Take myself. I have amassed a number of skills in my day. But what I may focus on is the intersection of five skills.

• I am a programmer
• I am a writer
• I am a sculptor
• I am a photographer
• I am a jackass (to thine own self be true)

As a programmer, I can come up with nifty scripts and applications. I can put them onto web server or deliver them client-side

As a writer, I scrawl on about topics that interest me.

As a sculptor, I like to make shapes in 3D– items with depth and texture.

As a photographer, I capture places, people and things. How I compose the shot– the light, the content– colors what the photo is about.

As a jackass, I make wise-ass comments and do stupid things. Sometimes, those stupid things are entertaining to others.

These five skills sets have some crude intersections with each other– writing + jackass; writing + photography; sculpting + photography; programming + photography; et cetera. But what if you were to draw a Venn diagram of those skills and what they could combine to create?

In Internet terms, the hispter version of the Venn Diagram is the mashup: Google maps + garage sales = Garage Sailor, a site that puts garage sales on a Google map for your easy use.
Make a mashup of your skills and interests to see what you could do and do well. This is more than just a matter of building on your skills. Your combination of strengths is almost unique to you. Like my friend, I like Star Wars. My friend who is a designer is not a programmer and vice-versa. I could come up with the Star Wars search engine; while he could come up Star Wars mugs and t-shirts. When you add in enough features it makes a key specific to you. If no one else has that combination of skills, you have a prospect that is unlikely to be copied by another entrepreneur.

Back to my five skills: I can write something creative (so can many people). I can create specific sculptures and then photograph those to some end. If I wanted, I could make a JQuery driven presentation engine to show off these photos in series using my programming skills. As a jackass, I would be well equipped to pose the characters in ways that made them look sarcastic or ironic– or produce images that held multiple meanings.

Taking my skills and cooking them into a mashup, I end up with an online story told with sculpted characters as opposed to drawn illustrations. As a kid, I loved Rankin & Bass, so the territory is enjoyable.

Could the tale of X-Ray Boy & Bag-on-Head Lad be marketable? Maybe it could be. Look at online comics like HomeStarRunner, The Oatmeal, XKCD or even Web Design Depot. Comic strips have been popular for more than 100 years. I would argue they will be popular for a hundred more. No one says, “Geez, I want some content, right now.” but people love content– it’s why they visit celebrity sites and look at their friends links via Facebook. People come online to consume new stuff– something digestible like an online story could sell. If you create content, you can couple it with advertising and affiliate products (details to come in an upcoming post).

Your homework: look at your skills. If you don’t think you have any skills, then look at your list of jobs. Look at what you last did that was fun or interesting. Look at what people compliment you on. Take those qualities and stitch together a list of your skills, then try to combine pairs of skills. After that, see if any of the combos can dance with other combos: cook + writer and jogging + dieting = a healthy tour of restaurants in your area in blog form.

In my examples, I have a concept that I can execute online as content. Perhaps your idea ties in with products you can sell because you can suss out winning products vs. duds. Take this exercise of your own skill mashup to narrow what your winning business idea is to be.

Some winning tips for getting your feet wet: Click here

The post Go With What You Know appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood

* compliments of http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/most-expensive-google-adwords-keywords/

Do you want to go for the gusto? Here’s a list of the top 100 keywords that fetch the big coin: http://wpmarketing.org/2009/08/the-top-50-most-expensive-adwords/

The post Show Yourself The Money appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

This is a big catch-22: you need interns, henchmen, lackeys, underlings.There are several reasons you need help even before you’ve cracked through the poverty line yourself.

A henchman is different from an employee. An employee costs /yr. in salary– even if you outsource the work. An intern or henchman is a free worker who is doing your bidding to build experience or show allegiance. Because they are a $0/yr. workforce, their costs scale well (eg. 10 x $0/yr = 100 x $0/yr.). You do need to keep an eye on the interns– even a virtual eye– to make sure they are acting in your best interests. That supervisory element is one of the few limiters on getting interns to do your work.

The world is fair. Every person is capable of one person’s worth of success. If that were entirely true, there would be no millionaires; the world’s income would just be distributed evenly to every worker. That’s clearly not the case: there are rich people and very poor people. What’s happening is that there’s a clustering of prosperity. Instead of doing work, you can amplify your output by directing others to accomplish some of your tasks.

You Need Help

There are three routes to interns: sympathy, size and salesmanship.

Sympathy

When you’re starting out small, you can drill for interns / henchmen / unpaid help in the same place you would mine for investment: FFF; or Friends, Family and Fools. They will donate their time to you out of sympathy. Don’t turn down a free lunch: take people who are willing to type or submit links or stuff flyers under car windows. Before you start cranking out your sales, this free help is all you can afford. Your relatives are always willing to help– that’s what Mom is for (payback for your hundreds of hours of unpaid tech support). Your friends, should have your back. As for fools: you have to dig a little. You can Craigslist your call– but some people will pepper the same list with retorts. A great place to plea for help is a site set up to find interns / henchman: http://www.someexperiencerequired.com/ And, lastly: post flyers asking for help. A good place to post these is at the local university or college. Look at all of the people there churning out unpaid work: students writing papers. They have the mindset you’re looking for. Beyond that, any bulletin board is fair game. People who are doing laundry or waiting for their CPR class to start are bored and may see your call for help. Get ready for rejection: most people who read the call will ignore it. Most people who contact you will go cold after you tell them that there’s no money in it now.

Size

You have to get to be very big to have interns based on the size of your company. I know of places where they pounded through billing, had 10 full-time staff and were still too tiny to woo real interns. If your business is large enough or interesting enough, you can lure in interns. Until that point, people will guess that you’re trolling for free labour. Well, you are: but when you’re big enough, that’s okay.

Salesmanship

People can be talked into anything. A salesman can make you part with your cash. But it’s easier to make you part with your labour. A $100 of cash in your wallet seems more valuable than 10 hrs. of your time at $10/hour– salesmanship can get a volunteer to part with their time. Even when you don’t know the person or you’re just starting out, you can sell your concept and get someone interested.

Why Have Henchmen?

The head of the company can make bad deals; but not a henchman. When you do work or interact with others, you want to get to decision makers, to lock down a deal under your own terms. When someone comes to make a deal with you (or your company), you want to be able to have someone else negotiate it, tee it up and then stop with “I have to get this approved by my boss.” That’s a terrific moment make sure that something holds water before it gets approved. It also allows for a little more negotiation room.

Interns convey a sense of size. When someone sees that your business has all of these people, few people will think “how many of these people are interns?” I was impressed with the number of employees on staff at a local TV station. I was less impressed when I found out that most of them were part-time, many of the remainder were unpaid interns and there were only a half dozen paid full-time staff. People don’t ask about your payroll. They look at your company size and its body count.

Henchmen can be anyone. Here’s a little secret: you can be your own henchmen. Maintain several email accounts: sales, billing, orders, shipping, et cetera. Then control the email flow and respond appropriately. Some outfits will make up names for their henchmen. I don’t believe in this concept– I actually stung one place that tried this, quoting their individual staffers in correspondence that preambled legal action. In other words: imaginary people are great to build up a work force, but it could really sting you.

Henchmen have specialties. If you have a repetitive task, your interns may be up for a task that you can’t handle without going squirrely. Maybe they have time during the day when you’re tied up. Maybe they have a list of contacts who could survive your congenial spamming. An intern could even do what do you well, but she/he may be willing to do it. You can benefit from these specialties and capacity to build your concept.

How To Keep Henchmen

The dividing line between staff and interns is wages. Once you pay them a dollar, you slide from having a well loved volunteer to having a poorly paid serf. If you are going to pay them a salary make it a decent salary and realize you’ve crossed them across the threshold. If you cannot afford the ongoing responsibility of paying for your staff, then don’t start. What you can do to show your appreciation: praise and swag.

Praise

Your interns are not paid. You have to be give them the only currency you can easily dispense: praise. Give your staff an attaboy and some kind words. Praise is also the perfect time to nudge in course corrections: talk up what you like about their work maybe even contrasted with what you do know like so much. You have to remember that you cannot push them too hard, but you do have to urge them to do their best.

Swag

You know that the 7-11 clerk earns the equivalent of two bargain trips to London every month? The worst income in the world could pay for some of the coolest benefits. While you cannot pay an ongoing wage early in your business building process, you can spring for bonuses.

Your homework: find work you can delegate. Get an intern (even your mom). Give them some work to do that will really help you.

The post It’s All About Henchmen appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

To make money– profit– you need a wide profit margin. Retailers usually work with a 45% mark-up from what they bring into their store from wholesalers vs. what they retail. That mark-up usually leaves them with a thin margin of profit. Other industries have much wider profit margins. Oil costs about $1 per barrel to extract from the ground. One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent to 25,000 hours of human labour. Even when oil hit $100 a barrel, that was still cheap for the amount of labour the money performs.

Imagine if you could find something with cost to profit to labour curves like oil? It’s possible. Zuckerberg’s dorm room hatchling, Facebook, climbed to being worth a disputed $50 billion in just seven years. It entered a crowded marketplace (vs. Friendster, MySpace and others). Why do people like Facebook? It’s because of what their friends post on Facebook. Facebook is a medium that shaves ubiquity from its users in the form of links and discussions; then it feeds it back to those users. The bigger Facebook gets, the more content it will have to perpetuate the cycle of growth.

Ubiquity can be fantastic. I love having enough air to breathe; and enough gravity to keep me tied to the surface of the Earth. When something is ubiquitous, you can only profit from it, if you can head off the supply chain and pipe it through what you do. If you can make false scarcity, even a ubiquitous supply of a resource can become valuable. We pay our utility to get water. They haven’t clamped off the supply; nor are they raking in the dough. But they are in between myself and clean drinking water– a resource that falls from the sky in my region in massive amounts.

In your quest for the First $10,000, you need to collect the rain. Find something that exists in huge amounts but not yet converted into money you can tap into. Some examples:

• A discussion forum website where confused people post questions and smart people post answers. The world has a huge supply of confused people, people who think they’re smart and people who will kibitz.
• A webcam aimed out a window capturing images. Maybe you have an interesting vantage point and people will want to check in.
• A feed of news filtered or cooked in some interesting way: for example, stock prices. Maybe the stock prices are locked up, but maybe there’s another source of information people want to know about: traffic, grocery prices, TV appearances, etc..
• Find a really cheap raw material and convert it: water into ice sculptures; or, recycled plastic into art.

There are a few ways to do a conversion:

• Alchemy. You have to take something that has no value and imbue it with value (like the water > ice sculpture process).
• Gamer. Take cheap advertising and turn into higher valued revenue. This is called arbitrage and it’s largely frowned upon. Many sites will guard against it or shut down bad operators. I’m only bringing it up, in case you mistake alchemy for arbitrage and end up gaming the systerm.
• Treasure Hunter. Find something rare and bring it out to the world. Like finding old glassware in a thrift store that could sell big on eBay.
• Pharoah. Get throngs of people to build something great for you (eg. Facebook).
• Huckster. Take something common or kind of interesting and push it out there for the world to adore (eg. BoingBoing).

If you try to retail goods– or try the retail experience (modest mark-up tied to an inventory), you’re likely to find online success to the scale of a mom-and-pop shop. If you spend massive amounts to bring in traffic, you may get stung: the advertising will certainly cost you cash, but the reward may be small to non-existent.

Find your source of rain and put out a catch bucket.

The post Collect The Rain appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

• Time
• An Idea
• Some Money
• A Salable Product

Time

Can you spare 20 hrs. a week in the short term? More time is better, less time may be too little. At the start of doing an online business, you’re going to need learning time, start-up time, experimentation, follow-up. These all feel like lost time, but they are foundational. You wouldn’t build a house without a foundation, would you?

An Idea

You don’t need an original idea, but you need a solid idea. I always look at Google. It entered the crowded search market and dominated. It had a strong idea, not an original idea. You need a solid idea behind what drives your business.

Likewise, you need to make some important distinctions with your idea:

• Is a physical product involved? Lots of the junk in your inbox is connected to products. There’s a reason: online pushing of products makes a lot of money.
• Are your charging for access? If you do this from the ground up, it may be tricky to open the door with for-fee service, but it’s been done. Fremium is terrific way to give away some access and charge for the bonuses. This is a model followed by Flickr, SurveyMonkey and most of the Facebook games out there.
• Are you going to make money from advertising? This is my preferred model, but it’s tricky because you must have a massive amount of traffic to make it viable. A general rule of thumb: 1000 hits equals $0.75 of revenue.

Some Money

Don’t spend your last dollar to start off your business. Anyone who says “start a business with $0” is completely lying: registration fees, banking fees, business cards, website hosting, advertising– You need a minimum of $1000 to get a business going. That’s the guerrilla amount required; if this is going to start as a side venture. If this is going to be your full-time gig, then you need at least six months of living expenses in the bank– more is better.

A Salable Product

A product is what you’re after in the most abstract version of the concept. This isn’t necessarily a box you ship; or even something you sell for cash. Your favorite TV show is a product; as is Facebook; and a box of cereal. How you get your product to your customer is very different from product to product, but you are always creating a product.

Use these points as sliders. More money, more time and you can have a more auspicious product. Less money but a lot of time and you can dote on the product as long as the costs of innovation are not too high. For example, we recently started up KR8 (aka “Crate”– get it?) to shorten and share urls. I’ve been programming forever (well, 29 years) so whipping up an application is easy. I didn’t need a lot of time to pull it off. Hosting came as part-and-parcel of what I use through Varial hosting. Domain registration amounts to $10-20 per domain per year. So, for a weekend of coding plus $20, I had little business idea ready to launch. My day job with Game Boyz involves an upcoming massive and complex web application. It’s going to take many months of coding, so it’s going to need a lot of money to pull off. But this is meant to be a very salable product, so the time and money is commensurate.

Knowing the product gives you a chance for the very important litmus test: the market study. Does your online venture have legs? See if friends and family would use the service. See if the market is saturated. Look at Groupon: a nifty idea that was immediately copied by about a dozen other sites. Your idea has to take a market leadership role or be able to swim in a big pool. If the pool– the potential for business– if it’s big then you can find your niche or make for some aggressive pricing or just be cooler than the other cats.

Once you set on a course, be committed to do one of two things: get the vessel (your idea) to port or sink it (yep: walk away). If you launch your idea then veer right or left with each piece of feedback, you may either get a venture built by committee or it might sink. If the idea is a dud, don’t keep flogging it. Be ready to be mercenary and pull the plug.

The “pulling the plug” may seem like a huge downer, but good ideas and good elements can go back into the hopper. Flickr started out as an online game and they tacked on a way to upload and share photos. Paretologic, an anti-virus maker, wanted to sell their wares and needed a good affiliate system. They launched RevenueWire and it took off like gangbusters. In both cases, these were outgrowths of their core business.

Your idea can evolve after you establish what evolutionary branch the idea is climbing.

The post What are you going to sell? appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

To geek out: you need to hit them when their shields are down. If you are in a crowd, you’re a face in the audience. If you send in emails or submissions, you’re in a crowd on a desktop in what could be a busy office– one where you don’t stand out. If you’re posting comments online, well, swell: you’re part of the gigabytes of data made every few seconds online. If you speak one-on-one with people when they’re not at work you’re engaging them. When you ask them for something, you’re challenging them to try to have the nerve to turn you down.

Victoria (where I used to live), had a disproportionate ratio of panhandlers. I’ve come to the sad realization that the difference between many of the entrepreneurs and many of the panhandlers is location and delivery. People who hide out in their businesses or clutch to a support beam with an open baseball cap: they don’t get much business. I had one panhandlers step up and be conversational: he opened with a general question, then moved into the pitch. While the beggar in the shadows was easy to ignore, the one engaging me was much harder to dismiss out of hand. He challenged me to turn him down. Personal interaction in an unfamiliar setting (location and situation) can catch people off guard and make them open to your ideas and make it harder for them to dismiss you.

At WordCamp Victoria, I went to a great talk by David Hutchinson about building relationships to get your best content. His work involved going back to the basics of journalism: personal contact; build and maintain trust; and capitalizing on the material when its crucial.

When you are trying to build your genius idea into that first $10,000 of revenue, you may find yourself lacking. You might not hold all of the skills it takes to pull off what you’re planning. The phrase, “No man is an island.” is very true. You will not hold all of the skills required to be a success. You can gain all the skills you need if you develop one key skill: networking.

Rely on the skill of being social. Move into circles of people where you could make professional relationships– mixers, conferences and the like. They are likely there for the same reason as you, so it’s not like you’re there under false pretenses. Go. Mingle.

Have a conversation with everyone you can. Wedge in an excuse to start talking. Ask about them and steer the questions towards what you’re interested in. There are lots of good tips for how to start a conversation. This is a good place to start.

Get people interested in what you’re doing by telling about the cool stuff you do. C’mon: some part has to be cool. Tell them about that part; or build up to a big finish about what you and why it’s cool.

Networking can accomplish a few things:

• • Give your idea a litmus test. Maybe it’s not ready to come out of the oven and some suggestions could steer your concept.

• • Get help from others (more on that coming here).

• • Promote and publicize your idea. This benefit comes with a caveat. If you have an idea: talk about the idea. If you have a product: talk about the product. If your idea for a product isn’t ready, don’t try to sell it. People will say “I’d like to see that.” If the idea is new or seemingly nonviable / impossible, they’re not showing interest. They’re calling your bluff.

• • Despite the above, getting your idea out there is a way to mark your territory: you can announce what you’re doing. If someone else is doing something similar, maybe there’s room for collaboration. Maybe you can establish yourself as the lead horse.

• • You may get in touch with people who can supply your business or be supplied by your business.

• • Some of these events are attended by government people with programs meant to help entrepreneurs: help them spend your tax dollars– on what you’re doing.

• • Generate buzz that can filter up the tree in the direction of media, potential supporters and potential customers of your service.

When you make contact, you don’t want a one-night stand. Start to build a relationship. Follow up with your contacts to chat with them about what you’re doing, what they’re doing and how you can collaborate or involve them in what you’re doing. Networking and trust building a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny situation. You shouldn’t go in with the idea that you’re going to shake down your contact for all of their available resources; nor should you become someone’s lackey. Expect there to be some give and take as an outcome of successive networking. I’ve answered questions from people I’m in contact and the reverse has happened too. If you don’t have the personal bandwidth to be open to helping others to get specialty help in return, you should be conservative with putting yourself out there.

The post Networking : The First Volley of Marketing appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

To earn an income first you have to earn an audience, then advertising and lastly that income. You aren’t so much a content creator: you’re a chef. Some restaurants have faults that doom them and those same problems could spell the difference between success and failure for your venture. If you cater to the audience, then you can get them to gorge on your content like you’re serving up an all-you-eat buffet. Good content is like good food, it hinges on good ingredients. When you cook up good ingredients once, it’s called cooking. Doing it repeatedly for others is what the restaurant business is all about. If you can cook up great content, you need to know how to make that skill into a business. Content has to be served with several attributes: interest, easy digestion, quality, timeliness and regularity.

Interest

Your fare has to be interesting. Bread is boring, but a bakery is a destination. Celebrity sites are old hat, but look at how many are runaway popular. You have to be your own first fan. As long as you make your site interesting to your first fan, you have something to build on. If you don’t like what you’ve output, stop. Re-assess what it will take to grab your interest and make it a destination for yourself and people like you.

When you look at what to cover, the general topic needs some longevity. If you do a Miley Cyrus site, you have to expect it to have a short shelf life with a boom and bust for content.

Some ideas to think about:

• A news site (any topic with lots of material)
• Videos (post them to Youtube and put a fleshed out version of information on your own site).
• Comic strip (eg. XKCD or The Oatmeal).
• Information site (like Instructables or similar).
• Your Blog (if you have a fabulous site, you can have a fabulous blog).
• Review site (you must like something, review everything in its category).

Easy Digestion

The easier it is to digest your product, the more likely you will get traction. Radio is still in the media game because it’s so easy to recieve. You can turn on your car radio and it fills the car with noise. Print is on the ropes because of all of its downsides of delivery, cost and timeliness– not to mention quality.

New media (aka the Interwebs), also has a similar pecking order. Pictures outflank text. Video out-performs pictures. Portability trumps them all. This is why podcasts had such a good time in the sun; everyone popped an iPod into their pocket and earbuds into their ears.

Consider how you produce your content. A site like I, Cringley will publish its text (great for SEO) and produce a podcast for each article. The podcast contains the article text in spoken form, but it opens another front by making the content easy to digest. If you do a video edition of your site, it will be easier for people to watch, but it will take more production time.

Quality

Your site has to have a consistent quality– effectively an editorial voice. This isn’t to say high quality or low quality. It has to be same quality. If you got fast food at a posh restaurant, you’d be insulted. If the opposite happened, you’d be confused. Figure out what you want to produce and keep aiming for the same territory. Read a paragraph in US Weekly and then a paragraph in the NY Times. You will see a very different editorial voice– even if both pieces are about the same subject.

There are two aspects of quality: there is the editorial quality and the quality of the delivery. Your editorial quality should be as high as you can make it. In cooking terms, this amounts to a clean kitchen. As for the quality of delivery or the editorial voice of your site. It doesn’t have to stuffy, polished or polite: grunge isn’t bad. Some popular sites (cough! MySpace cough!) look horrible. If your site works best with quirks and clutter, go for it. I like a clean site with all of the intact navigation and no more, but how much you toss into your site is a topic for another day.

Timeliness

Food has to arrive quickly or its stale. Keep apprised of the social trends. Use popular topics as cues for what you should cover. For a while, you can run with the herd and riff off what the topic of the day is. After a while, even currency will grow stale and you can pepper in fresh ideas. If you’re lucky, you could even get a jump on a trend and be the first to run with a meme.

In magazine publishing, some magazines used to have content locked down three months before publication. This was their way to get advertisers on board. You don’t need to be that far sighted with the Internet, but you should still look to the future for fodder. Be prepared for what is to come. You could use this cool link to the trends of 2011 to gain some precognition into the coming year.
JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011View more presentations from JWTIntelligence.

Regularity

You have to publish on a consistent schedule. This is my greatest sin. I will go through periods of feast and famine. That is such a big problem when it comes to building an audience. There’s this terrific Indian food place a few blocks from my house. They hung signs that read “Open Daily For Lunch”– they weren’t open daily nor were they open for lunch. If they had hung a sign that read “Open Randomly: Get It While You Can” I would have a lot more respect for them. For them, the random schedule means that I usually give them a pass rather than come by and find them closed. In Internet terms, publishing content randomly is the equivalent to the lack of regular opening hours. Do you have new content today? Should I check back today or next week? Meh– now I’ve forgotten about this site of random novelty. It would be wonderful if you could kick out content daily or even more often, but your schedule has to be consistent.

When you arrive at a survivable schedule, there are three ways to stick with it:

Prep Work – Before you begin your new venture and embark on your path to your first $10,000, do some prep work. Make a chart of the content you want put into your site. If possible, write several pieces before your site launches, put them into a hopper using scheduling. When your site debuts, you won’t be writing your first piece, but your third or fifth or tenth piece as the prepped backlog helps you.

Scheduling – Try to work up a backlog of articles. When you have more articles ready than you can fit in your schedule, write them and leave them unpublished. Drupal and WordPress both have scheduling add-ons available to allow you to publish pieces when it suits your schedule best.

Save Your Scraps – While frowned upon with restaurants, it’s fine to do with content. Start to work on pieces as the mood suits you. When you have more material to flesh your pieces out, fill out a piece and put it into the queue for use.

The key to running a good web business is cooking up interesting material; delivering a consistent product; and keeping your audience intrigued.

The post Give The Gluttons A Feast appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

Well, not really. But the dark side of the moon– is unknown to us. We look at the moon almost every night but we never see the dark side of the moon. The same is true with the world of audiences and niches.

Last month, we went to this special event. I live in a small town (less than 300,000 people) and after a while you get to know alot of the faces– maybe you’ll never talk to these people, but you know what they look like– they’re locals. This special event involved a demographic I never hang with: Sportos. It was like I had gone to another city. I was used to the migration patterns of my “flock”– how they behaved, what events they frequented, et cetera. These people behaved differently: they had interests and practices different from mine. For all intents and purposes, they lived on the dark side of the Moon.

When you say, “I don’t have any good ideas” or “No one will go for this.” I have to counter with “BS!” You don’t need a new idea. You don’t need to worry if your idea is mined out. You just need a potential audience bigger than what your product could satisfy.

“Bigger” is important because you want to sell to everyone who could partake of your product. If you’re a landscaper who takes 1 hr. to mow a lawn, you want there to be at least 40 clients you visit a week. Say, you have a book about selling your polymer clay on Etsy and it took 1000 hrs. to write. If it retails for $10/copy (digital download), your audience need to be bigger than 1000 readers/buyers otherwise you would have been smarter working at 7-11 rather than scribing about Sculpey.

To find your audience, take an expedition to the dark side of the Moon. Look for unfamiliar demographics– those that exist out there that you don’t know about yet. Maybe they need your product because it’s cool and new to them. Maybe they need your product in a form that you think no one is buying any more.

Here’s an example from the dark side of the Moon. A friend of a friend (I do know him and we’re cordial, but we don’t hang out– he isn’t that friend-of-a-friend who was handcuffed in a Batman outfit– this guy exists). For the last decade has been doing direct mail. His schtick is to sell information on lotteries. He has someone assemble a catalog. He has someone else maintain the mailing list. And he has a service slip the catalogs into envelopes, label them, post them and ship them off. Books of information about lotteries. He doesn’t sell lottery tickets– not in the past or the future. Still, he has a loyal following of people who want to get information via the mail about lotteries.

His business breaks my brain. Who would buy this? Why isn’t there a website to show off the information. The reason is because there’s an audience large enough to satisfy his business model. They opt– for whatever reason– to get this information via snail mail and they pay for the privilege. I don’t know a single person who would buy this product. Clearly, they live on the dark side of the Moon.

Twitter is an example of matching a product to fit an untapped audience. I hate texting (fat fingers + small keys = frustration). I’m not alone– a lot of people couldn’t get into the idea of writing on a teeny keypad. Enter Twitter: there is no technical limitation inside of Twitter that hems posts into 140 characters, but it is a sweet spot of how much you’re willing to fumble with the keypad before you’re pissed off. They made a product to match people who both had 140 characters of tolerance and a 140 character cap in their phone messages. The product, Twitter, has leveled the playing field for l33ts and grandpas alike.

You need to see if there is a moon colony needing what you want to sell. Maybe your product can be repackaged or re-marketed to that audience.

Homework Assignment: Don your Pith Helmet Spacesuit

You need to travel to the dark side of the Moon. Travel incognito: trucker hat for the trucker hat crowd; bring kids to a family event; curb the profanity for the clean-cut crowd; et cetera. Go to an outing that you wouldn’t usually go to. Eavesdrop– in a benevolent way. Listen to the background chatter of what people are talking about; what interests them; what vexes them. Do you have a product that could be geared to this audience?

The post Moon Bases On The Dark Side of The Moon appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

Divide to Conquer

What do you love vs. Do you love money? – There are two ways to drive to you to a topic your site will cover: is it of interest or is it popular? The best topic is one that’s popular, then you have the widest audience. But you also will have the most competition. If there is a topic that you have a passion for, you may be able to speak authoritatively. You may know some minutiae that is totally unknown by the larger population. For example, “R2-D2” the name for the Star Wars robot came from the production house where Star Wars was being worked up– R2-D2 stood for Reel 2, Disk 2. Can you spin that kind of info into something interesting to people who have a more surface interest in the same topic? If you can, then you want a topic related to something of interest to you.

Entertainment vs. Education – Do you want your topic to come from one of two houses: one that educates or one that entertains? For example: a site about smart investing educates. A site about Bernie Maddoff’s excesses entertains. Education is good but the information needs to be sound. If it’s analytical data (like stock market numbers), people may be able to find the same data on a more popular site. If you make a great inference out of the data, then your site is worth the visit. Instructables.com does a great job of showing people how to do things. Entertainment is both an easier act to pull off and more fleeting. That said, Youtube.com got to be popular not because of its educational content, but because of all those great videos of cats that can talk.

Where To Dig

FUD – I like to think that people seek what they enjoy, but they are also attracted to what concerns them. The Internet is a private confessor. You can search for a very controversial subject and do it with comparative anonymity. Do you have a bladder issue? Scared you’re gay? Looking up divorce lawyers? The Internet is a friend who won’t blab about your interests (as long as you clear your browser history ;)). A place to mine for topics is inside of what was labeled “FUD”: Fear Uncertainty Doubt. People look for information on what they are afraid of, uncertain of, or what they have doubts about. If you want to dig into the direction of an education or informative site, FUD is fertile ground. Cancer is one of the biggest killers and most people will come in contact with it– they’ll get it or their lives will be changed by it. If you have an interest in writing about cancer research, survival rates or tales of triumph, that’s right in the middle of FUD territory and your site could find a lot of interest. On a less morose note, a lot of people worry about finances. A site like FrugalVictoria.com shows people how to save money. It’s a terrific topic with one gotcha: if you’re poor, you may not shop the bookstore or lay out for the eBook. Knowing your topics is a little bit about knowing their earning potential.

Sunny Unicorns – FUD is about the dark drivers of interest. There are a lot of bright topics. While a coupon clipping site may cater to people without cash, a site about the best golf courses would do just the opposite: it would cater to people with money and it would carry along a lot of affiliate program potential (stand by for upcoming piece on affiliates). People will enjoy a positive site, but such sites fall into more of a constructive or recreational realm. People don’t need to go there, so you have to make the content sing: timely, clear and fun.

Some givens

Be Happy – The world likes positivity, despite everyone’s fascination with horror, crime and corruption. If you made a blog about how your life sucks, people may come for a dose schadenfreude, but you will be hard pressed to build a lasting audience. What if you did a blog about how people fail? Fail Blog, Cakewrecks and a lot of others do make a market out of failure because the enjoyable bad examples are all guest stars on the site. Even though it’s looking at bad stuff is does it in a way that’s fun. This is why ThereIFixedIt.com is helping to power the life support Jay Leno’s career by showing up on the Tonight Show; but Stileproject.com and Ogrish.com are in the dark fringes.

Living Topics – Visits are traffic. You can attract one person to do a drive-by; or you can get one person hooked and convinced to come back every hour for years. Your site should be about a topic that evolves and grows over time: a living topic. Breaking news is good, but CNN dabbles in news. You should aim for a specialty. More in-depth looks at a subject are great. Likewise, something that aggregates new information as it becomes available is awesome. I am working on an all-mobile site, www.VicBC.mobi. It has a large contingent of crowd sourced information. Google will frown on regurgitations of old data that is can find elsewhere (more on that topic in an upcoming piece), but it will reward smartly cooked data. If something is new on your site each time a visitor hits it, visitors love it and Google does too.

Where do you start?

We have a podcast about ideas: Ideas where do they come from?. Maybe that can get your gears in motion.

Look at what interests you. Look at what interests your friends and co-workers. At the beginning of this exercise, you’ll have to find some sounding boards. If your and your friends are into basketball, getting their take on a new particle physics site may not yield a lot of good feedback. Make a list of topics that you know a little bit about.

Take out the dud topics. If a topic is too obscure, you can write about it, but it may be hard to turn it into your First $10,000. Ask yourself: could 100,000 people worldwide be interested in the topic?

You need to turn out a decent volume of content. The best approach would be to have 1 piece a day popping onto your site and out to your followers. A fallback is one a week and some sites where they have LOTS of new content get a new piece every hour. I am not a cartoonist because I can’t come up with hundreds of comic strip ideas, I can come up with 10. That wouldn’t be enough to give TheOatmeal.com a run for its money, so I’m not doing a cartoon-a-day site. Maybe you could. Could there be 50 articles on the topic?

Still got nothing? Look at Google Trends for ideas

The post Choose Your Audience appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.

• These guys charge to tell you the missing piece.
• They tell you they make $500/day but they don’t mention how much the spend nor how much of this $500/day is lost to advertising.
• You don’t need to sell a product! (Though some are all about making a “product” and selling said product)
• You likely have to spam a lot of people via email.
• You likely have to spend a lot of advertising
• They all talk about the money climbing
• Some people are doing it and they are making money at it.

What they don’t talk about is the first $10,000 mark. I understand about getting the second or third $10,000 volley. That’s how business works– it’s a machine. When it starts to hum it keeps going. But how do you start the fire? How do you get that first $10,000?

Well, that’s what I want to talk about. Over the next year, I am going to post a collection of findings. What works, what doesn’t, the scams, the lingo. I am going to try to net $10,000 through this “online marketing” craft/art/science/dark art. As I go, I’m going to share what I find. If there’s a download involved, it’s going to be available for free (not free after you register). I may link to other sites where the dark arts are being practiced, but I will caveat all links and not throw you to the wolves (yes, I know there’s an irony of that claim coming from a DeWolfe).

The post The First 10,000 appeared first on Shawn DeWolfe Consulting.