.

If you want to learn how to how to communicate in a way that turns interested people into paying customers, I highly recommend the book Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller as well as his book Marketing Made Simple. I've read these books multiple times, and it's changed the game for me.

For the visual content, if you feel comfortable shooting content your phone, start there. If you don't feel great about creating it yourself, I suggest teaming up with someone who can create photos and video for you. Try to find someone that also understands marketing and how to make content that will lead to engagement with your brand.

I’m a personal branding photographer and videographer based in Nashville, and would love to team up with you to create some amazing new content to take your business to the next level.

Here are some examples of photos I created to help other local entrepreneurs grow their business online.