13. Business Keywords

I’ll readily admit that the concepts in this lesson are ones that I learned from Ryan Levesque and his book Choose.

It’s a great book that goes through the process of finding a business idea. You’ll find a lot of similarities to our approaches but when I saw how he used business keywords it was a true lightbulb moment.

The concept behind a business keyword is simple.

You’ll learn about SEO and search keywords later on, but after going through your business ideas, there has to be a keyword that people search for that also represents you.

It’s important that you understand this business keyword because you want to make sure you have a chance of being seen.

In his book, Levesque uses the following example:

Let’s say you ran a business that helped people with their memory. You might say that you help people expand their memory and so for you, your business keyword is ‘expand memory’.

However, when you search ‘expand memory’ in Google, this is what you get:

It’s all about increasing the memory of your computer or phone.

You could talk about how your business helps to expand memory and you’re using a completely different vocabulary than what your audience is using.

Instead, let’s see what you get when you search for ‘improve memory’:

That’s better and more in line with your business.

It’s going to be really hard to reach your 1,000 True Fans if you don’t understand the lingo that they use.

That’s why finding your business keyword can be so important.

It’s also a great way to narrow your business down to a singular focus. This tends to make people freak out because they want their business to be a lot of things and it still can be.

But starting off what is going to be your business keyword?

Odd Noodle started off as a Pinterest book so ‘getting traffic with Pinterest‘ was my keyword.

Now I can claim to have a lot of keywords but if I want to stick to one general one for the Dream Roadmap (as an example) then it’s going to be ‘start an online business‘.

I want to help show people how to start an online business that makes over $100,000 a year.

Simple and gets the point across.

Take your time to find the keyword that you feel will represent your business idea.

I Want to Show People How to…

We’ve already talked about motivation and the one thing your business must always do (serve people).

Let me tell you something. 

I’ve worked on successful online businesses where I had no interest in the topic. Once I reached a certain goal, I lost all interest in working on them.

Interest is different from motivation. 

If I lose interest, there is no getting it back. I have to care about something in some way to even look at it.

So if you still believe in motivation and even more so in maintaining interest in your business then you need to finish this statement:

I want to show people how to…

As you move along the Dream Roadmap you’ll see this statement works for your Hero Journey and the Promise that you offer your tribe.

It’s a simple and yet complicated statement.

It’s simple because you can finish it in a couple of words.

It’s complicated because many of you will want to add everything under the sun.

Because you’re creating an education business (info products) I like to use “show people how to” in the statement.

That gives it more meaning along with your business. It helps you stay focused on realizing that you need to show people how to achieve a transformation (you’ll learn more about this later).

In the previous lesson, you uncovered some business keywords that fit with your business ideas.

Those keywords should plug right into that statement.

I want to show people how to build an online business.

I want to show people how to lose weight with keto.

I want to show people how to take better pictures with their iPhone.

We looked at the succulents site earlier.

That site can have a very simple statement.

I want to show people how take care of their succulents (succulents care).

Simple, right?

That’s all you need for the basis of your idea.

After that, you need to see how much you really care about that statement.

Do you really care about helping people take care of their succulents? If you don’t then how can you wake up every single day hoping to serve them to the best of your ability?

If you already know the concept of Why for your business, we will get into that stuff later. It goes much deeper than this simple statement but if you can’t get past this statement, the Why will be impossible.

If you want to make this systematic then look at the Dream Roadmap workbook and check off each column that fits for your statement.

  1. Passion: Do you believe in this statement?
  2. Interests: Are you interested in this statement?
  3. Skills: Do you have the skills to make this statement a reality?
  4. Opportunities: Is there a great opportunity by following through on this statement?

You’re doing this to add more clarity to your business. If you know where you’re going you have a better chance of getting there.

What About Multi-Niche Businesses?

Some of you might already have sites that are established where you talk about a number of different things.

What do you do in this case if you’re trying to find a keyword?

I don’t think there is any need to panic.

I would just take a step back and look at your topics and treat each one as an individual business idea.

Then from there see if you can find keywords that work for you within those different topics.

The goal is to see if there is one topic that you can focus on for a while as your business. The reason why you’d do this is that you want to be able to find that one specific person that you’re going to talk to and that requires focused messaging.

Assuming all of the topics tie in together in some way, over time you can expand into each topic as if it’s another aspect of your business.

It’s similar to Amazon starting off with books, perfecting that aspect of things, and then branching out.

However, if the topics can’t really be tied in together (don’t stretch yourself trying to make it happen), then I would consider letting those topics die on the site while you focus on the ones that can work together or I would branch those off into separate sites if you feel you have the energy to pursue them.

An example would be my site Thrive/Strive.

It covers the following:

  • yoga
  • workout
  • weight loss

If I want to push this into a 6-figure business (without ads) then it would be best if I focus in one of those topics and find the specific keyword that I’m going to start off with.

However, since they are all relatable enough where I can transition someone that buys a diet product over to a fitness product, eventually I can make them all sub-businesses (mini-businesses) on the site.

It’s a different story if I ran a site that talked about travel, organization, canning, and fashion.