Are you thinking of starting a business? Or maybe you’re thinking of creating a product or a service that you want to offer to the world, but you’re not quite sure whether or not it’s a profitable idea that you have in mind?
Well, today I’m going to deep dive for you and give you four strategies that I share with clients and use myself to be able to determine whether or not it’s worth investing money and time in an idea.
The first thing you need to be really clear about before you can even get into the four strategies is who you want to sell to.
Who is your target market? If you don’t have that nailed, you don’t even need to move forward. This is an important part in starting your online business.
Click play on the video to find out how to figure out if you have a profitable idea.
4 WAYS TO DETERMINE IF YOU HAVE A PROFITABLE BUSINESS IDEA
STRATEGY 1: AMAZON BOOKS
Head over to amazon.com. Yes, Amazon. You’re going to head over to specifically the books section on Amazon.
Take a look at the categories, and find the one that is most closely related to the niche that you have. Focus on the top-selling books.
What are people buying? What books are people buying around your niche?
You can even cheat a little bit, and take a look at the chapters inside that book. What are the chapters about? These are actually topics that can even help you when you get into the creation process for whatever it is that you want to sell.
STRATEGY 2: FACEBOOK GROUPS
The next thing that you can do to get even more clearer about what people want and whether or not it’s profitable is to listen in groups. Yes, Facebook groups are still around.
I know tons of people have closed Facebook groups down, but they’re still around. The wonderful thing about them is it’s free marketing research for you.
People gladly share in groups what they’re struggling with or what their desires are. You can even do polls. Make sure you find out from the group owner whether or not it’s okay to do polls or what you’re allowed to post, whether or not you can post polls, questions in the group.
But basically, people are in those groups to share and get support. This is a wonderful way for you to just listen to what people want.
STRATEGY 3: YAHOO ANSWERS
The third way that you can figure out whether or not you have a profitable idea is Yahoo Answers. People actually go on Yahoo Answers and ask questions about what they’re struggling with.
All you have to do, again, is be super clear on what your niche is and do a search in Yahoo Answers for questions around that particular topic. That way, people are actually asking in their words, and they’re being very specific.
It’s very easy for you to determine whether or not your idea is profitable but also to come up with an idea to be able to deep dive in a more selective way and decide whether or not you have something hot on your hands.
STRATEGY 4: BECOME A SPY
The last way I’m going to share with you today is for you to spy on the competition. Who is in your industry that is killing it? Who is making epic steps in your niche area?
Listen, we don’t always want to reinvent the wheel, and we don’t want to copy. But paying attention to what your competitors are doing, especially people who have already taken strides ahead of where you are, and looking at what kinds of products they’re producing, looking at what types of content they’re putting out.
Take a look at the blog posts they have. Sign up for their email list. That’s a really, really good way for you to be able to spy.
BONUS STRATEGY: ASK YOUR AUDIENCE
Ask your audience. If you are just starting out and you don’t necessarily have a huge audience, you can use other people’s groups or platforms to be able to leverage this.
But if you have some presence online in some social media form, ask people what they want. That’s a really easy way for you to figure out whether or not your idea is profitable. It’s real simple.
You can simply say something like, “Hey, guys. I’m thinking about creating something around this topic. Do you think you’d be interested?”
Or, “Hey, I have four ideas that I’m thinking about. Which one do you think you’d be interested in?”
Or lastly, if you have somewhat of an email list, you can simply send out an email and ask people, “Do you think that you’d be interested in whatever this is?”
All right, so those are just a couple of ways for you to determine if you have a profitable idea.
