[The two preceding posts suggested that you open your mind to entrepreneurship as a way to protect your income against the uncertainties of a full-time job. This post provides more specific ideas for how to do that.]
What entrepreneurial business enables you to avoid all the 21 negatives and achieve all eight of the benefits listed in the previous post?
You can accomplish all that through only one way I know of. You can sell products or services through the Internet.
Are you thinking you don’t want to sell junk on eBay for lunch money? Do you think nobody’s made much money selling on the Internet since the dot-com bubble burst?
You Don’t Need Your Own Product
Don’t worry. Plenty of small entrepreneurs have made tons of money selling over the Internet without selling a thing on eBay.
You don’t even need your own product or service to sell. You can sell someone else’s.
5 Big Advantages to Selling on the Inernet
Selling on the Internet offers huge advantages in addition to the 29 listed in the previous post:
- The cost of entry is very low compared to that of nearly any other business.
- You can reach large potential markets, even in many relatively small niches.
- You can research and test markets very quickly and inexpensively before you risk much time or money.
- You can easily research a great deal about your competitors.
- You can be extremely flexible in moving from one product or service to another, until you learn which works best for you.
Change the Way You Think About Selling
To succeed at selling on the Internet, you may have to make some important changes in the way you think. You’ll probably find the changes liberating, maybe even exhilarating.
You have to think about selling through written words, audio or video rather than through one-on-one or face-to-face interactions. This has some huge advantages:
1. You can sell to many people at the same time.
2. You can leverage your time and energy much more effectively.
3. You can scientifically test your sales approach and refine it until it’s as good as you can make it.
4. You can deliver your sales message with absolute consistency and at very low cost.
5. You can sell even when you’re sleeping or taking time off.
Another big change is in the way you think about products and markets.
When you’re selling for someone else, you try to find an employer that offers products you want to sell into markets you want to work with. If you don’t like either the products or the market, you have little choice but to look for another employer.
Think First About Serving Markets, Then Find Products to Sell
When you’re running your own show, on the other hand, you think first about markets. Then you find products you can sell profitably into them.
The process involves these 13 steps:
- You identify a potential market you’d like to serve.
- You determine whether the market is big enough to generate the level of sales you’d like to achieve.
- You determine whether the market can afford whatever you might sell.
- You confirm that you can reach the market cost-effectively.
- You research what the market is looking for.
- You test whether the market is passionate or needy enough to spend money on the kinds of products you might offer.
- You confirm the existence of successful competitors serving the same market.
- You identify potential sources for the product(s) you will sell.
- You begin selling.
- You test your results.
- You tune your sales approach – your ads, your offer, your sales pitch, your pricing, etc.
- You keep selling the same product or you move on to others.
- You keep selling to the same market or you move on to others.
These steps are straightforward. You can execute them without a big investment of time or money.
Could This Work for You? Three Key Questions
At this point you may be asking yourself three more key questions:
- How would I execute each of those steps?
- How much time and money would it take me to do that?
- How much money could I make?
Look for answers next time.
Stay fresh.
– Scott Silverback