New Business? Take The Path Of Least Resistance
Today, I spent a couple of hours watching a video course. It was ostensibly about email marketing/list building, but really it was a set of four minute videos about how email marketing works and why you should do it.
The product wasn’t very good, and that’s an understatement. Out of three hours of “instruction” I probably got about two minutes of useful information – possibly less.
…And that information wasn’t anything that I couldn’t have worked out on my own.
Still, that’s one of the pitfalls of buying online courses and learning new stuff. That’s not the point of the article though.
The point of the article is that sometimes you overthink things and this leads to inaction.
If I were to create a course on email marketing, it’d be brilliant… but it’d probably never get released. Naturally I want to put out the best thing ever and create a high-quality product every single time.
The sad fact is this means a lot of abandoned projects, even though I’m fully aware of this personality flaw.
The sadder fact is the guy whose course I bought is – to put facts in the cold light of day – out-competing me.
Your Competition Doesn’t Have To Be Good If You Do Nothing
I’ll assume that most of the people reading this are ethical people who want to build great businesses and do great things. That’s the impression I get from your emails and other discussions.
A lot of guys and girls with those particular traits get pretty frustrated with business. When you’re looking to create something perfect, it’s easy to fall behind, lose time, get discouraged and more.
This is bad because often procrastination and analysis paralysis kill great ideas before you have time to bring them into existence.
On the other hand, there are people who’ll throw together subpar products and churn and burn through customers. They move from one scheme to the next, collecting checks and buying cool gadgets.
They can get away with this because they have products on the market and you don’t. Or I don’t, at least.
Whenever you see something being done poorly, there’s an opportunity. If the business you’re looking at is commercially successful, then the reason they’re getting away with the poor experience is because they haven’t been forced out of the market by someone better… like you.
Whilst you sit and ponder and look for a perfect product, the people who you can do better than are making money and thriving – potentially leaving unhappy customers in their wake. You need to don your cape and set upon them like a superhero.
Reality: I Can’t Compete With Everyone
Now, let’s say you’re a copywriter. You can’t go to a restaurant, order chicken and get fish, and think, “Gee! I’m going to compete with these people because they don’t know what they’re doing!”
You can use the experience though. Market other restaurants. Throw the experience in a recipe book. Otherwise use that one bad experience in all of your sales letters.
The point is that there’re plenty of people making lots of money whilst not being very good at what they’re selling. That means that you don’t have to be either. Sure, it helps. Obviously you want to be good. But it’s time to stop procrastinating and get on with it, and once you’ve found some bad providers in your niche, you know that your excuses amount to little.
If someone stupid is making a terrible product and selling it, then you have no excuse not to make a slightly less terrible product and sell that.
Here’s How To Start
It’d be annoying if I said all the above and then didn’t provide a blueprint.
Here’s what I suggest, should you find a bad product and know you can do better.
- Do your due diligence – see if there’s money to be made in the niche. (Are companies profitable?) If they’re not, move on. Bigger fish in the sea and all that.
- Get a simple email marketing software thing. Something like aWeber will do, but it needs an autoresponder feature. (So Mailchimp is ok providing you pay for that feature.)
- Look at the best blog posts in your niche that collate all the information your market need. (For instance, “How to get started with fishing.”)
- Create a free ebook or offer based on the information you find.
- Create an autoresponder thing giving your book away free and then sending a handful of emails to your target market with useful links.
- Embed somewhere in there an email asking your list what they want out of a product.
- Start sending traffic to your sign up.
- Build your product taking into account competitor weaknesses and customer suggestions.
At that point, you’ll have a product based on what people want, a list to sell it to and that’s really all you need. Everything else is an added bonus.
That Seems Tricky…
Those steps seem like a lot, but they aren’t really. Your free offer will take you five hours to write. The emails are only going to be short and you can probably link to other people’s content. They might take a couple of hours to write in total.
Setting up an autoresponder is easy depending on your software. Again, it’ll take a couple of hours maximum.
Sending traffic to the sign up page is tricky, but if you’ve already got an audience then you can almost skip the step, and if you haven’t got an audience you can buy traffic (or get someone to do it for you.)
Building the product will obviously take time and effort, but it’s made easier because you’re getting your research for free and the bad product has done the hard work for you.
Final Thoughts
Cracking a tendency to over-analyse is tough, but the above method strips out all of the excess.
Now, there are millions of markets and niches and I can’t really give a fullproof step-by-step that’ll work for all of them, but the approach above is all about stripping out the excess.
Really, any business starts with Get Lead>Warm Lead>Sell.
If you’re overthinking things (and you probably are) try and take your business idea and boil it down to those simple stages.
- What do people want?
- What Can I Give Them?
- How do I convince them what I’m giving them and what they want are the same?
- How do I sell it to them?
Genesis of the article comes from this annoying fact: Plenty of businesses manage to make huge amounts of money without being very good or giving a particularly good solution to the problem.
They’re obviously not overthinking it, so neither should you.
Instead, strip your idea down to its core. Create a barebones offering and then build out from there.