14. Go Where the Money Is

There isn’t much point in starting a business that can’t make money and since this whole journey is about creating products of a business to sell then you should figure out if your niche works for products.

Scrivs, I can’t think of a single product for my audience.

Trying to think of the world’s most unique product is similar to trying to think of the world’s most unique recipe.

If you want to make a pizza, what do you do?

You look up pizza recipes.

As you go through the $100k Climb you’ll begin to know your audience more and more. That means you’ll understand the places they go online and the people they listen to.

Your best bet for your first product idea is to do research and see what others are doing in that space.

You don’t need to find your product idea right now, but the goal should be to ensure that others are making money in the same niche/audience/industry that you’re potentially looking at.

Let’s pretend that I have a passion for succulents. I want to start an information business around succulents but because I know I want products to be the main source of revenue, I need to see what is out there.

So what do I do?

Simply go to Google and search for “course on succulents”.

Look at that! Right at the top is a site that offers online succulent courses.

Let’s have a look.

A $127 course on succulents!

Wow.

Did you think that was possible?

Well, now I see it is.

Of course, you can’t take everything at face value. Just because someone has a course up that doesn’t mean it’s successful. I would have to do a bit more research into the site and get to know it.

If it’s been around for a while that’s a good sign.

Also, sign up for the mailing list to see how the sales funnel is.

After a while, you get a feel for if this is working or not.

Fortunately, I know this site and I can safely say she does over 5-figures a month which is great.

Throw in affiliate marketing due to the niche (succulent growers need to buy supplies) and you have yourself a pretty solid business in a niche that many people wouldn’t have considered.

Another place to look is Amazon.

Simply search for the ideas you’re interested in and see if people are writing books on them.

If they are great, but you also want to see if people are buying ads for the books.

There is a healthy number of succulent books but there are also people buying sponsored listings for the topics.

Why is this important?

Because it means people in the niche are willing to spend money to acquire customers. This doesn’t happen in niches that don’t make money.

However, I have to be careful about how many people are buying ads. If the whole page is ads then maybe that niche is too competitive at the moment and I need to scale down.

Going through the succulents listing I see 4 sponsored listings on the first page. That’s a healthy number.

Seems like there is money to be made here.