5 minutes of learning today is better than no minutes of learning today. -- Robin Sharma

This will not happen OVERNIGHT!  I just want you to know this up front.  

Overnight Success

If you are looking for a magic trick or a quick fix to make money, then please stop reading this right now and unsubscribe.  This is not what this is about.

There are never any OVERNIGHT successes.  Why it might appear overnight to us, we didn't see the years of effort they put into their work before they became a success.  The hours of time they spent honing their skills goes unnoticed when we see them on their stage.  

Think about Sidney Crosby...Was he born an NHL Star???  No, he worked darn hard to get there.  He put tons of hours into his craft to make sure he was the best.  Now he is a success.  Some might call him an OVERNIGHT success.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, calls this the 10,000-Hour Rule. 

"Studies suggest the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent....It's simply practice. 10,000 hours of it. 20 hours a week for 10 years."

You Already Have It 

If you are still here, guess what???  You have already put in the work.  

Now we just need to pull it out of you so you can share your knowledge with the world and bring value into the lives of others.

Whether you are:

• Working For The Man
• A Real Estate Agent
• A Student
• Unemployed
• An Event Planner
• A Web Designer
• A Consultant
• A Mom
• Own A Restaurant
• Work In Retail
• This list could go on forever.

Whatever you do and you are reading this, I GUARANTEE you have a skill, that you have honed over the years that you can charge for and bring value to others.

What I am doing with this series of posts is EXACTLY what I am talking about.  I honed my skills as an entrepreneur and more specifically, the Internet over the last 11 years to bring this information to you.

We all have it and I am going to show you how you can pull it out of yourself.

Finding That Profitable Idea Hiding In Your Body

This is where we get a bit more tactical and I will show you how you can find your profitable idea with the skills you already have.  

Then I will show you a way to see if you are able to make money with that idea and turn it into and informational product you can offer to your market.

Disclaimer:  I am not saying I came up with these formulas or concepts, but I have learned them from many hours of reading, studying and observing how many individuals are doing this online now with their businesses.

The concept I am about to share with you was first brought to my attention by Ramit Sethi, author of New York Times Best Seller, I Will Teach You To Be Rich and then shared by Neville Medorha on his blog.  Neville does an excellent job of helping people find ways to earn money on the side.  It is this formula that I think will definitely help you in finding your profitable idea.

Here we go....

Step 1:  I need you to grab a piece of paper right now and write down all the things you are good at and you love to do.  Examples could be:

• Painting 
• Cooking
• Branding
• Babysitting
• Buying real estate/selling real estate
• Playing video games
• Coaching sports
• Cleaning
• Travelling
• Anything!!!!!!!
• The crazier the better.

Step 2:  After you write down your ideas (shoot for at least 10), I want you to come back to this post and take your ideas through this framework.

Now that you have some ideas built around your skills and things you love, now you need to find out if there is a market for them.  Side note, we used this process to create our flagship product Big Santo back in the day.  We just didn't know it. :-) I will discuss this in a later post.

Question 1: What's the product/skill?

Lets say you picked "Siamese Cats".  You have a ton of knowledge on breeds, caring for, products, how to keep them from biting your guest :-).  Whatever it might be, you have knowledge on this topic that you can package up into an information poduct and share with others.

Question 2:  Who will pay?

This will determine who you market your concept to, so make sure you write down every possible person or organization that would pay for this information.  For this example people who might pay for this information Veterinarian, Pet Stores, SPCA, Cat Owners etc.

By the way, I am just winging this example, so it will be interesting to see how this turns out. :-)

Question 3:  Ability to pay

Look at each individual or group and see if they have the ability to pay.  So for this example,

• Veterinarian ='s Yes
• Pet Stores ='s Yes
• SPCA ='s No 
• Cat Owners ='s Yes

As you are going through this, you might have more then one Yes, so now you need to figure out which market is bigger and would for sure have the money to buy your product.  Oh and you feel confident marketing to.

Question 4:  Final Decision - Do it, yes or no

Look at each option, who will pay and has the ability to pay, then pick which one you want to move forward with.  You can do this for a bunch of different ideas/skills, but this is just an easy way to see if an idea is good or not.  Factor in the market and profit margins etc.

You can grab an excel spreadsheet I use when going through this here.  

Is Your Idea Still To Generic?

To take Ramit's and Neville's formula a bit further, you can even niche down your idea with what Ramit calls the Two-Qualifier Method.

The Two-Qualifier Method takes you from one level — say, tutoring for high-school kids – and layers another qualifier on top of it — say, tutoring for private high school kids. Of course, you can take this a lot further.

In essence it looks like this:

[QUALIFIER 1] — [QUALIFIER 2] who need (YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE)

Now, how does this help us with our example?

Let’s say you have a siamese cat with diabetes and you’ve decided to create an informational product on the best ways to care for siamese cats with diabetes, and based on this, you know your target from the Two-Qualifier Method is the following:

Siamese cat owners whose cat has diabetes.  What do you know about this group of people?

You know that they (1) have money, (2) want their cats to live as long as possible and (3) love and care for their cats. 

Indeed, they really care about their cats  — since we all know people are crazy about their pets.  We are!!! :-)

There ya go.  Happy idea hunting. :-)

You can either take your time or move on over to the next post, where I will show you how to use Google and Facebook to validate your idea.  

STEP 2 IS THIS WAY --->