Many people fall in love with an idea and decide to turn it in to a business. Often that is a great idea that builds wealth and provides a lifetime of fulfillment.  Just as often, it leads to endless frustration and failure.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to figure out which, ahead of time?

Here are 8 simple questions to which you need answer “yes” if you want to be sure that your idea can really go the distance.

1.    Do customers want what you’ve got to offer them?
So often people come up with an idea they fall in love with.  They think it so interesting that they try to make a business out of it.  The trouble is while it may be neat, it’s not necessarily something anyone really wants.  This is the only question that can get a “no” and still leave you in business, as long as the answer to the next question is “yes.”  If you have a brand new product category that no one has seen before, then they may not immediately want it, simply because they never thought of it before. 


2.    Are there enough people with “latent pain” you can persuade to want what you’ve got? 
In other words, people may feel the pain, without realizing there is any solution. Once you offer them the solution, they may recognize that pain, and want to relieve it. 


3.    Are there enough prospective customers to earn you enough money?
Is the market big enough?  Are there enough buyers? If you sell a reasonable fraction of them will the sales be enough for you?  


4.    Is there a cost-efficient way to reach those prospects?
If not, how are you going to get them to buy and still make a profit?  If there’s no way to reach them without spending a fortune, you’ll never grow quickly.

5.    Is there enough capacity that if you sell out, you’re making enough money? 
Many businesses have only a limited capacity; only so much raw material, a limited number of skilled employees, a fixed number of seats in the theater.  When you use up all you’ve got, does that bring in enough cash? 


6.    Are margins strong enough to leave sufficient operating profits for investment and lifestyle?  
Some businesses can answer “yes” to all the above questions, but the product or service costs too much to produce, and no matter how many you sell, it never adds up to a profit.


7.    Is there a future path for the business? 
Can you build on the first product with a second one?  Are there new markets to conquer? Is there some way to take advantage of the assets you’re creating? 


8.    Based on these questions, can you leverage this business to reach your dreams?  
If not, then what you’ve got is a hobby.  Keep it that way. If yes, go for it, and good luck. 

These questions are about as solid as you can get when trying to decide if your new idea will actually lead to:

1. A financial/lifestyle goal, or
2. Just keep you tied up bailing water out of a ship with holes

Make sure and ask yourself these questions next time you’re tempted to start a new business or develop a new product – they’ll save you a lot of time in the long run!

Please post your thoughts and comments below…I’d love to hear them!

Tight rolled jeans?

Flouresent colors?

Skinny ties?

Perms, crimps, mullets and mohawks?

Some of those come to mind for me, but mostly I think of all the awesome movies that came out in that decade.

(Funny thing is, now that I think about it, if I were to write up a list of all my favorite 80’s movies, more than half of them would include either Sylvester Stalone or Tom Cruise…but how can Rambo III and Top Gun NOT be on your all-time best movies list?!)

One of my favorites from those 10 years was Rocky IV (see, Stalone again), and while a big part of that reasoning has to do with the totally unrealistic blood-bath of a boxing match at the end of the movie, there are some actual success principles to be learned by watching it.

(hint: men, make sure to point this out next time you’re trying to convince your wife it’s a good movie for date night!)

As a quick recap (in case for *some* reason you haven’t seen the movie [and you call yourself an American?]), Rocky’s friend and mentor Apollo gets killed in the ring by Ivan Drago (the Russian heavyweight champ) and so Rocky must avenge his death by beating Drago in the ring.

The reason this isn’t the greatest idea is that Drago is about 12 times the size of Rocky and the Italian Stallion hasn’t been in the ring in a couple of years, so he’s got a lot of ground to make up.

And here’s where the leadership and personal development lessons come in…

Rocky takes a very unorthodox approach to his training.

While Ivan Drago is using state-of-the-art machines and athletic training equipment and facilities, Rocky opts for an abondoned barn in the middle of Siberia using old ropes, rocks, and horse wagons.

Makes perfect sense, I know.

But there’s actually genius in his approach, and it comes back to some basic success principles that when followed, regardless of the endeavor, increase your chances of success many fold.

The Success Secrets of Rocky Balboa

Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

This is principle number 1.

When you get used to being in the same environment doing the same thing all the time, you get lazy and soft.  You’ve got to change your environment and change your method of operation enough that it engages the creative problem-solving side of your brain.

You will become more productive and you won’t fall into your old time-wasting habits that are limiting your results right now.

Think of the ways you could be pursuing your goal but aren’t because you percieve them to be too hard or you are afraid of for some reason…THOSE are your next moves to make and methods to act on.

And when you do, that is where you will find a breakthrough.

Simplify

Most of us have way too much going on at once, and way too much stuff in front of us at any one time.

Rocky ditched the hi-tech stuff for a barn because he knew the only thing he needed to train hard was discipline and gravity.

Take account of your schedule and daily activities and “to-dos” and ditch anything that isn’t directly related to the goal at hand.

A big one here is email.

More specifically, being subscribed to 238 different “guru” lists that always have great new products coming out and things to sell…nothing wrong with that at all, it’s just very distracting and at some point you have to stop learning and start doing.

One of my personal goals is to unsubscribe from all lists except from a handful of marketers I  know and trust so I can stop using up mental RAM with the nagging feeling of “my inbox is about to explode and I need to do something about it!”

Singular Focus

This one is similar to Simplify, but a little more specific.

Pick one task to complete (two TOPS) and work on it until it is done.

Multitasking, while a cool word that earned you some level of status 10 years ago, is not all it’s cracked up to be, and most times proves to decrease productivity instead of increase.

Have a small list of things that MUST be accomplished each day and do not stray from them until complete.  You’ll be amazed at how much more you get done and how much better you’ll feel about what youv’e accomplished.

And finally…

Deadlines

Make sure you put some timelines on the things you want to get done.

It’s way too easy to continually let things slide if you don’t have a “must be complete by this date” stamp on each project.

If you need to, pretend you’ve got a boss that’s going to ask for the assignment on the due date, or ask someone else to hold you accountable to it’s completion.

Bottomline, make sure you have some sense of urgency (real or imagined) attached to your goals or you’ll soon find it WAY past when you thought you’d be finished with them.

Rocky knew what date he needed to be in the ring.  He was either prepared when he got there, or he was certain to be savagely beaten for all the world to see.

(not that that’s what awaits you if you don’t complete your goals in a timely fashion, but it makes for a good point!)

So there you have it.  Personal Development and Success Habits from movies of the 1980’s…hmm…do I feel a series coming on?

Talk soon,
Steve

I’ve done this myself before, as well as use Digg for headline ideas, but since Perry went to the trouble to put together the video I figured it was a little easier to let him explain it this time around!

Far from it.

In fact, most people are lost in a sea of conflicting information and endless methods for using social media and Web 2.0 sites to create a brand and turn traffic into loyal readers and customers.

Fortunately, there is an answer, and it’s a method called SEO 2.0, and this is what it does:

• Drives targeted traffic to any offer, website or blog without doing any of the things that normal Internet marketers do and see success above and beyond expectations
• Gets you 200% more search engine visibility than your competitors automatically
• Gets higher search engine rankings automatically
• Gets inbound links from other website owners automatically
• Rallies large followings using no advertising budget

Sound too good to be true?  Not so fast there cowboy…keep reading.

SEO 2.0

If you’ve watched the post about social media being like a big party, then you understand the basics of how SEO 2.0 works.

And while Perry did a great job of explaining the basic concept in his video, here’s a more structured breakout of the steps required to develop a concrete action plan and maximize your results with social media and Web 2.0.

There are 5 Main Steps to SEO 2.0:

Step 1: Build your central hub

Step 2: Discover potential networks (social media blueprinting)

Step 3: Learn your communities

Step 4: Develop and deliver your content strategy

Step 5: Engage the Audience and build your fan club

What these steps boil down to are:

• Creating your self-hosted wordpress.org blog
• Finding the main social networks and forums that your target market are primarily engaged in
• Becoming a contributing member to those communities
• Putting together content that your target market within those communities would find enlightening, entertaining, or educational
• And then drawing people with that content back to your central hub to engage them further and create a loyal fan club of people who will evangelize your message and promote it on your behalf

And that last step is where the rubber really meets the road because it leads to viral content syndication that is totally out of your control and reaches to the far corners of your target market – much farther than you could reach yourself.

It results in tons of backlinks, social buzz, and ultimately higher search engine rankings (which is the ultimate goal), and you don’t have to go through all the “traditional” internet marketing techniques to acquire the organic traffic.

One of the best parts about the whole process (in my opinion),  is that it’s plannable, predictable, and on purpose.  You’re not just throwing stuff up hoping that some of it will get promoted.  You have a plan about the content you’re going to create to get a desired result and you can act on that plan in a focused and methodical manner.

No more wondering which networks to use.

No more banging your head against the wall to figure out what kind of content to produce.

No more confusion on what to do where, when, and how.

Just a simple, actionable, focused gameplan that you can follow to start dominating your niche in a very short period of time!

Now, I wish I could take credit for this method of branding and content syndication, but unfortunately I can’t.

This concept was actually developed by what I consider to be an “under the radar” marketer who’s quietly been getting top search engine rankings and taking brand new businesses from nothing to massive results in a very short period of time (like 30 days) for the last couple of years.

After getting amazingly repeatable results, he and his team set out to systematically determine:

1. What are the core elements at play?
2. How does online social media work to produce these results?
3. Why do people spread content around even if it sucks?
4. How could they repeat this process for all of their content in any business?

The best part?

They put together a report and lessons that go over every single aspect of how to generate these type of results for any business model that you can gain access to below.

All you have to do is fill out the simple  form below to send out a tweet letting others know about this powerful marketing method and I’ll send your report right over.

This is honestly some of the best information on the net today that literally cuts through the fog and brings a laser-like focus to your social marketing efforts.  

If you plan in any way whatsoever to use Web 2.0 and social media in your marketing plan, then you cannot operate any longer without this information.

Before I saw it, I was confused.

After having digested it, I am not.

And it’s a great feeling!

So just fill out the quick form below (don’t worry, no personal info is saved) and I’ll send your report right over.