Chapter 05 - Picking Things to Make Money Online
Hopefully, your mind is now starting to race as you recognize all of the possible methods available to you to earn money online, even as a busy professional. But there is a difference between setting up a business quickly and setting up a business that will be successful quickly.
And this is where your knowledge as a business professional will come in handy.
Using your existing experience and understanding, you should be uniquely poised to be able to create an online business model that earns money quickly and hopefully you will stand a better chance than most people when it comes to quickly understanding the systems in place – and tweaking them to get better results.
Ultimately, if you’re looking to make a profit quickly, then you need to consider two crucial factors more than any others: the type of product that you’re going to sell and the niche/audience that you are selling in.
The objective is to find the right product and then match it to the right audience. Or to put it another way, solve a specific problem for a specific person.
By getting this right, you can make life much easier for yourself.
Picking the Niche
The first thing you need to do, whether selling a digital product, a physical product or a service, is to find your niche. Niche in this context is internet marketing jargon meaning ‘industry’.
By picking your niche, you are picking the subject matter that you’re going to be dealing with and therefore the kind of customer that you are going to be selling to.
The obvious choice here is to pick one of the most popular niches that most other internet marketers will also be promoting products too. By far, the biggest internet marketing niches for selling products are:
Making money online
Dating
Fitness
Health
Business
Lifestyle
These are popular niches because they have a global appeal. Only some people like cats and only some people are into rowing: but everyone wants to be healthier, everyone wants love or sex and everyone wants to earn money.
By choosing one of these niches, you are giving yourself the biggest possible audience and therefore giving yourself the best possible chance of success.
Or are you?
Because as well as giving yourself the biggest possible audience this way, you are also giving yourself the most possible competition.
These are the most popular niches as we have already established and as such, they are filled with the most other sellers all selling alternative products that are just as good as yours (or better).
Not only that but you’re also giving yourself zero focus and no direct ‘routes to market’.
Where would you even begin to promote a product on ‘fitness’? Or on ‘dating’? There are so many other sites going up against you and the audience has been completely saturated with offers, products and deals.
Now let’s reconsider rowing. Sell an ebook on rowing and now you have a much more targeted niche with specific, direct routes to market.
Head to a forum or a social media group on the topic of rowing and what you’ll find is that there are probably a few hundred or thousand people here and all of them are passionate about that subject.
Better yet, they probably very rarely get people trying to sell them books on that subject because it’s much more niche. There’s a demand here.
Chances are that they’d love to know how to get better at their chosen sport/hobby and if your book can do that for them and they haven’t read anything like it before, then promoting said book in this forum might just lead to sales!
Then you can think about all the other routes to market that are available. How about a rowing website? A rowing magazine? Even a rowing club? What about a college that has an active rowing club?
All of these are possible places where you can promote your book and start making sales.
A popular alternative choice is to pick a specific industry. How about the stage lighting industry? Or the food truck industry?
There are thousands of people in these industries that could benefit from more information and if you can sell them something to help them, then you can stand to make a lot of money.
Because they should earn money by buying your book, they will hopefully see it as an investment and won’t mind parting with the cash.
Once again, you are solving a specific problem for a specific person.
When thinking about which niche to go into, always consider your existing opportunities, contacts and resources.
Most of us know people who have some kind of influence and most of us have certain resources already available to us; it makes sense to make the most of those resources and once again, you are this way making life easier for yourself and finding the fastest way to start making money from internet marketing as a business professional.
For example, if you have a blog already all about martial arts, then you can always make an ebook or buy an ebook on that subject. You already have the audience to sell to, so it’s a no-brainer! The same goes for if you happen to be a martial arts instructor.
And it goes for if you happen to be best friends with someone who owns a big martial arts site. Make life as easy for yourself as possible!
You might find it hard to pick a small niche with a smaller audience. Perhaps it goes against your natural intuition to pick the biggest and most popular subjects:
that’s normal and to be expected.
One solution then might be to merge niches and to turn multiple subject matters into one subject matter. For example, you can combine something like martial arts and fitness easily by making your book a book on ‘fitness for martial artists’.
Or how about ‘fitness for students’? In this way, you are honing in on a smaller subsection of a larger niche and that way appealing to a more specific market while still having that global appeal.
This is actually a very effective way to maximize your potential earning through something like a PLR product. Buy a generic ebook on fitness and then simply alter the content slightly to turn it into an ebook on fitness for students, for martial artists, for the elderly, for diabetes.
This way you can quickly start marketing it in multiple different areas and potentially maximize your earnings!
Choosing Products With Value Proposition
What’s also very important is that you understand why it is that certain things sell and other things do not. It’s not enough to choose a product that is in the right niche, you also need to make sure it has that ‘wow’ factor that will help it to sell.
There’s a fair bit you can learn about sales pages but one of the most important things you need to understand before you start trying to profit is how to use the ‘value proposition’. This simply refers to the way in which your product provides value to your audience.
A good product should in some way improve the lives of your audience and that will make it worth more than the sum of its parts.
If you’re selling a fitness ebook then, you mustn’t focus on how many pages it has or how beautiful the images are. In fact, you shouldn’t even focus on how good it is at helping people to lose weight and build muscle.
Instead, you focus on the emotional aspect: the value proposition. You tell the buyer how they will feel when they love their own body, when they feel confident to look in the mirror, when they are more effective at attracting members of the opposite sex and when they become ill less often.
That’s the inherent value.
Something like a fitness ebook can sell for much more than something like a gardening ebook for this reason – the value is inherently greater and has more of an ‘emotional hook’. Look for products that you can really get people to want.