As the 1st day of my challenge came around, Apr 11th 2011, my coach was ill. Nothing I could do about that, and right there is something that be a hurdle when you set out on goal achievement – things outside your control.
We were supposed to have a chat via skype, but Steven’s voice has gone, so that’s out of the window as well. So, I sat around doing nothing, right?
Er, no.
Although my personal week with Steven started Apr 11th, he actually started the process right after payment was made, back at the tail end of January.
I felt it would be a good time to go through the many emails we have swapped since then, and I also copied them into a separate document.
In all it makes up just under 10,000 words of exchanges, and we covered some good ground in that time, focusing on niche selection and strategy…
Important? Just a bit, yes!
We began by coming up with things I knew about/liked, and then went about gauging the size of the market.
We also looked at the sites on the first page of Google, to assess the competition.
I say ‘we’ for these tasks, but Steven told me what to do, then went over the results.
I like that, it means I am not being handed things on a plate, it’s me doing the work – that’s the way it should be.
I like the self improvement/goal achievement niche, as it’s something I’m genuinely passionate about. I also have my own product to promote in the market, plus an ability to create content for it.
As it ended up, I had a health problem during the process, it’s a recurring issue, and when I researched it, I found it to be a potential market itself!
Having picked the market, Steven suggested a plan, which was to set up a review site, to review existing books on the subject, promoting them as an affiliate.
I would create a free report to build up an email list too.
I got to work creating the free report, and then bought the books I was going to review.
So many people do not actually buy the stuff they review, they simply use the sales pages, but the sales pages and the insides of products are often *very* different things!
This was the case with my project – the books did not really live up to their sales letters, and I did not really feel able to recommend any of them to potential customers!
That’s a problem.
It’s a problem many marketers get round by simply ignoring it, but since I try to use integrity as a driving force in my life, I couldn’t ignore the problem.
So the solution seemed to be to create my own product that I *would* be happy to recommend to customers.
I’ve written books before, it’s something I enjoy doing, and promoting your own product over someone else’s has many advantages. So, I set about turning the report I had created into a fuller book.
In the book, I combined my own experiences with this particular health issue, with nuggets I had gleaned from the other books, plus further research, and it was here that I came up against another problem!
There is no singular magic cure/relief for the health issue!
It can be an individual thing, very much so, as I know full well myself. This means it’s not possible to give a single answer that will definitely work for someone seeking the relief.
Hmm, I had been planning to charge $27 for the book. Not a lot in ebook terms, but was I happy charging someone that money for a ‘maybe’ answer?
I went back to Steven on this, telling him that I was feeling uncomfortable, and would prefer to go back to the goal achievement niche.
He replied that it was up to me, that we would go together on what I decided.
I decided to finish the health boo, as it was pretty much done anyway, but stress in it that the solutions to the health issue were varied and had differing results, as in fact did the cause in the first place!
That project would take a secondary place, and that’s where we found ourselves on April 11th – a fair amount of time passed with maybe not great results, but that would be a false summary.
We had covered a lot of ground in ideas and research, all of which needed to be done.
