#14 Keywords refine your research
Your mind map is full of keywords, right? 
So today you will take the keywords that you have the greatest feeling about for your business and you are going to learn about who else and how many others search for those words on the internet.
What you are looking to do is to test your assumptions. You are also looking to see if the opportunity you think is there, is big enough to make any money in and how much noise and competition you will have to get through.
So take your keywords and visit these sites:
Spyfu – use the free option for this exercise
What you will get is several different ways of looking at how many people search for the word you entered.
How much competition there is for that word or phrase.
How costly it will be to buy advertising around that word (google adwords) which will show you how deep the pockets of your competition is.
And more importantly you will get other alternatives to your word or phrase that may help you refine or narrow your idea to a profitable niche that will allow you to be an authority in your area.
Today’s exercise will help you refine your research and your thoughts so that tomorrow you can move to the first level of planning.
Have fun. Keep all your results. You will review them regularly because they can change daily
Roberta
Simplifier, Presenter, Mentor
This blog is part of the 30 minutes 4 30 days successful business start-up
Do you understand money? Part 2
In the last article, we said that you could become a millionaire, whatever your income. You just set aside 10% o
f your income and let it accumulate with interest. The idea works through compounding interest.
If you have a spreadsheet application (Microsoft’s Excel, for example) on your computer, you can do the calculations yourself, either by using enough rows and repeating a formula through the various cells. Or, if you know a little about the financial formulas, you can input a time period, interest rate, constant payment and other parameters, and get the same kind of answer with only a few entries.
What you find is that getting to your first million can take a long time. In fact, most people probably won’t live long enough to reach a million dollars, regardless of their income. Thus, all get rich schemes look for ways of shortening the time frame. Please note: that’s ALL get rich schemes, whether fast or slow.
One of our readers sent in a question. It’s more of a statement, but phrased as a question: “Surely you are better off with multiple sources of income? I’m involved with MLM and I’m into a number of affiliates on the Web. These passive income sources are my claim to be wealthy. And everyone can do them, and get the same results as I do.”
Here’s the thing: those passive incomes (Web or MLM) depend on people buying the products or services. Yes, it seems like you do very little to get that income. But you still need to SELL! Take a close look at the global figures about Web or MLM success – only about 5% of the participants have an income worth talking about. The other 19 out of 20 people are lucky to get a nice little addition to their main income. Those paths are only passive in the sense that you can do a very small amount of work – selling – to get an income. As with all selling, fashions change. What was a huge earner loses its appeal. You constantly need to chase after the next product, the next item that will sell. To get a decent income, you might need to have a hundred different products and places to which you are affiliated. But your earnings are still based on your efforts. You are not creating wealth, just more money.
There are only two ways of getting an income:
(1) YOU work for it, putting in your own time and effort. You might extend this by getting a share of the earnings from other people using their own time and effort, but this is still dependent on that time and effort. The share might only be 1%, but if you can get 1% of the income from 100 other people’s earnings, it is exactly equivalent to what you can get by doing the work yourself.
(2) You get your wealth to work for it.
Both ensure you have an income, or the equivalent to an income.
The first is easy to see and do. At least, it is easy in theory. It is how many of us were brought up with the ethic that earning money depends on working for it in some way. The harder you work, the more you should be able to make over your lifetime. It’s a good paradigm, and is sometimes called “the protestant ethic”, but it holds for virtually every race or creed. But, Kiyosaki points out that this is the way his “poor dad” works and thinks, while his “rich dad” does not.
For the moment, let’s concentrate on how the “work for an income” paradigm affects most of us and our thinking.
Most people spend their lives in a job. They go to work, do what is required, and get paid. It may be one job, or it could be a hundred, but the same principle holds – someone pays them for their time and effort. The job might require special training or special knowledge, but the principle is still the same: turn up for work, do something and get paid. Even managers, at all levels in a company, are in the same basic scenario: go to the office, do the work, and collect the salary.
We assume that this is the norm for people – it is for a huge majority of any population, whether they are farm hands, production workers, office staff, managers, executives, and so on.
What do they do with their incomes?
Pay rent or mortgage, pay for water and power, buy food and clothing, buy petrol to run their cars, pay rates, buy entertainment, gamble a little, give some money to charity, buy larger things like household appliances and cars, take holidays, give children pocket money, and so on. Of course, they save some for later financial independence – their version of having a million dollars.
Some of the spending is through credit and debit cards. They may also take out loans, and thus pay interest on the debts. They manage their debts and cover fines and other penalties, for many reasons, plus taxes, rates, school fees, insurance…
When one starts to look at ways people use their incomes, one begins to see why “job” is sometimes referred to as “just on broke”!
It is easy to finish up with the income being not quite enough to cover the pay period, hence the need for money management. And the need for supplementary incomes.
Remember: if one looks at a country’s population as a whole, this is the NORM, not the exception.
Jobs take up at least one third of each person’s day. Then you can add on commuting time, relaxation time and de-stressing time. How much time is left for the person to properly enjoy themselves, or do the things they would like to do? Even weekends and days off do not make up enough time to make a fully satisfied normal person.
So we dream of becoming rich.
How?
Most people see this happening through increasing the INCOME! So, people get better qualifications, look for job promotions, take on second (and third) jobs.
This, as Kiyosaki calls it in Cashflow 101, is the rat race. We run around the track of life, collecting our pay packets, spending our incomes, gathering debt, and then wonder why we are still in the rat race, even though we might have changed some of the circumstances around the track we are using.
What else can we do?
Some people buy and sell houses. They find a place that they can fix up, buy it at one price and sell it for a bit more than was spent of the original purpose and repairs. What is this but another J.O.B.?
They buy into the MLM dream. This involves finding either buyers for the products or buyers for the PLAN, and thus building a down line. It can be lucrative, but most of the time, people have substitute products or they find the effort too much to build onto the down line, and so drop out. In other words, people finish up doing another JOB, to increase their normal income.
They look at the Web, and see people making money through Affiliates. It sound easy and simple – just a Web page that people can go to and sign up to buy products or services. It’s little effort, since, once the page is up, it doesn’t need much change or tweaking. They can then put their efforts into promoting the affiliation link through writing blogs or articles, which pay through a cut of the Adwords tacked into the article or blog. And they can run their own Adwords campaigns. Surely, there’s no real effort in all of this? At least that’s what the promoters claim. But, really, what’s the difference between this and a normal JOB?
The one thing these have in common is that, if you stop doing them, what happens to the income they generated?
Right! The INCOME stops as well!
So what else can one do to increase income?
Start your own business?
We’ve been involved with people in their own businesses for more than twenty years. That’s not counting working in a job for years before that, gaining the knowledge and experience to allow us to be good consultants, mentors and coaches. Yes, we’re still for hire to help people do the analysis, strategizing, marketing, and all the other things that a business needs, but we do this less and less as the need for that INCOME diminishes.
One thing about many business start-ups: most are there to earn the owner an INCOME. Often, the income is greater than they would get working in a JOB, but they still need to work in the business to get the income. If they stop working, then the income stops, just as it does in the other cases.
They fail to reach the first step in becoming wealthy – financial freedom! They are still working the paradigm that goes with the first way to get an income.
They have not yet learned that:
People are not wealthy because they have money;
they have money because they are wealthy!
Next time, we’ll start looking at creating or gaining wealth and the paradigm that goes with it.
Maven Connect
CommentLUV
Guest Blogging with Jon Morrow
