If your business idea is going to fail because of lack of demand then you want to FAIL FAST and move on quickly. Spending longer than you need to on an idea that isn’t going to work is a huge waste of your time, energy, money, self confidence, and potential.
Be Found By The People Looking For You
You can put people into different categories:
- People who need your products/services, but don’t know it.
- People who know they need your products/services, but still don’t want them.
- People who want your products/service, but aren’t actively looking for them at this moment in time.
- People who are actively looking for your products/services, right now!
By far the easiest people to sell to are the ones who are actively looking for your products or services. If you can pick this low hanging fruit and get profitable from this category then you can look at selling to the other categories later on.
It would be criminal to start a costly exercise to educate those people who need your products/services but don’t know about them, when there could be a lot of people actually searching for you that no-one else is serving!
Your Plan In A Nutshell
- Find out what people are looking for.
- Find out how to give it to them.
- Find out if you can make a profit doing it.
- Create and implement a plan to act upon this knowledge.
Getting Started On The Right Foot
1. Got to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. Make sure the region is set to Ireland if you’re target market is Ireland.
3. Enter a phrase that someone might use to find your services/products (“dog grooming” for the case of someone thinking of setting up a dog grooming business).
4. Google will tell you how many searches there were in Ireland that had the words in that phrase on the line, and for similar phrases.
I’ve just done it and the results for Sep-09 are:
dog grooming 9900
grooming dog 9900
dog groomers 1000
dog grooming courses 1000
dog groomer 720
dog grooming ireland 590
dogs grooming 590
mobile dog grooming 480
dog grooming equipment 260
dog grooming course 210
dog grooming supplies 210
dog grooming in ireland 140
a dog grooming 110
dog grooming jobs 110
grooming a dog 110
dog grooming clippers 91
dog grooming services 91
mobile dog groomers 91
professional dog grooming 91
dog grooming business 73
dog grooming parlour 73
dog grooming salon 73
dog grooming table 73
etc
5. Determine which are the best phrases to indicate people are actually looking for you, and have a reasonable volume of searches (don’t get too excited about volumes… remember it’s for the whole of Ireland).
6. Put those search phrases into Google yourself and see what pops up. Are there lots of Sponsored Links (on the right hand side)? If there are then people are probably making money from those Ads. If there isn’t but there is a high search volume then maybe it’s ripe for you to go in there and be the first to have Ads up.
7. Check out your main competition (the ones with Ads in the top positions over a few weeks). Reverse engineer their sales funnels for free by pretending you’re a shopper and visit their website and see how they lead you into becoming a customer.
8. If you think there is enough traffic out there and you can compete with (or better) the competition create a simple 4-5 page website such as [YourCounty]DogGrooming.com.
The 4-5 pages would be:
Home | Products/Services | Testimonials (optional) | About Us | Contact Us
A simple one I’ve done for a client is www.dublin-electrical.com
Nothing fancy, but it works.
9. Create a Google Adwords campaign to run only for people who type in the search phrases you identified within the geographic region you cover (with Google Adwords you could set it to being your county or within, say, 75km of your location). Don’t forget that people travel to work during the day and could be searching during their lunch break, so factor that into the geography you want your Ads to be displayed in.
10. Analyse the traffic stats over a month and see how many times your Ads are triggered. Hopefully you’ll also be getting a few sales leads too.
11. After a month use this info to help decide whether you have a viable business idea. If there is a lot of demand on Google then maybe there’s something in it, if there isn’t then maybe there is still something in it, but you’re going to have to work harder to get those sales.
