My first business failure: the show search engine business

Lesson Details:

I: Introduction

A: How to find your business niche ideas

I think everyone in this world has an idea for a business, but most people just can’t pull the trigger and start their own business. It’s not because they don’t have enough money or that they can’t find the right opportunity, it’s because people are afraid of failure. They always think “What if I quit my job and try to make it on my own, but I fail? What will I do then?” These are valid concerns, but I’ve learned throughout my career that if you don’t take risks you will never succeed. I’m here to tell you that if you want to get anywhere in life you have to take some risks. You can either play it safe or take chances that could lead you to success. I’m telling you right now that if you want to get anywhere in life you have to take some risks.

I want to tell you about my first business failure, because I believe it teaches me a lot of lessons about running a successful business. So I was in college at the time, and I wanted to make money while I was in school so I needed a way to pay for all the expenses while I was there. So I came up with the idea of making a website that had show advertisements for free. I thought it would be a great idea because I was already building websites for all the bands that played on campus.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I found a server to host the website on and I made the website, but once it launched it didn’t take long for me to realize that this wasn’t going to work. People were using the website and finding ads. They were even clicking on them, but they weren’t paying for them. I put a lot of time and effort into this website and it was completely useless.

You see, no one was willing to pay for these ads. The reason for this is because they were only small shows and not many people wanted to pay for advertisement on them. There were plenty of other sites like this out there and there were no shortage of advertisers. Also, the kinds of advertisers that would be willing to pay for an ad on a small show website wouldn’t be willing to pay much and they would also want something in return.

What did I learn from this experience? Did this stop me from trying again? No way! What I learned from this failure is that you need to be able to differentiate yourself from your competition, and when you do that your customers will come back to you. So what did I do next? I looked for a different niche in the online advertisement industry and found an untapped market.

My next venture was called “Pay Per Click Advertising” or PPC for short. This is a type of advertising where you can pay a small fee each time someone clicks on one of your ads. This works really well if you know how to use it correctly. It can work especially well if you know how to use it correctly.

So what did I do next? In order to get started with PPC marketing, all you need to do is go out and get a list of keywords used by people searching for things related to your product or service. Then you put your ads on these search engines, and whenever someone searches for one of those keywords your ad will pop up at the top of the search results. If someone clicks on your ad then you get paid a small amount by Google or Yahoo or whatever search engine you use. Now that you have a good idea of how this works, let me tell you how it worked out for me.

I used a service called Google Adwords and set up an account with them so that every time someone searched for certain keywords related to my services, my ad would appear at the top of their search results. Now the trick is knowing which keywords to choose so that your ad will get clicked on more often than all the other ads competing with yours. This is where experience comes in handy, because the more you do this the better you will get at it. So here is what happened next…

As soon as my ads started showing up on the search results people started coming to my site looking for what they were searching for, and when they found what they wanted they bought my products or signed up for my services. The cool thing about PPC marketing is that once you start getting customers through your ads then they will continue coming back to buy more products or sign up for more services over and over again. Each time they visit your site they will see your ads at the top of search results and click on them again and again until they finally become an actual customer.

So now that you know how PPC works, here is how it turned out for me… After signing up with Google Adwords I put up several ads for related keywords like “how to make money online” “make money blogging” “make money affiliate marketing” ect.. Within 3 months I had over 30 paying customers, which means that each month I got paid $30 per customer (my cost per click was $0.30). That may not sound like much but if there are 10 customers who pay $30 per month then that alone brings in $300 per month! But wait, there are more customers coming back so there are more sales! For example, one customer who signed up with me decided to do some more research on making money online so he came back several times before he actually made his first purchase with me! That means more potential sales! So just imagine how much money could be made if all 10 of those customers stayed with me forever! All together my traffic was bringing in about 20 new visitors per month which meant potentially 20 new customers! Also, keep in mind that most of these people who signed up with me were also buying stuff from other members on my site as well! This is why giving away free stuff can help build relationships with others! Now lets look at what all of this means…

Each month my ad cost me $240 (my cost per click was $0.30) but after subtracting my ad costs from the actual revenue made each month it worked out like this…

30 x $30 = $900

– 240 = $660 profit per month! Now imagine what would happen if I continued increasing my traffic? Also keep in mind that these numbers are based on one particular niche only! There are unlimited opportunities available related to this niche! There are hundreds or even thousands of related niches available online that could generate even more income than this one! When I first started out using Pay Per Click Marketing it cost me $500 per month just to run an ad campaign because my keyword bids were too high and my cost per click was $0.04 per click instead of $0.30 per click! So even though I had no sales and no customers yet, I still lost $500 each month… But now we know why this happened… The truth is that even though we didn’t have any sales we still had costs we had to pay every month whether we made sales or not! We had costs such as hosting fees, domain name registration fees, keyword bidding costs, and other costs like picture upload fees ect.. Even though we didn’t have any sales we still had expenses we had to pay every month whether we made sales or not! We had costs such as hosting fees, domain name registration fees, keyword bidding costs, and other costs like picture upload fees ect.. Now let us look at what would happen if we changed our bidding strategy and lowered our cost per click down from $0.04 per click down to $0.30 per click…If we lower our cost per click down from $0.04 per click down to $0.30 per click… 30 x $30 = $900 – 240 = $660 profit per month! Now imagine what would happen if we continued increasing our traffic?! As long as our traffic increased then our profits increased as well! Just imagine what would happen if we increased our traffic 100 times bigger than it is now? Lets say 10,000 visitors a month… 30 x 10,000 = 300,000 – 240 = 60,000 profit per month!! As long as our traffic increased then our profits increased as well!! Just imagine what would happen if we increased our traffic 100 times bigger than it is now?! Lets say 10,000 visitors a month… 30 x 10,000 = 300,000 – 240 = 60,000 profit per month!! As long as our traffic increased then our profits increased as well! Just imagine what would happen if