How To Find Your Million Dollars Business Idea

Prerequisites for your business

First of all, always remember that you have to give added value to people. Your offer should address the main problems faced by your audience and help them solve their issues. People are willing to pay for products and services that will help them to solve their issues.

Do not keep to yourself passing a lot of time to produce products or services thinking they will meet the concerns of people. People do not think like you. They may have a totally different view of the World than the yours. What you think will be useful to them is probably useless.

Do not consider your idea is brilliant and you must keep it secret because you fear someone could steal it. Actually your ideas have nearly no value and it is likely that thousands of people worldwide have the same idea at the same time. What is important is how you implement your idea and if people adhere to your project. Therefore I recommend you to talk about your idea to many people to gather their opinions and see if there is a market demand. If your market is too small it is not profitable and you will spend a lot of time for poor results.

I made this mistake long time ago by creating a social network from scratch whose goal was to help people succeed the goals they set in life, with the help of coaches. It took me several years to develop the website as I was learning programming by myself to carry out the project. It was before the boom in mobile Internet access and I did not expect that people would soon massively use mobile phones to get access to the Web. Consequently, I created a fixed design only adapted to computers and it was hard to change it. Then people started to become crazy with their iPhone and Android phones then hit the market. Because I was so far in my project and I couldn’t back off, I kept going until my social network was perfect for a public launch.

Sadly for me, the World had changed in the way people access information and I understood that people were not really interested in my services. Many people do not set goals and those who do are not necessarily ready to write and to follow them on a website while using random coaches to help them reach their goals. I realized that I didn’t use my own social network for reaching my goals in life. Why would people join this social network if I am not the first user?

Of course another reason for this failure was also the lack of advertising and the fact people had to register to the website to get access to the content.

I tell you this so don’t repeat the same mistakes. Here are some advice:

Provide added value to people. If people like what you do, you will get some return.
Talk about your project from the beginning to people who might be potential customers
Create a first functional prototype which offers a solution to a key service. It will help confirm your concept to the public. Don’t spend time creating the perfect product before the market validates it.
Use existing platforms and frameworks that meet the standards so you will not have to reinvent the wheel and spend much of your time for things that are not profitable. Spend your energy using your strengths and delegate your weaknesses to other people who are better than you in these fields. If you do not have money and if you want to do everything yourself, do it until you reach a certain level of success and then delegate when money comes. By using existing platforms you will gain a lot of time and you will be more flexible while easing your maintenance costs on the long run.
Be flexible. Adapt to your demand and ask regularly the feedback of your users. Get to know their problems and their expectations so you will be able to adjust to their needs, bringing added value.

Find your market

You are probably wondering what to talk about and why people would find your work interesting as there are already millions of websites available to them.

The bad news is the fact that indeed all the profitable markets are already saturated. There is almost no entry barrier to create an online business as you only need time, some basic knowledge and almost no money. Anybody in the World can stay long enough at home like a hermit and produce useful content and services via a blog, a website or a mobile application.

Luckily enough for you, it is possible to find success. You will have to differentiate yourself with your marketing, the way you promote your services as soon as you deliver an important added value to your audience. First watch your competitors and analyze how they do, what they offer, how it could be improved and try to profile their fans. Then you will be able to offer something different.

You should try to assess the size of the market you want to enter and see if people already spend money for that. There is a lot of information available online and many web entrepreneurs share figures like their turnover and the number of customers they have, or the number of subscribers to their newsletter.

For example you can find profitable businesses related to the health (“how to lose weight?”), seduction or financial matters (investing in the stock market,…). It is really important that you love the subject of your business as you will spend an enormous amount of time creating added value before reaching profitability. You will create enough added value only if you do great work, and the best way for that is to love what you do. If you hate to cook don’t start a business about cooking, you will not find the energy to create awesome products and services. Focus on helping people to solve problems they face.

Google Search Engine – suggestions tool

You can also search for ideas directly in the Google search engine. Enter just some keywords and see what people want by looking at the suggestions. If Google suggests these searches it means people try to solve related problems so it is a potential business.

Google search – suggestions

Google search – suggestions

Estimate your Market Size

I recommend you also to ask Google about the size of the market you want to enter. Two of their services are especially interesting: Google Adwords and Google Trends.

Google Adwords

Google provides the Adwords service for anyone who want to create a marketing campaign. Google describes Adwords as follows:

Be seen by customers at the very moment that they’re searching on Google for the things you offer. And only pay when they click to visit your website or call.

Google Adwords is the core business of Google. Millions of companies worldwide use the Adwords platform to display their ads on the Google search engine or on the website of their affiliated websites via the Adsense program. You can easily use Adwords with your Google account.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Access to the Keyword Planner via the “Tools” tab of your new Google AdWords account as shown in the screenshot below. Refer to the “Before you begin” section if needed.

Google describes the service as follows:

Keyword Planner is a free AdWords tool for new or experienced advertisers that’s like a workshop for building new Search Network campaigns or expanding existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how a list of keywords might perform […]

Get historical statistics and traffic forecasts. Use statistics like search volume to help you decide which keywords to use for a new or existing campaign. Get forecasts, like predicted clicks and estimated conversions, to get an idea of how a list of keywords might perform for a given bid and budget.

“Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”

Use this tool if you don’t know which keywords to choose for your business and to see the volume of searches for each keyword. After choosing your market this tool will still be useful to choose the right keywords for your communication and your SEO optimization to get traffic from search engines like Google.

“Get search volume data and trends”

Click on “Get search volume data and trends” to search for historical statistics like search volume for keywords associated to the business you want to start. Enter the keywords, the geographical market you target (country, region or city) and click the “Save” button. Of course you can search worldwide. If you don’t know which keywords to set use the “Search for new keywords tool”.

The output shows a dynamic chart with useful results, like the “Search volume trends”(the average monthly searches) and the “Breakdown by location” chart gives you an idea of the countries where people seek your keywords.

Google Adwords – searches by country (example)

Google provides a table listing all the keywords and their associated “Average monthly searches” defined by Google as “The average number of times people have searched for this exact keyword based on the date range and targeting settings that you’ve selected”. You will notice that people are a lot more likely to search for “finance”, “freedom”, “business” compared to “anthropology”. If a lot of people search for your keyword it is an indication of your market popularity. If a market is big enough, you have to assess the competition and if it is profitable.

Therefore, the table let you assess also the competition for each of your keywords. By competition Google means “the number of advertisers that showed on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google” [Google Adwords]. If companies (=advertisers) are competing heavily for a specific keyword it means you can probably do some business on this market. Usually companies don’t bother for things that don’t bring money.

In the same table you have also the suggested bid “calculated by looking at the costs-per-click (CPCs) that advertisers are paying for a keyword” [Google]. If advertisers are likely to pay a high price each time a consumer click on an ad you know that the companies are willing to spend a lot of money to acquire new customers on that market. If they do so, they probably expect these customers to buy their services and products and offset the profit loss of acquiring them. You can expect such a keyword to refer to a profitable market.

These searches are very important as you want to start your business so you don’t want to spend your precious time dealing with subjects that have no or little market potential.

Google Trends

You can also use Google Trend to see searches variations for your keywords over the years. The diagrams below show the relative change of searches for the keyword “pokemon”. As you notice, people are more and more looking for this term over the years but popularity growth is almost zero compared to the tsunami of July 2016. Indeed this corresponds to the release of the game “Pokemon Go” and it seems that a huge amount of people are now willing to hunt Pokemons in real life. Therefore it is the perfect time to start a Pokemon business.

Google Trends – “Pokemon”, from 2004 to July 2016

Google Trends – “Pokemon”, last 12 months until July 2016

If on the contrary you notice that the search for your keywords is in permanent decline, this deserves further researches to see if there is a future for your business.

In an upcoming article we will discuss about your market segmentation. This will allow you to offer targeted products and services to your specific audience, bringing added value and business opportunities.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you want to react!