KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Comm, Joel (free e books to read .TXT) 📕

rather, it’s enabled all of us to earn from our expertise, which isn’t quite the same thing, because you’ve always been an expert. You might not have a doctorate in cheesecake making or a Nobel Prize for your contributions to world crocheting, but if you know more about those things than most people do, then you’re an expert on that topic.

Note that I don’t say that you have to know more about those topics than everyone else does. You don’t have to be the world’s leading expert to earn from your knowledge on the Internet. You just need to have knowledge that other people don’t have but want.

Everybody has knowledge like that.

If you do origami in your spare time, then you’re an expert on origami. Sure, there are people who can fold paper better than you can. But they don’t have a web site that shares their knowledge. You do. (If they do have a web site, then their site discusses ways of making paper animals, while yours will explain how to fold paper boxes.)

If you like sports, then maybe you’re an expert on your local football team. If you’re into cooking, then perhaps you’re an expert on barbecuing, baking cookies, or making whatever type of food you like to cook the most.

Everybody is an expert in something because everyone has to fill 24 hours of his or her day with something. Even if you spend half that time on the sofa watching television and the other half in bed sleeping, then you’re an expert on sofas, daytime soaps, and a dozen ways to waste your time. As long as people want to know about those things, the Internet will give you an opportunity to make money from that knowledge.

You might not pick up millions of users. It’s certainly possible that if you launch a web site about knitting with yellow wool, you’ll find that only a fraction of the total number of people interested in knitting will stop by to look. But those people will likely be dedicated knitters. They’ll be the ones most likely to click on an ad, buy an affiliate product, or sign up for a paid subscription to your newsletter. It might be a tiny subject, but because it’s on the Web and therefore available to everyone, everywhere, you can land enough users to bring in enough money to start building a profitable online business.

That’s the value of the long tail—the Internet’s ability to build revenue-generating audiences for the most specialized of topics. And it means that any knowledge you have has value and can generate a KaChing online.

Choosing Your Niche

The first step is the easiest—and the most enjoyable. In fact, the best way to know you’re doing it right is if you enjoy it.

Yet even at this stage, people still get it wrong.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have approached me at conferences and workshops and asked me what their web site should be about. I can’t help them there. I have no idea what your web site should be about either. I do know the principle that should underlie the subject of every profitable web site: It must be a topic its publisher enjoys and is interested in.

Forget about the apparent value of the topic for now. Forget about the fact that some topics are more likely to make money than others. Build a web site that’s designed only to make money and you might hear a little KaChing in the beginning, but by the time you’ve built up a large enough knowledge of Internet business to make big money, you’ll have run out of ideas and be so bored with the subject that you’ll stop adding good content. Maintaining the site will feel like a chore, and when that happens, you might as well have a j-o-b. It will feel just as painful.

It won’t be as profitable though, because when you get bored with your site, you can be certain that it won’t be long before your users get bored with your site, too. The Internet is filled with the skeletons of dead web sites that started with the idea of making cash and then faded away as the publisher became bored and moved on.

When you’re looking for your niche, don’t think about money. Don’t worry about the KaChing. That will come. Think instead about what interests you.

What do you spend the bulk of your day doing? What do you do in your spare time? What books do you read when you have a free moment? All of those things can be topics for a profitable web site, whether you spend your day climbing mountains or battling aliens on your Xbox.

In practice, you can divide your choices into two categories: your professional life and your personal life.

Your professional life is always going to yield rich pickings. People already pay you for that expertise. If you’re a plumber, people call you because you know how to fix a dripping tap and they don’t. If you’re an administrator, you know how to keep an office in order and deal with paperwork. Those are valuable skills. And if you’re a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, or anything else, you don’t need me to tell you how valuable the information in your head is.

Whatever your job, your experience and training have given you information you can use to earn a living. The Internet has given you a place where you can share that knowledge. And all of the revenue systems that have developed online mean that you can turn that knowledge into KaChing.

One of my favorite sites, for example, is Tim Carter’s AsktheBuilder.com (Figure 2.1). Tim is a former contractor and home builder who has been online for a long time. He first set up his site in 1993, and it’s seen a lot of incarnations since then. One thing that hasn’t changed is the quality and the subject of his content. His articles are syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and he