Have you seen any ads or promotions for the instructional ebook on making 'desperate' money? It's a group of several different marketing gurus that are issued a challenge...they have a couple hundred bucks, no list, no web site, and they have to make $1000 bucks in 48 hours or something bad happens to their families...
Sound familiar? Well if not, don't sweat it. The point of bringing that to your attention is that it is both possible and relatively easy to turn nothing into something, and make money very quickly once you have the knowledge. Now, I'm not going to promise that if you dropped me in the middle of the Amazon, in the midst of the rainy season, with no guide, and a tribe of man eating pygmies chasing after me, that I could figure out how to make $1000 in 48 hours.
But...in 48 hours, I could create a product from scratch, and sell it for a profit with less than $100 bucks to my name; as long as I had a PayPal account, an Amazon.com account and I was within a short distance to a library. Why the library? Because assuming that I'm so hard up that I don't even own a computer with an Internet connection, I could head over to the local library and use theirs for free. Bottom line, is you don't need much at all if you have the know how.
So, let's break this baby out and see what sticks.
First, what do I need in order to market online and make money, much less be profitable in 48 hours? Ok, I need a product (I know...brilliant aren't I?), I need a way to take in money (see PayPal above), I need a store (web site) to sell it from, and I need customers (once again...brilliant John). And while I may be simplifying a touch, if I have these things, I have an income producing business, without starting with buckets of cash, a computer or Internet connection, a web site, or even a list.
Now for some quick clarification, and then we're off to the races. I did NOT say that I would make $1000 in 48 hours...I said I would be profitable in 48 hours. The distinction here, is rather than try to do something where the odds are really stacked against you, why not develop one profitable 'venture' and when up and running, duplicate the process over and over again? This is attainable for anyone with a little will power and even littler resources.
And on we go...I've laid out the basic necessities and the first of that group that I need to address would be a product. Keeping in mind that I only have 48 hours, I would need to be thinking about a report that I could write in a few hours or so...a big ole ebook would be out of the question, as would marketing someone else's stuff (because I wouldn't see cash from them in at least 30 days), so it would need to be a 10-12 (or so) page report.
This report would need to be about something that people were really interested in, A) because I'm short on time and B) to make money on 10-12 pages of product. Do I need to be insanely creative to work through this? Nope. I need to focus on things that cause people pain...things that people want to fix...things that they would research online. And I would need to be able to help them in that 10-12 pages. Impossible? Nope again.
So...what would be something of pain that I could whip up a report about? Well, people are vain, people like to look good, smell good, feel good, etc, etc. People are embarrassed by bad credit or worried that their home is going to be foreclosed on. These are general topics to start brainstorming. To help determine which is the best way to go, utilize a Keyword tool, such as the one provided by Overture to see what people are searching for online -
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
This free tool will tell you how much a specific keyword or keyword phrase was searched on in the previous month, in Yahoo and their partners. If it's in the thousands you're solid. Google's numbers will likely be even greater since they basically own Internet searches. I won't go into detail here about building a keyword list, but this is where you start.
Back to my 'challenge'...I need a product and I've thought about people and their pain...as well as their immediate desire to alleviate that pain. Well, oddly enough, today I was at a store and when the clerk spoke to me I was almost knocked off my feet by the smell of his breath. Almost 4 feet away he was noticeable. So, how about Bad Breath?
I run a search on my Overture tool and guess what? Over 21,000 searches in March, 2006 for 'Bad Breath'...several thousand more for various plays on the phrase, including many for pet breath (possibly a follow up product? Hmmm). People do get into their pets. And if they're searching online for breath remedies for them...betcha they will drop a few bucks on a report if it could help them solve the problem. Starting to get it?
Ok, product picked. Now to research and write it. You need to make sure your product actually helps the people with their pain or you are not going to hold onto any of that money you will be bringing in. Researching topics for free is really so much easier than people think. If you have the time and the resources you may want to outsource this task to elance.com or rentacoder.com but in this case I can find hundreds of resources with a little something called Search Inside.
Want more? Good. In part II of this series we