Whether you’re well on your way in creating your online business, just getting started, or even simply circling the waters trying to decide whether to get your feet wet, this post is tailor-made for you. It’s all about mining the raw material from which online businesses are built, and crafting it into the cornerstone of your success.
Entrepreneurs are an idea-happy bunch. You probably have tons of ideas swimming in your head right now. Maybe you’ve even grown used to hearing people say “That’s crazy” or “Wow—that’s going to take you a long time.”
It’s never a good idea to pay much attention to the naysayers. The fact is that nearly every idea is a good one, if you can figure out how to make it profitable.
Here are the four tests that will help you find out.
Test #1: Udemy.com
This is best suited to people who might want to sell digital products or programs. Udemy is an online learning marketplace. They have five million customers and they have digital products and programs ranging from everything from crocheting to IT. In other words, there’s a lot of opportunity here.
I have to say, it’s pretty great that there is a resource like Udemy, where you can simply go and see if somebody else is currently making money with your course idea. It’s that simple.
Test #2: Amazon.com
This, again, is best suited to digital products and programs. But you can also use it if you want to start a service-based business. It’s not limited to information products. As you may know, people can skew their Amazon ratings by canvassing their audience to buy books or post reviews at certain key periods of time. But ratings and reviews aren’t what you’re after. The sales results are what you really want to know about, and those are updated hourly by Amazon.
The way to make sure you are getting an honest reading of sales results is to look for a few different books in that category that are in that lower ranking. You can open up a whole bunch of different listings and see how well that topic, in general, is performing.
Test #3: Google Keyword Tool
It’s really important to discover if there is an audience for you to market your great idea. One tool for this is Google’s free keyword planner tool. (You can find it by simply Googling “keyword planner.”) It allows you to run a search for any keyword or phrase and find out how many people per month are searching for that phrase. It’s a really great way of gauging how big an audience is searching just Google alone.
For example, enter the keyword phrase “how to become a real estate agent” and you’ll see that that search gets 14,800 searches per month. In other words, almost 15,000 people every single month on Google are trying to find information on how to become a real estate agent. So if you already are a real estate agent, there’s an opportunity for you to offer a course that guides people down the path to becoming certified.
Test #4:Â Facebook Ads
This final test is where you go when a Google search doesn’t turn up any results. What that usually means is that the people in that market aren’t seeking their answers on Google.
Instead, they’re probably on Facebook.
To find out what kind of audience is waiting for you on Facebook, you want to find blogs within your industry…blogs that nearly always have Facebook Pages associated with them.
Alltop.com is a service that lists every single blog, all of the top blogs, in any category. Search on Alltop, and you’re likely to find the industry that you work in right now under one of those categories. When you select that category, it will bring up a list of all the top blogs in that industry. You can go through those sites and see if they have a link that goes through to a Facebook Page. Once you discover their Facebook Page, you will then use Audience Insights to see what size of audience they have and what demographic it lies in…what age range, what interest group, what gender, etc. (Audience Insights is a tool that is located inside your Facebook Ads Manager.)
Essentially what you are doing is targeting your already existing competitors to see what kind of audience they’ve already built up. Later on, you can use that information to run ads to those same people to sell your own products and services.
What Next?
If you put your idea through these four tests and find its profitability is validated on all four…well, then, it might just be time start creating a program or product. Even if your idea is validated on just one or two of the tests, it is definitely worth pursuing. You just have to make sure you are actually willing to commit the time and energy to really giving this a good go.
As I said earlier, creating an online business not an overnight thing, by any means. It’s going to take some time. But these tests will also give you insight on where you want to be spending that time, as well as where you want to price your product.
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