How Did You Pick Which Opportunity To Follow?

[PaulG]

Before joining the forum, everything I read about business always talks about spotting a gap in the market for innovation, to be the first mover or following your passion.

I've read the crash course and thanks to day 2 and 9 have a good understanding of industry selection and different monetisation methods available.

I'm itching to get started but it seems that with so many opportunities I've got decision paralysis.

My question is - how did you pick which business opportunity to follow, particularly for those just starting out?

 

[Jasper68]

I just picked something that I broadly know a fair bit about, which has products for sale and buyers who want to buy, and just went for it.

To be upfront, I started this 2 months ago, it's going to be an Amazon affiliate site with some ads when it gets some traffic, and then the plan is to see what sells across the sub-niches I will target, and then, in a couple of years, look to get into Amazon FBA or similar to swap out affiliate products with my own.

I think people spend a HUGE amount of time on niche selection. I'm certainly no expert, but if one picks a broad enough umbrella niche and sets it up as a brand, you have every chance of making good money. Some sub-niches will flounder, and some will fly. I'm gonna spend more time on the ones that fly once I know which they are.

I know the affiliate model isn't going to make me the most money the quickest, but I like it as it gives me a chance to see what works and what doesn't.

That's just my view and how I'm doing it.

 

[PaulG]

Thanks for the feedback @Jasper68 , I have a vertical in mind which means that I just need to start thinking about how to monetise it - do I go ecommerce or affiliate or digital product?... Maybe I go with all 3 eventually on the same site!

Haha @eliquid I read your post over on @Focused thread and was just like "fuck, that's my muse or motivation or whatever you want to call it". I think the whole reason for starting to explore my digital options is not to work some 4 hour work week but to live life on my own terms.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Typically you'll do one of three things:

• Reinvent the wheel
• Find a problem & solve it
• Invent a problem & solve it

You don't have to have a groundbreaking, innovative idea to get started. It might even be better to get your feet wet on a 'reinvent the wheel' site, where you're just another fitness site out there. Learning what works and what doesn't will be a great skill for when you do get the great idea, so you don't sabotage your efforts when it really counts.

The thing that nobody has mentioned yet about choosing which business opportunity to follow is the competition. You need to do competition analysis (Day 5 & Day 6). You should go into a vertical with billions of dollars flowing annually. But that doesn't mean you should start the Berkshire Hathaway Fan Club and try to compete with them in the SERPs (silly example, but you get the point).

You need to know that the opportunity you're choosing keeps you interested and also that it's even attainable for who you are, the funds you have access to, your skill level, etc. There's nothing wrong with dancing around the table eating the scraps of the giants if you know that you can one day join them at the table.

Here's an example that just popped in my head. On the Amazon support forums there are about five junkies there who've posted 15,000 times to each other with almost nobody else there. And every once in a while they'll share their numbers and niches and even sites. "I've been in the game for 12 years now, my site sends 30,000 clicks a month to Amazon, I convert at 5%, and sold 1,500 items at an average price of $10.00 for a 4.5% commission. Which means they're making a whopping $675, because they lived and breathed a site about selling books.
​

12 years to ramp up to $675 because they chose books, basically. Low cost items, people buy the hardbacks direct from Amazon, giving commissions to GoodReads, or buying in physical stores, and they're eating the crumbs of paperback scraps and Kindle sales. "But I love to read!" Meanwhile the competition has made it impossible for them to even bust $1,000 a month.

A business might pass the "interest, skill, passion, value, volume" tests and seem good to go, but you have to think about the competition. They may have raised the actual barrier to entry way too high, unless you have that special innovative idea.

do I go ecommerce or affiliate or digital product?... Maybe I go with all 3 eventually on the same site!

Those are essentially the same thing from your side of the table, although I'd say you would approach eCommerce and Affiliate marketing completely different. While on eCommerce you may have a blog with information and tutorials capturing traffic and funneling it to your store and shopping cart, on affiliate marketing you'll be funneling people to someone else's cart.

 

[PaulG]

Thanks @Ryuzaki I think I get where you're coming from and I'll be sure to go and reread those lessons tonight now that I have a better understanding.

 

[Jasper68]

I actually have a fitness site that I built in 2013 when I was personal training and nutrition coaching. Has about 70 posts and I get around 400-500 uniques per day.

I built a pretty comprehensive digital product, over 100 pages of content, training programs, etc etc, delivered as a pdf and then an upsell to a course.

Used the Ryan Deiss email sequence from his book. I've never been able to get that thing to convert...damn!

Now, I've almost given up and am just getting some Amazon affiliate links on the site, and a little advertising to just see if I can squeeze $100 per month out of it :-)

I've kinda lost interest in that one, but wish I could just turn it into a $50 per day gig. Problem is, I'm not even really motivated to write for it now, although I certainly am a reasonable expert on the subject.

Good luck, I know the health/fitness space is super competitive in many ways, I think my relative failure is a motivation and determination thing more than anything else.

Still, one would think I could find a way to get $500 pm out of 15k pageviews. If you have any ideas, I'm all ears :-)

@Ryuzaki - I used to do the day to day running of one of the biggest kindle book promotion sites, it played second fiddle to BookBub only. At one time, we had 50k subscribers, but the thing struggled to make more than $150 a day, other than the odd spike when we ran a book event with some big name playas promoting to their own huge lists.

But, still, it was a biggish site, lots of scriberz, but I think the best month it ever had while I was there was $7k, and by the time I left it was really in the doldrums with a massively disengaged list and making peanuts.

Of course, all the real cash came from other sales when the cookie was set, but still, not big bucks for a largish site.

 

[Zach]

I use competitive spy tools to reverse-engineer what is working out there.

I will also spend $XXX in paid ads to test the waters to see if consumers even care about what I'm offering. Based on results here + competitive intel (are there others making this work?) I will expand efforts or stop right there and try something else.

For me, its about getting quick feedback on the viability of something. My first project out of college I leased a $50k domain, spent 100 hours on content over half a year, for essentially something that was too big to chew & not enough people spent $$$ on. Looking back, I was never setup to make this particular venture work. Find ways to figure this out without spending tons of time and money.