Chapter 36

How to Get Rich on the Internet

By Doing What You Love

By Ben Hart

(This will take you 10 minutes to read)

This chapter is ideal if you are trying to think of a niche to target with your Internet business.

What should your website be about?

What kind of content will make money for you – a lot of money quickly?

There are two ways to learn the answer to this question.  One is trial and error.  That is, you try your idea and see if it works.

But that method will take a lot of time.

The other method is with good market research.  That’s the easy and quick way.

This chapter is about how to conduct good market research.  Your market research might take you a couple of days if you want to be really thorough.

But you can probably do a good enough job in a few hours to know if your idea will succeed or fail.

Failure is too strong a word.  It’s almost impossible to fail on the Internet.  So let’s just say, with a day, or at most two days, of good market research, you can know with certainty whether your idea will be wildly successful and you will become a near-instant millionaire . . . or whether your site and Internet business will just kind of putter along without much fanfare.

What we want for your site, obviously, is wild success and wealth beyond your dreams of avarice.

There are two fundamental keys to this: 1) Focus on something you love. And 2) Make sure your subject has a good sized constituency that is just as fanatical about your subject as you are. Getting part two of this equation right requires good market research (not even great market research, just pretty good).

So here’s Step #1 of your Market Research Plan, and that’s to focus on yourself.

This is the fun part.

What I want you to do is make a list of everything you really enjoy.  Make your list as comprehensive as you can.  This should take you two or three hours.

This is no frivolous exercise.  This is a key part of your Market Research – not only because you will be launching a website that might occupy the lion’s share of your working day for the rest of your life, but also because if you really love a certain activity or a certain subject, there’s a very good chance that a lot of other people (perhaps millions of people) share your passion for you hobby, sport, subject or activity.

So, as part of writing this chapter, I came up with such a list for myself that I’ll share with you now.  Here’s my list: 

1) Skiing

2) Nice restaurants

3) The science marketing (good marketing is science, not art)

4) Writing and communicating my ideas

3) Sitting at a sidewalk café in Spain with a glass of wine reading a book

4) Browsing in Bookstores

5) Movies (I'm a movie buff)

6) Playing tennis

7) Playing golf

8) Watching  pro football on Sunday afternoon

9) Politics (Though my enthusiasm is waning on this. Both major parties are abysmal)

10) I love reading the newspaper.  I’m a newspaper junkie.

11) I like staying in good shape for my age.

12) Reading

13) Daydreaming

14) Seeing my kids really get excited about something

15) Posing nude in front of the mirror

Don’t laugh too hard at #15 on my list.  I told you to be comprehensive with your list and brutally honest about what you like to do.

I actually came up with 42 items for my list.  But I don’t want to bore you with the whole list, just wanted to give you an idea of what your list should look like.

Include everything you can think of on your list.  This is a stream-of-consciousness exercise.  And it will tell you a lot about yourself.

Okay, now pay very close attention to what I am going to tell you right now.

Step #2 of your market research is your offline research.

You are going to do market research the old fashioned way – the way direct marketers did their research for decades before the Internet era.

I want you to head on down to your public library, assuming it’s a decent sized public library.  Pull a huge catalogue off the shelf called the SRDS List Directory.

This is the Bible of the Direct Marketing industry.  You cannot be in direct marketing in any serious way if you are not using this resource.

This directory costs about $700.  It’s expensive, which is why I’m having you get it free from your local public library.  The library edition might be a few years old. But that doesn’t matter for this purpose.

This is a 1,600-page catalogue that lists more than 30,000 mailing lists that you can rent.  You are not going to rent any of these lists.  This is just information for your market research.  

You can also find the SRDS List Directory by going to SRDS.com

But I like to browse through the printed version of the enormous catalogue of lists.

As you flip through the pages of the SRDS List Directory, you will notice that the lists are divided up by category – all kinds of categories.

I find the SRDS List Book to be fascinating, even riveting reading – far more exciting even than Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (and that’s saying something because Clint Eastwood is my favorite actor and  High Plains Drifter is one of my all time-favorite movies.  I’ve seen the movie at least a hundred times).

But the SRDS List Directory is even more exciting because it will give you just about all the market research you’ll ever need to get rich at doing something you love doing.

You’ll want to set aside several hours for going through this enormous catalogue of lists that are for rent.

Have a pad of paper, a pencil and a calculator so you can make your list of lists and add up the number of people on the lists you’ve selected.  These are lists of people who have bought something (preferably within the last 12 months) that directly relate to your #1 passion, or at least one of your top three passions.

Make sure you have brought your list with you of all the things you enjoy doing.

Now, if your #1 passion is collecting old dirty socks, you’re not going to find lists that fit that category.  Not a lot of people out there buying or collecting old dirty socks.  So your market research will tell you that’s a dry well as a market niche.

So let’s look at the next option.  Let’s say, like me, you are a fanatic about skiing.

I was a serious ski racer in an earlier life.  So let's pick that topic.

Don’t worry if you have no interest in skiing.  Just substitute your passion or you hobby.  This is just a case study to show you how to do market research.

So, for this, we’ve selected skiing as our topic for our market research target.

Let’s take a look at what the SRDS List Directory tells us about the size of that market niche.  What we are trying to find out is are there a lot of people out there who share my passion for skiing and who are spending a lot of money to pursue this passion.

Bingo!

A ten-minute scan of the skiing section of the SRDS List Directory reveals list after list of ski fanatics.  Ski Magazine and Skiing Magazine each have about 500,000 active subscribers.  There’s also Ski Racing magazine  (which is smaller). There are buyers of Warren Miller ski movies, buyers of ski vacations, buyers of ski equipment, buyers of helicopter ski trips. 

The list of buyers of ski publications, ski equipment and gear, and ski experiences goes on for several pages of fine print.

I write down the number of buyers on each list on my yellow legal pad.  I take the total number and cut it in half – accounting for overlapping names and weak buyers (people who have not bought in a while).

The rough number I come up with is about 2,500,000 die-hard ski fanatics in the United States alone.    

That niche looks very promising.  The market is a good size, and skiers tend to be fanatical about skiing.  So this has all the hallmarks of a great Internet business.

I then get on my cell phone and I call media relations department of the Vail Ski Corporation in Colorado. 

I ask if they have anyone there who knows about how many avid skiers live in the U.S. I figure, if anyone knows, Vail knows.  A guy who seems to know what he’s talking about comes on the phone and tells me the number is about 3,000,000, maybe 4,000,000 avid skiers in the U.S.

So I now know I’m on the right track.  I’m really only interested in the die-hard ski fanatics. So my number of 2.5 million is probably accurate.

I know, with near certainty, that I can  build a thriving Internet business around skiing.

But just to be absolutely sure, I now embark upon Step #3 of my market research.

I get out my lap top computer to begin my research on keywords and keyword phrases related to skiing, and also of websites that serve the skiing market.

My first job is to do a little keyword research. 

Good keyword research and selection is one of the key pillars of your entire Internet marketing program – because keywords and phrases are what searches type into search engines to find what they are looking for.  The search engines then finds articles and sites that fit these keywords and delivers its list of articles and sites to the searcher.

To start my keyword research, I head on over to Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool which will tell me how many searches of a term with the word ski in it occurred on Yahoo in January.  The number was 107, 223 – just for one month.  You can figure at least tripling that number for searches on Google.

So here’s what the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool gives me. The numbers on the left represent the number of searches on January 2007 for the ski term:

Sadly, Yahoo's free Keyword Selector Tool is no longer compiling this kind of recent search data. The most recent data is January 2007.

But that's fine for our purpose here. The rumor is Yahoo (or someone) will reactivate this wonderful, super-easy-to-use tool soon. It's too good a tool for it just to go extinct.

If you want new search data, subscribe to www.WordTracker.com.  It's even better than Yahoo's.  But you pay a monthly subscription for this service. 

Now, let’s check on the word “skiing.”

Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool shows 118,096 searches for the word “skiing” in January 2007.  Again, triple that number for searches using Google.

Not only do these numbers reinforce what we learned from the SRDS List Directory about the size and intensity of the ski market, but we now have a great list of keywords to build our site around and to write our articles around.

Why is this so important?

Because (as we learned in from the Google AdWords chapters) people search for things they want by typing keywords and keyword phrases into search engines.  People don’t usually just type “skiing” into their search engine, they add a qualifying word such as “Aspen skiing,” “Vermont skiing,” or “helicopter skiing.”

With the word “ski,” people add qualifiers such as “ski vacation,” “ski resort,” “Atomic ski”, “ski equipment,” “ski shop,” “ski clothes,” and so on.

So again, these keyword combinations tell you what articles and features a good comprehensives ski website should include.

The fact that there were 597 searches in January for the term “nude skiing” caught my attention.

I would like to see that – especially nude skiers falling on the freezing snow and ice.

Ouch!

Not sure you could build a big online business around that theme.  Probably too narrow -- not enough traffic, though perhaps you could sell “Nude Ski Vacations.”

Interestingly, our keyword search tells us that people don’t seem very interested in ski instruction.  A successful ski site should be about ski travel destinations and ski equipment . . . and certainly about saving skiers money (because skiing is expensive).

That looks like the best bet.  But we’ll need to do some more research to confirm this theory.

That means we must now go on to Step #4 of our market research.

And that’s to investigate our competition on the Internet.  What other ski sites are we going up against?

I’m going to make two lists.

My first list will be of the 10 ski sites on Google’s “organic” or “free” listings.

This is the list of sites Google gives you the runs down the middle of your screen. Websites listed here don’t pay anything to Google.

I will also make a list of the top 10 sites on the pay-per-click listings, which you’ll find at the very top of your screen an running down the right side of your screen.

If I need to go deeper, I will.  But for now I will start with the top 10 for the keywords “ski” and “skiing.”

The top site on Google’s organic listing for both keywords is www.SkiNet.com.

It looks like a good site.  And it should be. It’s powered by both Ski and Skiing magazines – the two biggest ski publications (owned by the same company) – and joint ventured with the famous ski movie producer Warren Miller.

So this is a high-powered site with some big money behind it.

The tagline for SkiNet.com is “Gear. Travel. Action.”

Interestingly, hardly any hint on this site about discounts on ski trips or ski gear.   Lot’s of great ski footage from Warren Miller movies.  And a lot of ads for real estate and ski vacations, but nothing about discounts.

Hmmm.  I make a note on that.

Let’s go down to the next site on the organic Google list.  The #2 ski site is something called www.GoSki.com

This looks like a much cheesier site, not nearly as good as SkiNet.com (which is a Ski magazine, Skiing magazine and Warren Miller product).

GoSki.com has no articles to speak of, but quite a few ads.  This site offers nothing of real value.  There is a bulletin board where skiers are can supposedly post comments, but the comments are all spam.

And this is the #2 ski site!  After this site, #3 is Wikipedia’s article about skiing.

That’s basically it for skiing on the Internet.  Everything else gets worse from there.

There is a good site called Skiracing.com.  Lots of info there on ski racing results.  But that’s probably too narrow a market.  I doubt there are 5,000 serious ski racers in the U.S. Most ski racers are poor and young (teens and early 20s).  They spend all their time skiing.  The best ones get all their ski gear free.  So this would not be a good money-making market.

You want to focus on the recreational skier – the ski vacationer.  That’s where the money is.

Aspen and Vail do not make money from ski racers. They make money from families taking a ski vacation.

So we have found one good ski site for the general skier.  Then GoSki.com which is just about worthless – followed by Wikipedia’s article on skiing.

In other words, there appears to be lots of room here to squeeze in as the #2 ski site in a hurry on the organic (free) searching engine listing for the keywords “ski” and “skiing” – not bad for a multi-billion-dollar industry that caters to about 3,000,000 avid skiers.

You would not need to siphon off much of this business to make a very good living.

So we’re done now with the organic listings on Google.  We found one decent ski site.

Now let’s look at Google’s pay-per-click ads.

Remember, there are two categories of listings on Google – the free “organic” listing down the center of the screen; and the pay-per-click ads down the right side and at the very top of your screen.

So now we are looking at the pay-per-click ads for the keywords “ski” and “skiing.”

A quick glance reveals that these sites are even less impressive – which is usually the case with pay-per-click ads.

The top pay-per-click AdWords ad is a promotion for a ski vacation in Val D'Isere, France. After that it’s an ad for dental mouth guards – I guess so you don’t lose all your teeth when you hit that tree.

Skiing magazine has a pay-per-click ad looking for freelance writers.  So even rich Skiing magazine is having a content problem.  Not enough skiing writers out there.  And you can tell there’s a content problem in this niche by the lack of content on these sites (other than some great snippets from Warren Miller ski videos on SkiNet.com).

As we move down the list of pay-per-click ads, we find more ski vacation packages to assorted destinations.

In other words, there’s clearly room here for another great content-rich skiing site to serve this multi-billion dollar industry and these millions of ski fanatics.

The ultimate goal for your skiing site would be to be in the top three on Google’s organic listing for those who type “ski” and “skiing” into the search window.

The problem is it can take Google a while to find you – no matter how great your content is.

But there is a short-cut – and that’s to sign-up for Google’s pay-per-click ad program, Google Adwords -- while your great content-rich site is working it’s way up the organic free listing.

So how much would it cost to be in the top three of the Google PPC ad listings?

Let’s check.

I head on over the Google Adwords.  I set up an ad campaign and bid on the words “ski” and “skiing.”  I don’t actually launch the ad.  I find that if I can be in the top three on Google’s paid listing for “ski” for about 80 cents per click and the top three for “skiing” for about 65 cents a click.

Google’s “Traffic Estimator” tool is not 100% accurate, but it gives me a good idea.

Let’s be pessimistic and say I’ll need to spend $1 per click to be in the top three for the keywords “ski” and “skiing” on Google.

Now let’s do a little math to see if this makes business sense.

If my “landing page” is able to capture just 20% of those who click on my pay-per-click ad, that means my list of prospects that I will be building will cost me $5 per name.

If I can covert just 10% of these prospects into a buyer of some kind, that means it will cost me $50 to find a buyer.  So if the profit margin on my average sale is $50, I break even with my advertising on my first sale.

The profit then is in my repeat buyers.  The key here is that you are building your email list of ski fanatics who will buy from you over and over again if your prices are great.

Remember what I said about the importance of capturing the email addresses and names of your first-time visitors.  This requires a sign-up form and valuable free offer to get people to fill-out your sign-up form – perhaps a free guide on How to Ski at the World’s Greatest Ski Areas for 50% Less Than Everyone Else Is Paying.  Something like that.

So we have now determined that it’s costing you $5 to capture a lead, and that this translates into a cost of $50 to find a first-time buyer – because you are converting 10% of your leads into a buyer of some kind.

So what is the average value of a lead?

And what is the average value of finding a first-time buyer?

These are numbers you must track to know how much you can spend (invest) to find a buyer.

Well, a pair of good skis can cost well over $1,000.  A pair of good ski boots, about $600. Then there’s all the other gear, the travel vacations and real estate – plus all the advertising you can sell to companies trying to reach the ski market  -- not to mention money you can make signing up for Google AdSense. 

A good niche to select as your market is a sport or a hobby that requires a lot of expensive purchases to be able to do the sport or hobby (i.e. wine, sailing, etc).

So your average profit per sale for your skiing site will likely be well over the $50 I mentioned earlier – probably well over $100.  Your profit might be $300 on skis and boots and $25-$50 on your other items.  So your average profit per sale will likely be more like $100 or more, in which case you would be doubling your money on your pay-per-click ad costs with your first sale!

But even if you are just breaking even on your customer-acquisition cost with your first sale, that’s still great because you then must factor in the Long-Term Value (LTV) of an average customer (which you will learn over time as your site develops a track-record).

But figure average LTV being at least three times the average profit on a first-time purchase.  That’s if your customer cultivation and upgrade program is completely incompetent.  Your average LTV should be at least five times the average profit from a first-time buyer.

Your average LTV per customer number will also increase over time as you add products and learn over time (through testing and trial and error) which products sell best.

You make money by building traffic from the avid skiing community.  You build traffic and keep it coming by having great content – and also being diligent about building your opt-in list of subscribers so that you can send follow-up email to your leads and keep your traffic coming back over and over again.

You can have instant traffic by launching a pay-per-click ad campaign on Google and Yahoo.

If your content is good, your site will also move its way up the organic free search engine listings. You’ll need at least 50 pages of really good content (articles) all focused on your core theme to get the attention of search engines.

Once you have traffic, making money is easy. 

For example, take the inherent efficiencies you have in running an online business over a physical ski shop.  You can afford to sell ski equipment and clothing at a deep discount online because you don’t have the cost of renting space at a premium location at the base of, say, Aspen mountain.  If a pair of top-flight skis costs $1,000 retail, you can likely buy the skis wholesale for $600.  That leaves you a $400 margin to cover your marketing costs and profit.

If your pay-per-click ads are producing leads for $5 each and buyers for $50 each, that means you could sell the $1,000 skis for $800 and still have a $150 profit for each pair of skis you sell. sell.  You can also make drop-shipping arrangements with the manufacturers of the skis (and other gear you’re selling) so that you don’t have to worry about carrying inventory.

The big key to your success here – your advantage over the physical brick-and-mortar ski shop – is that your overhead is so low.  You can do to the physical ski shops what Amazon has done to the small bookstores – destroyed them.  You can become the go-to site for discount ski gear, discount ski clothing, discount ski vacations and ski passes.

In addition to your great prices, you build your audience and keep your audience coming back with great content.

So now that’s probably the next big hurdle for building your successful information business on the Internet for skiers.

Where do you get ideas for great content . . . so that your skiers will want to continue coming back to your site?

This brings me to Step #5 of your market research.

The keyword study we performed with Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool gave us a great indication of what skiers are looking for when they type in keywords related to “ski” and “skiing.”  We get our clues from the modifiers to these words, such as “ski equipment” and “ski vacations.”

But there’s more you can do to get ideas for your articles and (perhaps) video podcasts on skiing.

When you’ve run out of ideas for articles, just head on back down to your library to research more on what skiers are actually reading.  Look first under “skiing” in the Subject index to find a list of all the books on skiing your library has.

Pull the books off the shelves and read through the chapter headings of the books.

Then ask the librarian for the Subject Guide To Books In Print.  This is a huge two-volume reference set. It contains the title, subject and author of every book still in print.

Make a list of these books.  You’ll find about 145 books in print on the subject of skiing.

Next ask your librarian for the Reader’s Guide To Periodic Literature.

This is a guide to every article that’s ever been written on any subject.  So you can imagine how big this reference set is.  Look under skiing, and you’ll see hundreds, even thousands, of articles listed.

Now, this looks like a pretty good goldmine for your website content.

Lots of ideas here for what might be on your site – for your articles and video podcasts.

You can even summarize in your own words the best information you find in these articles.  Make sure you are using your own words and source the information.  Giving a source for your information actually enhances the value of your article.  Reader’s Digest is one of the most popular magazines of all time.  Reader’s Digest consists mainly of condensations of bigger articles that have appeared elsewhere.

So following the  Reader's Digest formula for creating great content for your site is a great way to go.

Plus, if you are a ski fanatic yourself, like I am, you’ll have a good idea of what other ski fanatics would want to read and hear about. 

Remember, I’m guessing a good theme for your site is delivering great ski gear and adventures for less.

So here are some ideas for articles . . . and maybe video podcasts, ala Warren Miller (as you get ambitious):

How to Get Paid for Skiing Everyday

The Best Skiing With No Lift Lines

The World’s Best Skiers Review The New Ski Gear

Why More Racers Use Atomic Skis than #2 Solomon Skis

The Word’s Best Virgin Powder

The Cheapest Places to Stay in Aspen and Vail

The Top Ten Restaurants at America’s Best Ski Areas

The Best Company for Your First Helicopter Ski Adventure

The Best Source for Discount Ski Equipment

The Top Three Summer Ski Experiences

Ski in the Andes Mountains for Less than $20 a Day

I think you get the idea.

And when you run out of ideas for articles and content, go back to the library again and crack open that Reader’s Guide To Periodic Literature and look under skiing again.

You’ll find all sorts of great ideas in there for your site.

Okay, so now you have all this data and research.

You have found lots of interesting articles and ideas for topics by flipping through the book titles and chapter titles of your 145 books on skiing.  You have found even more ideas for content by reading the list of thousands of titles of articles that have been written about skiing over the years in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.  You have read some of the most eye-catching articles.

So we still need a theme for you site.  Yes, skiing is the big theme.  But what specifically and uniquely is your site offering your community of ski fanatics?

What is your offer?  What is your Unique Selling Proposition?

Remember, Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is a key concept in marketing.

Your USP is how you differentiate yourself from your competition.  Turns out there really is not much competition at all on the Internet for a good skiing site – just the one joint site put up by Ski and Skiing magazines. That’s it.

But you need a USP anyway – not just to differentiate yourself from your competition, but also to make you stand out in people’s minds and to make it clear to your target market what the primary benefit of your site is.  Your Unique Selling Proposition contains both what makes you unique and what you are uniquely offering.

So if we look at all those search terms with the word “ski” and “skiing,” what is it primarily that people are looking for?

A quick scan of the keyword search statistics given to us by Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool reveals that skiers are looking for ski equipment.  They are looking for ski vacations.  They are looking for ski adventures.  They are looking for ski jackets, ski clothes and ski helmets.  They are looking for ski stuff to buy.

If people are looking to buy a lot of expensive stuff (ski stuff is very expensive), people are looking for the best deals.  They want bargains – not only because ski stuff is so expensive, but because you have to buy a lot of it to go skiing.  This is a very gear-intensive sport.

So one idea is to be “go to” site for great skiing on the cheap.

Now that niche makes sense because you are making a money offer.  Good money offers always work. You are offering to save ski fanatics a lot of money if they use your site.  It’s an easy proposition to understand.  Doesn’t take a lot of thinking to figure out what you do.

As of this writing, there is absolutely no competition for that niche.

You would literally be the only quality skiing site on the Internet dedicated to delivering great ski experiences and the best ski gear for less.

So now for Step #6 of your marketing research.

And that’s picking a domain name.

What kind of domain name should you pick?

You want a dot-com domain name if at all possible.  Everyone remembers dot-com.

You want a domain name that is easy to remember and says exactly what your site is about – if possible, a domain name that clearly states your offer and your Unique Selling Proposition.

But also a domain that’s not too long . . . because you want a domain name that is super-easy to remember.

You can’t always achieve all your goals with a domain name..  Many of the best dot-com domain names are taken.  But there are many surprisingly good ones still available. 

With a little brainpower and creative thinking, you’ll come up with a good one.

So I hop on over to GoDaddy.com.  In 30 seconds I find that BargainSkier.com is available for a fee of $6.95 per year.  SkiingAllTheTime.com is available too.

I like BargainSkier.com better for this site.  But you never know.  I’ll buy both names and see which pulls best.  You can never have too many good domain names in your inventory.  Easy-to-remember domain names are the modern toll-free 1-800 number – only a 1,000 times more valuable.

Maybe we can find a better domain name.  But BargainSkier.com is not bad for 30 seconds of work.

So your site should be all about saving money for skiers.  The best skiers often don’t have much money.  They live for skiing. There’s a big sub-culture of ski and snowboard bums out there.  I know. I am one.   So this would certainly be a site that would appeal to them.

So your site will be the go-to site for the best bargains on ski stuff and skiing on the cheap.  This is the primary way you will monetize (make money) from your traffic.

But, remember, the key to getting traffic and keeping traffic coming is great articles and great content.  You must think of yourself as a media property.

Your articles would be about how to ski at the best places cheap and the hidden bargains.  A classified ad section on a site like this could be big – ala www.craigslist.org – and would help create sense of community on your site.  People like to read classified ads.

Your mission must be to inform and entertain the die-hard ski community.

As you get really rolling, you could produce webcast coverage of the big ski races and big ski events; and have interviews with Bode Miller and the big name ski stars. Run your ski site a lot like the Golf Channel on cable.  This does not require much money.  Webcasting is super cheap.   All that’s required is a camcorder and dedication.

Dedication is what it takes to have a great content site.  But you don’t mind, because you’re a ski fanatic.

There really is not much content at all on the #1 skiing site – the joint one put out by Ski magazine, Skiing magazine and Warren Miller.  Mostly just Warren Miller videos.  The videos are nice, but there’s so much more a great ski site could do.

And, of course, you can just apply this formula to whatever your passion happens to be.

I just picked skiing because that’s just something I’m into in a big way. 

I had fun doing the market research on what it would take to build a highly profitable site on the subject of skiing.

But this formula works for just about any business.

The big key is for there to be a big constituency of people out there who share your passion. 

Your subject should not be too broad . . . or too narrow.  And you want a high degree of intensity in your target audience.

That’s important.  That’s why hobbies make great internet businesses. 

Stamp collectors are passionate about stamp collecting.  They live and breath stamp collecting.  Same with chess players. 

All sports fit into this category. Also health, fitness, gardening, pets, politics, religion. 

Politics and religion sites are some of the biggest traffic sites on the Web.

What? You still don’t get it?

Okay, let me come at this now from another angle. Let me tell you how I first leaned how marketing on the Internet works.

This is a story that turned the light on in my brain – when I said to myself “Ah, ha, I think I get it now.”

Remember, before I got into Internet marketing, my 20-year background was in direct mail marketing. 

But it was the great Internet marketer Alex Mandossian who first explained Internet marketing to me in a way that made me understand it.

Alex explained to me how he discovered the power of Internet marketing.

He was trying to figure out what subject to build a website around.  So he began a study of the most popular keyword searches.  What he was looking for was unusual keywords on offbeat subjects that ranked higher than you’d expect.

You would expect a lot of searches to be conducted on the President of the United States or a celebrity who’s just been arrested for drunk driving and throwing punches at the cops. 

But that’s not what Alex was looking for.

Alex was looking for unusual keywords that were being searched a lot.

The keyword that caught his attention was “Iguana.”

He noticed that, for some reason, a lot of people were searching for information about “Iguana.”  Alex wanted to find out why. 

He assumed, of course, that these were owners of Iguana as pets.    So Alex put up a simple landing page site designed to capture the email addresses of Iguana owners who were looking for information on Iguana.

The landing page was a survey.    The survey said that that “we are writing a book on how to properly care for an Iguana” and that “we would like to know from you, an Iguana owner, what questions you would like to see answered in the book.”

Alex got swamped with answers.  What he learned from the answers was that the #1 concern for an owner of an Iguana is that the Iguana might die. 

These are fragile creatures.  Sudden changes of temperature can cause the Iguana to get sick and perish. 

So as Alex studied the answers to his survey, he discerned that the best possible title for an eBook that he could sell to this audience would be “How to Have a Healthy, Happy, Long-Living Iguana.”

Alex knew nothing about Iguana.   But Alex, who was one of the pioneers of the television Infomercial, is a world-class marketer. He knows how to conduct market research. 

So after he finished his market research, he had an expert write his book on Iguana, and gave it the title “How to Have a Healthy, Happy, Long-Living Iguana.”

I might not have the title of his eBook exactly right.  But you get the point.

The result was the Alex (who at the time was also new to Internet marketing) was able to sell about $500 of his Iguana ebook per day to Iguana lovers.  In other words, generate about $15,000 per month in sales from this little one-page website that just sold this eBook on “How to Have a Healthy, Happy, Long-Living Iguana.”

His business as an Internet marketing superstar was then launched.

That’s how he got into Internet marketing.  As I write this, Alex’s Internet information marketing business now brings in more than $5,000,000 a year.  I’m sure it will be bringing in twice this by the time you read these words.

As I said earlier and as I will continue to emphasize, your keyword research and selection is really the lynchpin (the foundation) to your marketing success on the Internet. 

You saw, for example, how Alex found a community of  passionate people (Iguana owners) by looking for odd keywords that are getting a lot of searches. 

A disproportionately big number of searches from a small group of people is an “intensity-of-interest” indicator.  Intensity (passion) is more important than volume.

You need enough volume to sustain a business.  But intensity is more important than volume (as we see from Alex’s Iguana example).  Intensity is what creates loyalty and is key for creating what some call “stickiness” for you site. 

That is, your audience sticks around on your site and comes back over and over again.   They become addicts to your site because your site is the best information and content about a subject they care deeply about.

Keyword selection is critical to every phase of your Internet marketing.  You must connect your site to the right keywords – keywords that your target audience is typing into search engines. 

Your site must be built around these keywords and phrases. 

This will get your site a high ranking on the search engines for those keywords.

If I am brainstorming a niche to enter, I’ll just go to the top sites in my niche.

I’ll read these sites.  And I’ll know right away how strong my competition is. 

The good news is that the competition in almost every niche (aside from perhaps technology and software) is surprisingly weak.

So there it is – your path to getting rich by doing what you love.

Now you have the blueprint for an Internet business that should be a near instant blockbuster success. 

You get rich by skiing at the great resorts around the world (getting free lift tickets at all of them), trying all the new equipment for free (because the ski companies will be throwing all their new equipment at you for you to test), and dining at the great restaurants at these resorts (which you’ll be reviewing on your site, so your fine-dining and wine drinking is also free). 

You don’t even have to be a skier to do this.  Remember Bud Collins?  He could hardly play tennis at all, but got rich and became a celebrity by covering tennis, talking about tennis and wearing funny clothes.

Not a bad way to make a living.

If your passion is gardening, tennis, hiking, photography, movies, books, jewelry, fiber optics, cement, cooking, politics, weight lifting, karate, games, opera, Renaissance art, Dante’s Inferno, star gazing, chess, landscaping, tracking UFOs, or hunting for buried treasure, just follow the same formula. 

Create the best information site on your topic – an online magazine (ezine) or blog.   Then offer products related to your topic.  This really is not a whole lot more complicated than that.

Or maybe you already have a thriving business that you love.

Then just develop your online business exactly like this that supports, reinforces and magnifies all that you are currently doing. 

This is the formula for online marketing success – whether you are looking for a niche to get into or whether you have found your niche already. 

If you have found your niche, you can skip most of the market research phase because you know your product or service is already selling.  If it’s selling well offline, it will sell even better online.

Now here’s an opportunity that jumps off my computer screen as I was doing a little market research.

I just spent a few minutes looking for sites on wine.  That’s another hobby of mine.

A quick scan of what’s out there on the Web reveals a big opening here for a great wine site.

This subject would lend itself to a blog and podcast. 

I can see great interviews with the wine experts, plus a section on cheap great-tasting wines.  It’s no challenge to find an expensive wine that tastes good.  The fun is to find cheap wins that taste as good as a the pricey wines.

I just checked. The domain name TerrificCheapWines.com is available as I write these words. 

For $1 a click (a click representing an actual visitor to your site), you can be in the top three on Google list for the keyword “wine.”   Everyday, you could be shipping crates of your great-tasting bargain wines and making a fortune.

So that’s a goldmine just sitting there, waiting for someone to cash in.

Maybe I’ll do it.  Nah, I’m too busy.  Why don’t you do it? 

 

To Your Success in Business and Happiness in Life,

Ben

Ben Hart

Your 21st Century Marketing Coach . . .

because everyone (even Tiger Woods) needs a coach