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Written on June, 3^rd 2007 – Yet another topic in my blogging without the internet experiment.

I hear it all the time from would be entrepreneurs of both the off and online persuasion, “the next great idea”.  This is usually followed by a statement like, “if I just had the money/resources/support to get it done”.  Now don’t get me wrong creating a new product or concept can indeed be a great way to become successful and hell rich.

What I think gets lost on people though today is how many opportunities are sitting right out in the open.  I actually find it humorous when someone tells me their idea with utmost secrecy and swares me to absolute silence.  They are so worried someone will “steal their idea”.  The reality is you never own an idea, you may have one and you may or may not act on it but rest assured you are probably not the first to think about it.

I have done consulting and training conference calls and given out multi million dollar ideas, got all kind so “oh wow” reactions, yet I don’t think a single person has ever acted on any of them.  Ideas and opportunities are everywhere; the key is knowing what to do with them and how to maximize them!  In other words how to use an idea to create money!

Most people would do best to start out at least using existing systems to create initial success with.  Online this is even more the case.  There are so many platforms to build on today on the internet many are free or so low cost you have to be insane not to start off with them.

Things like

• Contextual Ads
• Affiliate Programs
• Social Network Platforms
• Paid Blogging Services

Just to name a few that can be interconnected to basically create money from nothing!  Seriously today anyone that can think independently and be just a bit creative can create income with an initial investment of only a few hundred dollars or less.

So my question for you today is what opportunities do you see and where do you look for them?  Just driving on the highway I see opportunities to exploit vertical niches.  I see them in bill boards, small business store fronts and hear them on the radio.

Do you?  Do you realize that what everyone is blogging about is not always the idea that can make you the most profit?  The key is to take the knowledge you can gain from blogs, internet marketing training programs, podcasts, etc and find your own niches to exploit. 

Here are two niches I have exploited online that I came by in the offline world

The American Idol Phenomenon - While watching American Idol with my family two years ago I saw a young guy name Chris Daughtry.  While I watched the show I am not a “pop music” guy.  I like rock, country, blues, jazz and even some of the older heavy metal as well.

Well when I saw Daughtry I just knew he was going to be huge and better I liked his music.  I put together a site, started building a mailing list.  Today I have about 30,000 fans on a mailing list.  I have made thousands on Google adSense and Yahoo Publisher off the site and sold thousands of CDs. 

Part of the lesson is this was a side project, one that added more income to my Schedule C last year then many middle income Americans earn in an annual salary.  Yet as a side project I had to pick something I liked.  This year I picked the winner (Daughtry did not even win when he was on) in the try out phase but no one on the show reached me personally so I did not put any effort there.  There is a lesson there as well, do something you take some personal interest in!

My Inexpensive Wine Site – Three years ago I was going through the pain of annual taxes with my accountant.  Despite prepayments and extra withholding I had to pay in a lot of additional taxes.  I hate taxes; I think that governments (all governments) are the biggest waster of resources and money on the planet! 

How does this relate to wine?  Well my accountant started to point out that I should look for more things I can deduct.  One of my solutions was to make a simple wine review site and review bottles of wine at or close to the 10 dollar price point.  This was easy I drink wine often and while I do at times drink more expensive wines I tend to drink mostly everyday wine.

I also knew that good reviews of lower cost wine were hard to find and that the typical “89 points, flavors of plum, tobacco and anise”, etc were not much use to many people who just want to know what wines in their price range are good, what foods they pair with and what wines they are similar to that they may have tried before.

So I created my own review method for inexpensive wine based on

• Not Recommended
• Recommended
• Highly Recommended
• Highest Recommendation

As scoring levels these are much easier for a novice to understand then say 84 or 91.   I started to review wines, keep track of the cost of the wine and put adSense on the site and added an email list.

So what was the real goal?  To loose money at least on paper anyway I figured I would make some money but never cover the cost of the wine.  The reality is the site soon was ranking well, (currently number one on Google for “inexpensive wine”) my list grew and I got tons of long tail traffic all because of the names of the different wines and people searching by brand.

I do this type of thing all the time with fun little side projects for myself.  A lot of my friends are impressed; they think I am some sort of “Internet Master” that uses complicated technology the average person can’t understand.  The truth is both of these projects could have been done by an 8^th grader of average intelligence.  OK well they can’t buy or drink wine but you get my point.

The key was simply doing something I enjoyed and doing the basics of SEO, Revenue Optimization, Blogging and List Building.  Neither was really done the “right way”, I just did not have the time to do them the way you should really do a project, yet they make money, even when I tried to loose money with one.

Neither required me to build a new platform, hire a programmer or raised a dollar of venture capital.  Sum total (except for the wine which I would have bought anyway) I have less then a hundred dollars invested in the two combined so I did not need a lot of money.

These are just two examples of how you can build successful revenue streams and leverage trends with out slugging it out with the heavy hitters of Internet Marketing or mortgaging your house for investment capital.   So what opportunities have you found or do you see around you that can be exploited?

~ Jack

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