What You Can Sell Online When You Have No Product Or Service You Own

27 April 2020

What You Can Sell Online When You Have No Product Or Service You Own

The first thing you need to know when starting a business is what you’re going to sell!

If you’re stuck with what products or services to sell, then listen to find out how you can identify what you’ll sell and see if its something people really want!

Also, find out how to competitor hack your way to save yourself a ton of time and money in experimenting with online advertising and more…

Links From Episode

Competitor Hack e-Book: www.aaronhenriques.com/spyhack

Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/

Alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/

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Opportunity Awaits podcast Episode Transcript

Aaron Henriques: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. And welcome to the get growing online podcast. My name is Aaron Henriques and today I'm going to be talking to you about what you can sell if you don't already have a product or service, but you know that you want to start up your own online company. So before I carry on, I just want to apologize. [00:00:20] I've just gone for a walk. I was getting, you know, that Corona locked down sort of a feeling of being cramped. So before I'd go for a walk and as I was going for a walk, I just thought. Well, do you know what, let me just record this episode now while it's something that's fresh in my mind that I've been thinking about over the weekend, because I've had a few people contact me and You know, what's been clear, particularly with the Corona virus is that I've seen a lot of people have seen that they haven't been able to really run their businesses if they're already in business, if they're not online. [00:00:49] So that's happened to a lot of people and there's lots of people who have perhaps lost their jobs or, you know, perhaps they've been laid off or furloughed or something like that. And they've been looking at ways that they [00:01:00] can make money and use the opportunities and use the internet to be able to make some extra money for themselves or perhaps even go alone. [00:01:10] So today's episode is really there for people who, you know, may have lots of ideas, but maybe you're not sure what sort of idea to focus in on. And it's also there for people who may have, you know, who wants to get started, but they're literally not sure what products or service to sell. [00:01:27] And I think, you know, I personally, I think like the internet is the single best place to sell any product or service. If you're a new business, there is no easier way for you to get that engagement and start advertising your products and your services. To a very wide range of people that are outside of your, you know, your own inner circle. [00:01:50] So some people have been asking, you know, well, they want to get started with an online business, but they literally don't know what to sell. And so they've been looking around looking [00:02:00] what other people are doing, and with there being so much, you know, everything. No, you can get everything online with there being so much. [00:02:06] And it looks like, you know, some markets might be saturated. That may be something that people think is happening and they don't really want to waste their time because they feel like they can't get anywhere. You know, there are plenty of products. If you don't have your own products or your own service or well, your own knowledge to sell, even then you can look at things like, you know, partnership programs. There are plenty of them and, you know, affiliate programs. There's so many affiliate networks out there. [00:02:32] There are, there are literally people out there who will make more money than they're not, they're not than I am. Just by selling affiliate products, products that are not even their own. They just make a commission on referring it to other people. There are reseller programs. In case of reseller programs, one of my own businesses, my digital marketing company, we have a reseller program where we will white label our SEO service for them, and they can sell it on to their customers at whatever price that they so choose. [00:02:59][00:03:00] You know, you can look at importing, you can go on to a website like alibaba.com and you can import those products there. You can sell them on Amazon, you know, eBay, you can create your own websites, you know, you can go on you know, e-commerce sites like Shopify or shop it, and you could even sell your own knowledge. [00:03:21] You know, if you're, if you're particularly, if you're an expert, something in particular, then you know, why not share your knowledge? Because I can guarantee those people. That will be interested in whatever it is that you're an expert at. Okay. And maybe you thought, maybe you're one of them, people that you may have an idea and you don't even know it, perhaps there's something, a problem that you face quite frequently or, you know, friends or family of yours also faces and you've found a way to solve it for them. [00:03:48] And that's, as far as you went with it and maybe they love it. But you've never seen it as a business opportunity. So perhaps start thinking about things like that, that you may have done, that you could actually then turn that [00:04:00] into a real business opportunity and something that you can sell online no matter what time of day, no matter whether you've got coronavirus or not, you can get that out there to your customers. [00:04:12] So once you've narrowed down, you know, a few products and services, you're going to have to start really thinking about, you know, Are these realistic products or services, are they going to actually be something that I can, you know, sort of sell you know, online? Is it something that people are looking for at the moment? [00:04:29] And do you know what the simplest way to do that is with is by using the data from, you know, the biggest search provider on the planet and that's Google. So. So if you go to Google and type in Google trends, you'll be able to see, when you type in the few products that you've narrowed down to, you'll be able to see exactly what products are being searched for, how frequently down to the country you're in, or even the towns and cities. [00:04:54] And you'll be able to see if people are actually searching for those products on mass. And let's just say, you've [00:05:00] narrowed down five products. Enter the five product names on Google trends, and it will show you in graph format, easy to understand exactly what people are searching for. You know, you can take that as probably a sure sign of that's, what people are going to buy, but what you need to be careful of with that is needs to be careful of fads. [00:05:20] You know, there's a difference between something trending and a fad. So a trend is, you know, something is. You know, it's becoming popular and it's something that's continuing to go up and up and up in popularity, it's becoming more widely adopted. Whereas a fad is something like, you know, a fidget spinner or a yo-yo, you know, if you were one of them, people that, so when yo-yos came out so it'd be in popular about 15 years ago, they were popular for about a year or so, and then they went dead. [00:05:46] And if you set up a whole business in yo-yos. You probably did well for a short term, but in terms of our long-term, you know, the longterm sort of success of a business you want that you want something to be able to, that you can continue to sell be [00:06:00] able to, you know, sort of market to customers for years and years to come. [00:06:04] Okay. So you need to be careful of fads. So look over the history of time. If you see like a sudden spike in something, just be mindful that. That might just be a spike for now, for example, toilet paper or hand sanitizer. You know, we're in the Corona virus at the moment. And at the time of recording, it's the, you know, it's the Corona virus. [00:06:24] Now, if you typed into Google trends now, toilet paper or hand sanitizer, particularly, you know, face masks. Normally they're not, you know, hot trending products. Normally they're not, you know, something that you can build a business on and I can assure you now, if you are someone trying to enter the market to so hand, hand sanitizer now, You might sell, you might sell a lot. Now, if you can manufacture it, but I guarantee you in six months, time a year from now, your business will be dead. [00:06:51] Okay. So these are the things that you need to really consider when you are looking at what type of products that you're going to narrow it down to. [00:07:00] Okay. Think about the long term strategy, the long-term success for your business. You want your money, your business making you money consistently, you know, day in, day out for years to come. Right? So now you need to also think about, you know, who are you going to actually market to. That's something you need to identify, you know, how are you gonna, how are you going to reach those people? [00:07:25] You know, are you going to reach them? You know, through social channels, you're going to reach them through, you know, paid ads. Are there certain blogs that may work for them? Know, there's so many ways that you can market to people these days. And that's something you're going to have to identify, to be able to sell the products or service that you've got to see how you can actually sell those products to your customers, to the customers that you want, and then consider how you're going to deal with inquiries that you get. [00:07:53] How are you going to fulfill those orders? So if you're sat at home now, And perhaps you're thinking of starting your own business, but you're going to be, [00:08:00] you know, going back to work soon, you know, after a lockdown, you might be going back to work. So, you know, think about how you going to deal with inquiry, you know, getting orders out, you see it, particularly if you're a physical products, how are you going to get those orders out when you're at work? [00:08:16] You know, Monday to Friday nine to five. And that's something that I mastered in myself because I that's how I set up my business. Okay. I set up my business whilst working full-time as a police officer that, you know, years ago, and I made it work around my, my own sort of lifestyle on my own my, my job, because initially when I set it up, it was like a lifestyle business. [00:08:37] I just wanted to be of extra income and that was it. And that was fine. That's when it started growing and growing and growing. And then eventually I left, but obviously I tell my story and my webinar, if you want to learn more about that now, if you're one of them, people that don't do that research, you know, that basically what I just described there, you know, you need to do your numbers. [00:08:56]You need to make sure that this is something, a viable business that you can actually [00:09:00] profit from. So it's not just the case that, you know, you buy a product, you know, to land it's. Five pounds, but you know, I've spoken about this in a previous episode. It's not the case that you can buy this for five pounds, sell it for 20. [00:09:11] And so you've made a 75% margin. It doesn't work like that. You've got other costs to factor in lots of them as well. And if you haven't thought of them and really calculated it properly, you may end up selling a product that you think is profitable at a loss. That is, like I mentioned, there's a ton of ways that you can literally advertise, you know, your products and your services online. [00:09:35] And by far what I would recommend, you know, I even set up a company for it is search engine optimization, but the it's called SEO. You know, you've probably heard of it if you don't know, if you don't know what SEO is, basically when you type in something into Google, let's just say, for example what's a local service window cleaner near me. [00:09:55] Need a window cleaner. Okay. So if you type something like that into Google [00:10:00] and you look at the results that come up at the top of the page below the adverts, okay. Now over, over 70% of people will still click on those top three positions. So, you know, 70% of people that do any searches will click on those first three organic listings, because they're the ones that they trust. [00:10:18] Okay. And that's what SEO gets you. SEO gets you to the top of Google. Now the benefit of being there. You know, with the benefit of being there is the fact that it's not an advertising spend. So it's not like Facebook ads or Google ads, because if Google ads and Facebook ads, let's just say you've got 30 to 40 pounds a day budget for your adverts. [00:10:39] If you're spending money like that, it won't. You know, as soon as Google or Facebook, because, you know, showing your ad to as many people as it can for your budget, it will stop showing it. So if a thousand other people come and search for you, but like for the products and services you offer, but your ad spend has run out. [00:10:56] Well, you're not going to show into the next day when they can start spending more [00:11:00] money again. Whereas SEO, if 10,000 people come, it will still show to them. Okay. So that's why SEO is the bet. And that's how I grew my own businesses primarily through that. Okay. However, that said, SEO, there is a downside. [00:11:17] The downside is it takes a long time to get going. You know, you need, if you're a brand new website, a brand new site starting out, you need to be budgeted for at least 12 months of SEO to really get it, you know, really to be impactful for your business. Before that you're going to get a trickle. Okay. [00:11:33] Because it has to be done properly. And unfortunately SEO does take a while. However, whilst you're doing that, you know, it's still the same thing, you know, when you first launch your site and you get your SEO in place, let that build, you know, yourself that you're not going to see any major results from that for a while. [00:11:52] But what you will do in that time is you're then start using other forms of advertising. If it's, you know, Facebook ads, [00:12:00] Google ads, ads for advertising on LinkedIn, if you're like in the professional services, There might be offline places that might be, you know, you might be looking at blogs various directories, you know, places like Gumtree, Gumtree to have a free version and a paid version, things like that. [00:12:16] Okay. Is what you need to be thinking of. And you can literally spend a ton of time and money and trying to work all this stuff out. Okay. If you don't know how to find out where you know, where your competitors get the majority of their traffic from, you know, where they, where they managed to get the majority of their customers, visit their website from. [00:12:35] Then that's a problem. Okay. And for a lot of people, they won't have a clue in how to find that out. Right. So I've actually got a free guide for you that you can download. You can download that free guide right now. And I'm also going to put a link in the show notes. Okay. So you can go to https://aaronhenriques.com/spyhack. [00:13:00] [00:13:02]And you'll be able to get that guide for free, which will, which will show you exactly how you can find out where your biggest competitors are getting their customers from. Okay. And if you are in one of those markets where you know is saturated, where there's lots of people offering the same products and services as you, okay. [00:13:21] Then you need to think about how you can be a bit different. How can you differentiate yourself from the rest of the crowd? Because you don't want to be joining that crowd people because the people that joined the crowd are the ones who may not get anywhere or may, they may make a few sales here and there. [00:13:37] Yeah. But they may not make as many as you'd hoped. Right. And this is something that I found out in what I call my first proper business, my cleaning company, because when I was operating in London and, you know, I was always trying to compete with other people in that race, to the bottom. And when, I mean that race to the bottom, I mean, to go the cheapest, to offer the cheapest service possible, you know, [00:14:00] thinking that that's what customers want. [00:14:02] And when it got to a point where I was basically making no money per customer. It, you know, it was like, well, what is it? Is the effort even worth it? Because the margins were so small and you know, one day I just sat there and I was thinking, well, do you know what I'm literally. You know, I'm not making any money by doing this and I'm practically giving it away for free of cost. [00:14:24] And so I thought, well, why am I going to waste my time in trying to market exactly the same as everyone else? And why I ended up doing is I thought, well, if I can't be the cheapest in the market, and this is actually something I've heard since then, I've said this multiple times you know, if you, if you can't be the cheapest in the market and if you can't offer the same service and also be the cheapest. Then be the most expensive. [00:14:49] Okay. It might sound counterintuitive, but that's what I did. And then when I did that, suddenly I've got a ton of inquiries coming through. No, I got way more inquiries coming through when I was more expensive than everyone [00:15:00] else. I just created my own market. Yeah. It was probably 40% or so more expensive than the majority of my competitors. I just did that. And then suddenly I've got loads, more customers. [00:15:12] And so this is something that you need to think about, and I don't just mean put your prices up. Okay. There are other ways to separate yourselves from everyone else. Right. So there could be things like, you know, I don't know if you decided that you were going to sell coffee, but there's loads of people selling coffee online. [00:15:28] Okay. Let me know. Literally are. No, you go on Amazon, you try and buy coffee. There's there's literally tons, but let's just say you are going to, you want it to enter the coffee market, you enjoy coffee, you want to sell coffee. And so you're going to go and sell coffee. Right. But because there's so many people, how do you stand out? [00:15:46] I mean, coffee is expensive anyway, and you're not gonna, you know, for instead of a bag being 10 pounds, you're not going to go and spend, you know, charge 50 pounds. I mean, you might get a few customers buying that. Some people buy it, literally just from price. Like higher price data, link [00:16:00] that with higher quality, there are people who will pay good money for good coffee. [00:16:04] But what I mean by make yourself different is instead of just coffee, people have done this, but you could, you could add brownies with that coffee, make it a subscription product. Okay, this is where I always feel like you should be looking at subscription-based businesses whenever you can. Whenever you're selling anything, try and find a way where you can keep selling your same product or service to them on a subscription basis. [00:16:28] Okay. That's where I, I really enjoy making my money where people pay me every week or every month, you know, for continuously. Because they liked my products. They liked my services. Okay. And they keep paying me like that. That's how I prefer it. Okay. Because if you're just getting one off sales, if it's something that's literally just a one-off sale, the problem is with a one-off sale is you've then got to be able to go and find new customers every week and every month. [00:16:53] And it's just effort and it costs a lot of money. Right. Okay. So if you are one of those people [00:17:00] who, you know, you have been thinking for a while, that you really want to go and create your own business, your own online business. Okay. Go ahead and do it. You know, there's so many opportunities for you out there right now. [00:17:11] Okay. Go ahead and be inventive. If you don't find out what, you know, what is it that people are buying at the moment? You know, Google trends is honestly, it's a great place. I used it so much for various stuff that I do. And It's something I'd highly recommend and it's free, you know, it's free to use. [00:17:27] There are free tools out there that can really help you out, like my guide, you know, I'm going to leave the link in the show notes, you know, have a, haven't gone download the guide. Okay. Because it's going to help you out. It's going to show you exactly how you can see where your competitors are getting there. [00:17:43]You know, where they're getting all of their customers on, onto their website from where are they coming from? What social platforms that are using, you know, where, you know, what blogs are they on? What their adverts look like that are attracting them. You know, where are they advertising? There's so much stuff that, you know, that the key words are the top key words that [00:18:00] bring the most traffic to their site. [00:18:01] Okay. All this stuff you can find, find out and you can get that through https://aaronhenriques.com/spyhack. And you can download that now. So how else can you get involved with, we've asked, you know, this, this podcast is for yourselves. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't help me, but this is for yourselves and it's something that I want to be able to give to people who can't necessarily, you know, work with us on a one-on-one basis. [00:18:26]You know, or. Well, they, they may not be, you know yeah. At that point where they want to be getting courses or anything like that. I want to be giving something to you. And if there's something that you are unsure of, or that you think would be really useful for you in the future for a future episode, then, you know, just write to us, you need, you know, going, going find me on Instagram. [00:18:45] It's @AaronHenray. On Instagram, that's AaronHenray. And you can go and drop me a message in my Instagram. You can go on Facebook as well. You know, it's the same, it's the same thing. [00:19:00] It's AaronHenray on Facebook and you can drop me a message on there more than happy to, to hear from you. Or of course, if you don't use those, you can go on, on, on to your email and you can send me an email go to [email protected] and I'll pick that up and more than happy to get back to you about whatever it is that you want to. [00:19:20] You want to have discussed on this, on this podcast. So good luck with your online businesses. I hope it's going to be a success and I hope it's something that you actually move forward with because there's so many opportunities out there and every day, Every single day that you're not, you know, buying and selling online is other people doing exactly what you could be doing, right. [00:19:42] Who are just taking that step into actually doing it. And of course, if you need help getting started, if you need help planning your business, you know, join our Facebook group again, the links in the show notes. But if you fail, if you search on Facebook, right. Get growing online, you can join our Facebook group. [00:19:58]And you can ask questions [00:20:00] in there and you can, you know, you can help other people out and ask questions and don't be afraid of asking anything at all. You know, we're more than happy to help you out. And if you're one of them, people that think you need to be business coach. Okay. I'm not about to tell myself to you, but we are, I do have an episode that's coming up on Thursday exactly about that. [00:20:19] Okay. Whether or not you really need a business coach as a startup. Okay. It's going to be a good one. So looking forward to seeing you again next time and thank you for accompanying me on my walk. You know, it's been a nice, a nice long stroll, but hopefully some of the stuff that I've said today has been useful to you. [00:20:34] And like I said, if you have any questions or comments, please send them over to me. Get in contact, always happy to hear from anyone and you know, get, get yourself growing online. [00:20:52] Okay.

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