- So last night I had
a close family member come to me with an idea
for an online business. And I thought it was a pretty good idea. And so, I had sort of an
informal coaching session with this family member. And I'm not gonna tell
you what the market was, but it was for a membership site. Let's just pretend it was,
let's say scuba diving. It wasn't scuba diving, let's just pretend it was for an example. And so, it was an idea to
create a membership site that was really very community driven, that might or might not have some content. And she wanted to know what
I thought of this idea. And you know, I get people come to me with all kinds of ideas,
just all the time. And a lot of them, some of them are good, some of them are bad, some
of them are in between. Some of them I'm not sure. So this is a market that I
know a, just this much about, not very much about. But, I went through a thought process. I walked her through a thought process of how to go about attacking this market. How to go about thinking
about and getting started. And that's when I thought you know you might be interested in hearing about the thought process. So the first thing wasn't
to worry about product. It wasn't to worry about list building or positioning or anything like that. It was to research it. And so we did just a
little bit of research and then I said now your marching orders are to go forward and
do all this research. And then you can come
back to me and we can, come back to me in a day
with this research done. And we can come up with a plan from there. And so the idea was,
basically you need to know the landscape before
you jump into a market. And I've been successful
in a bunch of markets. And my students and clients
have been successful in thousands of markets. And markets are, every market's different. Every market has different dynamics. And so, we started with YouTube and we just typed in like a super. I'm like give me the
most common search term you could ever have for this. And we typed it in and we found that, we looked at the top videos. And the top videos had anywhere from 500,000 to two million
views for a single video for a single how to do this thing and whatever in this market. And let's just pretend
it was scuba diving. You know, how to put on
your scuba tank or whatever, two million views. And so, I'm like okay
well this is a big market. Right off the bat we
know it's a big market. I exist in a market and I do
very, very well in a market where you know many of the top channels get five or 10,000 views. And so, a million views,
that's a big market. So okay, we know we've
got a viable market. So the next thing we do is
just look at the top channels and some of those top channels and then take a look at
their actual website. So just look in their little
"About" in their channel. At first I'm like, wow this person, they not only have two
million views on their videos but they've also got 300,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. That's impressive, that's a lot of people. So then I click through their website. We get to their website and
the website wasn't awesome. It looked nice, but when
you got to the website, you couldn't tell ...
what's this website about. Who's it for and what's
it gonna do for them. That was not obvious when you just looked at the top of the website,
it wasn't obvious. Then there were these, lots of ads. Like across the bottom
there's this sort of semi-transparent ad from one
of these big ad networks. And then on the sidebar
there's other big ads from the ad networks. And nowhere on the page was there a place to subscribe to an email list. So, this tells me right off the bat, this is one of the top people that gets the huge following on YouTube and their website ... it's by someone who doesn't know how to market. You can't tell what the website's for. They don't have a good headline. They don't have any real
benefit in that top page for why you're at that website. It's got images but you can't even tell why you're supposed to
click on those images. They're not collecting email addresses and they're running these big ugly ads that are just gonna really torque off anyone coming to the site. They're gonna hate having these ads. You can click a button
to make the ad go away but then if you load another
page, the ad pops up. It's a horrible user experience. And it tells me that their revenue model, I mean they did have some things for sale, but you couldn't even, it was hard to find the things for sale. There are images, it was
a horrible sales process. They're not getting, they're
not collecting leads. They're not collecting email opt-ins. So that means, they're
being driven just by ads, by ad revenue. And ad revenue, especially
from ad networks these days, it's almost impossible to
make a living doing that. I mean five years ago, ten
years ago you could do that. Nowadays you can't. So, then I went, so
basically this is a market that gets lots of
traffic, lots of interest. But one of the top players here in terms of a YouTube channel, it's like almost a hobby for them. Then you go look back
and they, I don't know, they've done 20 million
views on this channel. So, rough rule of thumb
I think these days, is you can make about
$2000 in YouTube ad revenue per million views. So if this person's got 20 million views, maybe they've made $40,000 but their channel's five years old. So over five years,
they've made about $40,000. It's not horrible, but it's still, we're looking at probably more or less a hobby channel. And, so this is just
looking at one channel. So what I told my family member here is you gotta do this
for the top 20 channels. Look at the top 20 YouTube channels. Then go find the top 20 forums. Then go find the top 20 Facebook groups, and then the top 20 Instagram channels, and maybe Pinterest. Every market is different. So where people hang out is different. So in this market, those channels that had these had 300,000 YouTube subscribers, they only had like 30,000
Instagram subscribers. So that tells me, this is
not an Instagram market. This is a YouTube market. Different markets are different. So your market's gonna be different. And so, this is just,
then go to the forums. Look at the forums and find out, assuming not all markets,
not all niches have forums but many do. If there is a forum go there and see what the sticky topics are. See what the hot topics are. You can sort in most forum software to see which threads had the most views, which threads had the most replies. So that can start to tell you about the really hot topics in that market. Then you wanna go find
out if there are people that really know how to market
in whatever this niche is, that are selling stuff effectively. So go do some searches on Google and find the top 20 sites that are listed and go to their, do that same analysis where you go there and say, are they collecting email addresses? If they're not collecting email addresses, unless it's a pure eCommerce play then they don't really have a business. They don't know what they're doing. Anyone who's serious in this business is making a serious effort
to collect email addresses and build an email list. Join the email list. Setup a special email address
that does nothing but, you setup a new Google email address. Go to Gmail, setup a new email address and just join every list you can and watch what they're
sending in terms of emails. Watch who they're promoting. Figure out where their revenue is. So really, I'm going through a lot here. And I know I'm spending
a lot of time doing this. If this is useful, let
me know in the comments and I'll, maybe I'll do another video on the next step beyond this. But this is what we're talkin' about is some forensic intelligence. Some covert intelligence, but
learning about your market. It's learning about the size of it. It's learning about the hot buttons. It's learning about the revenue channels. It's learning about the
relative marketing skill of the players in your market. And so this is the first step
in starting this business. It's not about right now
what product you should get. It's not about how to build a list. It's not about how to build your authority and your positioning. It's about figuring out what
the playing field looks like. Who are the players? How are they running their businesses? Are they making money? Are they people that could
possibly be partners? Where, is this a market
that's driven by advertising? Is it a market that's
driven by joint ventures? These are the things
you need to figure out before you can go anywhere. And it will inform everything
you do in your business right down to whether you should
start your business or not. So, I know I covered a lot of ground. You can watch it again. Like I said, if you're
interested in this type of video, if you're interested in what
are the next steps beyond that, scroll down, leave a comment for me and let's go get 'em this week.
