How to Come up with High Potential Business Ideas

1. Here's what You Will be Learning: Hello, everybody. My name's Theo MacArthur on. Welcome to how to come up with high potential business or product ideas on the ability to do this is fundamental to success is one of the key elements to be able to spot opportunities and then come up with ideas based on those opportunities. But this is not talent. It's a learned ability on in this course, you're going toe to learn how to do this in a short space of time. Now, some people have developed that ability on. They are able to come up with a lot of successful ideas. But most struggle to come up with even warn actionable idea. So we're talking about 95%. 95% of people are not able to come up with actionable ideas, but as mentioned, this is a learned ability, and that's what you're going to learn. Now. I just want to tell you a little bit about myself. My online career started back in 1995. I've always been involved with affiliate marketing. I'm also an Amazon seller, e commerce store owner. I started teaching others to do what I do back in 2015 on to date, More than 80,000 students from all over the world have studied my courses. Now what you're going to learn here in this training is how to come up with low budget, high potential ideas. How to spot opportunities on take advantage of the latest trends on how to think out of the box on Think differently, how to generate exciting business ideas and potentially lucrative product ideas. Andi. How to validate ideas before making any decisions, testing new ideas with minimum risk and generating dozens of unique and catchy business or product names. Because I know from past experience that students could get stuck generating names on how to make an idea or a product unique with a few simple tweaks or even one tweak. Also, we're going to use some free on really fund software to develop the ideas now. Just to be clear, this course is not about launching. A business is about coming up with a lots and lots of actionable on potentially profitable ideas for a product or a service. So you're going to learn how to do this with these, and it's going to become like second nature. By the time you finish the course. You will have a whole new perspective on coming up with ideas on how to capitalize on trends on doing this without merely copying everybody else. All right, so you in a minute. 2. Being Different: Hello. Everybody know before we get started, I want to explain to you what it means to be different. Being different doesn't need to mean that you are developing something from the ground up. All right, that's one way of being different. But there are many ways of being different that don't involve anything as complex as that. So being different can simply mean putting a new Spain on something that already exists and something that's already popular. Now, for example, a regular flashlight becomes a tactical flashlight not by changing the flashlight in any way, but by giving it some new packaging. Andi new marketing So calling it, in other words, a tactical flashlight. This has been done, and it's been done very, very successfully, not just flashlights, but many things. Many irregular products have bean relabeled as tactical. Andi generated a lot of money for the people who thought up that idea. Another example. Men's watches. This is also a really life example turned into a consumable fashion accessory by creating a subscription watch box program on basically what that is is the customer subscribes to get a new watch every single month. Now you might wonder why on Earth. Would anybody want a new watch every month? But there are a lot of people who spend a lot of money on their appearance on, but they don't want to look the same all the time. They don't want to wear the same clothes. They don't want to wear the same accessories, and that includes watches. So when the customers subscribes to the subscription watch box, they don't know which watch they're going to get. They don't know what is going to be like, but that's part off the whole thing. You don't know what your watch is going to look like until you actually receive it. This has been very, very successful. No, here are some more examples. Kids popular activity, toys packaged into rainy day packs. I don't know if this has been done. This is just a NY idea that I thought up. No, what we think about kids activity toys on what you could give kids to do on a rainy day, we think about coloring books and color in pens. We might think about Kraft paper safety, scissors, paper glue, all that kind of thing that kids can use to keep themselves amused. but there are lots of other things. If you really think about it, some different things are more unusual. Things that you could put into packs and then relabel those as rainy day packs a market them as rainy day packs. Another example, And this is done all the time. Existing ingredients used in popular supplements are then tweaked to create a brand new supplement. And this is in fact, a lot easier than you may realize, because there are many companies that will create a custom formula for you. You can put your own brand on that, and that is your own exclusive product. Now, these are just a few ideas. As we progress through the course you're going toc more ideas on do your also going to, of course, learn to generate lots of ideas like this for yourself. So really, what we're doing is instead of copying everyone else, we're doing something different. But no, a radically different and it certainly does not need to be complex. It can be a very simple idea. Often the simple ideas are the best ones. Okay, so you in the next lesson 3. Thinking Outside of the Box: no. In order to come up with ideas, well, you need to be able to think outside of the box For anyone who's not sure exactly what that means. It means to think differently unconventionally or from a new perspective on this is from Wikipedia. To think outside the box is to look further and try not thinking off the obvious things, but to try thinking off the things beyond the obvious. For some people, this is easy. Im for some, it's very hard. It is something that's acquired. It's an acquired skill. It's usually acquired subconsciously over a period of time, but you can acquire it consciously very quickly. Within a matter of weeks on, Many of the lessons here are going to help you to develop the ability to think outside of the box. 4. Examples of Simple Ideas that Made a Million: hi, everybody, Before we go any further, just to give you some motivation and inspiration, let's look at a few examples of simple products that have made a 1,000,000 or a lot more. Now the 1st 1 here is our mates. It's an allergy alert. Rubber respond for kids? No. When Allah mates came on the market, the concept wasn't new. Well, first of all, rubber wrist bands were already popular, so that wasn't new. Allergy bracelets weren't new, either, so neither concept was actually knew. The thing that was new was the design, the actual design on the bracelets. So these designs are unique, so they were created to be completely unique. This as an example off putting a new Spain on an existing product. Next is the pet rock. No, you may or may not have heard about the pet rock, but it's goes back to 1975. No, all it is is a rock. It's a rock in a box. Andi, the creator. He knew that there were a lot of people who would love to have a pet, but they don't have the time or resources or whatever to look after a pet. So he took regular rocks. Put them in a box. They have little stickers that you can stick on them. His eyes. I'm called my pet rock. No, it only lasted about six months. It was a far, but it made the creator a millionaire. Now it's something only last six months, but it makes you a millionaire. Well, that's good enough. Next Born is skinny Me T. This is on example, off taking an existing product, Andi taking existing T different varieties of tea on a mixing them together to create a unique blend. They call it skinny me, even though it doesn't that really help anyone to lose weight. But it's a known fact scientific fact that the build up of toxins in the body has a negative effect on weight loss. It stops you from losing weight on T. Many varieties of tea have detoxification qualities, so by taking some off these existing varieties of tea, they didn't grow their own. T your grow. Any new varieties thes air, just existing varieties of tea and mixing them together make a new blamed. They are able to use marketing that suggests it could be beneficial to weight loss. I knew that skinny meaty is incredibly successful, and they now have other staff as well. Like chocolate. Okay, tightly temporary tattoos with a difference. Temporary tattoos. We're not new. I think Tat Lee started around about 2000 and 11. I'm not 100% sure about that. To be honest, you would need to check that up for yourself. But temporary tattoos were certainly not new that time. They were popular at that time, but the creator of Tapley came up with the idea off unique designs. So she enlisted the help off graphic designers. So graphic artists and there are so many off thes people who are very, very talented. But their services are really not that expensive. So she enlisted some graphic artists to create these unique tattoo designs on the idea for this came from the fact that she couldn't by any nice temporary tattoos for her daughter. They were all same old, same old horrible designs, which most of them are. So she came up the idea off, getting her own unique designs on creating her own unique temporary tattoos 5. Clear the Decks: all right. Everybody knows for this initial thinking stage, I highly recommend that you clear the decks. Very few people can be creative in amongst complete chaos. I know there are some people that can if you are one of those people, that's fine. But if you are like most of us, we find it difficult to be creative when we have a complete mess around us, not just in our physical surroundings, but in our head as well. So in our mind, if we've got too much going on in their niggling us worrying us, it is really difficult to stop those thoughts going on all the time, which really has a negative impact on creativity. So unless you are one of these people who could just switch off completely, ignore a complete mess all around, you ignore any things are going on in your life that you should be taking care off. If you're one of those people that can ignored all that. Okay, fine. If not, I recommend that you create unorganized workspace for yourself, no matter how smaller is as long as it's organized. Take care of any outstanding tasks that you have, you know, the things that you know you should be doing. But you really don't want to do. But they keep niggling at you, tidy your living space so it not just your workspace but your entire living space. Because if you one of those people that it bothers you, you know that you should be doing this work. You should be tied in your living space. You haven't gotten around to it. Then doing it is going, Teoh help to clear your mind on resolve any niggling issues or worries that you have If there any things that you know, you should be taking care off. So this is similar to outstanding tasks, but they may not be tasked as march, but it just could be anything. Really that's bothering you is worrying you. If you can resolve it, resolve it. We can't almost resolve things, of course, but if it can be resolved, resolve it, take care of outstanding debts. I'm not saying pay off your desk. I'm saying, if you have debts, their outstanding that you haven't actually done anything about you haven't taken care off any kind off plan. You haven't done anything. You haven't spoken to the company's all the individuals that you owe the money to. You haven't tried to sort anything out that's going to play on your mind. And I think it would do for most people. So take care of that so that you don't have to think about this all the time. So all of these things together is going to clear your mind on give You remind the space to be creative Now, in this initial thinking stage. All right, see you in the next lesson. 6. Getting Direction Part 1: Okay, Before you start brainstorming or anything like that, you need to get some direction. So you need some focus. Even if that is quite a wide focus, you still need some direction. So here's a few questions to ask yourself, What are your hobbies and what are your interests? What do you do a new day to day life? What you involved with? Who are you involved with in your dates? Day life? What do you really enjoy doing on? What would you happily right about? I think this is a really good question to ask yourself. What would you be happy to sit down and write a 1000 word article about? Just think about that. I think that's quite important. If you have a job. What part of your job do you like doing? What aspect of your job do enjoy, if any at all? Which kind of stores do you like visiting? I think this is also quite an important one. Do you like to go into clothes shops? Do you like to go into shops that sell gadgets? Do you like toy shops? Which kind of shops? Do you really? You like to go into What kind of places do you like visiting? Do you like going to cities? Do you like going to museums? Do you like visiting rivers and mountains and forests? Where do you like to visit? On what kind of people or who are the people you associate with the most? If you're a parent on a parent who is the primary carer off your Children than the people you associate with the most are probably going to be Children. Andi, do you have any pets? And if you do, what kind of pets do you have? Do you have dogs? Do you have cats? Do you keep horses, horses or no pets of such companion animals? Similar thing. Maybe you keep another kind of animal, a different animal altogether. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you a free software that you can use now to start getting some direction using these points here. So what are your interests? What do you enjoy doing? Etcetera, Etcetera, etcetera. All right. See you there in a moment. 7. Getting Direction Part 2: Okay, so I wanted to show you this really great tool for brainstorming. I only recently found it myself. It's free for creating 10 Popular its on going to show you what that means in a moment. If you want more than that, if you decide you need more than that, it's $3 a month. Let's take a look at some examples. First of all, okay. And this whole thing here, everything on the screen. This is called a popular. It under popular is made up off all these little boxes called Pop ALS. All right, So this one here, this particular example, it's about the effects of plastic on marine and vitamin. So you can see here that right in the middle, we have got the main poppel, the causes and impacts of plastic within purse, marine and vitamin. And from there, the popular has been built out. So we've got a Poppel up here named causes Andi. Then we've got all the different causes. But the person who was creating this popular, it could think off on going off to the right here. We've got solutions on from this Poppel here. We've got all the different solutions Andi going off here to the left. We've got the effect on the impact on going off from that Poppel. We've got all the different effects on impacts, so you can see how this is working. If we go back, you can look at some. Or in fact, you can click around on a few of these samples. These are public popular. It's so people have created these on Made them public. The one I just showed you there about the plastic. That was a really good example. But there are lots more you can take a look at. All right. So now you have an idea of what a popular it actually is and what a Poppel is. You can start to create your own. I'll do a very quick walk through just to save you. Time. Andi, think back to the last lesson where you spent some time hopefully thinking about the various different things that were listed, their interest hobbies. What would you happily sit down and write a 1000 word article about? Who are the people you associated with? Do you have pets? All these kind of things. This is going to help you to start to build out your popular It's on really brainstorm using this tool going to call this one glamping on. We can pick a color, which is going to be the main color scheme for the board. I think I will choose blue Click on Make It so. And now we've got the blank canvas to start building out the popular IT board on up here. Click the little cog new couple. I'm going to lead this one black because this is going to be the main Poppel. Could make it a bit bigger. Onda. We can type something here inside the purple. I'm just going to call this main Poppel the same name as I call the popular. It going to call it glamping. Now, you can also add an image to your pop lit. Let me go ahead to do that. Upload things at an image. I'm going to upload it from my computer. Okay. I want to move this up here. Now you can keep yours in the center is just a personal preference. I like to do it like this. I like to have the main one of the top. Okay, let's add another Popil I want this one to be a different color, though. Clicking here, make this one red. Now, this, of course, is going to be related to glamping. So I'm going to enter camping pods here, make it just a little bit bigger at a picture. Make out a little bit smaller on to attach these two together. We just want to drag across like days. All right, let me pause this for a moment. Andi are build it out a little bit. Mawr, Andi. Then we'll come back. Okay, so I built this. Pop it out a little, Bates. Now you can make this smaller so that you can add a lot more to it. No, for me on my device, all I do is scroll the mouse. I suppose it depends on the device. You are on the only to figure that one out. I've built out this poppel here by adding different ideas. So furnishings, your furnishings spare parts. There's a big market for that now, buying and selling. If you were in the position where you could buy used your it's perhaps refurbish them on, then sell them again for a profit on from furnishings. I've expanded a little bit further added a couple of ideas. Soft furnishings, that's all the rugs on the bedding and that sort of thing because you're furnishings are not the same as regular modern furnishings. People want the right kind of rugs, the right kind off furnishings and bedding. They want the authentic you feel the same applies to accessories. So the your accessories like crockery. All this kind of thing are actually quite expensive because again, people want to kit out their year to feel like a really authentic Mongolian your, especially if they are using it for commercial purposes. So renting out to people the years experience. So the whole package, not just the year it itself, but everything inside it is tailored towards the actual experience. So you're getting the idea here now quickly, let me show you. This is going to save you a bit of time. You can duplicate any Poppel quick on it. Now you can't just right click or select copy from your keyboard doesn't seem to work. You need to go up here, go to edit Copy Poppel, then go back to Eddie to gain paced Poppel. And that gives you a jubilee. Kirch although it doesn't give you the duplicate size. Unfortunately, you need to adjust it un to connect and create a new Poppel at the same time, you can simply drag down like this on a new papa was being created. Now with the pay plan, I get the feeling that you're going to get a lot more color choices on other things that you can do that you don't get with the free plan I haven't got the paper on yet. I probably will, though, because $3 a month for such a useful tool. I think it's worth it. You can dilly just by clicking on the little Cross. No, I think that adding images to your main pop ALS you wouldn't be able to add them to all of the pop ALS. But to your main pop ALS. I think that is really helpful just to have that visual, that extra visual aid. I think it helps a lot with creativity. All right, so that's pop lit 8. Things to Take into Consideration: Let's take a look at some things to consider When you start to come up with ideas, there are a few things that you want to ask yourself on. The 1st 1 I have here is Is it social media friendly? Why does this matter? It matters because it is so much more difficult to a launch. Anything that you cannot launch on social media. Andi, especially Facebook. If you can't use Facebook to get exposure for your new idea, your new product, your new business, whatever it is is going to be more difficult for you. It can be done. I'm not saying it can't be done. It's just is more difficult. So that's the first consideration. So what do I mean? By social media Friendly versus no social media friendly, social media friendly is all your regular products. Toys, household products, outdoor products, travel, most beauty gadgets and jewelry and watches and fashion services. But no all on digital products, but no all on things that are no social media friendly supplements, but not all its at Facebook's discretion, whether they allow you to promote supplements on their platform. So they're going to look at the supplement on they're going to decide whether or no you can promote that on their platform. Adult products needs no explanation. Weapons as kind of obvious surveillance and spying stuff. So any kind of surveillance stuff, even domestic CC TV stuff, any spying or tracking devices for mobile phones and that kind of thing. This is not permitted. Loans. Tobacco and alcohol dating is also restricted and virtually prohibited. Financial services on that means anything like promoting credit cards or that kind of thing . Financial trading on any gambling with real money. I've covered their most of what is either no allowed or is restricted meeting that you would need special permission. I've covered most of it there, but you should go to facebook dot com for such policies. For such odds, Teoh get even more information. No, these are the policies per paid advertising, but they still apply to any kind of promotion. But you're doing on Facebook, all right. No consideration number two is Is it low cost startup? This is going to be, I think, pretty important if you are in no unexperienced entrepreneur, so you're no experienced in coming up with business ideas and executing them on bringing them to market launching a new business. It's probably a very good idea to go for a low cost startups. So the questions you should ask yourself is, Do you need to buy equipment? Do you need to invest in any product development and do you need to enlist in paid help? So some examples here local start up existing product with just some new packaging on a new Spain. So a new marketing angle online coaching on services in four products and DVDs, our membership site Absence software can be low. Start up if you or a partner that you have is able to develop the apple, the software, not local, start up developing a product from scratch that costs a lot of money. Ah, something that requires special equipment or premises, something that requires expensive software. Some software's can run into the thousands, even tens of thousands, on an example of that I can think off. Is this a company that's more than one? Actually, they're quite a few. Do this now where they do horoscopes so you can get like horoscopes by text and that kind of thing online. They have very sophisticated software. It's all generated automatically so very sophisticated software most likely costing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. But these companies, some of them, are doing 2030 40 $50,000 a day in turnover. However, the point I'm trying to make is if your idea does require some kind of expensive software that's not going to be a low cost startup if it requires paid labor. Of course, it depends on how much paid labour it requires. But if you're going to need, ah, lot of paid assistance, then is not going to be particularly low cost startup consideration Number three. Is it simple or is it complex? Simple ideas. One size fits all product. So, for example, a flashlight doesn't matter who you are or how tall you are or what gender you are, or whatever is the same flashlight. Something that's a non Elektronik something that doesn't confuse the user is easy to obtain . For you, that is a service that's one size fits all. So same service for everybody or the membership site just focused on one specific subject. Examples of things that could be complex clothing or shoes, and these are complex because you've got all the different sizes. You've got a high rate of returns, that kind of thing. So anything that needs to fit electron ICS I class electron ICS is complex because they have false. All kinds of things could go wrong if it is difficult for you to obtain, if this logistics problems in obtaining eight or ordering it or getting hold off it for you in the first place. If there are problems that's going to make it more complicated, maybe a service that has multiple different options, that's a bit more complex. Sometimes when you offer lots of different options, you end up getting nothing, because if the user i e. The potential customer has too much choice, they very often don't make a choice at all. Whereas if there's only one option, the decision for the potential customer has already been made consideration Number four. Can your idea be executed relatively quickly? The examples off ideas that can't be executed quickly on existing product with a new packaging and you Spain Online coaching services in for products, DVDs, other things that are not so quick. Absence Software takes time to develop usually offline businesses, usually take quite a bit of time before you can launch the business. If you're going to require funding that is going, Teoh slow things down a lot for you. If you need an in depth website with a lot of content by in depth website, I don't just mean a website with 345 pages in depth website and talking about ah lot off work and a lot of content that's going to take several months to do now. Later, though, we're going to look at what's called the minimum viable product so that even some of the things that would perhaps be not so quick can actually be executed quite quickly. 9. Identifying Problems Part 1: okay, So identifying problems or needs? This is a quote from a successful and well known entrepreneur, but unfortunately I can't remember who. But the quote say's the key to generating a lot of ideas Is toe form the habit off consciously noticing problems and identifying needs? Eventually, this will become like second nature. Now there was a survey done. They're just a couple of years back. Andi. There were a number off very successful entrepreneurs surveyed on one of the questions. Waas. What is the most important thing, the most important concept when coming up with a business idea and they were given a choice of five different things. I can't remember what all the five things were, but one of the things Waas identifying a problem, a need or a pain point on, then finding a solution to that. That was one of the options. And that was the option that Waas selected by almost all off them as being the most important thing when generating or trying to come up with a business idea. Okay, so where and how do we find these problems? How do we learn what problems, what needs what pain points that people have in their lives on in the various things that they do in their day to day life. Well, forums is a great place. So if you hang out in active forums that are in the niche related to the idea that you have come up with all the idea or ideas that you're considering, Facebook groups another great place, one obvious one is your own experience, for your own experience is not usually enough. It can be on some great business ideas have come through personal experience. Andi, I believe the AL inmates allergy responds, came about because off the sun off the lady who created Al Amaze, but one years old, she found out that he was allergic to a lot of different foods. So your own experience can come into play. But often we need to do more than that. We need to go further. Surveys Andi posting questions in Facebook groups So how do we do these things? Forums join active forums on spend time reading the threads. You're soon going to get our picture on idea off the problems that people have on Facebook groups. Same is above. Read the posts, read the active post surveys. There are market research companies that you can employ the services of these companies to do this for you. But this is expensive. And as well as just reading Facebook groups, you can post your own questions. So examples off questions that might be posted in a Facebook group with the intention off getting feedback that could hopefully identify problems and issues and needs that people have. Example. What's the easiest way to carry hiking poles when you're not using them? This comes from my own personal experience, because when you use hiking poles, you're not using them all the time. On the rest of the time, you've either got to find a way to put them somewhere, or you've got to carry them, which is really annoying. Ah, lot off rucksacks don't have a way for you to attach your hiking poles to them. Hiking poles, Even the telescopic ones are normally too big to fit into rucksacks. Now, some rucksacks no do have a way for you to attach them, but a lot of them don't. So it be great if there was some kind off some kind of device, something that you could attached to your rucksack. So if your rucksack doesn't have anything where you can attach your walking poles and secure them into place, be great. If there was something that you could attach to any rucksack that did that job, what is the best way to find a unique gift For a 10 year old girl? Getting unique gift is always really hard. It's harder, the older the person gets so the older the child gets or the older the adult gets, because the older they get, the more that they've already got. So people are always looking for unique Gift's. You could generate some ideas or find out some of the issues that other people have finally unique gifts. Does anyone here grow vegetables indoors? And if so, how difficult is it to do so? Not is directly asking What are the problems of trying to grow vegetables indoors? Does anyone have any creative ways to encourage kids to do their homework without being act ? So with these kind of questions, you're asking for solutions to a problem that can give you ideas. You are asking what problems people have with X y Z. So you know this is really helping to fuel your creativity to give you ideas on to find out what other problems the common problems that people have with a certain thing or a certain situation. 10. Identifying Problems Part 2: Let's take a quick look here now at how we could use popular it to help us with coming up with solutions to problems. Now here's the popular it I created earlier. The subject is glamping. Andi. I'd made a start with camping pods and your it's so let's say, for example, that I was going to identify problems with years. What are the problems that people face with their Europe's, both for their own personal use? Onda on a commercial basis, i e. As I mentioned earlier, renting out your it's or a year it to people who want to stay in a year have the your it experience. I created this public called Your it problems. Andi identified a number off problems that people generally experience with your It's we've got UV rays because I learned that the life of a year is 8 to 15 years before it needs to be replaced on. This is very much dependent on UV rays, so very much dependent on where the year is, what country it's in, or what part of the country it's saying. The stronger the UV rays, the sooner that the year it will need to be replaced mould and moisture is also a problem. Sanitation, because you're it's generally don't have any running water. That's really what it's all about. There's no running water on, generally, no electricity. That's part of the whole experience. Safety is also a consideration. Can be a problem because you're it's have log burning stoves inside them. No, all of them. But many of them do. If they're going to be used in the colder weather, they dio. Therefore, the safety aspect comes into it warmth. If people want to use the years in the colder weather, they need some kind of insulation in various ways to keep the your warm as well as the fire lighting as well. Because there's no electricity choice on cost off deck or in general, this is more about cost. But if you really get creative, there are some ideas that you could come up with their to give people more choice as well. On the next step will be to develop one orm or off these problems with their own public board like this one, for example, cost and choice of your deck or and this is where you can start to develop some ideas based on solutions to the specific problem 11. Validating Ideas Part 1: Hey, everybody, In the next few lessons, we are going to look at how you can validate an idea. Now, before you look at validating any ideas, you need to validate the topic. The idea is related to under validate a topic or a niche we're going to use to different websites to different tools. We're going to use Google trends on Facebook audience insights. We're going to start off with Google trends, so let's go over there now. Okay, I'm over on Google trends. That's just trends dot google dot com on go. What we're going to do here. It's only going to take a minute. We're just going to make sure that a topic or a niche is not declining in interest. So people are either showing, ah, consistent interest in this topic over time or interest is increasing, but we don't want interest to be going down. So, for this example, I'm going to use hiking now. You can select either search term or topic, but I tend to use topic, so let's go for topic. This is in the United States. We can change the country if we want to, but what we can see here in the United States is that over the last 12 months, that's what we're looking at at the moment. 12 months. That interest is going up in hiking. Let's check out the last five years and there's a steady increase on. Of course, now, looking at the years, we can see that the interest is quite seasonal. But even in the winter, interest is going up. We see down here and then if we look here, we could see the interest is going up even in the winter. But clearly the summer there's more interesting hiking, which is what you would expect if you want to change the country. So I'm going to check out the United Kingdom and once again over the past five years, interest is going up. Just double check go to the past 12 months. Interest is going up now. We can also check for the last 90 days, although these results are not really asked relevant. What we really want is more long term data, so 12 months and five years, that's the data that you really are looking at. So for this topic, we can see that there's no problem with interest declining or anything like that, in fact, is the reverse interest is going up. All right, so this is the first thing you can do. But you're not really validating the idea. You're you're just validating the topics, all the niche that your idea is relevant to. That's the first day. Our next we're going to do something similar in Facebook audience insights, and that's going to give us some different data, because here we're getting the trend. But in Facebook audience insights, we can actually see the size off the audience off people who are interested in a particular topic. So that's the next step, and we're going to do that in the next lesson. 12. Validating Ideas Part 2: all right, So to get the data that you need from Facebook, you first need to create a quick Facebook page. So lock into your personal Facebook account, go up to the blue bar quick on the drop down arrow and click on Create Page, select business or brand and click on Get Started. Now I'm not going to show you how to do this. It's a very simple process on do. You don't need to populate your page with any content. You don't need to create any header images or profile pictures for your page because you only need this page to be able to access Facebook audience insights. So go ahead and create a quick page on. Once you've done that, you can go back here to the drop down arrow on. This time, you can click on create acts you're not going to create an ad. This is the way that we can access Facebook audience insights. All right, now, we ignore everything here, go up to the bar at the top, click on the menu and click on audience insights. Choose everyone on Facebook, and now we are going to drill down just a little bit to find out how many people or get are very rough idea of how many people are interested in a particular topic. So the first thing to do is you want to choose your country. Where are you planning to operate your business? If you're operating a business in the United States, just leave it United States. If it somewhere else, you can change it. So all you need to do is to type in here. Let's go United Kingdom, for example. And then I want to remove United States in this case, okay, and now I'm going to stick with the same topic that's hiking. So here, under interests, I'm going to just start typing in hiking and see if it comes up. We've got hiking trails, hiking, boot hiking in Quitman, not actually hiking itself. But that's OK, because if somebody is interested in hiking trails, hiking boots, we know they're interested in hiking. I would prefer to have just found hiking, but this is gonna be the next best thing. All right, so I know I've got some figures I can see that 250,000 to 300,000 monthly active people in the UK are interested in hiking trails and that's pretty good because if somebody says they're interested in hiking trails, that's really quite specific. So they've got to be interested in hiking on. I would say that the figure the number of people interested in hiking in the UK is more than 250 to 300,000 because here I've only got people who specifically said they're interested in hiking trails. I hope that makes sense. No, What we can see here, anyway is that 60% of them are women, 40% men. But we've also got to remember that there are slightly more women than men on Facebook. And in any case, unless what we are going to do is specific to one gender, it really doesn't matter what the split or ratio of men to women is. So anyway, that's fine. 250 to 300,000 monthly active people in the UK This is a good enough number now. You don't want anything, Bill low. Ah, 100,000 monthly active people know if a topic comes up and shows a less than 100,000 monthly active people, you should probably reconsider doing anything within that topic because there may not be enough customers on. This is going to be really quite crucial to your success. In most cases, it is, anyway, having a big enough potential customer base. All right, so anything you see that is below 100,000 monthly active people. I would say that that is not enough. There is no upper limit. It doesn't matter. If you've got millions and millions and millions, that's OK. It's only the lower limit that matters. Okay, so that's a very simple way off. Getting a rough gauge off How many people are interested in a particular topic? It's not about the idea. It's about the topic that the idea is related to, because you need to know that the topic is popular enough. All right, so you in the next lesson 13. Validating Ideas Part 3: all right, now, how do we go about validating on actual idea? So we've looked at validating the topic or the niche topic Neige kind of interchangeable, really? But when you have an idea, So when you've come up with an idea that you really like on, you want to know, is it going to be viable or you want to get a good idea If it's going to be viable, What can you do? Well, the first thing in the obvious thing is toe ask people. So you're asking ordinary consumers the general public, what do they think of your idea? So how did you do that? Would you ask here? Would you post it on the Q and A board inside the course? No, you wouldn't, because everybody in this course is looking to generate ideas for their own business. You don't want your idea to be stolen. Would you ask your friends and family? Well, maybe. But you want to be sure you're going to get unbiased answers because they are your friends and family. They may not want to offend you by saying, I think this is a terrible idea, so you won't completely unbiased answers If you think you can get unbiased answers from your friends and family, that's fine. But if you think that your friends and family might say they think it's a good idea just because they don't want to offend you, then it might not be the best way to go about things. You can do a street survey that's an option, or you could use a service, and that's an option as well. So a street survey. Now I've done these. I haven't done it for a good while now, but I used to do it quite a bait. Andi, it's really know. As difficult as you think is completely free, you get a better targeting. You can get really good targeting. So, for example, if your idea is a toy or related to toys, you caught target people who are coming out off a toy store now. You wouldn't want to stand too close to the door, because if you do, maybe the staff are going to come outside and say, Could you move? They might not like it. You annoying their customers that kind of thing, but stand a little bit away and then you can walk over to them as they walk along the street a little bit. You can walk over to the people that you see coming out off the store. Now you can get a lot of data in a short space of time if you do this on a busy shopping day. So, like a Saturday, maybe even a Sunday Sunday's could be really busy in towns and city centres, so this could be a really good way to validate your idea. So you're simply asking people what we think of your idea. Andi, you're asking very targeted people. So you're getting some really good data and really good answers. You can get the 100 or so answers from people that don't know you at all. That's going to give you a really good idea whether I know your idea is a good one. The other option is to use a service so that our services that will do this for you. But there is a cost involved. The targeting is never going to be is Gord because it's unlikely you're going to find a service that is going to target exactly the type of people that are going to be your a potential customer. You're going to get fewer results unless you have a lot of money to spend. There's no work involved, of course, and there is work involved when you do it yourself. Now there are a few services online that you can find that will do this kind of thing on one of them is called Idea. Check his idea. Check dot i O That is the website address. If you just type that in and it will come up. Andi, you can even see a sample report there. So what they do is they will target people just by country and demographic. So you're not getting that targeting that you would get if you went out and did a street server yourself. Nevertheless, it can still be very useful data. You get the results in a couple of days. So 25 respondents, that's 25 reports coming back. That's going to be $49. I don't think 25 is enough. 50. That could be, You know, I thought $79. If you want 100 that's $139. Personally, I would do the street surveyed myself. That's what I would do. But if you can't do that, or if you feel very uncomfortable about doing that well, you know, there's lots of things that we feel uncomfortable about. Sometimes we have to step out of our comfort zone to get what we want and what we need. But if you really can't do it or you really, really don't want to do it, you can use a service like this. But as I say, I want to stress the results are not going to be a scored because the targeting is not going to be is good. There are other companies that will give you more targeted results so they will target a much more relevant section off the population off. The general public is going to cost you a lot more, though, so you just have to think about the cost here. Whatever you choose to do, I highly recommend that you do know miss out this part of the process. So asking people okay, another thing you can do is you can take preorders, so you haven't even got your product ready yet, but you take orders for it now. The pros of that is that you've got guaranteed orders before you've even got your product or service ready. You're also gauging mark demand. The cones are the with your payment processes. That's PayPal stripe any of thes payment processes that are certain rules you need to follow. So if you take preorders, you really cannot go longer than 30 days before you then deliver the product. So if you take preorders, then you need to know that you're gonna have that product ready to send out before 30 days with PayPal. I believe it's 28 days now, unless that's changed. But it definitely used to be 28 days. No, if you are doing this with service of some kind of digital product, you could have that ready quite quickly so you could take a lot of orders and then deliver that product two weeks later. It's a tangible product. You would have to be really careful that you were going to be able to fulfill those orders within 30 days. Now, if you don't get the kind of response you want to get with the pre orders and you decide not to go ahead, you would need to process refunds. That's not a big deal. If you don't have a lot of orders, of course, you can just hit the refund button. Refund, refund, refund. There's not really any problem with that. No, taking pre orders is something that is actually quite popular. It is something that's done a law. Some companies will take hundreds of five thousands of dollars in pre orders before they have the product ready. But they do know that they're going to have that product ready within a few weeks, maximum another way of doing it. That removes any risk. Tall is taking pre orders without payment, so these are not really preorders. It's just people registering their interest, saying they want to buy the product when it's ready. So you would get the email address. That's a good thing as well, because you're building an email list, and that could never be bad. That's always got to be God. And of course, you are gauging market demands. If you decide not to go ahead, you haven't got any refunds to process, so it is a lot less risky now. The coms are that when you take preorders this way, not everybody is going to actually buy the product so although you might get so you've got 1000 people who say Yes, I want to buy this product When it's ready, they submit their email address so they can be notified when they can buy it. Well, you're not going to get 1000 people buying it when it is ready. That's just human nature. So you should assume 10%. If you get 20%. That's great, but you should assume 10%. So if you've got 1000 people who submitted their email addresses, so yes, tell me when this is ready to buy, I want to buy it. You could assume 100 orders from that. Now here is what I would do in this exact situation. Let's say that we got 1000 email addresses. We can assume that we're going to get 100 sales from that. Definitely, I would get 100 products ready to mail out Andi. If there was more than 10% ordered, it will be the 1st 100 that gets them on the rest. Taken pre order with payment this time. Maybe this time you've gauged the market. You would feel quite confident in doing that, but it's better to sell out and no have enough. Then it is toe. Have a surplus that you then perhaps can't sell or takes a long time to sell because Europe money's tied up in that hope. That makes sense. All right, see you in a minute. 14. The 'Minimum Viable Product': Hello, everybody. I want to just talk to you a little bit about the concept off the minimum viable product. Now, this is leaning more towards when you launch your idea. So you launch your product or your service. But I wanted to touch on it here. Even though this course is not about launching a business, it's about coming up with an idea. But the reason I wanted to touch on it here is because I think it will help you to validate your ideas and help you to know whether or not an idea is going to be possible for you to actually launch when you get to that stage. All right, so what is a minimum viable product? Well, this is from Wikipedia, and it's, Ah, good description. So I just brought it over here, copied and pasted it. It's a technique in which a new product or any website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters. So the first customers on the final, complete set of features is only designed undeveloped. After considering feedback from the products initial users no, the last bit where it say's. The final set of features are only designed and developed after considering feedback from the products initial users. That part is kind off optional. So what I'm trying to say here is that you may already know what your final product or your final service is going to be. But you can still launch a minimum viable product without the intention off gathering feedback from your early customers so you can launch their minimum viable product for financial reasons. In other words, if you don't have the funds, our you don't have the resources right away to have your product or your service completely ready exactly the way you want it to be. You can still launch it as long as it's viable on four. Your early customers, you would normally charge a lower price and then put your price up later. All right, let me just go into this a little bit more. So what kind of things can you use the minimum viable product method for pretty much everything? Apse and software. And it's very, very common with absence off where many APS and a lot of software is released before it is completely ready. Very often in these cases, because of the nature of that kind of product. It is a beetle launch so that it could be tested with hundreds or thousands of users, so very often that's the reason. But the reason, often a whale, is to raise money through sales to continually on to develop mawr, that APP or that software membership websites with membership websites. This is also, ah, common method, so launching it as a minimum viable product, launching it with just enough content to satisfy the early users who get a lower price. So perhaps if you plan to charge $49 a month for your membership website, you could have AH special offer for the early customers. The early subscribers to your membership website off say, 1999 a month. Those early members would understand that content is still being added Now that is a really good way to start a membership website with subscription services a similar thing on with tangible products. You could do this to, for example, I have no idea if Allah mates launched their bracelets there, responds as a minimum viable product or if, when it first launched it waas the completed product, the finished product, as they had planned to have it ultimately, but just to demonstrate what I mean. So the responds over here on the left could be eventually developed into the responds on the right. Onda. The response on the left, if they were initially launched like that initially sold like that. But the company planned to ultimately make them like the response on the right that could be classed as a minimum viable product. It is still, ah, working product is still viable, but it's obviously nothing like the product on the right, so to give you some ideas of what could be classed as a minimum viable product, So if it's a tangible product on, do you want to have it in a nice box with your own design on the box? But that costs a little bit of money to do that toe. Have these boxes printed out with your own design on the outside of the box, but it's obviously good for presentation. However, you could start with just a plain box on a stuck on logo, a logo sticker, and that is very cheap. You could start with no logo on the product, so maybe ultimately you want to have your own logo embossed on the product. No, that costs money, but you could start without that. You could start with an initial version of a product. So if ultimately you want your product to do X or be like X y Z or to have this toe have that feature have this feature, but you could start off with an initial version. Andi, as you raise money through sales of that initial version of the product, you could then add features because that would cost money if you were going to be doing some development of an existing product to add more features to it or to change some existing features that will cost money so you don't necessarily need to do that. To begin with. You can start with the initial version on as you raise money. You could then reinvest that money into developing your product until, ultimately, the product has everything that you wanted to have does everything that you wanted to do. It is everything you wanted to pay, and at that point you be charging more for that product membership site with only initial content ready. We spoke about that before a subscription service with only the first month ready on. There's nothing wrong with that now. You would have to work very hard to get the second month ready on time if it was a monthly subscription. So in this case, assuming it is, you could start and launch with just the first month ready. Whether that's a service or a tangible product, it makes no difference. Just the first month ready on, you can start. And then, as I say, you just have to make sure that you've got the second month ready on time. But there's nothing wrong with that model on. This is very, very common way to get started. 15. Coming up With Unique Names Part 1: Hello, everybody. Let's talk about coming up with unique names for your business idea. I know this is something that many people do find difficult, because I do get a lot of questions from students asking if I can help them to come up with a name. No, I'm not really that greater coming up with names myself. Fortunately, there are free online tools that we can use. But first of all, let's look at things that we need to have in a name, so a name should be memorable. So it should be easy for the user to remember. Easy to spell, not too ambiguous. So a name shouldn't have another meaning that could mean something, perhaps negative. I saw this happen once before with a student of mine on This was a student who did no have English as his first language on didn't realize that the name that he had chosen was actually on offensive word in the English language. But it's not just about that there could be other meanings to the name that would be perhaps off putting to people. So make sure that your name doesn't mean something else completely different to what your actual business idea is about Andi domain name availability, because once you have an idea that you know you want to go further wave, you are more than likely going to want to buy a domain name for that particular idea. Now that domain name should be the actual name off the product or the service easy to pronounce. You don't want something that's long and difficult to pronounce, all right, now that you have these points down, let's go over to look at a really good free online tool that can help us generate names on and also tell us if the domain name for that name is available. 16. Coming up With Unique Names Part 2: okay. I am at a website called name Alex dot com, and you want to go to name looks dot com forward slash ap, and you'll get to a page like this. No, what you could do is over here. First of all, under extension, put a ticking dot com. Now Let me explain this quickly a moment if you are going to buy it. A main aim for your new business idea, which you really would need to do, because when you go ahead with it, you're going to need to create a website. At some point dot com is the best or the country extension that you are going to be operating. In example here is dot co dot UK. So if I was going to be operating in the UK, I could choose dot co dot UK Here is dot c A. If I was going to operate in Canada, I could choose dot c a. No, no. All the extensions are here, unfortunately, so if you want a different country extension that's not listed here, you would have to go to a website like go daddy dot com to check if the domain name is available but for the most common ones here. Now I want to tell you why you shouldn't choose something like dot or dot net. Don't l? Why or don't anything like that? Because thes are no what's known as a top level domains. Top level domain is dot com or dot co dot UK. His country extensions, but dot or dot net, that kind of thing. They are lower level domains. They're not top level domains as far as the search engines are concerned and search engine optimization but does something else as well. Regular Internet users will very often type in a domain with the extension that they are used to using. So many people are used to using, or most people are used to using dot com not so much dot net or don't organ this other ones like dot w airs and dot biz all this kind of thing. So what will happen is that you will actually lose visitors through having one of these lower level domains. It also doesn't look as credible, is not as professional looking on God or as well, by the way. Just to point out is really for websites that are known monetized, so they're not selling anything at all. Dot org's is more for information websites, not for selling anything, so that should definitely be avoided. Now what I'm going to do is I have here just joy down a couple of ideas. One idea here. Unique kid's toy kits for creating miniature worlds. There are other kids like that and toys like that on the market. But because you can buy all these little components Singley very, very easily from wholesalers, more from China, even from wholesalers and Europe. Another places you could easily, very, very easily makeup. Unique kits. The second idea I've got here is how to Party train and Al Packer. No, that idea came into my head because our packers are now being marketed as an animal that you can keep in your garden. They don't need a lot off space. They don't need a lot of land you can keep to al Packers. I believe, as to half an acre of land, which is not very much, and it is really a lot less thurn, say, a pony or a horse so they don't need a lot of land, so people are actually getting them now to keep in their gardens on to keep the grass down . And as a really nice, gentle and friendly pet, some people are party training. They are park. It's still they can have them come in and out the house. Some people are doing that, and it's getting more popular. So that's an idea that came into my head there. All right, so let's start. What we need to do is we need to pick some keywords. Some main words from the ideas. So for this idea here unique kid's toy kits for creating miniature worlds, I would probably use thes words. Miniature worlds on may be kids we can start off with. Don. I see. Sorry about that. We need to take this here. This box domain available. Okay, Now you can see here. That's it's come up with just dot com names that are available. Many of them are going to be completely unsuitable. But let's just scroll on down and see. I'm not happy with these. So what I'm going to do now is quick. Use keywords on click, generate a gain. Okay, So what have we got here? Mark Worlds, Maybe in Maggie worlds. That's really good. I know I won't get miniature worlds dot com on. The reason I know that that won't come up is because I own that domain myself. So in matchy worlds, I really like that. See what else we've got. So in much the world's would be a really good name for this kind of concept. This idea. Hot miniature dot com Not so much for this idea, but that's actually how really good domain name for another kind of idea. Miniature riel dot com. Again, that's a good one. Miniature men dot com That's a little bit too long. We've got to remember our key points here. Memorable. Easy to spell, no ambiguous domain name availability. Well, we know that we got that ticked easy to pronounce, so we need to remember these points as well. So there are some good ones here. There are definitely some good ones. Mag miniature is a good one, too. It's memorable, easy to pronounce, easy to spell. But of all of the ones I'm looking at here, imagine worlds would probably be my first choice, so I would grab a text file here. Drop this down in modules dot com. Mark miniature. I would drop that down as well and go through and find any others that I do like, but put them in order off priority. Now let's try the next idea how to party train and I'll Packer. So I'm going to take these words hear potty train. And of course, I'm going to need help. Aka going to leave everything else as it is quick, generate and see what we get. No. Well, this one hasn't turned out quite so well. But there is warn this one here portal packer dot calm. I can't really see any others, though, to be honest, that are suitable for that specific idea. If it was just more about training in Al Packer in various different things, not just potty training, then we would get a lot more ideas. I guess this is quite hard, but portal Packer that would do. I'm not crazy about it, though I probably wouldn't pick it. What I would probably do here is remove the word potty and just look for a domain that was more about training our packers or more about our pack of training. Rather than just about party training, the product could just be about party training. But the domain name doesn't necessarily need to indicate its party training. So that's what I would probably do here because there's only warn here, put our Packer that I would even consider and I don't like it too much. I don't think it's very catchy. Okay, so anyway, we've gone through a couple of examples there, and you get the idea. You can also try using the shorter names option as well. So if you're looking for something really sure, no. Most of these names that come up, though, are already quite sure. And I will say that it is harder to get very short names because those domains are very hard to come by. But you could try it if you want to. All right, so that's name licks dot com Forward slash up 17. Checking for Trademarks: before you use a name, you need to make sure that that name is a no already trademarked. And now in practice, if a dot com domain name is available, it is highly unlikely that that name is trademarked. Anyone who goes to the trouble of trademarking a name has almost certainly purchased the dot com two main Amos. Well, but you just need to double check. You don't want to run into any issues. So I'm going to show you how to do this on the U. S. Trademark search on the UK trademark search. If you are going to be operating anywhere else, just do a search on Google for how to check if a name is trademarked and then the country. So how to check if the name is trademarked in Canada? How to check if a name is trademarked in Australia, etcetera. So, first of all, I'm here on the United States Patent and Trademark Office websites on. Do you want to click on search Trademark database? Select basic word. Mark search End to the name here. No, in the last lesson are we were looking at name licks. Andi. I saw a few names that I like They're one of those was imagine worlds. So let's type that in and just find out whether or no, it has a trademark on it, leaving everything as it is. Submit query. All right, now imagine a world This is trademarked But the name I was looking at is the magic worlds with an s on it. It's not the same word. If I untech the box for plural and singular and just have a singular no records were found to match the criteria off your query. That means that there are no trademarks on the name. Imagine worlds within s so that's OK. And this is the result you want to get. You want to get no test records were found to match the criteria off your query. That's what you want because that means the name you want does not have any trademark on it . There is no trademark on it now on. There has never been a trademark on it in the past. That's what you want to get. No test records were found to match the criteria off your query. No, over on the UK trademark search website search for a trademark and you want to search by keyword, phrase or image. So it's by word, word type not similar. You want to exact Imagine worlds and we want all words. Ignore this right down. Quick search. No trademarks. Matching your search criteria were found. Andi, that's the message that you would want to get. And just to prove to you that this does actually work, I'm going to type a known name in here. Let's just type in Google. Scroll down the bottom click search on. There we go here, all the Google registered trademarks. So that's what you need to do if you are going to operate in the U. S. Or if you're going to operate in the UK, you need to check your name just to double check anywhere else any other country. Do a Google search to try and find the government trademark database, the searchable government trademark database. Now, as I said at the beginning, and I just want to repeat a game if the dot com domain name is available. So when you are using name licks and it shows that the dot com domain name is available for the name that you like, the likelihood off that name being trademarked is very, very small. But you should still double check 18. Using Angles Part 1: Hi, everybody. I'd like to introduce you to angles. So what is an angle? It's a technique used by affiliate marketers. Or let me rephrase that. It's a technique used by a small percentage of affiliate marketers. Most would be affiliate marketers don't make any money at all. Andi. The savvy ones. So the small percentage that do make money on, especially those that are making a lot of money. Some affiliate marketers are generating $100,000 a month upwards in revenue. Andi, even in profits in some cases now, as far as affiliate marketing is concerned, I was an affiliate along before I did anything else it all online way before. In fact, I'm still an affiliate. I have a lot of experience in the industry on because I have been involved with the industry for such a long time now. I will probably always be an affiliate to some degree. Anyway, let's just take a look on Affiliate cannot change the product that he or she is promoting. If you think about it, he can't change anything at all. You can't change the packaging. You can't change the name. He can't put his own brand on it. It is a service. You can't change anything about that service, and you can't change the price. It's not his product or her product. But if he doesn't do something to make himself different, how can an affiliate compete among the thousands, even tens of thousands of other affiliates promoting that exact same product, not exact same service? The answer to that is Angles Onda. We can use this very same strategy as non affiliates to take an existing product on, do absolutely nothing to it, not even change the packaging. Nothing at all, but still be very successful with it. OK, no, the angle has nothing to do with the product, but it has everything to do with the way that product is perceived by the potential customer. If you think back to the example that we looked at about the flashlight, so taking a regular powerful flashlight Andi, labeling it as a tactical flashlight that is in fact a form off angle that's a type of angle. The actual product is not changed in any way, but the way that product is perceived by the potential customer is changed. Now, with that example, we talked about creating new packaging. But what if you could do something like that without even changing the packaging? So perception is created not through changing anything about the product, but through your marketing message about that product, on the content on your sales page for that product or that service. And once again just to remind you this course is about generating ideas. This course is not about launching your product or your service. Your business is about generating the ideas. But the reason im, including a section about angles, is because I think this will help you to come up with more ideas on to be able to put ideas into practice, to execute ideas that you perhaps thought you weren't able to execute because you didn't have or you don't have the financial resources or the resources to make changes to an existing product. So by understanding angles, I think that this is going to help you come up with a lot more viable ideas. 19. Using Angles Part 2: all right to explain things a little bit further to understand angles, you need to know about the life. Force eight on the author, famous for coming up with the Life Force eight is Eric Wittman. If you have a no got the book cash advertising, it's really a must for any entrepreneur. You can get it on Amazon. So this is the life Force eight on every angle that you could ever think about that has ever been used, is created around one of these. They are here in order. According to Eric Wittman, You may know, and I may know, agree with the order, but I think that every entrepreneur would agree that these are the eight things that derive 95% of the population. No, here's an example. If we take these two off the Life Force eight. Care and protection of loved ones Survival, Enjoyment of Life on Life Extension There are a lot of products being marketed as survival essentials or as essentials for being prepared in the event of a catastrophe or in apocalypse whatever you believe or whatever I believe the thought is, there is a growing segment of the population who firmly believes that they need to be prepared for an apocalypse. They believe that there is going to be an apocalypse on. Do they need to be prepared to be fully self sufficient when it happens? No, only self sufficient but to defend themselves because they believe that when it happens, it will be every man for himself. Then there will be lots of other people trying to take what they have got. Now here's an example off a product that is marketed with that angle so marketed with the apocalypse angle. Never fear the walking dead again with these badass weapons, the zombie bit is a little bit tongue in cheek, but all the people who believe in this kind of thing on we call them Preppers. By the way, they are preparing for the apocalypse. All the people that believe in that they believe that they are going to need weapons to defend themselves. So the uncle being used here is the zombie angle. It's pretty much saying this weapon is so good that you're going to be able to even defend yourself against zombies, even if there are no zombies. Hope that makes sense now in order to come up with good angles. You need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer. And this goes back a bit in the course to where we were talking about going into forums to find out people's problems and pain points and needs. So you could use forums and Facebook groups and that sort of thing to begin to get an idea of how people think, because the key to creating good angles is to know how your potential customer thinks and know what your potential customer's needs on problems. Andi once Oh, are andan This next lesson I'm going to show you a couple of examples on. I'm going to show you how you can find lots of different angles yourself. 20. Using Angles Part 3: Okay, let's take a look at this 1st 1 Andi, this is actually a really good example off how to use an angle to create a different perception off on already existing product on the headline is How to fix a scratched DVD or CD. And now if we just scroll on down, we've got blah, blah, blah. This is what you do. That's what you do. Keep going down. And now we find the product that is actually being sold here are promoted here, Mr Clean Magic, A Razor which wasn't made for CDs or DVDs. Mr. Clean's budget based pad may be geared towards household cleaning, but it's also surprisingly useful when it comes to restoring the proper finish to optical disks. So, in other words, it's a new angle for an existing product. I want to show you this war. What this is doing is taking existing products like, for example, the Amazon echo, the tap tronics led desk lamp and more things here, some kind of cooker small cooker. They're smart plug are rotating oven, many rotating oven on a wireless charger. Various other things with the angle being used here is dorm gadgets. So these are being marketed as dorm gadgets, putting another perspective on existing products a different angle on marketing and promoting an existing product without making any changes to the product. Now, what you can do to find a lots of different angles alike, this is to go to any off the big new sites online. Andi, wait. Let me show you. Yeah, so any of the big news sites and you're going to be able to find a lot off this sort of thing. So you want to scroll down Andi, you're looking for things like this so sponsored where it say sponsored. If we click home base now, this is a little bit kind of risky because what they're doing here is none of these links are clickable. But this is a tactic used by some affiliate marketers. Andi theme. More risky thing about as though they are using the name off a famous person here. So basically the angle here is they are talking about Jack Ma, who buys a new startup for 250 milion, saying this is where the future lies. This will definitely be misleading. What they are doing here is obviously selling some kind of Bitcoin software or course so. Yet join us and start getting rich with Bitcoin revolution. No, there is nothing surer than the fact that Jack Ma do did not buy anything from Bitcoin Revolution. But the angle is to use a famous person to validate in a roundabout way to validate what you are selling. But that is, as I say, risky. Some of these affiliates have very, very high risk tolerance, and they will do pretty much anything to make money on suffer the consequences if they should be any backlash. So I'm no condoning this. I'm not recommending this. I just happened to click on it, and I wanted to explain to you exactly what's going on here. Something like this had to clean your TV screen. If we clicked on their, we would definitely find some interesting things. I'm really you only want to scroll down. But this far down the page, there's no point in keeping on scrolling down and down and down there is one there Quick on this? No, that's just a regular website. We've just gone to a website there. What were you want? Let me close this while we want Let's go back up here. We want something like this where we've got other abs. Andi links down the side. Here's this one again. Jack Ma. This will make you millionaires instantly, so that's definitely an affiliate again. Here's one here. This $99 drone is incredible. It's sponsored, you see, so the sponsored ones are the interesting ones. But when we click on something like this, we might find more sponsored ad Stand aside. Here, Here is one why no one in Hollywood wants to hire Jim Carey. So let's see what this is all about. Okay, well, I know what this is. It's one of these websites where they put a lot of content, the kind of content that a lot of people read vital type of content on. Then they monetize the website. So that's what this says. Drone revolution in Ireland. The concept is genius. Okay, so I hope you can see this. And I hope this is starting to make sense to you. If it's not making sense to you yet, I advise you go to some of the big news sites, start clicking around looking for this sort of thing, and it shouldn't take you too long to start recognizing angles, and you can use popular it to start coming up with some angles of your own. But you can take existing angles on apply those angles, maybe just tweet them a bit too different products for different services. 21. Trend Spotting Part 1: Hello, everybody, Let's take a log. Taking advantage of trends Here are some examples off recent or fairly recent trends. Tiny homes, tiny homes are know, as popular as they were for a couple of years there, they were very, very popular. It is declining a little bit in popularity now, and that's because, Ah, lot of people got a really sick and tired off living in their tiny home. So they did it for a year or so and then decided they just couldn't do it anymore. So that's not as popular. But for a couple of years, there were lots of opportunities there to sell all sorts of things that are suitable for tiny homes. Glamping, and that is certainly not declining in popularity is getting more and more popular on. There are different types of glamping, so you're it's are becoming very popular your holidays. So there's an opportunity there to sell accessories for your it's there. Also glamping pods, various different types of glamping, virtual reality men, skirts, human, great dog food, that is food for pets, that is such high quality that people could eat it. Emojis Artificial intelligence chat box. New Tropics, also known as smart drugs. These are supplements to enhance the brain. Denim is becoming popular again. Clean eating that's eating food without any additives. Plant based food and drink noticed there. I'm not saying plant based diet, because there are a lot of people who are no on a plant based diet. But they're still buying plant based food and drink because they're doing it for health reasons. So they may not be on a completely plant based diet, but they're still buying and eating. Ah, lot of plant based food and drink. Unicorn accessories. Indoor growing so growing your own herbs and vegetables inside. Smart backpacks. Detox tea. We've spoken about that by July for B I FL. For short, this is a trend that's becoming more and more popular on these are products that would normally be disposable. But instead of buying the disposable variety, you buy one that's non disposable. And this is all about the environment, of course. Subscription boxes. We spoke about subscription watches. There are tons off subscription boxes. You can get subscription dog toys and treats so you can get a different box of dog toys and treats every month. Just about everything you could think off, and this is a really good opportunity, not just subscription boxes, but just think about boxes in general. We're going to have a lesson on this to help to give you some ideas. Pocket Squares This is a fashion accessory for May I. Bride products are popular at the moment because, well, it used to be fashionable to have very, very thin eyebrows for women I'm talking about here. It is now fashionable to have thicker eyebrows, so there are lots of products that help women's eyebrows look thicker, and this is trending at the moment. Anti snoring devices. Yet that's very popular bail age. This is a product for hair. It's a type of hair dye, but it's a different type of hair dye to the usual stuff this is popular on. This is a trend at the moment. How can we tell? The difference between a trend on a fired is actually very difficult because you can never be sure whether or not something is going to last on stay trending for years and years and years. Or perhaps it's only going to trend for six months to a year, maybe even less sometimes take tiny homes, for example, there was no way of knowing that tiny homes was going to start declining in popularity. It could have gone on for decades. If you had started a company producing tiny homes, that could have been a problem. But if you were just somebody who decided to put a different angle on already existing products on market, those as tiny homes products just like the example, we looked out with the dorm products. So even though it's very difficult to know whether something is going to be a fired or whether it's going to be something that lasts a long, long time into the future, that should not stop us from capitalizing on these opportunities. Okay, so how do we find out about trends? Well, there is no magic solution to this. It is a case of keeping your eyes and ears open, but you can look at places like Google trends, news websites, social media, offline publications and niche specific publications. The High Street, of course, on another place that you can look is Kickstarter. So let's go over there now and I'll show you how I would use Kickstarter to try to spot trends 22. Trend Spotting Part 2: Okay, I'm on Kickstarter dot Cole. Now, just before I do anything here, I want to say that this website changes design quite a lot. So if you come along here and it doesn't look exactly like it looks right now, don't post on the Q and A board and say it. I went to Kickstarter, but I don't know how to use it because it doesn't look like the way it looked in the video . You just need to look around the page here to find the things that you need and I'm going to show you now the things that you need to be looking at. So along the top here, as it stands right now, it's along the top. We've got design and tech comics, games, food and craft music, publishing Phil and arts. What we're really interested in is primarily design and tech on food and craft. But we might also be interested in arts, and we might be interested in games. Let's start off with design and tech. Andi. This is the default at the moment when they come to the home page here Kickstarter dot com By default, it shows up design and tech So, first of all, this is a new and noteworthy. These are the newest projects looking for backing. No, this one here kind of surprises. May. It is a mechanical calculator. So just like a regular old fashioned calculator, Andi, it's retro. I think that's really the key. Here it is funded 1880% so that means it's attracted way. Mawr funding than it really needs is going away past 100% a better backpack. This will be a smart backpack. 485% funded. The looking glass Ah, holographic display for three D creators. Pretty interesting, and that is also one. Fires and over 1000% funded Alfa Body, made from food waste to grow easily in nature, have no clue what that is. It's only 86% funded at the moment. What you are looking for our projects that have attracted a lot off funding, something that's gone way above what it actually needs, meaning that people are really interested in this project in this particular product. However, this shouldn't be completely discarded because it may no. I've had the chance yet to gather a kind of funding that it is going to gather. You can keep coming back here checking back here every week or so, looking for other promising products. Let's take a look at this. 639 backers 27 days to go. It is a nice little gadget, in fact, but what does this really tell us? The clue for May is in the word retro. If people are attracted to a retro calculator, there's a very good chance they're going to be attracted to other retro design gadgets as well. Thanks to the mechanical key switches, you receive physical responses reminding you of your productivity by hearing on feeling the key caps clicking, clacking as you crunch the numbers away. So this doesn't do anything really special. It's just that it has thes old fashioned keys where you can hear the click, click, click or clack clack, clack, whatever you like to call it similar to a new old fashioned typewriter. So, again, what I would take away from this would be nothing to do with calculators themselves, but to do with retro on. I will be thinking what else? What other gadgets are there that are retro in design. So are there other gadgets that have retro variations off them on? If there are, where can I get them from? That's what I would be looking at here. Okay, go back here now. This was new and noteworthy. We can also click on view all to see them all, but there's also popular iconic pillow collection. 312% funded. Now here's denim Boulder denim 2.0, Performance Jeans, Revolution Allies. So remember I was saying that Denham is getting popular again. It's trending again. 810% funded Vector Robot. This thing is just so amazing. It's 235% funded, so this is no really attracting as much funding as I would have thought it would. You can always go by your own what you yourself feel, because I've watched videos of this little thing and I would really like one of peace myself. But what I want has got nothing to do with it. So this has been up for a while now on Kickstarter, I think Andi, it's only 235% funded. So at this time, people are not flocking to invest in this particular product. Let's take a look at food and craft monsters on sweets in animal pens. That's interesting. It's 887% funded, so it's not 1000% funded, but still, it's close enough. 277 backers Not huge cute, which in normal pins on this is 849% funded. This is telling us the enamel pins must be popular because we've got here quite a few off the pretty pride ponies in animal pin sets, which is an animal pin sets. So I'm definitely beginning to get the idea that enamel pins are trending at the moment. Now, almost there. That gives us the products that are not quite 100% but almost These could be struggling to get enough interest, but it may just be because they haven't had enough time. I want to take a look at this Alfa pot. Okay, so this is indoor growing, or we spoke about this in the last lesson on These are biodegradable indoor parts, so they're not made of plastic or anything like that. But I don't think that's particularly new anyway. As I said, you can keep an eye on these things on. When you see projects that are getting a lot of attention, so up too close to 1000% funded or over 1000% funded, you'll see projects on here. There are 5000 plus percent funded pay attention to those products and start doing some brainstorming based around these popular projects you can use popular it to record everything. 23. Trend Spotting Part 3: no as well as Kickstarter. There are a number off other really good crowdfunding platforms that you can use to help spot trends. Now, many of the platforms of this nature are for causes and nonprofits on Lee. But what I've listed here, these are at this time all off the crowdfunding platforms worth visiting that are for business startups as opposed to causes and charities. Kickstarter is the most well known now, Patrick Eon. That is more for creators off artistic type of products. So writers and authors, content creators, video creators, that kind of thing still could be interesting. Indiegogo, this is a great one. Go fund me crowdfunding fungible. We funder crowd cube and cedars. So right now this is the all By the time you look at this video, by the time you're watching this, there may be more. I'd like to go over to Indiegogo for a couple of minutes to show you something interesting very similar to Kickstarter. You can get some really good ideas here about what's trending on what people are really interested in. I know some of these projects actually get millions of dollars worth of funding if we scroll on down here, we can see the funding amounts that some of them are getting. So for example, this toothbrush for dogs it's got over half a $1,000,000 in funding. But I just want to point something out here. If we click on health and fitness, you're going to see the This is a really, really popular niche. So we've got a lot of really interesting products here with a lot of funding. If you keep clicking on down clicking, show me more. I just want to point out this one these devices to help you track things like your body fat , your body mass, index metabolism, all these kind of things. These are mega popular now, and all the other kind of devices that are associate ID with that kind of thing. So, as you see, this has raised 1.5 $1,000,000 nearly it's almost finished. Only has 64. I was life. But just this little gadget here has obviously generated a huge amount of interest. I just want to find something here that is really interesting. Yeah, here we go. Do a mountain on your sofa. People are always looking for the easiest way to get fit on these many gyms. This is a gym that fits in your pocket and as well as that compact portable gyms that you can fold up and carry around with you. These are mega popular now as well. There are some of these on here that have raised over a $1,000,000. A swell. So what is this telling us, really? That this is a huge, huge leash is a trend that's never going to go away because people are always going to be looking for the easiest way to get fit. So anything that can give people the same kind of results as they would get if they went to the gym every day. That is really what people are looking for. Anything to do with getting better, sleepers well on anything to do with snoring. There is a snoring device on here that's raised well over half a $1,000,000 battery free toothbrush that's doing really well. Spine Jim, Strong back and Abs for life. Here we go again, close to $2 million raised, so spend a little time on this. It's not just about these kind of devices. There's all kinds of things here. We've got green energy. We've got fashion and wearables, food and beverages, home phones on all kinds of things. Travel. Spent some time on this, just as you would do on Kickstarter. It's going to hopefully help you to spot some trends on, give you even more ideas. 24. Trend Spotting Part 4: Onda last, but definitely not least. I'm on a website called Trend Hunter on this is where you can see lots of different trends on also get, hopefully, lots of different ideas as well. And I'll just quickly show you how to use it because as far as I'm aware, there are no instructions on the website. All right, so along the top here you've got different categories. We've got fashion, technology, life, culture, design, etcetera, etcetera. So if we go to life that has a whole lot of different categories underneath that got sports health toys on oldies. Let's click on toys right at the top of the page. You're going to get the top 20. We can scroll down, though, on just take a look through, see what's here. Three D anatomy puzzles. This looks really God, but it looks like it's got some symbols on it, perhaps Chinese writing or some kind of Asian language there. Let's take a look to anyway, scroll down, down, down until you get to the stats for the product. So these are the starts for the swine anatomy puzzles. I think if this waas in North America or Europe, it would probably be called pig anatomy puzzles. Anyway, let's check this out. Popularity score 8.1. So that's pretty good. It's out of 10. But the score here is for all these combined popularity, activity and freshness. If we look at this year carefully, it's probably about seven popularity out of 10. Activity is about eight or 8.5. Freshness is 10 out of 10 so it's pretty new, and in fact, it say's trending this week and hot. So it is definitely very new. Interest is four minutes, so when somebody goes to this page takes a look at this. The average time they spend is four minutes, which is pretty good, because if the average interest time is very low on many or less, even two minutes or less, that's no enough time for people to really look around properly on this page. So something's putting them off. Your better toe have, ah, high number of minutes, two minutes, orm or even three minutes or more is good. It means that viewers air finding all this here interesting. So all the different pictures we've got here, sometimes there's a video as well. I do think this is really interesting, except that it's obviously not for the English speaking market. And we can see that here because here's the map with the distribution. So over here now, this shows you the demographics, age groups, male or female on what we're seeing here is 50 50 interest between male and female or more delays. It's not accurate, but more or less. 50. 50 Onda. We can see the age groups young child, preteen and teen Andi Young adult. This here is middle aged on. This here is classes, elderly. So these are the interest groups. That's what you would expect for the demographics. And it's equally male and female. You will see some products that are targeted at all female on some all male. This one is telling us that both male and female would equally be interested in this product. Okay, so what are my takeaways from this? Well, it did catch my eye instantly. I think it could be designed our little better. I think it's a great educational toy. Now what I would do if I was going to create something like this. If I was going to find ah product like this that I could in some way change. Andi make a little bit different. What I would have here is I would have different color is here or different textures because all the pieces here are same color on same texture. No, they've got labels on them, obviously, but to make it more interesting. Different colors. Andi. Some of them perhaps even textured just to make it even more interesting. So some kind of texture surface on the top. Quick look at one more just to do a comparison on here. Is this robot again? We looked at this before. One of the reasons I think that this is a not generating as much interest as much excitement as I would have expected it to. I think it's the price because it comes in about 250 or 299 U. S. Dollars. That's just scroll down and see what's happening here. So we've got a score of only 5.8 for this warm Andi. The popularity is about six. Activity is pretty low. It is new. It's not quite to the end. I don't know if you can see it, but the blue bar is not quite to the end is about 9.5 there. We've got both male and female being interested in it. Andi, the age group demographic, is younger, adult through to middle age. All right now you can spend a long time on this website, Andi. It's kind of addictive as well. There are so many different things you can look out on. Some of the things don't generate much attention, but some of the things are really amazing. And you can get some excellent ideas as well as getting to know the trends. We got lots of different posts here as well. Block posts Top 25 pet trends in June Canine health care kits. That's such a really good idea as well. Like a first aid kit for dogs. Anyhow, you know how to use this. Now, This information I've shown you just now in the last few minutes is free to access. But there is a pro version. If you want to delve into things in much more depth 25. What's in the Box?: Hello, everybody. I want you to talk to you for a couple of minutes about boxes because this is a major trend that is not showing any signs off. Slowing down now. A couple of years ago, there were a few articles in the media talking about the fact that this is a trend that is dying. But far from that happening, the opposite has happened on the trend is growing and growing and growing. So when I talk about books, is what exactly do I mean? We have subscription boxes. So the bark box that's a subscription box for pets. I mentioned that already. In another lesson, the bits box is also a subscription box. Andi. It's mainly for kids, so they get lots of different bits, just as it say's subscription boxes are almost always monthly sold. The consumer signs up to get a new box every month, but as well a subscription boxes. We just got boxes in general so you could create a box for almost anything on bond. Make that a new product, a brand new product. The purpose of this lecture is toe show you a lot of different examples. Just Teoh help you generate more ideas. So here we've got the birdhouse box building. Painter Birdhouse. We've got planting books, obviously for kids there. We've got science boxes. We've got craft boxes. We've got this travel box here. It's even got a pretend passport in it. Boxes are not just for kids. So here we are, on the left. That's a box for men. It's a men's box or we got a toy box there. Down here at the bottom, we've got some other kind of gift box. We've got boxes here for pre teens and early teens. We've got boxes here for girls and for women. We've got more boxes here. Look at this one. This is for single girls, obviously. Or single ladies, singles and swag. We've got a yoga box there. Doodle crate. This is no on established brand on. Do you get all different kinds of things for creating a making aimed at kids again? Ah, lot of boxes are aimed at kids, but as you see no, all of them. There are a lot of boxes aimed at different age ranges and different demographics. So you got boxes for teens, boxes for little kids, boxes for young adults in boxes for older people and the different genders, There's almost nothing that you can't create a box for. There are so many different themes, and as I mentioned, it doesn't not have to be a subscription box. You can just create themed boxes. So it's definitely something to consider on perhaps something that you could start creating some popular. It's around. 26. Guidance on Your Next Steps - Part 1: I just like to finish off this course by giving you a few pointers on where to go next. What's your next debt? Once you've made a decision, you've come up with an idea and you've decided you're going to pursue that idea. Where do you go from there? Because I didn't want to leave you completely high and dry. Now many of you are going to know what I'm going to be covering here in the next two lessons, but many of you won't. So anyway, here we go. What about sourcing products? If you're going to be marketing a product, your idea is based around a product. Where do you source products from? First of all, Ali Express is a huge market place. It's a Chinese market place. There's no minimum order. You could even order one. I'm the shipping is very low cost. In fact, it's sometimes even free, and I'm talking about shipping to anywhere in the world. Shipping is not very fast. It's quite slow. That's the disadvantage. Nevertheless, this is still a great place to explore. We also have Ali Baba Alibaba on Ali Express are connected, but with Alibaba, things work a little differently. There is a minimum order on that varies from product to product on from supplier to supplier. The shipping cost is a much higher than it is from Ali Express, but the cost of the products is generally significantly lower. The other thing is that with Alibaba, you can have customization done by the supplier. So if you wanted a different color, for example, off a product, if you wanted your own logo in Boston, the product if you wanted your own package design, put on the packaging. These are all things that you can have done by the supplies that Alibaba. So they will do them for you in the factory. The dam inside off that is that you cannot have that done for small quantities. A normally the minimum quantity that you will be able Teoh get this done for is 500 units. Now that's a lot of units. If you are just getting started on, do you want to go to market with a minimum viable product? So that's perhaps no an option you would want to look at immediately, but it could be an option that you want to look at once you've got your product already launched on, you're going to develop it further. There's also D H Gate. Another Chinese plot for the minimum order here varies, but it does tend to be smaller than on Ali Baba on the shipping cost is reasonable. So here we're looking at shipping costs that are a bit more than shipping costs on Ali Express. Less than shipping costs of Ali Baba. But definitely it's faster shipping, so you will be able to receive your products faster than you would from Ali Express. Zen Trotta is a marketplace business to business market place for Europe. There are minimum orders, but they are a relatively small, so we're talking around about between 100 and 200 euro. Minimum order on the shipping cost is reasonable, Andi. The delivery times are quite fast. A swell. With all of these websites, you are able to buy products that you can customize so you can take these products. Put your own logo on them and put them in your own packaging. So these are the kind of products that you can do things with. You can change around customize makeup, gift boxes, makeup subscription boxes, all this kind of thing. So what about your packaging supplies? Well, from Ali Express in China, you can get boxes. You can get labels on customized labels. You could get customized tags. You can get stickers which have pre written messages on them, such asked, Thank you for your order or for Polly Box, for example, suffocation warnings, all these kind of stickers. You could also have customized stickers made so you could have logo stickers made. You can get poly bags. You can get pretty much everything from Ali Express Pack Lane is a website where you can order custom boxes so you can order boxes. That would be whatever size and shape you wanted, so these will be mailing boxes, boxes that you can post out through the mail. And that's what all of these boxes that we were looking at earlier in the earlier lesson these RL mailing boxes. So any design goes on that actual box, and then that box could go directly into the mail. You can customize thes 1,000,000 boxes with text with the logo with a full design if you want to, with a very small minimum order. In fact, you can even get just one box if you want. The only issue is with the very small orders. The prices of the boxes are really quite high, so that's one thing to consider a pack. Hell does a similar thing. They have a 30 piece minimum order paper. Maher does a similar thing, but they've got a much higher minimum order quantity, but they're also cheaper. There's also precious packaging for the UK Custom boxers custom other things as well. Higher minimum order quantities again, but cheaper now for your design work fiver for your logo design for your packaging design for your box designs very cheaply. Andi. Very talented designers over there as well. Can va if you want to do your own. So camber is a fantastic free to convert dot com. There is a paid version off it, but you will not need that. You could do everything with the free version. It is definitely worth spending a couple of hours just getting familiar with camber and practicing because you can do some amazing things without it costing you anything at all. No, only that, but you can get exactly what you want. So when you go to somewhere like Fiverr you order a logo, you don't know really what that's going to look like until the designer sends it to you to take a look up. You might not like it. If you do your own and you have control, you could just keep changing it until you get it exactly the way you want it. So definitely check that. I now again is a free alternative to photo shop. So this is where you can do all kinds of things to do with editing and designing. I've never used him. I have Photoshopped myself, but I believe it's fairly similar. You'll find lots of tutorials on YouTube if you want to give gimp a try now. Website creation. You have a number of choice here so you can do it yourself, using WordPress now where presses are not the Onley platform to build a website on, but it is most definitely the most popular on the best. You're going to need hosting for that. Now you're hosting will come in around about 5 to $10 per month, but with hosting, you get free. Your professional email addresses as many as you like, so that is one huge advantage off hosting, but you really should have your own hosting. So I definitely do not recommend that you use one of the furry website builders like Wicks , for example, or wordpress dot com, which is a definite thing altogether to wordpress dot org's where press dot org's is just something that you install on your hosting once you get it. Very simple to do. Wordpress dot com, on the other hand, is a free website builder on when you use a website builder like that, like wordpress dot com or wakes, and there are other ones as well. You don't own that website, and you don't have full control over that website, so I certainly don't recommend that another option is pay somebody else to do it for you, so you'll find plenty of experts over on upward, especially WordPress experts, who can build a really nice website for you for maybe $200 or so or $250. If your idea is a product or products use a purpose built e commerce platform. There are a few off them, but by far the leader is Shopify on. That will cost you $29 a month. It has a 14 day free trial, though, so you can do some practicing on it. Put your site together and do all the things you need to dough. Before you start paying your monthly subscription, you will need a domain name for your website on the two most popular on probably the best domain name registrars are go daddy or name cheap. Either one of those is fine and for keeping track off everything that goes out and comes in . I highly recommend that you do this from the very first dollar, pound euro, whatever it is that you spend. If you don't keep a record of everything right from the beginning, there is no way that you're going to remember everything that you have spent. You may remember everything that's come in, but everything that you have spent, you won't even if you have a dedicated business bank account. Andi, you only ever spend any money from that bank account is still going to be really hard looking through it to know exactly what each transaction was. Four. Plus, you have all the little things that you don't. I always think about like ink for your printer if you use it on, What about your heating, your alighting? This all comes in as part of your expenses. So as soon as you start the day that you start, just start to record everything, the free way of doing this is on a spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel if you have it. If no Google Sheets, Kingsoft Apache Open Office or you can't use paid bookkeeping software like QuickBooks, Sage Quicken or zero on for taking payments for whatever it is that you are selling. Ah, papal business account is a really big advantage. It's no an absolute must because you don't necessarily need PayPal. But you do need something. I also recommend stripe if it's available in your country. It's available in a lot of countries, but no every single country. The reason it's really good is it is for online businesses, and it's very easy to get so there aren't really any checks are not going to do any credit checks on you. They're not going to be too interested in what you are selling. But of course there are one or two restrictions on you could not be selling anything illegal that would go without saying 27. Guidance on Your Next Steps - Part 2: All right, let's take a look at some of the different ways you can offer your product or your service . So first of all, there are marketplaces, for example, Amazon at sea or eBay. The advantages off these kind of marketplaces is that there is an existing customer base. Now that doesn't mean to say that you can just list your product or your products on one of these marketplaces. Andi. That's all you need to do, You know. Normally you need to do some work to gain some traction with your listing. Nevertheless, the existing customer basis there There is already credibility on this already trust, so you don't need to build that up. The disadvantages are selling. Fees apply to these marketplaces. There are restrictions on what you can and cannot sail, so you're not allowed to sell everything you thought that are quite a few things that you can't sell. You have less control because you don't call the shots. It's not your website, so you must abide by the rules off the marketplace. So whether that's the rules of Amazon, eBay, etc. Or wherever you must abide by those rules on, they are the ones calling the shots your own e come store now the advantages off that you can sell what you want. Well, virtually within reason. Obviously, you have complete control. There are no selling fees except for the normal transaction fees. So whether you're using PayPal or whether you're using another payment processor like stripe, for example, and there are many others, there's going to be a small credit or debit card processing via payment processing fee charged by that payment processor. We have to expect that that's normal. But that's a very small fee compared to marketplace fees that exists on places like Amazon , eBay, etcetera. There are some great purpose made platforms you can plug into very user friendly, easy to set up and use. We spoke about Shopify there a few minutes ago. The disadvantages are that because it is your own store, your own website. When you start out, you're just like a little tiny island in the middle of a huge ocean, and nobody knows you are there, so you've gotta obviously do some work from there on to get some exposure. Andi to start getting traffic generating traffic on sales. Other website. So, for example, were a press that we spoke about a couple of minutes ago. The advantages are that you can sell more than just products so you could be selling services. You could be selling memberships. You could still sell tangible products. All this is possible, including digital products. So with WordPress, for example, there is a plugging a free plug in called Wu Commerz that allows you to sell just like you are selling from an online shop. But you also have, ah full website with full flexibility that you don't have with something like Shopify. So if you are really not sure whether something like Shopify would suit you or something like WordPress, you got to do a little bit more research into that. Andi, it's going to depend a lot on your own situation. No, the disadvantages are that once again, just like with your own AECOM store, you're starting from scratch. You're like this little tiny island in a big, vast ocean on. Nobody knows you are there. There is a learning curve. Are learning curve involved with something like were praise, but it really isn't that bad on Once you learn were oppressed and you get the hang of it. It's actually very easy on when it comes to getting some exposure, starting to get some exposure for your business for your new business, your new idea that you've just launched. There's Facebook on Facebook, of course, is the big one. We all know this. There are advantages and disadvantages. Of course. As with everything with Facebook, there are so many people on Facebook around about 80% 75 or 80% of the population, so you can get unlimited exposure literally unlimited. There's credibility, there's trust, and you can see immediate results with Facebook. The disadvantages are that there are rules and restrictions, what you can and cannot promote on Facebook and what you can and cannot say and do if you are going to be going into paid abs. So if you're going down the paid advertising route on Facebook, there is most definitely a cost on. There's most definitely a learning curve for paid outs. Now what I recommend you do if you want to do pe dance, this is not so relevant. If you are thinking about just generating organic I e. Non paid exposure on Facebook. But if you want to run pay dance. The first place you should go is Facebook's own training. It's free is called Facebook Blueprint S E O search engine optimization. The advantages off this is completely free. You have complete control on it definitely works the disadvantages. It can be time consuming. But the biggest disadvantage is that it's no instant. It's nowhere near instant. It can take anything from maybe six weeks, right up to a year, even to start seeing a real results from CEO. No Google ads. This could be very effective. So these are the sponsored house that you see when you do a Google search. Advantages immediate results on its highly targeted. So you can target your ads so that Onley exactly who you want to see them sees them. The disadvantages are the cost. It can be very costly. There is definitely a significant learning curve. But like Facebook, Google has their own training. Just go to Google and type in Google AdWords. Official training is the official training you want, and it doesn't cost anything. Other disadvantages are that there are rules and restrictions. So again, there are some restrictions on what you are allowed to advertise, but not as many restrictions off there are on Facebook, but there are still some restrictions on there are definitely some rules on what you are actually alive to say in and out. Now, the good news is that you can pay somebody else to do most of this stuff for you. So you can definitely pay somebody to do your social media stuff, your Facebook stuff, and you can definitely pay somebody to do your CEO. Not so sure about the Google ads. I would be hesitant to pay somebody to do that unless I do exactly what I was doing so that I could monitor those results and make sure my money wasn't being wasted. Now we also have crowdfunding. Now we've looked to crowdfunding. The advantages of crowdfunding is that it can give you exposure on media attention. So if your project on, of course, it would have to be a project that you were developing or you developed. So it would be something that you have developed either from scratch or you took an existing product and you had that product in some way changed. Fundamentally, though I don't mean just sticking your own logo on it. That would know class so you wouldn't get accepted. Your project would not get accepted if that's what you did. If your project really takes off and we've seen some that have, you can get a lot of media attention there, which is amazing, very, very good. You could make sales on raised funds. The disadvantages are exposure, so exposes an advantage but is also a disadvantage because without doubt there are people on the crowdfunding platforms every single day looking for ideas to steal. So if you are going to put something on one of these platforms, you really need to trademarked the name and the logo on. Also, you want to apply for a patent, are playing for a Peyton Allies. You to then say, Peyton pending you need to apply. Many projects don't get accepted. The target might not get met, so you need to have a target for raising funds. If your target isn't met, you're not going to get any of the money. It'll because it's all going to be given back to the investors. There is work required. It's no simple as just putting something on Kickstarter, for example, on expecting to get a lows of attention for it now you might, but very often you've got to do a lot of promoting yourself and draw as much attention as you can to that project. And you should actually do that before even goes on to the Crowdfunding website because once it goes on there, you'll only have a certain amount of time to meet the target. All right, so that's crowdfunding can be gored but also has its disadvantages. Another thing you can do is content creation. So I'm talking here about content creation and distribution. You can create content and distributed various places around the Internet. Most of them, if not all of them for free, gives you complete control over what you're doing and it also generate sales. Disadvantage is quite a lot of work. It's time consuming. The results are likely to take some time as well, and then we have other social media. So we got YouTube. We've got Pinterest. We've got Instagram. We've got Twitter. You can get immediate results. Not always, but you can. It is free or low cost unless you are going to spend money on the paid outs. So Instagram you can do a lot on their for free YouTube. You can dio a lot on their for free Twitter. You could do a lot on there for free disadvantages. All this stuff is time consuming. There are always going to be some restrictions. Depending on the social media platform, There are always going to be some restrictions on what you are allowed to promote. YouTube is fairly open. You can promote most things now. Once again, you can pay someone else to do this for you so you can pay someone else to create content on, distribute the content. You can pay someone else to do all your social media stuff. If you don't have time and you want to pay somebody else, you don't need to do all this stuff yourself, Andi. In fact, you can't do it all. One person couldn't do all of that. We've got upward dot com. There is nothing that you cannot get done over there on up work. There's people per hour that's also very popular on Fiverr as well has ah, lot of services. There's a lot of stuff and a lot of things that you can get done over there, too. Okay, so that was just some pointers, some general guidance on where to go and what to do Once you've decided on your idea. All right, speech you soon.