Tag Archives for " start a business "

4 What is My Target Market?

This is the fifth question on the Junior Achievement’s list of 20 questions to ask yourself before starting your business.  Why is this  an important question?  It is important because you need to know who you are going to market your products and/or services to.  I would even say that Who is my target market is more to the point.

Who is Your Target Market?

Define the people whom you are looking for and those looking for what you have to offer.  How old are they, where do they live, what do they do, and where do they hang out on the web?  What are their desires and their pain points?  What do they love?  Your little corner of the business world, your business, also known as your niche, should cater to the needs of your audience while also being true to yourself and what your passions and interests are.

Where Does Your Target Market Hang Out?

Do a Google search for forums within your niche as well as key word searches within Facebook and Twitter.  Build up your networks on social media so when you are ready to start monetizing your business, you can bring your ideal customer/client to your website.  Remember you are targeting an audience that is interested in what you have to say or what you are selling.

Let’s say make awesome jewelry and decide to sell your creations online.  What age group will love your jewelry?  Will you sell to the person who will wear it or to the person who buys it for them?  Where can you find these people?

Another good question to ask yourself is who do you want to hang out and establish relationships with?  Will they relate to your business idea?  If not, can you offer them something that will interest them so that they become a part of your audience, tribe, posse, family, fans, or whatever you choose to call it?

If you have a business that will have you relating one-on-one with your client or customer, ask yourself who that perfect person will be.  What do they like to do?  What do they spend their money on?  How do they use your product or service?

Don’t skip this step when making decisions about how to your business will look.  It is essential to have clarity on who your target market is in order  to create a successful marketing plan.  In this day and age on the internet, marketing is king.  Without a well thought-out marketing plan with clear goals and clear targets, you are at risk for failure.

Who is your perfect client/customer?

31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset is available on this blog.  Click on the Resource Button above then on the Buy Book button.

You can also still get the Get Stuff Done Tool by entering your name and email in the box at the top righthand side of the page with the red arrow.

12 What Products/Services Will My Business Provide? Part 2

I would like to remind my readers that this blog is geared toward teens and young adults (so please don’t be offended by my admonition to look up a word in the dictionary – that’s meant for my young readers).  The information here is just a summary, intended to guide them toward thinking about what they want their online business to look like/be about.  I invite you to post any ideas or suggestions you have that would add to the topic and be a good addition in the upcoming book I’m writing using these blog posts.

In part 1 of this topic we looked at service oriented businesses.  In part 2 of this topic we will consider just a few examples of internet businesses and the products or services you can offer online.

Online Training.  I heard about one man who taught piano and wanted to move to an island in the Caribbean.  He decided to take his business to the internet in order to make the move.  He purchased a video camera for his computer and worked with students via Skype (a free online video conferencing tool).  He was able to demonstrate and to observe the student playing the keys.  He eventually added pre-made video lessons which he turned into DVDs and MP3s and built a million dollar business.

Get any ideas from this story?  Many classrooms use video conferencing and online videos as an adjunct training (if you don’t know this word look it up in the dictionary as my father used to tell me).

Online videos are easy to make and are a great training tool.  You can do live demonstrations, embed video on your website, post them on your own YouTube account or create DVDs for sale.  Most computers come with built in cameras now.  If you have an older computer, there are very inexpensive cameras you can buy.  I got a Microsoft camera for my desktop for only $12.

As you become experienced, you may want to write a book about your topic which then becomes one of your products.  You may develop a training program that you can teach using webinars or have teleseminars or telesummits and teach classes over the phone.  The tools to do these things are free.

Be a Rock Star or a Comic.  Using YouTube you can create videos of your performances, post them on YouTube then give everyone the link to your video and ask them to share it.  If you’re good, or what you do is interesting, you might hit it big.  Just look at Justin Bieber and Gangnam Style.  These people posted on YouTube, their performances caught some eyes and they went viral and became overnight successes.  Both have ended up on Dancing With The Stars and Gangnam style is being danced all over the world.  It’s possible with a little talent, some creativity and a lot of luck.

Be a Talking Head or a DJ.  You too can have your own radio program on blogtalkradio.com.  You just download the software and start talking.  You can invite other people who are in the same niche as you to interview, interview customers, just talk about whatever interests you for an hour, review movies and books, play music.  You can record it and use it as a demo video, send it out to stations you might want to have a radio show for, or use it as a demo tape to get DJ gigs.

Online Retail Store.  You can open a storefront online using a website.  You can either develop your own or buy into an already existing business where they provide the website and all the tools you need; you only need to do the marketing and bring people to your site.  This is known as a turnkey business (everything is done for you, you just need to market your site).  Post photos and information about the product you are selling, set up a paypal account, use a WordPress plugin that is very inexpensive to purchase that becomes your Estore and tracks your orders, sends out invoices, notifies you via email about sales and keeps track of the money.

I use the WordPress  estore and their affiliate plugin.  You can get more information about that here.  In the interest of transparency, I am an affiliate for this product (that means I am part of their sales force and earn a commission if you purchase this product using my link).

There are many other options for services or products you can provide at your website or other online business.  Can you think of any?

Do you have a business model that isn’t mentioned here?  Please let us know if you provide a service that hasn’t been mentioned and you think we can benefit from knowing about it.  Thank you.

6 10 Thought Provoking Questions to Help You Find Your Passion and Choose Your Business

If you are new to this blog it’s important to know that I write with the intention of empowering youth to develop an entrepreneur mindset.  So if you already know and are working your business, you may not find all of my posts useful for your situation.  However, many of them can serve as good reminders and motivation for you as well.  I hope that you have as good a time reading the posts as I have had writing them.

We have considered a variety of exercises to do and steps to take toward finding your passion.  In this post I want to provide you with 10 questions meant to provoke a deeper level of looking for your passion and choose your business.

Spend some time considering each question.  Go as deep as you can with these questions.  When you get an answer, ask yourself, “is there more?”  Write down the ideas and insights that pop into your head.  Look for connections or themes between your answers.

1. What do you want to be known for in your life now and in the future?
2. If you could change just one thing in the world, what would that be?
3. What makes you feel good about yourself?
4. What is a goal that you have and how will you achieve it?
5. If you won a million dollars how would your life change?
6. What do you think your strengths are and what skills do you need to work on?
7. If you are feeling unmotivated, who or what helps you get yourself moving again?
8. Do you see yourself as a leader or a follower and why do you think that?
9. If you could spend a day with anyone – past or present – who would it be and why?
10. What are you not spending enough time doing?

Did you learn anything new about yourself from considering these questions?  Are you closer to finding your passion(s) and choosing your business?

18 The Sensible Blogging Checklist

In this post we’re going to look at a checklist to create a successful blog.  This checklist was created as a guide by The Whole Brain Group, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based internet marketing company.   It is being used here with their full permission to reprint.  They even provided the html code to embed it in the post.  Thank you The Whole Brain Group.

You may not know this, but business blogging can increase your web traffic on average by 55%. Yesterday we looked at some reasons to have a blog. But how do you get started?

The Sensible Blogging Checklist will help!  Follow the simple suggestions in order to:

• Define your goals and audience
• Plan your content strategy
• Make sure your blog is user-friendly
• Optimize your posts for search
• Encourage engagement and content circulation

Don’t forget that this checklist is just a guideline to get you started! A really effective strategy and implementation plan takes a lot of thought and research.

Additionally, using this checklist can help you see the areas where you need more clarity.  For example, it reminds you to know and be able to define your niche, also called your audience, your tribe, or your clients.  The checklist makes you think about the people you are trying to reach and engage with.

In the “plan your content strategy” section, you are prompted to consider whether your blog serves both your business and your readers.  It makes you think about the details of what your blog content will be and how you will present it.

There’s a suggestion in the Content and Readability section that suggests that your blog should be under 350 words.  There’s some debate about that.  I’d like to suggest that you make that decision depending on your audience.  Some blogs, like mine, need to be as long as they need to be in order to explain the concepts being discussed.  If your audience is made up of people with attention deficit disorder, then I suggest you might want to consider keeping your posts under 350 words.  If your audience are intellectuals or college professors, well, there may be no limit on the number of words that are acceptable.  Do you homework, read other blogs that speak to your audience and see what’s popular and what is not.

One thing is certain, using this checklist will help you learn areas where you need to increase your knowledge and skill base.  With a bit of research, taking a free webinar, reading free ebooks/reports on blogging, you will learn all you need to learn to build a potentially successful blog.  I say potentially because no matter how good your skills are, without commitment and consistency, you won’t have a successful blog.

Take time to look over this checklist and lets discuss the questions at the end.

8 To Blog or Not to Blog For Your Business – That is the Big Decision

I suppose that those of us who are participating in this blogging challenge believe that blogging is in our best interest or we wouldn’t be here. Recently I talked with an internet marketing authority who doesn’t blog. He doesn’t find it useful. When I talked with another friend about it, I realized that he has no reason to blog. He doesn’t have a website and he’s spent a lot of years building his business and his following so he has a very large list to market to without blogging.

My friend does have a website, I have a website. We blog because:

We are concerned about SEO and Google rankings

We need to drive people to our online businesses

We want to increase our visibility

To build relationships

To get our message out to our niche

These seem to be the main reasons to have a blog.

Blogs ensure that your business is listed on the search engines as well as positions you and/or your business as an expert or authority. And blogs are far easier to update than your other web pages.

There are downsides to consider. Blogging is time consuming. Having a blog means making a commitment to write something on a specific schedule. It requires that you create content related to your business on a consistent basis and it should be fresh material in order to keep people coming back each time you post. You might have to develop some writing skills and in many cases, you have to keep abreast of what is happening in your industry or chosen area of business. You’ll need to keep track of what your competition is doing so research will be important.

Should you decide to have a blog, it would be a good idea to use a checklist to help you plan it. A great resource for checklists for internet and digital marketing is a company called The Whole Brain Group of Ann Arbor, Michigan. They have developed a series of checklists to help you create your online marketing plan. In the next blog post we will look at how to use their Sensible Blogging Checklist to ensure you get the most value for the time you spend blogging.

33 Using the Ultimate Blog Challenge to Write “Pick From The Passion Tree”

It’s very exciting to be joining all of you in the October 2012 Ultimate Blog Challenge.  For those of you who don’t know, I address the crisis of youth unemployment by proposing that we guide our teenagers and young adults to develop an entrepreneur mindset.  My first book, 31 Powerful Lessons: Empowering Teens and Young Adults to Develop an Entrepreneur Mindset is currently on sale as a digital book and as a perfect bound paperback book at my website and will soon be on Amazon.com and Kindle.  I wrote that book during the last Ultimate Blog Challenge using the daily posts as the foundation for the book.

Using this new blog challenge in the same manner, I plan to write the second book, Pick From the Passion Tree in what I call the Empowering Young Entrepreneurs series.  It is my sincere hope that you will read the posts and share your constructive criticism, positive feedback and any ideas you have that will enhance the topic I’ve written about.

I am also accepting guest posts about how to decide upon and start a business and other entrepreneurial ideas appropriate for teenagers and young adults.  Steve Eason has already provided a guest blog post about selling solutions to the customers’ pain.

I’m looking for exercises designed to help youth focus on identifying their passions and how to make decisions on how to build a business around those passions.  Checklists would be useful as well as free resources that young people can access to help them build their foundation and start down their path.  Some of these guest posts may be included in the new book (with your permission of course).

Additionally, if you have any advice you would like to share directly with young people, I would be happy to consider those posts as well as real stories of other successful, young entrepreneurs, both for the blog and possibly for the book.

There is no particular order to the posts as I have not yet organized what content will be in the book.  I do know that we’ll have some reality check exercises (two that I’ve already posted on this blog during September), some exercises for our youth to identify what they are passionate about.  The book will include information on social media, blogging and other business building blocks.

I am looking forward to reading and commenting on as many of your posts as possible during the course of the challenge.  It’s nice to meet you and it will be nice to get to know you.

10 2 Easy Steps to Identify a Potential Business Based on Your Passion

Step 1:

This is an easy and fun exercise.  Think about times when you felt really passionate about what you were doing or times when you felt really alive and happy when you were doing something.

After you’ve thought about this for a little while, write down three memories from your life that you felt passionate about.  For example, “I loved learning survival skills at summer camp.  I really enjoyed backpacking in the wilderness.  I love traveling and enjoyed our vacation in the tropics.”

Look for a common theme in these memories.  The examples above might mean you love adventure.

You have now identified a potential passion around which to build an entrepreneurial business.

Step 2.

The second exercise is a mission to gather facts about building a business around your passion.

Possible businesses/careers regarding adventure could include being a travel agent, leading guided tours, running a white water rafting business, fishing, teaching camping and backpacking skills or simply selling outdoor supplies and accessories.

Do research on the internet or at the library about being an adventurer.  Find out what sorts of businesses already exist around your passion.  Good sources of information can be found using Google, Safari, Bing, or any other major search engine.

You have now started thinking about being an entrepreneur and creating a business doing something you love and will be happy doing.

What common theme did you identify from your memories?

10 A Call to Action on Behalf of Young Entrepreneurs

If you’ve been here before, you know that this blog is about empowering young entrepreneurs.  I have spent a lot of time writing about empowering teens and young adults to develop an entrepreneur mindset.

Now it’s time to move to the next step; empowering teens and young adults to pick their passion, put their stake in the ground and take the first steps to start their business.  The next step for this blog means writing articles about how to decide what the business should be, how to decide on a niche and learn what they need, branding and other action steps to create and move a business forward.

As I plan out the articles for this next step in the series, I’m issuing this call to action to provide your input.  Will you help by answering these questions in the comment section?

How did you decide what business to start?

How did you find your niche and decide what they needed?

What would you advise a young person about to start a business?

Thank you in advance for your input.

21 What Can Your Teen Do to Earn A Million Dollars?

What talent does your teen have that could become their money tree?  What are they passionate about, what do they absolutely love to do and would do all the time if they could?  What bright ideas do they have?  Can they turn that into a profitable business?

Does your teenager want to be a musician or songwriter but they haven’t shown any musical talent?  What sort of businesses could they have around music?  How about selling music, either records, downloads, or sheet music.  What about musical instruments?  Start small by buying and selling on Ebay or Etsy.

Did you know that Richard Branson, now a billionaire who owns the Virgin companies started selling music from his home in London when he was boy?  He certainly parlayed that into a successful corporation.  He went from his home business to Virgin Records.

Recently on the show House Hunters International they featured a man who wanted to move to an island and work from home.  He started a business teaching piano on the internet using an online video platform so he could live where he wanted and teach piano to people all over the world.  He claims to have a multimillion dollar business and his home purchase seems to confirm that.  Granted he’s not a kid, but this is something a kid can do.

What skills or talents is your teen capable of teaching to someone else?  How about creating tutoring videos about math or history?  Teaching guitar by video or how to garden, how to can and preserve, how to crochet, how to scrapbook?

Have you heard about the tween who started a company called Man Candles because he was embarrassed to use perfumed candles?  They are masculine scented candles in a can.  The company grew from his home kitchen to become a real manufacturing company.

One young woman became a millionaire selling greeting cards she designed for teens because her friends complained that none of the cards in the store fit their age group.

Recently I saw a video about a 12 year old who was well on his way to becoming a five star chef because he got fed up with mother’s poor cooking skills.  He decided to teach himself how to cook.  He watched the food network, practiced knife skills then started cooking.  He turned his bedroom into a professional chef’s kitchen with money he earned and once a month he and his mother turn their home into a restaurant where he tests his skills on the neighbors.  This 12 year old is now apprenticing with some well renowned chefs and his goal is have his own 5 star Michelen restaurant in the near future.  You can see his passion when he talks about it.  It made me want to find out where he’s cooking and get an invite.

Another young man who is 11 was so repulsed by the effects of genetically engineered food that he has decided to become an organic farmer.  He is learning everything he can and is educating other young people along the way about healthy eating.

Ted Talks features a 12 year old boy who creates apps for android phones.  His apps are very popular, he’s earning a lot of money and has plans for a future in Silicon Valley.

And if you don’t think your kid can create a million dollar business around skateboarding, just google Tony Hawk and get back to me.

Kids are amazing and can accomplish awesome things when given half a chance and some solid support.  What are you doing to empower your kids to become an entrepreneur?