So you’ve got this idea or special knowledge or hobby and you want to turn it into money. It’s done millions of times and I highly recommend it. If it is something you like to do, why not profit by sharing it with others who need it. So I’ve put together this little guide on how to get from A to Z. I hope you find it useful.
STEP 1
The first step you should take is to determine what you have. What assets can you put together to market? Let’s use an example for this road map so that you can get the gist of what I’m talking about. For this example, we’ll assume you’re a therapist who helps people recover from muscle injury. You’ve been doing it so long you know all the exercises people need to do, when to do them and how to measure their own progress. And you’re thinking you could turn this knowledge into a business. So Step 1 is make a list of everything you have – your assets. In this case they might be:
- Testimonials from your clients
- Primary Information (PI) on how injuries occur. (Primary information is stuff you don’t have to research – you just know).PI on how to do 22 exercises
- PI on using muscle assessment tools
- PI on common mistakes
- PI on the answers to most FAQ’s
- PI on the FAQ’s.
- Anecdotes
- Famous clients
- Scientific Studies, Reports, proof
- Photos of the equipment, customers, places you worked, you at work
- Certifications and degrees
- Written information on any of these topics
- All the written information in electronic form
- All the written information in paper form
- Doctors, Nurses or other professionals who will speak on your behalf<
- Doctors, Pharmacists who already prescribe what you do
- Doctors, Nurses or other professionals who would be happy to “prescribe” your “video” or website once made
- What exactly is this pile of assets you have at your disposal already? This will go a long way in determining the cost of your project moving forward – and how long it will take to start selling products.
STEP 2
Testing and Research.We don’t know what people are already looking for yet.The best way to learn what potential customers are interested in is to find out what they’re currently looking for and get in their way.This is not always easy; however, it becomes very valuable once you achieved this arena.For instance if we determine what keywords people use when searching for “at-home therapy” information and built a website that rose to the first page of Google for that keyword, we’d really learn what the people are interested in knowing. We could track what topics they clicked on, where they navigated on site and over time figure out what really interests these people. However, getting to the top of Google is not easy.
If you could put a bunch of pamphlets in waiting rooms of therapy clinics and see what people pick up and read, that would be helpful. A good test here would be to put out the same pamphlet with different names (Advanced exercises, At home therapy, etc. ..)
What pamphlets do they pick up before they meet with the therapist and what pamphlets do they pick up after? The idea here is to find the traffic and get in the way. And if you don’t already have content written, these two methodologies (among others) can be a lot of work to build the appropriate content.
Find blogs in your industry and interject yourself into blogs bringing up ideas and judging responses would be another research tool.
Without a product, starting on Radio or TV at this point would be less effective because the only information you garner is from the people who call the 800 number to request or order something.
Using a web analytic tool to measure traffic on your website is good because you can continually move information around, add new information, make highly trafficked information easy to find, delete information not being clicked and add new stuff.In this manner, you can create a site that’s got the information people are looking to read.
Whether you do this stage in doctor’s offices with physical pamphlets, on the web, using keyword search tools or via some other marketing avenue – testing is important. From this original testing and research step, the goal would be to know what niche or focus your users are interested in. The product you think you want to develop for sale is likely not the same product that people will buy.
While you’re thinking “at-home muscle therapy.com”, your customers might be searching for “muscle recovery exercises”. If you can’t get in their way – they won’t find you.
Product Creation – From your testing you should know now what product you want to try to put together. If you’re talking about building a website, you should know what keywords you want to use based on their profitabilty, search volume and competition. This is the time you put all that information together and create the product/website.
Marketing
Marketing is more testing and research but with a product to prove performance. This is the point at which you would create a shopping page on your website or begin marketing the website. There’s no right or wrong here – only successes and failures. Driving traffic is done many, many ways. The more targeted traffic you drive – the sooner you’ll learn how well your site works.
There are so many ways to market the website, it’s not worth going into detail. Some of them are marketing via affiliates, Google AdWords, Banner ads, Article marketing, Blogs, etc. . .Pick one and start testing whether it’s working. It would be important to have marketing assistance during this process because you’ll want to make sure you’re always doing an A-B test and you’re always comparing one thing to another, not several different things at once.The result of successful marketing is profit.
If you want to do this on your own, I recommend one service SiteBuildit. They literally help you with every step – all right not every step. You’re still going to have to provide the knowledge and content. SiteBuildit is built around the idea that Content is King. If you build a site that has lots of relevant information, and is structured so people can find it on Google – visitors will come time and time again. Furthermore, SiteBuildit will help you monetize the site in a variety of ways (google ads, affiliate ads and your product). Check out SiteBuildit or contact me if you have other questions.
Stay tuned for Using Social Media to Drive Traffic!