I had one of those ‘aha!’ moments the other day when I received this email from Andrea J. Lee’s Best of Multiple Streams f’ree ecourse. The subject line was:
Niche + Problem + Format = Income Stream
Out of a deluge of emails in my inbox this one instantly jumped out at me – as a (much needed) reminder of just how simple online business really is! And how much I had been overcomplicating some things in my business lately…
I’ve been knee deep in online business for years now – coming up on ten years actually – and despite all the great new things that arise in the online world it all comes back to this simple formula.
To break it down…
Niche
Definition: A niche is a group of people who have common issues and problems and who hang out together in some organized fashion.
Who do you serve?
It is essential that you have a clearly defined and specific niche market. This is the foundational piece in the ‘8 Steps to Building a Multiple Streams Business’ that we’ve been teaching for years now… and is the one area where many businesses fall apart.
If you don’t have a good handle on your niche it becomes really hard to effectively tap into the specific needs of a market and provide products/services that serve that market (and that they are willing to pay for!). We go into finding your niche in great detail in Pink Spoon Marketing – be sure to check it out if this feels like an area that needs some work in your business.
Problem
People spend money on things that will help ease the ‘pain’ of their problems.
What keeps your niche up at night?
When you know what it is that the people in your niche market struggle with, then you can look for ways to help them – the solution becomes obvious. The key is, of course, to know what their problems are in the first place! And the thing is, this will change from time to time… so you need to make sure you are ‘plugged’ in to your niche.
How to find out their problems? Ask them what their biggest challenge is, and listen to their answers – look for themes. Read their blogs. Subscribe to their ezines. Follow their tweets. Pay attention.
Format
Once you know the problem, you want to consider how you are going to package and deliver the solution.
What is the best package for your solution?
The options for packaging offerings today are simply endless – everything from print-on-demand services (for books, CDs and such) through to webinar, multimedia and online video. It actually wasn’t too long ago that we were limited by our packaging choices, as many options where complex and expensive. We’ve come a long way baby!
When looking at packaging you want to consider two things:
- What will be appealing to my market? If you are marketing to baby-boomers they may prefer a print book to an ebook. If you are marketing to twenty-somethings you may want to do an online video series.
- What would I enjoy creating? If you love speaking but aren’t a big writer, drop the idea of writing a book and look to create classes, trainings, recordings and such. If you are camera shy you may not want to go the online video route. It is just as important for you to enoy the creation process, otherwise you will get frustrated, stuck and may never finish your product.
And there you go – at the heart of things it really is just that easy.This is one super powerful little formula – one that I recommend you print off and post on your wall.
If you want to dive deeper into any element of this simple formula check out the Pink Spoon Marketing Multimedia Home-Study Kit which will take you step-by-step through the process of building your business online.
Comments, thoughts? Post them here at the blog.