The Thirty Day Challenge kicked off today. I will be keeping track of daily summaries of the key points for each day on this blog. This is kind of like my online notebook. Here’s my Thirty Day Challenge Day 1 Mindmap:
Content of day 1:
- 4 Critical parts to an online business
- How to overcome procrastination
- Brainstorming your micro niche
4 Critical parts to an online business
Or as Ed referred to it – Magnificent Symphony in Four Parts
- Market research
- 95% of mistakes are made by choosing the wrong market
- Many people start with the product. Wrong! Start by identifying the market
- Qualify your market by asking: 1) Is there a market? 2) Is the market interested in buying?
- Traffic
- 30dc will focus on 3 ways of generating traffic, 2 free ones, 1 paid for [no further info provided today]
- Conversion
- Conversion = get a visitor to take a action you want (ie buy product, download report, register email, etc)
- Ed’s performance –> 1 sale every 200 visits
- Product
- Once you have tested the market, and visitors are converting, develop a product
- Use the market to tell you what they want
How to overcome procrastination
Why do we procrastinate?
- Fear of failure
- Fear of success
- Fear of what others might think
How do you stop procrastinating?
- Break through the fear. Look at why you are afraid and let go of it
- Stop feeling sorry for yourself
- Break large jobs up into small manageable parts
- Ask yourself – If not now, When?
- Only focus on those things that are important. Forget about the unimportant.
- Make time to focus on creating, reviewing & actioning your todo list
Brainstorming your micro niche
This is about generating ideas, without worrying about how viable they are.
- Get a real notebook, and always write your ideas down as soon as they come to you.
- Start with topics that you are passionate about and that interest you.
- Dont just focus on the online/web world – look out into the real world. For examples, look at real magazines & papers
- Look at what people are selling through the magazines. Look at the adverts.
- For the 30dc, focus on a micro niche (niche in a niche), for example:
- mega market > shopping
- market > fashion
- market segment > designer fashion
- niche > alexander mcqueen [ie designer]
- micro niche > alexander mcqueen skarfs
- Use the list of sites provided as part of day1 to get ideas, for example
- The magazine section on amazon:
- Browse through the different topics
- Look at number of magazines per topic to get a feel for “market size”
- Scan through the magazine titles
- Extrapolate for there, brainstorm related topics, write them down in your notebook
- The ehow website.
- Select a category
- Look at the How To’s that are shown
- Spark other ideas from this > Brainstorm like with Amazon
- Springwise
- Lists ideas for new innovative products & shows trends
- Check daily for a couple of minutes
My additional tips, suggestions and resources
Procrastination
- Dedicate time to specific actions & use an egg timer to ensure you focus on the task at hand
- If needed, schedule activities in 15 – 30 min slots
- Switch off twitter, email, instant messenger
- Resist using the internet -> you will get distracted
Identifying your passion & interests
- Check your delicious / digg / stubleupon bookmarks, and identify the “tags” you have used most often
- What do you like reading? Look at the tv programs do you watch and why?
- In Google Reader, select the Trends view. Look at the tags you use most (tag cloud in bottom right corner). Also look at your “Trends”, in particular which rss feeds you have starred most in the last 30 days.
- Look at Amazon’s Best Selling Magazines
- On eHow, also look at the Top 10 eHow’s (bottom left sidebar on homepage), Popular Categories (bottom right on homepage), and the Top Requested Articles page.
- On Springwise, check the Top 5 Most Read (left hand sidebar, homepage, in the middle), or this great Top 10 for each Industry post
- Subscribe to the Sprintwise RSS feed in Google Reader
