A Great Idea is a Recipe for Failure

Biggest thing I’ve learned from the 30 Day Challenge so far:

A Great Idea is a Recipe for Failure

I’m great at coming up with great ideas for products, but that is the wrong way to approach internet marketing.

To summarize what I’ve learned so far:

1. Identify the Market
2. Test for Validity
3. Build the Product

What this means so far is that we just brainstorm for a while coming up with a dozen or more general ideas of niche markets we’d like to play in. Ed and the 30 Day Challenge team gave us a few different tools, such as playing around with the Amazon magazine list.

Once we’ve got a dozen or more ideas (I started with 25) we can use the Market Samurai tool to identify micro-niches, and determine if it meets some fairly stringent requirements for our purpose. These include less than 30,000 competitors, and 80 searches a day for the keywords selected.

Once a niche meets those basic requirements, we examine the current leaders in the market to see how penetrable the market is, our goal being to get on the first page of google for our key words.  Next we look as how commercially viable the the market is by verifying that people are actually purchasing advertising for the keywords, and that affiliate products exist for us to leverage.

Truth be told, this is a complete new way of thinking for me.  I’ve been the kind of guy who would have a great idea, build a product around it, and then try to market it.

Wrong .

So with the new game plan in hand, I’ve identified three potential micro-niches, none of them perfect, but pretty good none the less. I’m going to proceed with all three for the moment, until one seems to jump ahead of the rest.

I’ll be reporting on just how it goes.