Several weeks ago, I told you about a nearly risk-free way to start your Carefree Business.
It’s a strategy that will allow you to nail down the niche for your Carefree Business, test your business ideas, figure out what type of products you should sell, and refine your advertising and marketing strategy… without spending much money (a few hundred bucks at most). And you’ll experience success – and your first profits – much faster.
This start-up strategy is called Ready, Fire, Aim. And I’d like to tackle the next step today.
First, I have to mention that today is the very last chance to join the Internet Money Club online business building program. The next session is starting next week. And although the official deadline to sign up was yesterday, I’ve arranged for Carefree Entrepreneurs to have one last chance to get in.
With IMC, you’ll start from scratch … and at the end, have a fully functioning online business. With a mentor showing you the way, you’ll go step by step through determining your niche, honing your marketing, building your website, and everything else you need to have your own profitable "mom and pop" Internet business.
Several past members have gone on to create five- and six-figure Carefree Businesses working just part time. Read their stories – and find out all the details on the Internet Money Club program – here.
Back to Ready, Fire, Aim.
In a nutshell, RFA is all about taking action, speed, keeping things simple – especially at first, and not spending time or money on unprofitable ideas.
You don’t go through what are considered the conventional first steps to a business: logo, fancy website, office equipment, or product stock. Because you are starting an information business online, you don’t need any of that anyway. All you really need are your home computer and your ideas.
You test those ideas in the market first by trying to sell them. You let your customers determine what your business looks like. You start with the prospect, not the product.
As Michael Masterson says in his book Ready, Fire, Aim:
"Wise business owners know they cannot determine the goodness of an idea until they try to sell it. So they will try to sell it as soon as they can – before they have spent a lot of time and money making it perfect."
In my first essay on RFA, we covered the initial steps in the first phase: Ready. When getting Ready, you narrow down your business’s niche, determine the target market, figure out what products you’re going to sell, and put together the initial marketing plan.
This is all done quickly and easily with the online tools I’ll be telling you about. And we’ll be taking things one step at a time here in the Carefree Entrepreneur.
Last time, I asked you to come up with an idea for your Carefree Business. I heard from several readers.
Thomas wants to sell information on disaster preparedness. Sally is a wedding planner in Italy looking to take her business online. And Charles wants to help people on a budget with interior decorating.
If you haven’t picked your niche yet, take a moment to do so now.
Brainstorm all your passions, hobbies, or interests. Then pick one that your gut tells you will sell.
Now we’ll back up that gut feeling with some proof that this is a viable business idea.
So you have an idea for your ideal business. Let’s use something having to do with yoga as an example. Insert your own business idea to follow along.
You love yoga and so do all your friends. It seems to be everywhere.
To confirm your feeling, do this:
Look for real-world evidence. How many yoga studios are in your area? Is yoga offered at your local gym? Have you seen yoga DVDs and other products for sale in local shops? At your local bookstore, do you see yoga books and magazines for sale? Do you see ads related to yoga in magazines you read?
Here in South Florida, I found 30+ yoga studios in a 20-mile radius of my home, with 10 within a 15-minute drive – and that was just a cursory search. And yoga gear is for sale everywhere from Whole Foods to small businesses downtown.
If you found the same results with your topic, then…
My keyword searches yielded thousands of sites selling videos (yogawithles.com/videos/), subscriptions to member sites (yogatoday.com), and physical products (gaiam.com). And there were many sellers on eBay and the Amazon Marketplace (a great place to check out trends). Plus, there were paid ads up through the 15th page of search results. If there are that many businesses paying for ad placements – that’s also a good sign.
Now let’s make sure that all those sites in the search results are the real deal.
You want a topic that generates traffic (which leads to sales). Here’s an insider tip to find out just how successful all those sites you found are. Use free tools like Alexa.com and Compete.com. Just type in the web address and you’ll get a graph of web traffic. You should also use Google’s free Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to check out searches related to your niche.
Again… The more the better. A few thousand searches a month is not so good. Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of searches is where you want to be. I wouldn’t recommend going into any niche without at least 30,000 searches per month.
"Bikram yoga," for example, yielded 823,000 monthly searches on Google. "Yoga video" has 210,000 searches. "Yoga online" brought 110,000. Those are good numbers.
In the yoga example, going through the steps above yielded a huge offline and online presence. Thousands of businesses large and small are selling yoga products, from mats and clothing to instructional videos, ebooks, and yoga retreat travel packages. And the website traffic and keyword searches were off the charts.
It’s a certified worldwide trend and you should jump on it. If your niche didn’t have much of a presence, repeat with some of your other passions or hobbies until you find a winner.
You might wonder, how will you stand out from the crowd? Is there room for your business in this crowded market?
The competition is a good thing.
It seems counterintuitive. But you want to be surrounded by similar businesses. Other successful businesses mean there are customers out there. Customers that can be yours.
That doesn’t mean your business won’t be unique.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll discuss how to narrow down your niche to meet the needs of certain segments of the market. By being specific and coming up with your own unique twist on what’s "hot," you’ll position yourself as an authority and become the go-to online resource.
In our example, yoga is too broad. And you can’t compete with the big name companies and gurus in the field. But "yoga for preschoolers" or "yoga for busy professionals" might do the trick. The keyword tool you used above will be very useful here.
Next time, we’ll use several of the same online tools to help you pick your specific niche.
Before then, make sure to go through the steps above. It must be done before you can narrow down your niche, not to mention find or create a product to sell, create your initial marketing, and perform other start-up steps.
If you have any questions on market research, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at askjason@awaionline.com.
And if you haven’t already, be sure to sign up officially for Carefree Entrepreneur here. You’ll ensure you won’t miss an issue, and you’ll get a free video presentation from Michael Masterson. Created originally for attendees who paid $2,000 to attend a conference, in this presentation, Michael reveals the four stages of business growth. Go here to get access immediately.
For questions or requests: contact us online.
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Tip of The Day: Time is An Equal Opportunity Employer…
“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can’t buy more hours. Scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.” — Denis Waitley
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Speaking of Time:
We’re currently running a promotion on the “What’s Working Now Short-Cut System“, a monthly publication where we interview the top leaders in our industry…
What’s Working Now is like a newsletter but mostly with private webinars and videos where leaders in our industry actually show you how to set-up things like Facebook Pay-Per-Click campaigns, lead capture pages, and paid co-ops that rake in leads.
We’ve had the greats like Mark Wieser, Todd Falcone, Daegan Smith, Ferny Ceballos, Raymond Fong, Ray Higdon, Katie Freiling, Adam Holland, and many more share their secrets with our readers on our live webinars…
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The Parable of The Puppy And The Elephant…
YESTERDAY MORNING, I watched my six month old Springer Spaniel pup sit in front of an open door for five minutes pouting because he couldn’t get inside.
Thinking this was unusual, to say the least, I walked around the open door and led him into the house to get his morning treat.
Then I got to thinking about my own limiting beliefs.
They say that by the time an elephant has grown up in a circus you can tie them to a post with nothing but a leash and they won’t even try to break it.
They can walk away any time they want but they won’t. Because they are being held back by their memories of the heavy chains they were raised with. They were trained much like we are trained to have limiting beliefs…
But when you think about it: What’s really holding you back in life?
You know, I would be willing to bet that you are your own worst enemy. You are holding yourself back from greatness and you know it!
But it’s time to be your own best friend.
The door to the cage you think you’re in probably isn’t even locked.
But you’ll never know if you don’t try it…
Speaking of trying things out:
We’re currently running a promotion on the “What’s Working Now Short-Cut System“, a monthly publication where we interview the top leaders in our industry…
What’s Working Now is like a newsletter but mostly with private webinars and videos where leaders in our industry actually show you how to set-up things like Facebook Pay-Per-Click campaigns, lead capture pages, and paid co-ops that rake in leads.
We’ve had the greats like Mark Wieser, Todd Falcone, Daegan Smith, Ferny Ceballos, Raymond Fong, Ray Higdon, Katie Freiling, Adam Holland, and many more share their secrets with our readers on our live webinars…
Start Your Membership Today For Only $1
In the past several weeks, we’ve been going through the process of narrowing down your passions, interests, and hobbies into one business idea that has money-making potential.
Now we’re going to get even more in depth and figure out the specific niche within that broader topic you should go into. In today’s crowded Internet market having a very narrow niche is the only way to go – especially for new entrepreneurs.
For example, if “alternative health” is what you want to base your business on, that’s a good start. It’s a hot trend that won’t be slowing down any time soon.
But you have to go deeper in order to be successful. You have to figure out what specifically about alternative health you want to do. Maybe natural supplements for women over 50? Or natural cures for migraines?
We got started on this process by doing some basic market research with easy-to-use online tools in my last essay, “Get Ready.” Please take a moment to go through the steps in that essay first if you haven’t already pinned down the topic.
And by the way, there is a new bonus video presentation available to new Carefree Entrepreneur members. You are getting this newsletter free as part of your Early to Rise subscription. But to sign up officially and get the bonus, just go here.
Once you’ve done that, let’s keep going…
Because this is one of your passions in life… it shouldn’t take long to figure out a very specific sector of the market for your business.
Why get so specific? Wouldn’t trying to reach a larger market mean more customers and sales?
As a Carefree Entrepreneur, you don’t want to compete against Amazon and the big names in your market. It would mean working full time and then some with your business. And a huge investment of capital.
The Carefree Way is all about a great six-figure-plus income working just part time, with the opportunity to take time off whenever you want. No stress. No drama. Minimal start-up expenses.
That’s why finding a very specific niche is important. By positioning yourself as the go-to resource in a specific niche, customers will find you more easily, be primed to buy your products, and come back to your business again and again.
If you try to be all things to all people, you spread yourself too thin.
And don’t worry about having a smaller customer base by narrowing your niche. We’ll make sure you only go into markets with plenty of prospects and profit potential.
So let’s carve out your little slice of the Internet.
First step is to examine your chosen niche so far. Is it too broad? Are you interested in investment advice? Real estate tips? Dog training?
Those topics are definitely too broad. You have to drill down. Investment advice for baby boomers who didn’t save enough for retirement. Real estate tips for homebuyers seeking short sales. Dog training for aggressive breeds. You get the idea.
As Nick Usborne, creator of AWAI’s How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websitesprogram, says:
“We want to find an area of real interest to people that is not already being addressed by thousands of other better-established websites.”
Nick knows this first-hand. His own online business, which brings in $50,000 a year for just a few hours of work each week, centers around reviews of gourmet coffee and products like coffee makers – oriented towards beginners.
Another online entrepreneur using this method, Ellen Ferlazzo, makes a great living helping people learn to cook great meals on a budget. It’s chock-full of recipes and advice.
Brigitte Bradtke’s websites are centered on travel to Australia, specifically the wilderness area known as the Kimberley. She brings in about $10,000 a month. And she works only six months of the year.
Do you see how what these entrepreneurs are doing is powerful?
When you get specific with your niche, people visiting your business will know exactly what you are offering. And because you are specific, your site will rank higher in the search engines when people are looking for information. This brings customers primed to buy to your Carefree Business.
First, let’s brainstorm some possible niches within your topic.
Think of your business idea. Look back at your experiences – what specifically about this niche interests you? Can you get more specific?
When Nick was creating his own money-making website, he started with coffee – a very broad topic. So he started out by exploring some possible niches, including single-serve coffee makers, a coffee shop locator, and fair trade coffee beans.
To make sure you get specific enough, do what Nick does:
“Start with a general topic description, then a subtopic, and then an even smaller niche within the subtopic.”
Here’s another example Nick mentions in his program:
Gardening ? Gardening ponds ?Aquatic plants
Now try that with your niche.
Having trouble?
A great niche that can fit with just about any topic is catering to beginners. A beginner’s guide to yoga, for example.
As I mentioned, that’s what Nick did with his CoffeeDetective.com business. After exploring a variety of other topic niches, he finally settled on “beginners.” His audience is those new to gourmet coffee, not sure where to start. He reviews coffees, coffee makers, and other products and makes recommendations for newbies.
So go through the steps above until you’ve determined a couple of specific niches that you think make a good topic for your business.
The idea is to find a topic that interests you, is specific enough, and is in high demand. That’s the combination that will ensure your Carefree Business is profitable.
This, by the way, is the heart of Nick’s How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites program. He teaches you how to create a passive income ($50,000+ per year) working just an hour or so a day on your own little online business. And he helps you pick a profitable niche that taps into a growing trend, launch a website, bring visitors, and best of all, earn a steady income.
You can find out more about Nick’s program here.
And one more thing…
If you have any questions on picking your niche, just shoot me an email at askjason@awaionline.com.
Tip of The Day:
You Will Soon Become What You Project.
“Position yourself as a center of influence – the one who knows the movers and shakers. People will respond to that, and you’ll soon become what you project.” –Bob Burg
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This is by Special Invitation Only and it goes away soon!
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Or…
In these 7 free videos Mike explained in simple east to understand steps how I could attract an endless stream of prospects to me ready to join and actually get paid to have these prospects come to me.
These videos have really changed the way I do my home business, and I think they can help you too.
You can get free instant access to these free videos here…
http://wwaddell.magneticsponsoringonline.com
(just copy and paste the link into your browser)
Here’s to your success,
Wes Waddell
Are you the right type of person for us to team up with? Watch Robert Keyosaki and find out.
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