Proven Blueprint to Profitable Online Business – Step 2

People are far more likely to be willing to pay for information that they really need than for information that they merely want. Hence, it is important to differentiate between the two different groups and their requirements.

A simple example will illustrate this point perfectly…

If someone keeps a dog as a pet and they want to train it to do tricks, or they want to learn how to groom it properly, then they probably fall into the category of people who have ‘wants’. If, however, the dog incessantly howls throughout the night so that they never get a wink of sleep, they have a real ‘need’. They might want to teach the dog to behave properly, but from their own point of view, they have a need to do so for their own health, welfare and sanity!

It has to be something that people need or want…

You are going to set up a business that supplies information to people, and in order to make money by supplying information, it has to be something that they need or want.

Note the order that those two words are presented in, need and want.

People who have genuine needs are the people most likely to spend money to try to find a solution to the problem that they have. Moreover, they are likely to be willing to continue to spend until they find that solution.

As an example, if someone suffers chronic back pain, they will buy products that give them information about how to get rid of their pain. If a particular product they buy does the trick, they will no longer keep buying products of this nature, but if it doesn’t, they will.

Hence, the first step to setting up your business is finding the kind of things that people need and are searching for on the internet.

This is not to say that you cannot sell information that people want, because you can. However, it is far easier to sell information that people need, and in the early days, you want to make things as easy as possible.

Now, you may be wondering what kind of information you might supply to people, and how are you going to ‘package’ this information in a way that will make money for you. The answer is simple. You aren’t, because other people have already done the hard work for you.

People go online each and every day to find information about an almost unbelievably wide and diverse range of topics and subject matter. In effect, no matter what kind of information is available, there are people looking for it, and although most of the time they want that information for free, it is good enough, then they might be willing to pay for it.

Consequently, in most areas where the net is a popular information search tool, there are lots of products available for sale already. However, almost none of these products is doing anything more than scratching the surface of their intended target market. As a result, there are thousands of companies and individuals who are willing to pay other would-be online entrepreneurs commission to promote their products or services, which is where you come in.

You do not have to source the information that you’re going to supply to your prospects. You do not have to worry about spending countless hours researching your subject, weeks compiling the results of your research into a product, or building a fancy website. You just need to find a suitable market to promote into, and then find a product that matches the requirements of that market.

This is the first practical lesson!

You must always establish that there is a demand for any product that you are either going to promote on behalf of someone else, or even create yourself (a little further down the line) before you ever consider getting involved.

However, the majority of ‘newbie’ marketers do things completely the other way around. They find a product to promote or (far, far worse), they spend weeks or months creating their own product without first trying to establish whether there is a demand. Not surprisingly, most of the time this approach is a recipe for failure, and clearly it is therefore something you should never even contemplate doing.

You must always establish demand before finding or creating a suitable product – no exceptions – always!

You know that you need to establish demand, but you do not know what products other people have available that might satisfy that demand. For this reason, in these early stages, you need to create a shortlist of perhaps half a dozen areas of demand in which it might be profitable to work if there are suitable products available. The next stage is to establish how you do this.

Your initial market research…

Before setting off on your market research journey, it might make sense to take stock of your own situation, and what you already know. By doing so, you might be surprised how easy it is to come up with some ideas about the kind of information that people need.

For example, we have already mentioned people with back pain. Extend this idea, and you come up with people who are suffering from arthritis, people looking for information about gout diets, people with irritable bowel syndrome and so on. None of these conditions is particularly life-threatening, but every one of them is a painful blight on the individual sufferer’s life.

How about people who are suffering financial problems (debt is one of the few growth industries at the moment!)? Would a person whose house is just about to be taken from them qualify as someone who has a desperate need? I think that you could safely say that they would qualify.

I am not for a moment suggesting that you ‘prey’ on these poor unfortunates – you should only work with what you’re comfortable with, and you must be very confident that the information you provide to these people is of value and will help them.

All you are doing at this stage is listing down ideas, and if you are not personally comfortable with any idea you come up with, don’t go with it. Ideas are not in short supply, so just keep researching until you find something with which you are comfortable.

• The World’s population is getting (much) fatter at an alarming rate. Do you think that people who are seriously overweight have a psychological or emotional pain caused by their seeming inability to do anything about solving their weight problem? Once again, the answer can only be in the affirmative.
• Think about people who have just separated from their partner. If you could provide them with information that helped them to get that person to come back to them (assuming that that is what they wanted), it is a foregone conclusion that it wouldn’t be that difficult to find a hungry market.
• What about people who don’t have a partner but want one? Online dating is definitely a market where people who have a real need are to be found!
• Do parents ever have problems with their teenage children? Of course they do – all the time! They need help, so here is another one to add to your list.

After you have brainstormed for a while, you will probably already have a list of potential markets to consider. Let’s expand that list a little further by looking at some of the online resources that allow you to discover the kind of information that people are looking for.

Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers is the internet’s #1 question and answer website, a place where any Yahoo! member can post a question about almost any topic under the sun and have that question answered by other Yahoo! members.

The site is completely free to use, and is available to any registered Yahoo! member. The quality of most of the answers that you will find on the site is questionable at best, but the important thing for you is that you can use this site to discover what kind of information people are looking for.

There are several different ways to use the site to establish the kind of things that people need to know. One option is to scroll a little way down the homepage and to switch the ‘Answer Questions’ window to show the most ‘Popular’ questions:

Alternatively, there is a list of categories down the left-hand side of the page, and there are several of these categories (and sub-categories) where an educated guess would indicate that people need information rather more than want it. An example would be the ‘Health’ category, but others such as ‘Education’ and ‘Family & Relationships’ can sometimes turn up some very interesting ideas:

The ‘Personal Finance’ subcategory of the ‘Business & Finance’ category throws up quite a few questions that would give you an indication of the kind of information that people are desperately seeking:

43 Things

43Things is a site where people list the things that they want to achieve, their objectives and desires. Consequently, it is another good site for discovering what members of the site need or want.

On the homepage, you will see the ‘Need Inspiration’ tag cloud, within which the entries that are largest and in bold are the most popular categories in which objectives are listed.

People are concerned about ‘Money and wealth’ (more so now than ever before), so you could dive straight into this particular category, or start with the ‘Popular goals’ link:

Generally speaking, in order to obtain a generic overview before trying to narrow things down, I would use the ‘Popular goals’ link:

‘Lose weight’ is always a popular subject, but I would imagine that very few people would think that ‘stop procrastinating’ would be such a major concern.

‘Get a tattoo’ might also be worth listing, because while it represents more of a ‘want’ than a ‘need’, it is still a massively popular topic. Wanting to ‘Fall in love’ and ‘Be happy’ would both be important features of a stable relationship, hinting that relationships are another pain area.

There are one or two extra topics from the ‘Money and wealth’ category that would be worth adding to the list as well:

MySpace Groups

MySpace is one of the most popular social networking sites on the internet, a place where millions of individuals come together to discuss their interests, hobbies and desires. Within the site, many hundreds of like-minded people have got together to form Groups that focus on their particular area of interest, and so by investigating which groups are the most popular, you can once again get a fairly clear idea of the kind of information that is in demand:

On the group’s homepage, there is a comprehensive list of ‘Groups by Category’.

By now, you should be getting a fairly good idea of the categories that you should be investigating to establish the kind of information people are looking for. However, there is one other consideration which I have not mentioned previously, and this is the fact that even some extremely popular categories are not really worth looking at, because there is no money to be made.

For example, while there are a huge number of MySpace ‘Entertainment’ groups, there is generally little or no money to be made in this particular area as far as online marketers are concerned. You will see how to assess this a little later, but take it from me that this is not a moneymaking category.

The money making categories to focus on are (once again) ‘Health, Wellness, Fitness’ as well as ‘Business & Entrepreneurs’, ‘Computers & Internet’, ‘Money & Investing’ as well as ‘Pets & Animals’. All of these are categories where you will find needy people, as opposed to those in other categories who simply have ‘wants’.

A little way down the ‘Health’ category groups list, you have people who have come together to focus on autism, natural cures and yoga. While the latter is probably more of a ‘want’, ‘autism’ is a definite need (particularly for parents of autistic children), and for those who are dedicated to living a natural lifestyle, using ‘natural cures’ is probably also a ‘need’ subject:

Yahoo! Directory

The Yahoo! Directory is a listing of websites that have been submitted by their owners to Yahoo! for listing in that directory. The most important thing to understand about this directory is that a website that is submitted to it is not automatically accepted.

Websites are only accepted if they meet Yahoo! quality standards, meaning that the directory presents a snapshot of the highest quality sites on the net. Webmasters will only go to the trouble of creating a high-quality site if there is money to be made by doing so (almost all sites are monetized in some way), and that indicates a thriving market.

Choosing from the category listing on the left-hand side of the page, and again using the ‘Health’ category as an example:

By clicking on the main link, you will get a complete list of every health-related sub-category:

Look through those that interest you and you will again find many interesting subcategories that you had probably never thought of before.

Note that you are looking for sub-categories here – trying to compete in a broad, generic market at the levels we have been considering previously is not going to work, simply because the competition is too tough. For example, if you were trying to drive people to a ‘Health’ focused website, there are quite a lot of other web pages that feature this single word:

Hence, you have to be looking for a small ‘piece’ or slice of the overall health market where you would have a reasonable chance of making an impression. Such a ‘piece’ of a large market is usually known as a market niche.

As examples, we have already seen that ‘autism’ and ‘natural cures’ represent subcategories of the health market. It would make for more sense to investigate these in greater detail, rather than chasing a massive target that you have no chance of hitting.

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