In his brilliant book The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris talks at length about how to build a fully automated business in a few weeks. Since he wrote the book a few years ago, the tools have become even more efficient and powerful. Let’s discuss how you can build a complete business in a weekend.
Step 1: Market Research – 30 Minutes
Spend some time with the Google Key Word Analyzer tools:
• www.google.com/sktool/ – will let you look at keywords across all categories.
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – will let you really dig into keywords and determine exact traffic in your market
Choosing a market by starting with keyword analysis is an amazing 21st Century advancement. Market research used to take months of research in libraries, phone calling, and focus groups. Now you can do extensive market research in a few minutes.
When you’re looking for a market, pay attention to two important things:
1. How competitive is the market?
2. Is this something I actually care about?
It’s always a lot harder to run a business that you don’t care about.
Step 2: Choose a Product – A Few Hours
Pick a product with decent margins and preferably in the $100-1000 range. This makes the financials much easier to work with. The best products are intellectual property that can’t easily be copied, like an e-book or a DVD package that you created. Take a look around on Clickbank.com or other affiliate programs for a product that fits your market. The goal is to be at a 4x to 5x mark up to maximize your profits.
It’s important to note that you don’t actually have to build a product right away. You can use this process to test a business model and see if it’s a viable industry to compete in.
Step 3: Build a website – One Afternoon
There’s a new tool we’ve been playing with for a few months. SquareSpace.com lets you build a complete website in literally a few minutes. It comes with all the tools you’d need:
• Blog engine
• Photo gallery
• Analytics
• Templates
• Form Building and Data Collection
• Custom Editing and Content Management
• Fully export and import other blogs
The price tag is a tiny $8/month and you can get a full featured site for $14/month. What’s even more impressive is how a tool like this can help you build a real business in a really short time.
Most of your time will be spent writing the copy for the website. Copy writing can be tough, but make it easy on yourself:
• Use Short Paragraphs
• Use Bullet Point Lists
• Use Lots of Sub Headlines
• Keep Everything Short
• Don’t Be Afraid to Be Light and Humorous
Use paypal.com to set up a “buy now” button for the amount of your product. You can explore more sophisticated payment options in the future, but paypal.com is free to set up and inexpensive to use.
Step 4: Buy Some Traffic – 2 Hours
You’ve done some keyword research, now it’s time to buy a bit of traffic and see if your product will work. Adwords.Google.com is incredibly fast and easy to set up. A few clicks and you can set up a campaign to start driving traffic to your product.
Step 5: Does it Work?
Run Google Adwords for a few weeks and start to gather some data. You’ll get a good idea if your product works or not. There are tons of resources on this site on how to improve a PPC campaign, get better conversion rates, and boost traffic. But the most important thing is to get started right away.
If you can demonstrate that your business works, then you can start exploring ways to automate marketing and improve conversions. Once you have an automated business, you can move onto the next one.
