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Class 2: Earning Money On The Internet - Best Practices
You have an amazing potential to create an income in the world of digital marketing just by sharing what you already know. Even at your young age, you can influence and positively affect many lives just by sharing your skills, talents, and teaching others what you know. Are you afraid you may not know enough? Many school teachers are just a few chapters ahead of their students in certain subjects. Do you know more about your subject than others? Definitely! Some people know absolutely nothing about your subject.
People are hungry for information, so hungry in fact that the digital marketing (information marketing) arena is predicted to grow from a 200 billion dollar industry today to a 350 billion dollar industry within the next 5 years. Wouldn’t it be amazing to land a piece of internet real-estate now and became a part of that growth?
You are more than capable of accomplishing this. Why? Because you have something to say and you have something people want. If you are honest, have integrity, produce quality content and products, and offer something of value, your audience will crave whatever you are promoting. Your business has the potential to last for years and continue to grow through the predicted digital marketing revolution.
Can you imagine potentially building an online presence that generates passive/residual income that lasts for years after your content is created? Let’s use Youtube as an example. Youtubers who started posting videos years ago, still earn income on those same videos today. This is just one of many examples.
Passive income, described by Dave Ramsey, is money you earn in a way that requires little to no daily effort to maintain. Some passive income ideas—like renting out property or building a blog—may take some work to get up and running, but they could eventually earn you money while you sleep. We will be focusing on things like blogging (sharing posts about your interests/skills/products on your own website), building followings on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, and creating great quality content on your blog for the search engines!
Be mindful about being consistent and staying the course; this is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme! Once you begin your business, it may take several months before you start to see the fruit of your labor. However, if you remain focused and persistent, you will eventually reap the rewards and start earning money doing what you love to do. I hope this excites you!
Remember, building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. In order to truly be successful, you’ll need the mindset of an entrepreneur. It’s going to take time, effort, diligence, and patience. The more often you build/post content for your business, the faster you will see growth. The results for some, like my son who is constantly uploading his content on online platforms, are seeing turn-out within a month.
So what is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur is a person with great, innovative ideas that identifies the need for the creation of a business to fill a void. Entrepreneurs can be people of any age (from 10 to 100). Their characteristics are creativity, imagination, and they have a passion for what they do.
Entrepreneurs generally start businesses to fill a void, solve a problem, and to meet a need. If you do something specific or have or sell something specific that someone else needs or wants and you learn how to market to that particular person, you can be very successful. The secret is finding customers that want what you are selling or teaching in that specific field of interest. This is called a niche (often pronounced NEESH). Let me explain this further.
A niche is denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population. An example of this is an entrepreneur whose favorite thing is trout fishing and decides to sell specialized river trout fishing rods or trout lures to trout fishing enthusiasts. Another example could be selling high-end yorkie dog collars to wealthy super-obsessed yorkie owners. Or yoga instructors offering yoga classes or fitness tips to a targeted age group. The more specific you can make your niche, the more successful you can be. You would be surprised to hear that many entrepreneurs earn hundreds of millions of dollars in the strangest and most obscure niches. Do you have what other people may call an odd interest? Fantastic! You may be onto something BIG!
What is your niche? If you don’t have any interests or hobbies, it would be advantageous to choose a niche or an interest for certain online business models. Entrepreneurs don’t start businesses for the sake of starting a business. They start businesses with a targeted objective and a specific audience in mind to sell a product or a service. It’s much simpler and can be far more profitable to create content and sell products/services in one niche.
Every year, millions of people fail at online business because they don’t have the mindset of a true entrepreneur. These eager and well-meaning people try to market products and services in the wrong way and to the wrong target audience. An example of this is when a person opens up an e-commerce store and then tries to sell way too many products, with much too broad of an audience to market those products to. After a while, this idealistic store owner becomes overwhelmed and wonders why he/she never makes a sale. The problem is, selling too many kinds of products or services, prevents this person from targeting a specific audience. Without that targeted audience or objective, the business becomes one that fails to thrive. This is because the priorities are backwards. Many people are looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, while providing zero value to their audience and then assume that when they fail, the business they invested in was a scam. When you start your business, keep it simple and focus on what you can do for your audience. Give away lots of free content, provide value to your customers, interact with your audience often, and avoid taking short cuts.
99% of people fail because they are only looking at making money and not about the value they can offer someone else. This course encourages you to create a brand for yourself, create great content for people who want it, offer something of value, generate a following, and then offer products or services to those who see the value in your business. Put others first and be kind to everyone, including those who may criticize you along the way. Keep your integrity intact as you build up your own character and don’t forget to edify others in the process. Give a shout out to other teenagers (especially the ones taking this course) who also offer valuable content.
See you in the next class!
Call To Action (Classwork):
Examples of the importance of working in a niche:
Let's do a "Google" search.
In The Search Engine Type in "Dog" (try using quotations). We don't normally use quotes unless we are searching for content that matches that exact phrase with the words in that particular order. I believe the word "dog" is found on 2 Billion websites/articles. Look right under the search bar to find the numbers.
Try it without quotes. I believe the number increases to 30 billion. Now search a particular breed like a yorkie. Try it without the quotes. I believe the search results fall slightly short of 55 million. DOGS = 30 Billions results. YORKIE = 55 Million. Now let's niche it down even further to something like "yorkie training" (for now don't use quotes). How many search results populated? I found around 10 Million search results. Now, use the quotations and search "yorkie training". What results did you find? I found around 14 Thousand results.
14 thousand still may seem like a lot of websites to compete with but it's not. If you are passionate about your yorkie and starting a yorkie dog training business only training yorkies, you would do quite well! You would create really interesting content and videos around training your yorkie and share that with the world. This is really quite simple and very targeted. Lastly, try typing in "Dog Training" and see what happens. How many results populated? Do you get my point? It would take a very long time to start a generic dog training business unless you have more time and capital (money) for advertising. Niche your niche and you'll find success more easily using free digital marketing techniques. Don't be discouraged if your topic is more broad. You can still succeed. It'll just take more effort on your part.
This is just an example of how you should approach starting a business. What is your interest/skill and how can that interest/skill be used to target specific audiences?
Have you thought about what you want to do yet? It's always a great idea to ask your friends and family what they think about your business idea. Take some time this week and have a conversation with family or friends about your venture and see what they have to say.
If you haven't done so, please join our group/forum on the website! Tell us all something positive that you've heard after telling others about your new business idea!!! Thank you so much and we will see you soon on the next lesson!
- JP
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