46 and 47 » Small Business Ideas

Growing Your Internet Business By Looking Across Your Niche

47 — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:14:34 +0000

A few months ago I was browsing through a small business forum for some reason. It happened to have a pay per click advertising section which caught my attention. Someone asked a question about tracking sales on their website that were generated from pay per click traffic. The first thing I thought was “duh, use the free tracking code from Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing or where ever you’re running those campaigns.” Actually, I take that back because that’s second thing I thought. The first thing was “oh man, oh man, you’d probably double your ROI if you tracked anything.”

Anyway, at least a dozen people commented on that thread and one or two people mentioned using a form of subids. Not a single person even went down the tracking pixel and tracking code route. That’s something pretty basic to me and I only dabble in pay per click advertising now. Besides the obvious “maybe I have learned a thing or three” it got me thinking about other opportunities to expand.

Most of the time I tend to gravitate toward a few forums that are full of other internet business people when thinking about internet marketing. This experience, and others like it, keep reminding me that there’s a lot of opportunity with a lot less competition outside of that space. I don’t have any desire to sell pay per click advertising services or search engine optimization services, it’s hard enough finding time to work on my own projects, but forums outside of the internet marketing niche are ripe for the picking.

I’m sure most people already do this, but don’t forget to look horizontally into related niches. Maybe even set aside time each week or month or quarter for it. Maybe your niche is dog training for pet owners. Maybe you’ve already targeted dog training for the family beagle and dog training for lap dogs. Well, some of the same principles would apply to other types of dog training. What about training police dogs? Or search and rescue dogs? Or seeing eye dogs? It might take a bit of research to educate yourself on those markets but doing that opens up a whole new set of potential customers.

47
Trying to peek around the corner more often.

Don’t Let Losing Interest Sabotage Long-Term Projects

47 — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:58:36 +0000

I just wrote about getting bored with new ideas after three weeks and putting them on the shelf. It wasn’t meant to imply you shouldn’t think long-term or scrap an idea because it might take four months to finish.

What I meant was if you get bored with working on something then take a break. Most people don’t own just one site. Spend some time giving a little TLC to one of your neglected sites for a few days. Just enough to recharge your batteries until you’re ready to get back on track.

I end up rotating projects a lot too. The list of tasks for the month and goals for the year dictate most of what I do. When I get sick of working on something, I bump its priority down for a bit. When I’m feeling motivated again, I’ll bump it back up to the top.

Regardless of how passionate you are about a topic, reading, writing, and thinking about it everyday is difficult. Most businesses, even online business, take years of hard work before they’re successful. You’re better off fully exploring a strategy than jumping around every week. So take a holiday once in a while.

Attempting To Cure Idea Boredom

47 — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:22:02 +0000

How many of you jump from idea to idea? Probably quite a few if blogs and forums are any indication. I didn’t used to be that way but I fight it tooth and nail now. Between the internet induced ADD and all of the ideas swimming around in my head, motivation for anything new lasts about two seconds. Well, it’s a little longer than two seconds but you get the point.

Three Weeks Or Bust

I’m sure it’s different for everyone but I seem to have a three week limit. That’s about how long it takes before I completely lose interest in a new project. So that gets incorporated into my planning now. I give myself three weeks from start to finish, putting in natural break points of course. Work my butt off for 21 days and see how far things progress. After that, I’ll just come back to it whenever.

I used to do this type of thing for my writing. Work on a draft, put it away, feel motivated later, work on it some more. Eventually something decent fell from the sky with this method so maybe it will work with websites too.

Domain Name Wasteland

I’m thinking about adding an extra component for domains. Often an idea requires me to register a new domain name. So I think I’ll evaluate that site after 11 months. If I don’t have any content up after that long then I’ll just let it expire. When it’s broken even or made money then I’ll keep it. Unless maybe the name is really, really good…

Developing An Idea-Generating Mindset

47 — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 04:34:38 +0000

New ideas flow from some people like a river. I hated those people until recently. Not really but I was a tad bit envious. Anyone who knows me would probably say that I am the least creative person in the world, but generating new business ideas is much easier for me now. Here are a few things that helped me:

Motivation – I started seeing results after I got to the point where I really, REALLY wanted to become more creative. I will skip the background story for now but the desire to improve my creativity played a huge role.
More Science, Less Art – Dr. Edward De Bono, an expert on developing creativity, helped shift my thinking away from the “you are born creative or you are not” mentality. I took a one day course on Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step (Perennial Library) at work some time ago. The two things that gave me the most help were the concept triangle (extract the concept behind an idea and create more ideas from that concept) and the random entry (using a random noun, picture, or object to help stimulate new ideas) techniques.
Find Markets First – After reading The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, I started using my own interests and background to think about gaps in the marketplace. The niche keyword research tools like Wordtracker were a huge help there.
Effort – One of my previous posts mentioned how I spent July 2007 coming up with 100 niche business ideas. That was the first time I put real, extended action into improving my creativity. As much as anything, practicing helped unlock my inner creative self.

Some of my ideas are good and some of them are terrible. It does not matter though because I come up with a few ideas a day now. In fact, things often just pop into my head. For example, I tried to think of an idea for a new service a few days ago. I started thinking about it before starting my commute and ten minutes later I had a new idea.

None of these things may work for you but keep trying until you find something that does. It is well worth the effort. My biggest problem now is evaluating and prioritizing my list of ideas.

July 2007 Goals

47 — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:14:17 +0000

My goal for July 2007 was simple: come up with at least 100 niche business ideas. We met that goal It’s amazing but I’m the last person people would think of as creative. Once we got the process in place it wasn’t as hard as we thought. It really surprised us both. I’ll have to post about that later.