How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet – Part 2/5

By nathanonn On August 25, 2009 Under internet business

How To Work From Home & Make Money On The Internet Series
>>  Click Here For Part 1

Yesterday We’ve covered all the introduction so far. Now, we can take a closer look at the ‘real world’ of home-based Internet business:

> What can you sell?
> Who can you sell to?
> Where and how do you make sales?
> How easy is it to make sales?
> What is the income potential?

I believe you are going to get very excited about Internet business once you see the real world possibilities in action! I’ve been in my own business for a while now, and some of this stuff still blows my mind. It’s almost too easy sometimes, but that’s a good thing….especially if you’re lazy

So, let’s get the ball rolling here with some ‘Marketing 101′. We need to talk about the formula underlying ALL successful business activities:

Market <–> Offer <–> Traffic + Follow Up

In layman’s terms, here’s what our equation is saying: target a niche market, create an offer targeted for that market, send ‘market traffic’ to your offer, follow up on the offer.
That sounds good so far, but let’s break it down into even clearer detail.

Step 1: Target a Market

The process of market targeting is always your first step. This is really where you get the answer to “Who Can I Sell To?”

Proper market targeting is important to all business, but it is especially important in Internet business. What you strive for is a very clear definition of your niche. The more precise your definition is, the better your targeting, and this is vitally important when it comes time to construct your offer and drive traffic to your offer.

This is common sense once you get used to the process, but the concept of targeting is often ‘fuzzy’ for beginners who aren’t used to breaking down markets into ‘sub-markets’.

Here’s an example to illustrate that point –

Let’s say you want to target customers in the ‘weight loss’ market. This is a good market, but still too broad. You have to perform additional market research to narrow it down into subsets of weight loss approaches that the market is interested in, like: ‘exercise’, ‘nutrition’, ‘carb counting’, and so on.

The reason for this is that markets are not homogeneous. The situation is more like clusters of related interests under a common ‘umbrella’, somewhat like musical taste. Lots of people are interested in music, but that doesn’t mean they all enjoy every style of it.

So, how do you go about targeting a market for your business?

One of the easiest ways is to look at the products that are already hot sellers. In other words, pick your area of interest (e.g. computers, sports, health, relationships) and start visiting sites like Clickbank and Amazon to study the most popular titles in your market category.

Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you have to sell books or information products, but knowing what information your market is looking for is the key to determining their needs and interests! Now, once you have a general market area in mind, you need to verify it by doing some keyword research.

Keyword research is intended to do 3 things:

1. Give you an idea of how much market traffic is available

2. Give you a list of targeted phrases to use in traffic generation.

3. Help you spot potential sub-markets.

So, let’s pretend that you want to target in the ‘health/exercise’ market, and you’re specifically looking for people who are into ‘weight lifting’ and ‘build muscle’ as you’ve found a relvant product offer.

Your next step would be to go to keyword research tools, such as WordTracker’s Free Keywords Suggestion Tool and enter in the broad terms that describe your market (‘weight lifting’ and ‘build muscle’).

Let’s look at the results for weight lifting:

The screenshot above shows just a portion of the results, but you can get the general idea just by looking at the top 10 results.

Keep in mind that the numbers you see are averages compiled by sampling reported search volumes from the search engines that actually make that information public. The actual number of searches on any given phrase may be much higher.

Just looking at this list, though, you can spot a couple of potential sub-markets. How about  ”weight lifting for baseball”. That’s something you could actually create a new product around.

Or how about “weight lifting gloves“? If there’s a market for gloves, what other accessories related to weight lifting do people purchase online? Now, let’s look at build muscle:

This is interesting! You see, now, that you have two related concepts  ”weight lifting” and “build muscle”, but the “build muscle” phrase connects to additional potential markets.

The reason why can be seen in this search phrase: “build muscle without weights”. People can build muscle by lifting weights, but not everyone wants to lift weights in order to build muscle. And the good thing is..they don’t have to. You can build muscle by doing pilates, or riding a bike or working around the house.

Now, look at the phrase “build muscle tone”. Again, we see another aspect of a potential market. Some people just want good muscle tone, and not the bulging biceps associated with hard-core weight lifting. As you can see, this keyword research phase is highly beneficial. We started out with idea of targeting health fanatics who might be interested in weight lifting and muscle building, but discovered several other related sub-markets in the process.

What this allows you to do is move with clarity into Step Two. Now, you can decide exactly who target and what type of offer you need to put in front of them. If you’d put a weight lifting product in front of people who just wanted to build muscle tone ‘naturally’, your conversion rate would likely be much lower.

The End Of Part 2.

In the next part, I will talks about how to find and create an irresistible offer for you to ‘sell’ it online. If you have gain some tips from this article do comment below.