How to Find an Online Business Idea That Works

You can’t take all your internet marketing information and say that’s proof that you’ll sell online.

You could take ALL of the things that I sharing with you, or another teacher shares with you, and set up your own shop online, and find it doesn’t work. You could do none of this, and set your own shop up online, and find that whatever it is that you’re trying to sell works. I’m a big believer in just get out there and do it, and find out what works.

If you have an interest in a topic, don’t spend the next 12 months trying to figure out if is this the best topic for you. Some people take 2 to 5 years trying to figure out their topic, and by the time they do they find that all the competition has beat them to the market.

Instead, get out there today, put a website up there, start finding targeted visitors, and just see what happens.

How to Get Ideas to Test

You can look at what people are doing and buying offline. One place you look is the bookstores, local bookstores. Another place you can look is the late-night infomercials. 1:00am, 2:00am, 3:00am. It would be worth it to skip sleep for one night and just watch all the late-night infomercials, especially if you’re struggling to find a niche.

Have a notepad beside you. Have a pot of coffee, and a notepad. There’s an infomercial on every other channel at 1am! You can get 50 infomercial type topics at 1:05am, 50 more at 1:35am, 50 more at 2:05am, and by the time the rest of your family wakes up it’s 7:00am, and you’ve gotten a lot of data. You’ve got 500 infomercials and their related topics. Group those together: 100 were on this topic, and 75 were on this topic, and 55 were on this topic, 45 were on this topic.

This gives you a pretty good idea of what people are buying in the middle of the night. If they’re buying it in the middle of the night, they’re buying it during the day. If they’re buying it on the infomercial, they’re buying it on Amazon. If they’re buying it on infomercial, they’re buying it on somebody’s website. In fact, you’ll find with so many of those infomercials, there are websites associated with them. The infomercial is just one branch to the selling!

So, for example, if you do a web search on the name of the person on the infomercial, you’ll often find they have a book, they have a seminar, they have a DVD, they have something on Amazon. The infomercial is just one sales channel. So, if you can find it on the infomercial, it probably sells somewhere else.

Another Source of Hot Topics

Another place you can go is the business success magazines, like Fortune Magazine, Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, I think there’s one out there called Creativity. You look at the local bookstore, and not the small one, the big one, the biggest bookstore in your state. Take a drive and buy a copy of every one of those magazines. I’ve done basically this before. I’ve gone in and bought a stack of those magazines.

You read them, and you study them, and it’s amazing what you can learn.

When you’re reading, you’re looking for common themes. 20 magazines and 17 of them have an article on the same topic this month. What’s hot in the world this month? That topic. Why? 17 out of the 20 business magazines have an article on that.

Now, what would be funny is if you buy one every single month for a year, you would find that same topic gets featured every single month. Why? It’s a hot topic, and it sells.

And there’s multiple topics just like that. Same thing with the advertising. If you find an advertiser that’s advertising in one of those small business magazines, it doesn’t tell you very much. Ah, they wrote a check for $1k, no big deal. But, you find that same advertiser is in all 20 magazines, what does it tell you? They’re making money.

Okay folks, I’ve given you enough information, so that you can brainstorm now. By the way, that’s just the small business niche. Let’s say that you’re in any other niche. You’re in weight loss. You’re in pets. You’re in scrap booking. You’re in crocheting. You’re in fast cars. You’re in computers. Same thing. You want to find out what’s hot in the computer world? Pick up 20 computer magazines. You want to find out what’s hot in the craft world? Pick up all the craft magazines. There’s a bunch of them. You want to find out what’s hot in the equestrian world? Maybe there’s only 3 or 4 magazines. Buy them all. Even if you have to write for them or something, buy them online, if you can’t buy them at your local book store. You want to find out what’s hot in dog training? You buy the dog training magazines. You want to find out what’s hot in weight lifting? There’s like 7 different magazines out there, buy them all, every month for 6 months. You’ll know what’s hot. Look at the corresponding websites for that particular magazine.

This can be done in every single niche. If there’s anything being done in that niche. Let’s review. Books, magazines, infomercials, podcasts, videos. And, you can let your mind run wild with all the other places that you’ll be able to go get information. It’s out there. Do the research, then dive in with your topic and test it!