Small Business Ideas

I’m not a business consultant and I don’t give business advice. I don’t teach or consult or coach. I don’t have any product to sell to you.

However some people have asked me what small business ideas I have found useful. So I’m passing along these ideas as news, as journalism, not as advice. Hopefully these concepts will help you come up with your own ideas to grow your business, now or in the future.

These ideas can be applied to just about any business, whether you are offering a product or a service, or both.

The first idea may appear simple at first glance, yet it can have a profound effect on your success in any market.

Simply put, the idea is to find a way to offer way more value to the customer than they are currently receiving from a particular market.

When you create an enormous amount of value for others, you may suddenly find yourself with a flood of paying customers.

This was not my original idea. I learned it in a book by Jay Abraham that cost several hundred dollars. When I bought that book, everyone laughed and said no “book” could be worth that price. They said I was dumb for paying that much. I explained that I wasn’t paying for the paper and ink, I was paying for information and ideas and test results. That it was a collection of his tested advertisements and proven methods and ideas that had already created great results. Why reinvent the wheel?

People still thought I was crazy. However I learned plenty of good ideas from that book. I also received a lot of motivation from it. After digesting all of the ideas and information I had learned, I went on to create a new product that sold over 100,000 units.

Not bad. Thanks Jay.

This small business idea has two parts.

Part one is about providing great value to other people. This is Jay’s major message and one I heartily agree with. The best quote on this idea I’ve read is found in an interview that Janet and Chris Attwood did with Jay for their book “The Passion Test.” (Fascinating book) In that interview Jay said, “The key of all life is value. Value is not what you get, it’s what you give. It’s figuring out what’s important to other people, not just you.”

That is incredibly important advice. Every business should engrave those words on a plaque and hang it on the wall.

And yet, everyone goes about this backwards. It is human nature. They focus on themselves and what they want. But your customers don’t care what you want. They are not going to buy from you just because you want to make money and live the good life. On the other hand, if you offer them massive value for their money, they will gladly give some of that money to you in exchange for that high value.

Part two is a specific example of how I used this concept.

This can work in a variety of ways but here is the one method that worked for me. Basically you take something that normally has a very high value and high cost, and you sell it or a reworked version of it at a fire sale price. This provides massive value to your market, and customers beat a path to your door.

What I did was turn an expensive seminar into a bargain priced home-study course.

Years ago I would speak at conferences and seminars that cost thousands of dollars for those attending, and that paid me thousands of dollars to give the talks.

I wanted to reach a wider audience and also provide incredible value to the market. So I had my talks recorded, then transcribed onto a computer. I expanded upon that work by writing additional advice and information, and also added in copies of all of the hand-out materials that I normally gave to people at the seminars.

Now I had all of the same information from the expensive seminar, plus even more good stuff, and it was packaged in an affordable home-study workbook. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for the seminar fee, plus the cost of airfare and hotels and other travel expenses, people could now read the material in a humble workbook at home in their spare time.

I also gave massive value in the guarantee. Instead of a thirty day guarantee, I offered a full year. Wayne Dyer once said “It is never crowded along the extra mile.” With my guarantee I wanted to go farther than the extra mile (a month). I wanted to go the extra 12 miles (12 months).

The result was, the product sold like crazy to all of the people who had wanted to attend some of these seminars but had been too busy or had their funds tied up in other things, or were skeptical, etc.

That’s great for me but…

How could you use these ideas in your own small business?

Here is the best part. You can still use this concept of providing massive value. It never goes out of style. Think about the market or niche that you are interested in. What do people in that market buy? What do they want? How could you help them? Put yourself in their shoes. It is easier if you choose a market that you yourself enjoy, know and love. That makes it more likely you will understand and have empathy with others in the same market.

Find out what your market wants and then get creative with a way to provide massive value at a bargain cost.

Part three is to find a way to provide this massive value on an ongoing basis. Otherwise you don’t have a business, you just have a sale or a promotion or a launch that cannot last forever. That is what I did with that workbook. It was a promotion I launched and it eventually ran its course and that was the end of it. Not that I’m complaining.

Years ago, Dan Kennedy interviewed me and had me speak at his Super Conference along with Jim Rohn and Joe Sugarman, etc. One of the best questions he asked me was, “What was one of your biggest mistakes?” I answered by saying that one really big mistake was to sell 100,000 units of something that was a one-off purchase, instead of a “consumable” item that people buy on a monthly basis. This kind of repeat-use product can be anything from toothpaste to a membership website to an auto-ship coffee-of-the-month club.

Luckily I did develop some ongoing businesses for that customer base of 100,000 buyers. One product was a monthly printed newsletter. It had thousands and thousands of customers who renewed their paid subscription year after year. That worked well. However I retired from business training and that whole busy-ness. I found there was much more fun and more freedom in simply owning some websites on simple, everyday topics that have nothing to do with business or marketing.

Speaking of which, that brings us to…

The Business Where You Don’t Sell Anything To Anyone

This next idea might be one of the best small business ideas you will ever see. It has very low risk, you can start it with only your time and effort – yet it can grow into a substantial income producing venture.

It is a business model where you provide great value on the Internet for free and earn an ongoing income from that value for years into the future.

Here is the idea.

If you visit Google’s Adsense information page, they give examples of websites that are earning money. What these sites all have in common is that they provide massive value to people who go online looking for information.

You can create a website about your hobby or profession or anything you find interesting. Make sure you find a balance of both what you like and what the market wants. When you do that you have found the sweet spot. Once your website grows and grows over time, you will start to get visitors who appreciate all of the value you have created. While visitors are on your site, some will click on ads and you will earn some money from Google.

How much can you earn? It all depends on how much value you create. Large sites with tons of pages of valuable information obviously earn the most income. Small sites with only a little bit of information earn a little bit of income.

To find a topic, think about your own hobbies and interests.  Go through your home and take inventory of everything you have spent your money on. I mean everything. Make a list as if it is for insurance purposes.

Next go to a bookstore such as Barnes & Noble that has an extensive magazine selection. Take your time and look at every magazine on the shelves. You’ll see all kinds of hobby and niche magazines on an amazing variety of topics. If you have not looked lately you’ll be surprised at the selection. If a topic has enough of a following to make it worthwhile to publish a magazine, that topic probably also has enough of a following to make it worthwhile to publish a website.

Now go down the list and choose a topic that you think might be both interesting and also offer a good readership.

Want some examples? Okay but these are not recommendations, these are just off the top of my head. Some people own a computer. You probably do if you are reading this. People search for answers to computer-related questions. How about a boat, is that on your list? Or a car? People look up stuff on those topics. Do you sleep in a bed? Watch television? Play golf or tennis? Go fishing or camping? Is a baby stroller on your list? What about cell phones, coffee makers, barbecue grills, ipods, shoes, furniture, reading glasses, cosmetics, books, musical instruments, exercise machines, camping, jewelry, knitting, clothing, health foods, kitchen blenders, decorative shower curtains, scrapbooks, hairstyles, hot tubs, lighting fixtures, etc.

Visit a shopping mall or look in the phone book or on WordTracker.com to get an idea of what people are shopping for. Look for discussion boards and forums to see what people are talking about.

One person I know bought a beautiful and expensive crystal chandelier on the internet. Who would have thought of that? I was amazed. There are all kinds of websites out there that offer information about every topic you can imagine.

On the Google Adsense website they talk about a builder who created a website that provides free information and advice about home improvement projects. Great numbers of homeowners look for help online and they find that website. It gets a massive amount of visitors because it provides massive value.

The key is to offer value. There are many ways to do it but one of the most low-risk and high potential rewards ways to do it is by slowly building a very useful website and then later on working with Google Adsense.

The nice thing about Adsense is that you are not selling anything personally. You are a publisher, not a salesman. You don’t have any customers, so you never have any customer service work to do. You don’t have to answer emails, answer phone calls, answer snail mail. You never have customers visit your location. You can do this work at home in your pajamas or with a laptop while on a trip to visit the Hawaiian islands. And if you take a day off your websites are still there offering the great value to people 24 hours a day, while you are free to be doing something else.

It is not a get rich quick scheme in any way at all. In fact, a lot of marketers and business people don’t like it because it takes a lot of time and effort to slowly build a large and highly useful website that gets a lot of visitors and earns a good income. But if you are determined, and you love your topic (your hobby or passion) and are relentless about adding tons of pages of excellent content to the site, yours could be one of the next success stories. It’s all about the quality and quantity of your articles and web pages.

There are 52 weeks in a year. If you wrote one article a day of 400-500 words, five days a week (taking weekends off and also taking two weeks of vacation) you would have a 250-page website by the end of one year. That is five articles per week multiplied by fifty weeks (5 x 50 = 250).  You would be the proud owner of what is known as an “authority site,” which is one of the easiest and low cost/low risk small business ideas you will ever learn.

How could you write one article per day? By getting up a little bit earlier in the morning, or burning the midnight oil in the evening, or giving up one half-hour of television.

If this sounds like an interesting small business idea, you can read more about the process here, at the Google Adsense “Success Stories” page.

https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Success.html

Best wishes to you in your business efforts.

Note: Results are not typical and individual results will vary. Every business involves financial risk. Google is a registered trademark of the Google corporation and is mentioned here in the context of a news story; no affiliation with, or endorsement of or by this website is intended or implied.