It’s actually not that hard. You need to do two things to start with.
Firstly you need to make some genuine online profits so you can tell others how to do it, and secondly you need to realise that the people who are already involved in this niche and are successful ALSO need products and services, and they’re willing to pay for them.
I’m sure you’ve heard the story of how the richest people to come out the Gold Rush era weren’t the miners looking for gold, they were the people who sold the shovels.
And the one about not setting up your new hamburger joint in the same street where there are already 50 up and running. But if you open a stall selling indigestion remedies you might just be onto a winner!
So you need to find some making money that doesn’t involve telling other people how to make money (yet).
Here’s one of the ways I did it, and STILL DO in other niches.
Quite a few years ago, newsletters were very popular (as they are now) but back then the majority weren’t online, they were paper based, printed newsletters. The Internet was pretty much a baby but the gurus of the time were still selling HTMM products as they are today. They had newsletters too.
Except they were printed one. They were composed with early word processing packages. I used Lotus back then, as did a lot of people.
The guru-types were too busy writing their newsletters to bother about much else and the people trying to break into the HTMM niche were trying to emulate them and do the same by creating their own newsletters.
I was still working my 9-5 at this point but was earning extra money on top of my job as a leaflet distributor, and selling the occasional resell rights booklet (by mail order) using free advertising methods which I’d had to develop because I couldn’t afford paid advertising.
More money started to kick in when I realised that I’d become perhaps not an expert, but an experienced marketer at both the above methods. So I sat down and wrote the following booklets:
‘How to set up your own leaflet distribution business’;
‘Let me show you how I earn half my salary AGAIN with just a word processor and an old printer’ - How to profit from resell rights.
Put simply, I wrote booklets about how I set up the above businesses and sold them using free advertising techniques, through direct mail.
They did quite well, so I decided to start a newsletter to run alongside them. At the time newsletters were the ‘in thing’ – sort of like memberships sites are today.
Then a second light bulb went off in my head. This is where the REAL money came from:
In the process of writing my booklets I found that I needed to learn how to put together newsletters, booklets and ads using my ‘word processor and old printer’.
So while I did this I wrote down exactly how, in a step-by-step way, I used the software, made a template, formatted paragraphs, fonts, headings etc and made sure the whole lot printed out correctly.
If I was doing this today I’d use a Camtasia presentation which would be a whole lot simpler but back then, I had to write it down step by step.
I wondered – just wondered – if anyone would be interested in my guide, so I placed a few ads and was blown off my feet.
The response was overwhelming.
I quickly compiled the whole thing into a package which included a booklet (twenty pages or so I think) about how to build your own newsletter using my techniques and a simple word processor, and included (this was the real selling point) a template that they could load up into their own word processor that laid out various newsletter formats. It was a ‘newsletter in a box’ (LONGGGG before ‘blog in a box’ or anything similar came out)
It sold like crazy. Newsletters were the craze at the time and everyone trying to enter the HTMM niche was setting one up. So what had I done?
I’d stopped looking for gold and started selling shovels.
In doing so of course I found a lot of gold.
I even offered a printing service whereby I they would send me a floppy disk (remember those?) and I’d print and mail their newsletters for them. This didn’t work out because I badly got the costings wrong and ended up out of pocket on this part of the business so ended it. (Stick to what you know!)
So from having a little success with my initial attempts I now had the following:
1. A leaflet distribution business
2. I knew how to advertise for free (I had to learn because I had no advertising budget)
3. I knew about resell rights and direct mail
And this developed into
4. I sold a booklet about how to advertise for free
5. I sold a booklet about how to set up your own leaflet distribution service
6. I sold a booklet about how to profit from simple resell rights
And from this came:
7. I was forced to learn how to word process to write and print the above booklets
And then
8. I started selling a ‘newsletter in a box’ package.
9. I started a newsletter for online entrepreneurs (I thought I could pretty much call myself one by now) and made it clear I was still part-time (although not for long when all this took off) and was basically honest about my whole set-up.
