Mind Map, Spreadsheet, Nouns, Verbs, Part I
Yesterday I had an intriguing phone conversation with a friend. He’s thinking about starting an online community around a very specific subject, one that inhabits a pretty booming niche.
It all looks pretty good. He wants to create a community around this topic (check). He currently works in the industry (check). He spends a considerable amount of his free time enjoying products in the niche (check). He reads about it (check), has friends who are avidly found of the subject (check), and surfs web sites and blogs that deal with the subject (check), and even participates in different forums devoted to the niche (check check check).
So now he wants to build a site that explores a certain subniche in this sprawling, massive, incredibly lucrative niche. (Sorry for being so catty, but I don’t want to spoil things for this friend.) Lucky for him, his idea has all the things that make it compelling:
- A nice, big fat trough of customers with expendable income
- Tons of sites out there where he can contribute content to, create affiliate programs on, or otherwise raise attention without laying out tons of cash
- Lots of free or open source software that will help him get off the ground quickly
Okay, so why is he calling me? He needed advice. He needed a way to get all the spiraling thoughts organized in his head. He needed a way to get started on his journey, and I told him he needed four tools:
- A mind map,
- A spreadsheet,
- A list of nouns, and
- A list of verbs.
The first two will help you with your business and marketing plans. The last two will help you with gathering requirements for your web site. Let’s take ‘em in order.
The Mind Map
A mind map is a wonderful little tool for ideation. It’s perfect for all of those who need to explore a topic space in an intuitive, right-brained way. Pull out a piece of paper and write down your main topic (in this case, your niche or business idea) in the very center. Now start branching off into different major topics, exploring subtopics and subsubtopics as you go.
Very soon you’ll have a radial design that is three and four layers deep. You’ll notice right away that certain subtopics seem to group together, that others pull apart a bit, and that (best of all) you are easily able to come back to this list to make additions and deletions as needed.
What kinds of things go in a mind map? It depends on what you’re trying to do. For my 100-site effort, I wanted to have different niches and subniches mapped out. For my friend, it was going to be all the different pieces of his community offering, like types of channels, types of formats, types of users, and so on.
The Spreadsheet
Once you have your topic space mapped out, it’s time to do some hard research, the kind that will result in entries in a spreadsheet. For each area of the mind map, try to figure out things like cost of ads, number of blogs devoted to the topic, volume of ad traffic, types of affiliate programs.
What do you think will be the average lifetime of your customer? Do they come once and leave immediately, having made a snap decision to buy right then? Or do they join for a year after paying a nominal membership fee? If they stay for a while, how many ads will they click on? Will they buy an affiliate product?
Figuring all this out will help you determine the most cost-effective ways to acquire that customer. The reason you do all this is to get some perspective. You might not know any of this and see that it costs $10 a click to acquire a customer via a PPC ad campaign and therefore baulk. You might think differently if you knew that your average customer buys $100 worth of stuff from you over a year. The potential ROI is 10x, and suddenly that $10 entry fee isn’t so big.
This process of doing the right-brain intuitive loosey-goosey stuff first and then applying the left-brain analytical bean-counter filter is incredibly liberating and effective. Fly free, lark about, then put up a fence. This way you can explore the landscape a bit but then make some hard-nosed business decisions that support your goals.
Next time, we’ll talk about nouns and verbs!
