One of the most important business lessons I’ve ever learnt
is to sell people what they want not what they need (or
what you want to sell).

I have personally spent 10’s of thousands of pounds learning
this lesson…

When I was running my business brokerage I sold a great
course to customers all about how to negotiate the best
deal for your business, you’d think that business owners
would love that right?

Wrong.

Business owners knew that they ought to learn that and
they felt the skills would be useful, but what they wanted
was me to do that for them, so I sold them that service
instead.

When I brought total business cart I sold a how to course
for people to set up their shopping cart and get their first
100 clients, sounds great right?

Wrong

It bombed, no one wanted to learn that.

An affiliate offer I was running in France was for a diet e-book
that stressed great healthy food and exercise, I thought it
would sell like gangbusters…. wrong.

What sold like gangbusters was a pill you took twice a day
filled with acai.

I could go on and on and on

So how the hell do you tell if you have an idea that people
want?

Here’s how I test my ideas for less than £100

1. I buy a domain name for the most probable main
keyword such as www.organicsiamesecatfood.com

2. I put a wordpress blog on that page

3. I go to google and type in organic siamese pet food
articles and get 4-5 articles

4. I post them to my blog (my blog looks like crap but I
don’t care at the mo, I’m testing if I can buy traffic 1st, I’ll
make that traffic convert later)

5. I set up a google adwords campaign with the most likely
keywords; organic cat food, all natural cat food, cat food for
siamese cats etc

nb get 10 keywords max here, you want to focus on the most
obvious keywords that have the highest likelihood of converting, if
it won’t work with these keywords it ain’t gonna work at all.

6. I set my budget at £10 a day (you can do £5 if you want)

7. I set the campaign to run for 7 days

8. I write an advert that I know will get clicks

New Discovery! Organic Cat Food
Free Trial, No Credit Card Required
Give Your Cat a Treat On Me!
www.organicsiamesecatfood.com

9. I wait 7 days and see what happened

If after 7 days ( it has to be 7 days to allow for variance in
days of the week) I have got a over 1000 impressions a day
and I have converted >1.5% of those impressions into people
clicking on my ads then I get more interested and do more work.

If not I forget it and move on.

This, of course, is not foolproof.

However I can assure you it is 97% accurate when it comes
to picking a niche that will go on to make you money.

Once you have a niche that fits the above criteria you start to
invest in more detailed research. For now though this is a
VERY good way to start.

So, got an idea for a niche?

Put it to the test.

Neil

P.S that cat food niche is real BTW I had the idea, put it to
the test and 7 days later new it was not going to work, saved
me a ton of time (VERY precious commodity) and £££