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.