Fortunately, a content strategy does not need to have too much to do with SEO, and I would find it very hard to build anything without one. A content strategy is basically a process that gives you two fundamental things:

1) An idea and a vision of what the user is going to read, see and experience on your website (a marketing/sales funnel)

2) An early indication of the work you are going to have put in.

As usual, I am trying to keep this process simple and short. The more time I put into “strategy, planning, analysis, research etc” the less time I actually spend doing anything that is going to make me money!

Step 1: Identify a Core Problem

Having selected a niche, I now want to find one of the biggest, most common problems that is experienced by people. I call this the “Core problem”. It is effectively a problem that many people are seeking to solve, and its often a very popular talking point among people who are interested in this niche.

An example of a core problem would be “Getting a six pack” in the weight loss World. It seems almost universal that anyone looking to improve their body or lose weight wants to attain a six-pack. You don’t have to spend more than 5 minutes looking into this niche to realize that this problem alone is a huge micro-niche worth many multiple millions of dollars.

To find a core problem in your niche (and there are usually more than one in each niche) simply follow the next 5 steps:

1) Head on over to the Google Keyword tool and do some good old fashioned keyword research. Is there a set of keywords that keep appearing in your searches? any recurring themes? Dig a little deeper until you feel like you might be getting close to something.

2) Head on over to some big forums in your niche. Simply “Google” your keywords and then put the word “forum” after them. This should bring up a list of popular, related forums. You could also do a search on Big Boards (a directory of niche forums).

Go to the forums, and read through some of the most popular forum posts. To do this quickly, in a lot of forums, you can simply click on a link at the top that says “Number of views” or “number of replies”. Once clicking this, it should display the forum discussions with the most discussed and viewed discussions at the top of the page.

Quickly scan through the titles of those topics, click into the discussions and look at the kinds of questions being asked.

3) Visit popular niche blogs (again, a Google Blog search) can help with this. Look at some of the most popular blog posts, look at their posts that are attracting a lot of comments and notice the kinds of questions being asked again.

4) Visit the clickbank marketplace, and type in the keywords of your niche. Visit some of the sales pages there, and note down some of the problems that the products promise to solve. If there are a few problems that seem to be mentioned on several sales pages, again, you are on your way to discovering some of your niche’s core problems.

5) Repeat the above step on Amazon, looking at books and magazines in your niche. See what claims they make, and what issues they claim to address. Notice the themes, take notes.

Once you have done all this, it should be VERY easy to identify a number of core problems people in your niche are experiencing.

Step 2: Offer a Core Solution

You want to create some content around this problem, and provide a workable solution to your readers. You want to give them this advice for free. If you are a blogger, this might be in the form of an awesome post that sucks visitors towards your blog! Because I am going to be using an email/newsletter format, I am going to be writing a short report that I will be giving away as a bonus when people sign up to my free newsletter.

The report doesn’t have to be massive, but as a minimum, I would be looking at around about 12 pages of solid content.

Step 3: Write Some Relationship Content

Using the information and market research you did when choosing a niche and finding core problems, you want to write 5-7 pieces of content. For this part of the exercise , you want to make sure that the content is solid and your readers get value from it.

Because I am focussing on email marketing, I will be using these 5-7 mini-articles in my auto-response sequence. I will also be including promotions of affiliate products and any producst i create at the end of these emails. Out of 7 of these messages, I will probably promote around 3 times.

Whilst I want to make money as soon as possible, I also want to build a relationship with my audience. This free content is designed to do exactly that as it’s primary objective.

Step 4: Deploy a Full Website

After completing the 4 steps above, I will have created a free report and some follow-up content which I can use to promote products. I would setup a single-page website (with that single page being a squeeze page) and drive traffic to it using free and paid traffic methods.

Once that side of the venture is up and running, I would then be looking to expand the amount of content I publish and establish a much larger “web presence”. It is at this point that I would create a full website, with about, home, contact, blog and product pages. I would be posting new content to the blog, and using some re-written versions of the email content to get me started.

I will build the blog/website with social media functionality (so people can like, tweet or stumbleupon my posts) and also make sure I have commenting features setup to increase reader engagement with the content.

I would then use my new and relatively small email list to generate the initial comments and “buzz” on the blog by sending out an email announcing the launch of my new website.

Step 5: Deploy Social Media Assets

I hate social media with a passion. But I could never neglect social media as a marketing tool. I would setup a Facebook and Twitter profile for the site, and devote a little time to trying to gather a following there. I would also set it up so new blog content automatically posted on these profiles.

Until I was making good money, and I could afford to spare the time, I wouldn’t put any more work into my social media presence.

Conclusion

The above five steps roughly outline the approach I am going to be taking with this case study and similar projects. I am starting very simply with a single, basic sales funnel which is based on giving away great content to my subscribers. From there, I would then begin to grow my brand and web presence by building a website, social media profiles and posting more content that my readers will enjoy.

This rough outline will provide me with an adequate platform from which to launch my business from.

I hope this has been helpful to some of you starting out building your first email lists and online businesses. If you have any questions at all, or you want to make your own suggestions, then please, please, please share them in the comments section below. I’ll talk to you soon.

Lets gets straight into the nuts and bolts of it..

What I Need from a Niche

There are essentially two things I need in a niche, and I call these “consumer elements“.

1) A niche where there are clear problems to solve, and people are motivated to solve those problems quickly.

2) A niche that has a lot of motivated and interested buyers, who virtually obsess over the chosen topic.

In all honesty, I could find a niche with one or the other of these two elements. If I had no.1, then I would have an excellent “fast buck” niche, where I could make fast money, and have a reasonable income over the long-term. If I had no. 2, the chances are it would take a while longer to establish trust and authority in that market, but the long-term wins would be worth it in the end.

If I have a balance of both these customer elements in my niche, it means I have the opportunity to profit quickly, but also maintain a sustainable business with longevity.

The Big Three

Whenever I have launched a product or been involved in setting up a new venture online, I have always began with, and tried to stick with the Big Three.  The big three are massive timeless markets/industries that have huge audiences, and contain both of the “consumer elements” that I talked about above.

Each one of these markets has large sub-niches within them. Here is a list of the Big Three markets, and a couple examples of sub-niches for each of them:

1. Money – Make Money Online, Real Estate, Forex etc

2. Health and Well-Being – Weight loss, Build Muscle, Six-Pack Abs, Skin Care, Cure Anxiety

3. Relationships – Online Dating, How to Get Girls, How to Save Your Relationship, Get Your Ex Back

As a bonus, I’d also throw “personal development” into the mix. Any self-help based content seems to do very well these days as people look to improve their lives and their ability to succeed in life. There are a ton of sub-niches within the self-help space, but I am not confident enough yet in adding a fourth to the “Big Three”. 

All of these niches are ever-green (last forever) and have information in them that people have been, and will be buying for years. They have a ton of sub-niches, all of which fulfill our two consumer elements that we discussed at the top of this page.

My approach from here, is to select one of the Big Three and then settle in a sub-niche. I am essentially finding a huge market and audience, and then taking a small slice of it with my web presence. I don’t worry about it being over-competitive, or getting out-played by bigger, more established players. 

Of course you could take the opposite approach, and find a very niche market, and look to take a massive part of that market-share. You could also look to focus on hobby niches, where there is huge demand for information. I know several marketers who have grown five-figure-a-month businesses doing this, but its not my personal preference. In my opinion, such an approach takes too long to properly research and develop. I want the fastest results possible.

Niche Research

In order to find my sub-niche, I start by selecting one of the big three, and then listing sub-niches within it that I am interested in or have some experience in. The trick here is not to over-complicate this. If you are really struggling to come up with sub-niches, use the following 3 free tools from Google to help you out:

1. Google Keyword Tool

2. Google Insights for Search

3. Google Trends

(All three of these online tools are fairly easy to use, but if you are struggling at all, leave a comment or shoot me a message and I will put together some kind of tutorial on how to use these) 

After I have listed the most interesting sub-niches to me, I then go and check that people are making money in them. Its a fairly fast 4-step process (again, keep this simple).

1. Go to Amazon and see if there are any books or magazines on the subject being sold.

2. Type your keywords into Google and Bing to see whether anyone is advertising on these keywords and selling related products on their site.

3. Go to Clickbank, search the marketplace and see if any vendors are selling similar products, memberships etc.

4. Check the top 10 search results for the keywords on Google, and see how the top organic search listings are monetizing in that niche, and take a look at any websites advertising on them.

If you see a good level of business being done on 3 of any of the 4 channels mentioned above, you have got a solid sub-niche.

Once I have identified the commercially viable sub-niches, I choose the one that either has the most potential or interests me the most.

The Next Step

As you can see, this is a fairly simplistic approach to selecting a niche, and thats because I am sticking to niches that are already proven and working. Thousands of business people have been there before me, and that allows me to take a short-cut by using their hard work to my advantage. Niche research and niche selection used to take weeks out of my life, and was the biggest source of my procrastination. I need it to be simple and fast.

I am not going to share with you the exact niche I have decided on for this case study, but I can promise you the above is the exact process I used to select it. Perhaps in about 12 months or so, I may be willing to reveal my niche and even my website, but then I don’t want people just copying word-for-word what I am doing. Its not about the niche you select at all, its about the approach you take, and thats what I am hoping you will realize as we go through this case study together.

Moving forward, I am going to be putting together an initial content strategy (keyword research and the like) and then building the first elements of my web presence ( a squeeze page and initial website). After that, it is all about implementing and tweaking the traffic strategy, and playing around with the sales funnel to yield the best possible conversions. I will be talking about all these items in the up-coming articles.

If you have any questions about how I have chosen my niche, or if you would like to share how you choose your niches, then feel free to leave a comment below. I always try to answer every single one I get.

Why I am Looking at The Business Model First

A lot of people I know and have worked with in the past usually start their businesses and projects by considering what niche they are going to go into. Typically, they will pick a niche, and then look at ways they can make money in that niche. They spend a great deal of time researching competitors strategies, websites, and they spend an even greater amount of time researching business models and traffic strategies through purchasing “make money products” from places like the Warrior Forum and Clickbank to help them decide how they are going to create and grow their business.

This pattern of behavior (in my experience) tends to lead to these same people constantly shifting their focus and strategy which leads to poor results and performance. They quickly (and frequently) lose faith in what they are doing. They start multiple projects and never finish them, and on occassion they even find themselves questioning their belief in their chosen niche.

I know this because I have done it several times before in the past and have seen armies of ambitious entrepreneurs fall into the same trap of “paralysis by analysis”.

To avoid making this mistake again, I am going to decide on a core business model, that I will not deviate from. Whilst I may make adjustments to my strategy and marketing plan, I don’t really intend to alter the business plan I have settled on too dramatically. After settling on a workable and profitable business model, I will then integrate this with the niche that I choose down the line.

(I’ll be doing a totally separate article on choosing a niche).

The Business Model I Will Be Using

In a nutshell, my business model will be an information business. I will be running an online newsletter in a niche market and initially, I will be using it to sell affiliate products. Very soon after this, I will then be developing my own premium newsletter or micro-continuity course (a membership site with a fixed duration) a long with several stand-alone products.

The free newsletter will be the core of my business model, and will be the channel through which I will sell my own products and affiliate products. Although I will eventually attach a blog, social media profiles etc, initially, the project will begin with one squeeze page and a few follow-up emails. This will allow me to start the venture quickly, keep things simple, and test my sales funnel quickly and efficiently.

As I generate more traffic and interest, I will then begin scaling the business up by adding my own products and adding more features to the project (i.e. a fully-functioning blog and website and a social media presence).

Why I Chose This Business Model

There are three core benefits to the system I am going to be using and implementing:

1. It has been done before, many times, by many successful online entrepreneurs. Its a system that works, and its a system I have worked on through my work for clients and during my employment in an Internet Marketing firm.

2. It is a very scalable system. This business model can be very easily and rapidly grown once an effective sales funnel is in place that is converting visitors into buyers.

3. This business model has solid foundations. While this may take more time to setup and get going than a CPA campaign, it has far more longevity and long-term potential than an “email-submit CPA promotion”.

Ultimately, this is a model I understand, and its a model that allows me the flexibility to adapt and work with big changes on the Internet. For example, if I had chosen to rank 20-30 affiliate mini-websites in the search engines using SEO, then the second Google decided to make a huge sweeping change/update (farmer/panda) my entire business model could be wiped out over night.

Because the core of the business model never changes, and is only ever improved and tweaked, then it gives me the freedom to diversify how I generate traffic to my website and how I win new customers.

I have seen it happen so many times, when a tactic, strategy or system isn’t working for some one, they abandon their whole project and business model, and fly off to buy the next WSO or big Clickbank release. I have been guilty of this myself as well in years gone by. This sporadic approach yields very little except a string of half-baked and half-finished website projects.

This what I absolutely need to avoid.

You don’t always need the most recent, most daring, most advanced or most exciting system, some times, it is much better to keep it simple!

I hope this article has given you an insight on how I am going to try and achieve my goals, and I hope it also gives you an idea or two for your own approach as well. As always, if you have any thoughts, comments or questions, then feel free to leave them in the comment box below.

However, in spite of this, over the last 11 months, there has been a tiny trickle of traffic consistently finding it’s way to this blog, and a lot of that seems to be coming from people coming here directly, from the Warrior Forum, or from searching for this website on Google.

So, after a brief chat with an old friend in the Internet Marketing space, I have decided to start working on this blog again as a genuine live project.

Lets Wind Back the Clocks….

At the end of 2009, myself and the rest of the staff at an Internet Marketing company were made redundant. We were all working for a $50k a month information marketer (the kind who makes a killing on Clickbank). We had all been working in various capacities (affiliate managers, seo operators, customer support agents etc) but with very little direction. After a year of acquisitions, turbulent product launches and various other shenanigans, our boss walked into the office and announced he had to let us all go and do some serious re-structuring in the business.

We all left that company on good terms with our boss, and although at the time it didn’t seem like it, I learnt a lot from the 12 months I spent there.

The following year, at the age of 22, I went into business with an old school friend back in our home town. Armed with bucket loads of enthusiasm, a total lack of capital (read: cash) and experience we ventured into the World of offering online marketing services to traditional business owners.

Things went well for a time, and we picked up some reasonable clients. By the end of the first year we were earning enough to keep the business running and pay some one a full-time salary. Unfortunately, we needed to pay 2 people a full-time salary! My business partner went into business with another friend and I offered some input and help on the venture. Our time became fractured, and in the end, we decided it was a business model we both hated, and we decided we were better friends than business partners! We wrapped up the business, and I found myself at the start of 2011 looking for a new venture/job.

I found my new job in business to business sales, and that is what I am doing to this day. I have enjoyed my time in my current role immensley, and I have made some of the best friends I have ever had here, but it still doesn’t seem enough.

You see, like many people of all ages, cultures and backgrounds, I find myself wanting more control over my time and more freedom to do the things that I want to do. I also want financial security. Not incredible wealth, or untold riches, but financial security. I want to know I can weather the storms, enjoy my life in relative comfort, and assist those people I love in times of financial hardship.

To do any of the above, I know I HAVE to ditch the job, and escape the rat race.

When I first started this blog, it was intended to be a written documentary of how I left the rat race and found my own freedom. I now find myself firmly stuck in the rat race with a job (with very limited holiday time), debt, student debt and a rented apartment. Its not the life I thought I would be living right now!

What I do have though is years of experience in online businesses, and I have had the pleasure of working with some of the most successful people online in one way or another. I am now going to use that experience to launch a niche website and begin a project that I am certain will allow me to escape the rat race once and for all.

What The Rat Race Lab is All About

So, starting in 2012, I will be documenting, on a week-by-week basis my progress with this project. What I get right, and what I get wrong. Essentially, its going to allow anyone reading this blog to literally watch over my shoulder as I build an online business and escape the rat race. Most of (if not all the content) will be delivered in the newsletter, which you can sign up to here, or on the top right-hand-side of this page.

Essentially, I will be starting from scratch (perhaps like many of you reading this article) and you will be able to see how I deal with many of the challenges that are typical for any aspiring online entrepreneur. You will see first-hand how I deal with these challenges. Where I succeed, and where I fail.

And unlike many bloggers out there, I won’t solely be making my money through “teaching people how to make money online”. I still maintain contact with a number of old clients, and I do offer my consulting services to them on request, but  apart from that, I will be looking to make the majority of my money through my niche project.

This blog, website, newsletter (what ever you want to call it) will effectively be my experimental lab. This is where I will come back and make my notes and observations on my tests and experiments. This is where I will write up everything I have done, and what results my actions produced.

What This Means For You:

1. You can learn from my mistakes.

2. You can discover what is actually working right now. (Not what worked a year or 2 ago when the latest make money online guru made it big).

3. You can see the exact tools and resources I am using.

4. You can ask questions and get get detailed up-to-date answers.

5. You will be able to apply these techniques to your own business today as well, and we can build our online empires from scratch together!

I am not saying I have all the answers, but I am resourceful and motivated enough to go out and find those answers. And if you would like to cut out some of the hard work involved with getting the lifestyle you have always dreamed of by running your own Internet business, then join the Rat Race Lab Newsletter today.

Thank you for reading and thank you for sharing this journey with me. If you have any questions at all, then please feel free to leave a comment underneath this article. I answer every comment I receive!

Let me explain…

If you are sick of living to work, and seeing all your hard work line the pockets of your boss or the owner of your company, and if you are sick of living your life on some one else’s terms then its about time you setup your own business. With your own business you can make more money for the same amount of work, you can empower yourself, live life on your terms, and not have to dance to some one else’s tune. Despite recent developments in the Internet marketing industry, setting up your own online business is still one of the greatest business opportunities out there for aspiring entrepreneurs, and the barriers to entry are still low enough to welcome all those with two brain cells to rub together!

These 3 books that I am about to share with you and review (in my opinion) contain ALL you need to start, grow and profit from your own online business. I see a lot of people promoting “get rich quick” ebooks, and I see a lot of people “pimping out” the latest “make money online” ecourse, and those courses are great and serve a purpose, but they often miss the basics, and leave a lot to be desired.

Some of those get-rich-quick eproducts you are probably used to are almost entirely based on gimmicks or techniques that used to work. Not everyone needs that when setting up an online business. Everyone who wants to run their own work-at-home/internet business does need to understand some business basics and needs to understand how online tools and tricks can help that business. It’s a balance, and these books provide you with the balance you need!

Now before I go any further, I want to let you know a couple of things:

1. I have bought and read all of these books. In fact, I have bought, read and re-read at least 2 of these books.

2. I truly believe these books answer nearly 95% of all questions you might have about starting your own online business. The rest you can discover through trial and error/networking on internet marketing forums etc.

3. I have linked to these books in this post using affiliate links. If you click my link and decide to purchase these books via my link, I will receive a tiny commission and it won’t cost you a penny more. These commissions will be used to pay for the hosting of this humble blog, and it’s associated running costs (email newsletter etc).

4. Although I will receive an affiliate commission if you decide to purchase through my link, I wrote this post because I genuinely feel these books can help a lot of struggling Internet marketers out there. They have helped me, and I hope that they help many others who are in the same position as I was a short time ago.

With that out of the way….

Here are the Books:

1. Tim Ferris – 4 Hour Work Week

2. Drew Eric Whitman – Cashvertising

3. Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson – Rework

6 Reasons These Books are Great For Internet Marketers:

1. They are REAL books, which means you can read them anywhere, and not just on a computer screen. I don’t know about you, but this makes it a lot easier for me to read and absorb the content!

2. They cover everything from basic stuff like; “what niche should I go into?” and they cover more advanced stuff about how to use outsourcing effectively, and how to “grow and develop” your business/company. These 3 books totally cover the life-cycle of an Internet marketer.

3. No annoying up-sells. Everything you need to know is in these books. There are no hidden up-sells etc. You buy the book, you read it, you use it and you profit from it. Perfect.

4. Buying these 3 books is far cheaper than buying 3 ecourses. If you bought all 3 books from amazon, you’d spend around $37. If you bought 3 ecourses or “guru products” at $47 a pop then that would cost: $141. Thats a difference of $104. Seriously, why spend over $100, when you could spend $37 for a lot more information?

5. These books can help all kinds of online businesses and entrepreneurs. Does’t matter whether you are into building your own social applications, networks, ecommerce stores or even if you are an affiliate marketer, these books can help and change your business today.

6. It’s all killer and no filler! A lot of the advice is timeless. There is very little fluff, and the tips, tricks and advice in these books are timeless and backed up by real research and practical experience.

Individual Books Reviews

Lets take a quick look at each book individually, and take a look at how each one can you help you start, grow and succeed in your own online business.

Tim Ferriss – 4 Hour Work Week

Cost: $12

Who is it Ideal for?

Answer: Complete beginners and intermediates. Whilst some advanced Internet marketers and entrepreneurs would probably benefit from reading it, I think beginners and intermediates will get the MOST benefit from this book.

Some of the Things Internet Marketers Will Learn From This Book:

- How to pick a niche

- How to come up with a business

- How to test a business idea on a tight budget

- How to grow your online business and generate a life-changing amount of income

- How Tim went from $40k per year working 80 hours a week, to $40k per month and 4 hours per week

- How to eliminate 50% of your workload in 48 hours.

- How to remove yourself from business and outsource your life, allowing you to do whatever you want and enjoy your money.

- And much, much more…

Personal Thoughts:

I love this book and Tim’s writing style. The tips and strategies he shares are priceless, and when times are tough, and I need reminding why I am trying to grow my own business, I always pick up this book for a “pick-me-up”. Its a classic and must-have book for all internet and affiliate marketer’s libraries!

Drew Eric Whitman – Cashvertising

Cost: $11

Who is it Ideal for?

Answer: Everyone. I truly believe every single business person should buy this book to improve their marketing and selling. This is an especially good book for affiliate marketers and information product merchants.

Some Of The Things Internet Marketers Will Learn From This Book:

- Ninja copywriting techniques that will help you sell anything to anyone

- How to create powerful ads that literally suck visitors to your website/offer

- 100 secrets of the biggest and most successful ad-agencies in the World

- How to make people really believe what you say, and how to build trust and rappourt with your audience so you can sell more stuff.

- “Sneaky” ways to persuade people to respond

- Effective tricks for writing “magnetic” headlines.

- What you should ALWAYS do, and NEVER do in your ads

- How to get inside the minds of your prospects and find out what really drives them and what they really want

Personal Thoughts:

This book is all about selling, copywriting and advertising. It is full of insights and secrets from some of the best ad-agencies in the World, and gives hundreds of real-world examples on how to effectively promote your business. This is a thoroughly researched book, backed up by 23 years advertising experience. The hot-lists at the back allow you to quickly reference important techniques to use when setting up your marketing campaigns. Every affiliate, information product merchant should have this within arm’s reach of their work-desk!

Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson – Rework

Cost: $14

Who is it Ideal for?

Answer: Advanced Internet marketers and beginners who enjoy some “heavier” reading. Its all about how the “regular” way isn’t always the “right” way. Its a different outlook on business, and it shuns the traditional teachings of business school and goes in a slightly different direction. This book is certainly not for everyone, but this different take on business will be helpful for many online entrepreneurs.

Some Of The Things Internet Marketers Will Learn From This Book:

- Why meetings are toxic

- Why you should fire workaholics

- Why planning to flip your site is a plan to flop

- How to prevent “bloat” in your business and why bigger is not always better and how less is often more

- How to recognise that enthusiasm is not the same as priority

- And many, many more simple rules for success

Personal Thoughts:

This will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a relatively quick read, with a lot of interesting concepts that could help prevent you making some classic mistakes often made by more traditional businesses. It is an easy-to-read book written by the people behind 37 signals. It’s about taking a minimalist approach to your business and eliminating, clutter, crap and waste. I highly recommend it, and suggest you apply the rules that you feel are most useful, relevant and helpful to you and your business.

Conclusion

These are 3 books I have bought, read and enjoyed in 2009 and 2010. These are not the only 3, but they are the 3 most relevant/powerful books I have come across for experienced and beginner Internet marketers. I genuinely believe these books have helped me transform my outlook on life and business for the better and I hope they do for some one else out there too.

I’d highly recommend reading the 4 Hour Work Week first, and then read Rework. Then, once you start creating your business/campaign/project I’d recommend referencing specific/relevant parts of the 4 Hour Work Week to keep you on track. After that, I’d use Cashvertising to help you develop and turbo-charge your sales message, marketing and advertising.

I hope my review here has been helpful, and if you have any questions, comments or reviews of your own about these books, or any other books you have found useful, then please feel free to leave them in the comments section below!

Let’s get started….

Why People Never Seem to Get Started (The 5 Obstacles)

One of the biggest problems many beginners and intermediates face is deciding on HOW they are going to make money online. Three months into buying information products and reading up on money making systems on forums, most people could probably talk at length about 3-5 systems/methods that they know about for making money online. Despite that, a lot of the time, the same people never take any action and get started. Why is this?

Usually, the reasons why people don’t get started on building their own online business can be distilled into the following;

1. They want to make sure 100% something is going to work before they do it. If they spend money on domain names, they NEED to know they will get that money back and make a profit.

2. They need some one to tell them EXACTLY what to do. They don’t take action because they are waiting for some one to hand-hold them through the process. Usually these people can’t afford to hire a mentor, the help they are looking for never comes and they get stuck.

3. They have read so many ebooks and courses online, they have no idea what system they want to use. They are spoilt for choice and don’t know where to focus their time, energy, money and efforts.

4. They are afraid of failing and becoming a laughing stock.

5. They are waiting for their circumstances to be “perfect”. They take their time “planning” and preparing, but when it comes to taking action, they remain paralyzed, waiting for the “perfect set of circumstances”.

I know the above thoughts and problems affect a lot of people in this market, because all of the above has affected me significantly at some point, and one or two points from the list have been affecting me as recently as the last few months! Everyone has these thoughts initially, so don’t feel embarrassed, ashamed or depressed if you do too. It’s all part of the process, and as long as you get past these fears and thoughts, then you are on your way to starting a successful online business.

How to Overcome the Five Obstacles

One of my biggest obstacles has been deciding what I want to do. I have been a bit of a jack-of-all-trades and I have never focussed on one system. I have made money with several projects and revenue models (affiliate marketing, information products, SEO, offline consulting etc) but I have never stuck at anything long enough to develop it into a system or a full-time income, and a year or two on I am kicking myself.

Kicking myself never made me any money though, so I decided to focus and get serious.

I know a great majority of the ways to make money out there, but I need to find something that is right for me so that I can get out of this “rut” and move forward. I have been doing this planning for the last couple of months, and I have setup a small online “infrastructure” so I can begin moving forward and making money. I think my plan will help a lot of people out there struggling to overcome any one of the five obstacles, so I am going to share it with you now.

The 6 Month Battle Plan

Before it puts you off, 6 months is only a rough time frame. The reality is it could take longer or quicker to implement this plan.

Here is my mission statement for the next six months:

In the next six months I intend to test and trial a number of revenue models, identify one with the greatest potential and automate it and use it as the core money-maker for my business going forward.

(When I mention revenue models, I am talking about money-making systems/methods).

Basically, what I am saying in my little 6 month missions statement is that I am going to try some stuff out, see what works and see what I like, and then scale it up so it makes me more and more money consistently with minimal input from me.

So for example, in the coming months I am going to try and have a go at affiliate marketing, list-building, Video marketing and information publishing. Once I have tested these methods out, lets say I enjoyed list building the most and also got the best return on my investment from it.

I would then look at what I did with my list-building and identify what worked and what didn’t. I would keep the parts of the list-building that worked for me and get rid of the things that didn’t work (poorly converting traffic sources etc). I would then focus all my attention, time and money on working on my list-building.

I would then try and automate it as much as possible, so my list-building will continue with minimal input from me. I could do this by outsourcing work, or using clever software to automate processes in my business.

If this all works well, it should give me enough money to live, pay the taxman, and still leave me with some money left-over. With this extra money, I can either re-invest in my list building and dramatically scale it up, or I could diversify my business by trying other things.

I truly believe that in order to find out what system you want to use and in what niche, you have to try things out and test them. A lot of the time people are afraid to do this because of the risk of investing too much time or money in something that doesn’t work.

I used to be like that as well, but it wasn’t a good way of thinking. No time is wasted time. If you try something and fail, learn the lessons from it and don’t make the same mistakes twice. I believe (although I don’t know for sure) that successful people are the ones who pick themselves up and go at it again, even when they have failed 100 times before.

In terms of wasting money, I totally understand why for a lot of people it’s a big concern, and it’s a massive concern for me right now. But I think I have a way to dramatically reduce the financial risk to just about $15. Not bad right? How many other businesses can you test with $15?

The $15 Infrastructure (Test Launch Pad)

I mentioned earlier in the post I have created myself a small online infrastructure that will allow me to test things out with minimal risk. It is like a mini launch-pad where I can launch my tests and experiments from! I’ll show you how to do this and then I’ll share with you a few rules I am going to be sticking to to make this work.

The $15 covers one domain name (from Namecheap.com) and the first month of hosting. Ideally you’ll want to make around $5 a month at first to cover the hosting, but that shouldn’t be TOO big of a deal.

You only need to buy one domain name, and you don’t have to do ANY keyword research. I would think of a domain/brand. You want a domain name that could really mean anything you want it to. Something very general, nothing too long. Try and come up with a little brand.

You are going to use your website to test and experiment in around three broad niches, and you will drill down more specifically into the sub-niches over time. By having a very general website, it allows you to test various niches out without having to buy a new website every time and you can also test a variety of methods out in one place. No need for new websites and hosting etc etc.

I came up with my domain name and then bought it the next day. I setup a wordpress blog on the root domain and wrote an introductory post or two explaining what the site was about (I described it as a blog website that covered topics on a variety of subjects). I then wrote three or four content posts to make the website look busy. I chose a good-looking free theme and uploaded it.

I now have a very general website that covers a few niches and topics. The broad niches and markets I will attack will be wealth creation and management (making more money etc), health and fitness, and dating/adult relationships. The reason why I have focussed on these three niches is because the people shopping in these markets have very strong emotions attached to their buying decisions, and every decision we make (particularly buying decisions) are emotional decisions.

I don’t want to manipulate anyone or their feelings, but I do want to go into a market where the customers and prospects are passionate about the kinds of things I am recommending and selling, and that is why I intend to focus mainly on these three niches.

The next step is to pick some techniques I want to try and test. When I find a winner (something that has made me money) I will then use that money/profit to invest in a new domain name where I can build a full business around the method. So for example lets imagine I do some list-building in the dating niche. If that goes well, and I make some money, I would spend that money on setting up a totally separate website where I can implement the techniques I learnt on my test site, and scale it up into a full-time business.

I like this approach because it seems like I can do a lot of testing and experimenting on one site or one domain, which means you limit your financial risk significantly.

If you were not comfortable setting up a site/blog that covers three or four niches or topics, then you could create niche subdomains. For example:

health.yourdomainname.com

dating.yourdomainname.com

money.yourdomainname.com

By structuring the site like this, you could in effect have three websites under one domain! Cheap and cheerful!

One Final Thing…

I think I have pretty much covered all the main points of how I am going to approach these experiments and my business online. I am hopeful that some one out there gets something valuable from this. And on a selfish note, I am hoping that in a few months time I will be making a post here saying that my experiments have worked and I am pleased to report positive results!

If you are near the start of your journey online, or you are starting afresh like me, then I wish you the best of luck. Feel free to come here and ask questions/leave comments about your experiences. I have received a number of interesting emails, blog comments and phone calls as a result of my first blog post, and I am really pleased people have been happy to get in touch.

My blog posts thus far (all two of them) have been infrequent, and irregular, and this is how I am going to keep it for now. I don’t want to put myself under any “pressure” to keep updating this blog. I will however be coming back here and reporting on the results of my tests, trials and experiments as regularly as possible. To stay in the loop with regards to blog posts, feel free to sign up to my email list at the top right-hand-side of the page. You can learn more about how you could expect to be treated as a subscriber and a friend by checking out the relevant section on the About page.

In the mean time, I hope this post has been useful and given you some ideas about how you can minimize risk and find out what is right for you online. It is important to take those first few steps when starting out on a new venture, and be ready to take the first few falls on the chin. I am off to get started now on my plans, and I hope you are too!