Outside the Western World - My plans: Thoughts and Comments please?
Hi, I'm new here.
I thought I'd tell you all my plans and hopefuly receive some useful feedback. First of all, I'm probably not in competition with (m)any of you as I intend to work in a niche which I think is untapped. My plans are based in Asia and I don't anticipate any interest from Europe, N America, or pretty much anywhere outside of this country! My target market have a reasonable comprehension of English.
My basic plan is to try and create an income of $10,000 a month by the end of the year, hopefuly reaching about $25k a month next year. This is just a pipe dream at the moment but I have a definite plan-in-progress. Here it is:
(1) My target market is worth about $18billion US dollars a year in this country, and I want to tap a tiny part of this. My first plan is to develop an email list providing GOOD, QUALITY content first of all. Getting people to sign-up to this list might be the hardest part of my plan, but I think it will be doable through forum-posting, answering questions on the local equivalent of Yahoo Questions and Answers and hopefuly through web searches. As I will be providing quality content which is normally paid for I hope referrals will eventually become the largest source of members for this list. I am initially considering placing ads in a local newspaper or magazine too, but I'm not sure if If I need to, or whether indeed it would be useful.
(2) Time to make some money! I intend to offer a targetted online 8-week training program. As yet I'm unsure how to do this. Would 8 emails over 8 weeks, each containing a lesson be good? (the emails would be equivalent to e-books or articles), or would I be better off coding some kind of site to which people get access to an extra part each week for 8 weeks? The coding side of the second idea might be hard. I would charge about $50 for this program. Maybe even less. Once it's up and running it won't need much upkeep.
A real life, in person equivalent costs about $250 or more so my program would be good value for money for the customer
(3) In relation to the above-mentioned training program, and open to anyone else who is interested, I will offer a service where people in the industry pay about $50 to have 2 papers checked and commented on. This is the standard industry price at the moment. I would generate customers for this through my list. The standard price for this service USED to be around $250 but has unfortunately dropped over the last year or two to $50! The essay checking and commenting would probably take around 10 minutes per essay, so about 20 minutes for the $50. If this becomes successful I'll outsource it if I'm getting more than, say, 40 customers a month.
(4) Further 4 week to 8 week online training programs will be offered similar to the one in (2), if everything is going succesfully so far.
(5) Real life, offline seminars will be offered on about half a dozen unique topics I've thought of. Again, my list will be the key source for people to sign up for these seminars. I may also do some offline marketing such as posters or flyering in certain targetted areas. These offline seminars will cost about $100 a person and last about 7 hours including a 1 hour lunch break. I would hope to have a minimum of 30 people attend each event, and the cost of putting it on to be in the region of $400-$600, giving a profit of about $2,500. If these are succesful then they'll be increased in size to, hopefuly, around 100 people at a time earning about $9,000 profit for a day's work. I would initially offer about 2 seminars a month, but if the demand is there I'll obviously increase this number and perhaps outsource the presentation side of things. I could pay a speaker $1,000 instead of doing it myself and take the day off! These seminars would probably only have enough demand every so often, so I guess they'd max out at about 4 a month. More than that would, of course, be great though!
Biggest problems:
(1) I need to get a fair bit of stuff translated into the local language
(2) I need to work out how to bill customers here. The 'local internet' is a little different to in the West so I'll have to find out about local billing methods and companies. Just to give an example of one way billing is different, almost everyone uses a simple bank transfer rather than a debit or credit card to pay online. There are also lots of rules and restrictions so Paypal etc. would be very hard to use here.
So, what do you all think?
And has anyone else started an IM business in a foreign country or language? Have the big Internet Marketing programs materials been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese etc. and sold in Asia yet? (My ideas are in a completely different niche, I'm just curious!)
I've actually only learned about internet marketing in the past 2 days, but I've been reading hard! My previous thoughts on the above mentioned proposals were to simply do part (5), the in person seminars to large groups, but wasn't sure how to market it. Now I've discovered internet marketing and realised I might be able to make a whole lot more money. There'll be a lot of work upfront, but hopefully a year or two down the road I'll be able to outsource 90% of it and focus on other things.
Oh yeah, I don't plan on giving up my day job. I like my day job since I only have to work about 12hrs a week and get 20 weeks paid vacation. Unfortunately my salary is only about $2500 a month which isn't great, but it leaves me with a LOT of free time, which I really should start putting to better use!
My apologies for the length of this first post, I hope someone has the time to read through it and tell me what they think!
-ForeignProfessor
(PS. Sorry for any typos above. I spilled beer on my keyboard recently and some of the keys are playing up)
I thought I'd tell you all my plans and hopefuly receive some useful feedback. First of all, I'm probably not in competition with (m)any of you as I intend to work in a niche which I think is untapped. My plans are based in Asia and I don't anticipate any interest from Europe, N America, or pretty much anywhere outside of this country! My target market have a reasonable comprehension of English.
My basic plan is to try and create an income of $10,000 a month by the end of the year, hopefuly reaching about $25k a month next year. This is just a pipe dream at the moment but I have a definite plan-in-progress. Here it is:
(1) My target market is worth about $18billion US dollars a year in this country, and I want to tap a tiny part of this. My first plan is to develop an email list providing GOOD, QUALITY content first of all. Getting people to sign-up to this list might be the hardest part of my plan, but I think it will be doable through forum-posting, answering questions on the local equivalent of Yahoo Questions and Answers and hopefuly through web searches. As I will be providing quality content which is normally paid for I hope referrals will eventually become the largest source of members for this list. I am initially considering placing ads in a local newspaper or magazine too, but I'm not sure if If I need to, or whether indeed it would be useful.
(2) Time to make some money! I intend to offer a targetted online 8-week training program. As yet I'm unsure how to do this. Would 8 emails over 8 weeks, each containing a lesson be good? (the emails would be equivalent to e-books or articles), or would I be better off coding some kind of site to which people get access to an extra part each week for 8 weeks? The coding side of the second idea might be hard. I would charge about $50 for this program. Maybe even less. Once it's up and running it won't need much upkeep.
A real life, in person equivalent costs about $250 or more so my program would be good value for money for the customer
(3) In relation to the above-mentioned training program, and open to anyone else who is interested, I will offer a service where people in the industry pay about $50 to have 2 papers checked and commented on. This is the standard industry price at the moment. I would generate customers for this through my list. The standard price for this service USED to be around $250 but has unfortunately dropped over the last year or two to $50! The essay checking and commenting would probably take around 10 minutes per essay, so about 20 minutes for the $50. If this becomes successful I'll outsource it if I'm getting more than, say, 40 customers a month.
(4) Further 4 week to 8 week online training programs will be offered similar to the one in (2), if everything is going succesfully so far.
(5) Real life, offline seminars will be offered on about half a dozen unique topics I've thought of. Again, my list will be the key source for people to sign up for these seminars. I may also do some offline marketing such as posters or flyering in certain targetted areas. These offline seminars will cost about $100 a person and last about 7 hours including a 1 hour lunch break. I would hope to have a minimum of 30 people attend each event, and the cost of putting it on to be in the region of $400-$600, giving a profit of about $2,500. If these are succesful then they'll be increased in size to, hopefuly, around 100 people at a time earning about $9,000 profit for a day's work. I would initially offer about 2 seminars a month, but if the demand is there I'll obviously increase this number and perhaps outsource the presentation side of things. I could pay a speaker $1,000 instead of doing it myself and take the day off! These seminars would probably only have enough demand every so often, so I guess they'd max out at about 4 a month. More than that would, of course, be great though!
Biggest problems:
(1) I need to get a fair bit of stuff translated into the local language
(2) I need to work out how to bill customers here. The 'local internet' is a little different to in the West so I'll have to find out about local billing methods and companies. Just to give an example of one way billing is different, almost everyone uses a simple bank transfer rather than a debit or credit card to pay online. There are also lots of rules and restrictions so Paypal etc. would be very hard to use here.
So, what do you all think?
And has anyone else started an IM business in a foreign country or language? Have the big Internet Marketing programs materials been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese etc. and sold in Asia yet? (My ideas are in a completely different niche, I'm just curious!)
I've actually only learned about internet marketing in the past 2 days, but I've been reading hard! My previous thoughts on the above mentioned proposals were to simply do part (5), the in person seminars to large groups, but wasn't sure how to market it. Now I've discovered internet marketing and realised I might be able to make a whole lot more money. There'll be a lot of work upfront, but hopefully a year or two down the road I'll be able to outsource 90% of it and focus on other things.
Oh yeah, I don't plan on giving up my day job. I like my day job since I only have to work about 12hrs a week and get 20 weeks paid vacation. Unfortunately my salary is only about $2500 a month which isn't great, but it leaves me with a LOT of free time, which I really should start putting to better use!
My apologies for the length of this first post, I hope someone has the time to read through it and tell me what they think!
-ForeignProfessor
(PS. Sorry for any typos above. I spilled beer on my keyboard recently and some of the keys are playing up)
You might not like what I say - but I believe it.
Build it, make money, then build some more
Some old school smarts would help - and here's to Rob Toth for his help. Bloody good stuff, even the freebies!