Idea Of The Week Friday, December 12th Uncategorized

So, I promised you all an idea this Friday afternoon, and I’m not one to bail on a promise. Now I have a lot of ideas on a regular basis; some of which are ridiculous (but would totally work) and some which actually have potential. Yet the ideas I have are very varied, and not many people are interested in the methods I suggest – no offence taken or meant.

My latest idea, being the film cell frames, has the potential to bring in a nice side income, but as some people commented, they aren’t too hot on selling on eBay. Others simply lacked the ‘physical prowess’, or simply were focused about making money online without creating products. Some simply disliked the idea. The list goes on. Basically what I am trying to say (albeit badly), is that I want to keep giving you guys ideas, but I’d like to know from you guys what types of things you’d like to see. If you’d like to see more ideas about making money by building websites, writing articles, etc. let me know – give me the topic and I will research / think.

Now that’s done, lets get down to today’s idea to make money online. It kinda pains me to reveal this one, as I had planned on making some money with it, but you guys are decent enough to come read my blog, I will share it with you. What I’ll do is walk you through what I did, and explain why I stopped, so you guys can get the full experience. The basic principle behind this, is we are going to sell an online eBook in a very niche market – the world of magic.

Now, don’t get too disheartened when you read that we are going to be writing a magic book – there is mountains of information on the subject freely available online – or alternatively you can hire someone to write it. Remember, you don’t have to do all the work yourself (this is key to remember later on). As I’m a big fan of magic, and knew a few tricks I could write up, I thought it would be right down my alley to do this, and make a bit of cash out of it. I decided that I would set up a landing page with a ‘taster’ eBook that they had to part with their email to get. Then once I had their emails, I would hype up about my new eBook being even better and charge for that book. Clever no?

Well, no, not really. Its a tried and tested method that is done hundreds of times every day by different people who hope to make money. Yet I was determined to make it work. I set up an aweber account (for the email marketing), and advertised the trick on facebook. The results…were very disappointing. In a few days, I had only amounted 3 subscribers – not good. Luckily I wasn’t paying for the advertising on facebook, so it wasn’t too much of a concern, yet I needed a way of getting more people to the site and subscribing. That’s when I suddenly hit the ’sneaky’ way to market a magic book to normal people. You see, it turns out a lot of magic can be ‘mistaken’ for almost superhero powers…this reminded me of the TV show ‘Heroes’, which was coming back. Now would be a good chance to ‘cash-in’ on this!

With this in mind, I decided to slightly change my free eBook to talk about ‘mind reading’, and base the facebook advert on Matt Parkman from ‘Heroes’. Within a day I already had 10 people sign up to the email subscription, and many more people visiting the site. I won’t lie, my landing page isn’t the best (you can see it here), but with a bit of tuning I was ready to change it, and then start work writing the book that showed you how you could have ‘the powers of heroes’. Based on the response from my facebook advertising, it was sure to make ’some’ money. So why didn’t it? Well, you remember me saying this – ‘Remember, you don’t have to do all the work yourself ‘ ? Well, I didn’t take my own advice. I decided I had to write it all myself, the book, landing page, adverts…and then the amount of work it seemed to be just demotivated me to actually write it. I spent weeks trying to draft out the book model itself, but to no avail. Eventually, the idea was replaced with different ones, and it went into the recess of my mind. The concept itself is good, and has the potential to sell – lets face it, even if you only make a few sales, you can use it as proof of concept to sell the website someplace like sitepoint for more money than you’ve put in!

Yet I think you shouldn’t just take the idea of a magic/heroes book away with you, but rather the fact that by looking at prospects ever-so-slightly differently, you can massively increase your gain. By changing the subject from general ‘magic’ to ‘learning the powers of heroes’, I was able to bring in a lot more people and interest them in a product that before was not being received well. Another example of this might be if you wrote a book about how ‘cakes contain too much sugar’, and how you should stop eating them/ start cooking them right - rather than marketing it to weight loss groups, change it slightly and it could almost become a ’sensible cake cookbook’!

I hope you take something from this post, and I hope you have found it somewhat useful. Me, I’m going to get back to work, all the while thinking about what other ideas I could come up with to share with you guys, and make money. I won’t have the Internet again over the weekend (broadband is being installed on Thursday), so if I don’t get back to any emails or comments, that’ll be why. Look forward to catching up with all you guys on Monday! I have some interesting posts lined up for next week, enough for one a day even! See you soon!

Dan