2.2. Generating Online Business Ideas

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” –  Linus Pauling

One of the first obstacles for the newbie entrepreneurs, when starting an online business, is to find the right idea that is worthy to peruse.

Some have no clue where to start, others may be convinced that they already have the wining idea and some may have many ideas but aren’t sure if they have any value. In any case, enhancing your initial list of ideas is always a good idea. At the end, you will have to narrow your choices but you have to be sure that you are not missing or neglecting the most promising ideas that suite your expectations and capabilities.

There are several methods and tools that will help you generate new ideas for your online business or enhance your existing list. The methods listed below could be combined in order to get the best results in this phase.

(If you believe that you already have the best possible idea for your online business skip to 2.3 Testing Your Online Business Idea(s).)

Brain storming

Brain storming is a simple technique where you write down all ideas that come in to your head no meter how silly or brilliant they seem at first glance. You may do this method by yourself or you can get help from friends and family. (Use our template)

You may start the list with: business you always wanted to do, website and services you already use, business your friends use, popular or new products and services, websites you regularly visit or encountered sometimes, how would you do something better, problems that need to be solved, wishes and needs for specific products or services etc.

Use the other methods below to enhance your list with more ideas that are not just circumstantial but have some logic, reasoning behind them.

In addition to your different ideas you may want to grade (low, average, high) the ideas according to your preference, the earning potential and level of competition. The ideas that you are not willing to pursue just shouldn’t be put on the list. Regarding the earning potential and the competition level, just do rough guesses in order to estimate the general attractiveness of each idea. (The true earning potential of the ideas depends on many factors as market size, competition, substitutes, needed resources, your capacity, costs, margins etc, what is something we might try to research later.)

The ideas with bad scores in all areas (low earning potential, low preferences, high competition) should be eliminated right away. The ideas that you have high preference for, but have low earning potential are probably bad ideas too; anyway don’t overrule them till you test their profitability. The ideas with high earning potential seem to be the most attractive but they may be also attractive for the competitors too. The competition level is very important aspect when we search for ideas and we will investigate the real competition after we filter our extensive list of initial ideas.

Follow your passion, interests and competences.

“Choose a Job You Love, and You Will Never Have To Work a Day in Your Life”

The best advice you can get when starting a business online (or offline), is to follow your passion and interests. When you love what you do it’s not work, is pleasure. The job itself and especially success will motivate you to do more. Only that way you can go a long way and reach your highest potential.

When the internet business environment comes in place, it is very possible that you could turn your passion, skills, knowledge or expertise in a profitable online business. You will be surprised when you discover that people might be ready to pay for your competences no meter how trivial they look at first glance. You can develop e-books, one-on-one trainings, video lessons, you can provide business services and sell them for profits. Anyway, your offering doesn’t have to be a service or information, it can also be a product or set of products, like fishing equipment for example, where you can additionally provide reviews and best use cases based on your experience in order to enhance your offering. If it happens that the potential customers are not ready to pay for your product and services, you may provide a free information on your site earn by publishing ads.

Starting a business based on your competences is the best way to start. Anyway, sometimes it might happen that you hate your field of expertise (education and experience) but the opportunity to create an online business, be your own boss, have flexible hours, can make you fell in love again, this time in the new light of your old expertise. If not, find a new passion and star fresh.

OK, that’s easier sad than done. Many people struggle to find what motivates them ,what they love to do or what they do the best. The following questions may help you find the answer: What do you do most often? What activities you enjoy the most? What do you think you do the best?  In what areas you (could) give advice to other people? Do you somehow help anybody? What is your hobby? What do you read in the news? Do you write? Do you do sports or exercise? What is your education? What skills you have gained at work?  You may also ask other people what they think you are the best at. Answer to any of these question may point to you future online business.

The skills and knowledge you can turn in to an online business include but are not limited to (only the sky is the limit): playing an instrument, teaching a language, math, sports, gardening, landscaping, crafts, woodworking, fitness, dieting, dating, traveling, fishing, hiking, acting, singing, drawing, frugal living, saving tips, alternative energy, investing, creating business plans, programming, video editing, knitting, refinancing, parenting etc. Don’t look at your skills only as a possibility to start a general business, you can be more specific targeting a niche like “organic food gardening”, “handmade embroidery t-shirts”, “writing business plans for woman entrepreneurs”, “programming courses for career changers” and so on.

The main pitfall when perusing your passion for a business is to get stuck with an idea that doesn’t have paying customers or a market big enough to make your venture profitable. To avoid that read further.

Solve a problem, fulfill a need

Very important aspect (or a feature) of every business idea is that it should help people. It should solve a specific problem (quit smoking, fix phone) or should satisfy a need (tasty food, travel abroad, play a game).

If potential customers don’t have an urge, don’t search for a solution or see no value in the products or services you offer they won’t buy (or won’t read your information).

In general, all business ideas metaphorically can be compared to candies, vitamins and pain killers. Pain killers are products you must have, and you must have them now. Vitamins are nice to have, they may improve someone’s life but not immediately since some conditions take time to improve. Candies are something nobody really needs but people want to have fun, spend time, enjoy life etc. If your idea is a pain killer, great! You just need to reach your market before your competitors do. There is not much convincing there. The pain you customers have will buy the products. On the other hand, if you sell vitamins you will have to find ways (appropriate online marketing methods) to convince your prospects for the benefits of your product and why they should buy from you. The candies are the hardest to sell since there are many competitors and substitutes. Suggestions are that you offer a free versions of your product until the consumers get addicted, after what you can offer upgrades, premium features, exclusivity etc. For example, Candy Crash Saga and Clash of the Titans are free games (among many others) that make millions per day from in-game purchases.

In order to find a need or a problem that needs to be solved start with yourself and your friends and family. In our daily lives, we all come across problems, annoyances or frustrations that we would love to see solved. Here are some examples: products hard to find, information needed yesterday, problematic pet’s behavior, needy kids, no local dating options, addictions, anger, tiredness etc. If you want to discover more needs and problems (beyond yours) or to find out if other people have the same problems and therefore search for a solution, you may look into the other idea generating methods below.

After you find an existing problem or a need, you should figure out a way (method) how to fulfill them. Should you offer products in an online store? Should you research and publish information? Should you give advice? Should you write an e-book? Should you blog? Should you build and app? … and so on. The solution you want to provide should match your competences (skills, experience, expertise) or you willingness and determination to become competent to solve the problem (get training, learn, outsource, recommend someone else’s solution etc).

Next important questions regarding your idea are;

– if people would be willing to pay for your solution and,

– is the market big enough to be profitable.

If people prefer free products or services for your solution (entertainment, general advice etc) you should consider another monetizing mechanism like publish ads, premium versions or donations. In any case you need a market big enough to be profitable on a long run.

Browse the web for more ideas

Besides your own and asking your friends and family for online business ideas you may also browse the web in order to come up with some more great ideas for your future venture.

You may start with some general sources like Twitter where you can use the hashtags #startupideas, #businessidea or at Pinterest Popular. Pinterest is a great social network where people share ideas but many other also make money. Almost any pin (post) you see there, leads to a site what could be someone’s online business. There you can find many ideas like travel destinations, diets, workout plans, home decorating ideas, gardening tips, interesting products, fashion clothes etc. The popular page shows you what is popular and that could be a good business idea.

Besides the general sources, there are more specialized web source where you can find suggestions for business ideas or brows someone else’s ideas like the Business Ideas page at Entrepreneur.com,  the Quora’s topic for Startup Ideas (and other related topics) and subredits at Reddit like /r/Startup_Ideas, /r/Entrepreneur/ or /r/SomebodyMakeThis/.

For currently poplar and new products you may check at eBay Trending or at Amazon Best Sellers and/or Movers and Shakers where you can go dipper to a specific category.

Finding interesting products at eBay and Amazon that sell good does not necessary imply that you should open an e-store to offer those products yourself but you could consider, for example, starting a review site for those type of products or develop other related content  and recommend these products using affiliate links (Examples: “How to decor a wall” – Recommend Wall stickers, “Makeup tutorials” – recommend branded makeup and accessories .) You can also try to develop or create complementary products, let’s say unique charms for iPhone.

Google features and tools

Googling is always a great way to discover something new including ideas for an online business. Anyway, here we don’t imply to searching from scratch but to some features Google Search has and specific tools provided by Google.

These features and tools provided by Google are probably the best method to generate and refine business ideas, but we put it at the end since you need some sort of initial ideas, topics or industries in mind in order to utilize them. So, you can use these features and tools to refine your ideas, narrow your niche or even discover new, related and existing business opportunities. The great thing of using them is that the suggestions you will get are based on searches done by real people, people that used Google to find products, solve a problem or satisfy a need they have.

The methods described below will also be of great use later for discovering content ideas for your website and for SEO keyword analyses when you optimize your site for the search engines. Google Trends and the Keyword Planer can also be used to test the viability of your business ideas but we will discuss that in the next lesson.

 Google Related Searches

After you enter the search term when googling, at the bottom of the search results you will get a list of 8 “Searches related to …”. These related searches are the most common searches (besides the one you entered) that users insert into the search engine to describe their informational need. The original purpose of this feature is to help the users find what they are looking for (if they didn’t find it in the first 10 results). Anyhow, you can also use this list to refine your idea, find other related ideas or narrow your niche.

For example, if you enter the term “piano tutoring” among the other related searches you will get the term “beginner piano lessons for adults”. This may direct you to focus your idea to adult people since you may have experience with them and you are aware of their specific needs. Another example is that if you enter the term “social phobia”, you will discover that people also use the term “social anxiety” to describe the same problem, what you may also want to use to explain your offering, let’s say an e-book on overcoming social anxiety.

Be aware that the (search) term itself does not describe your idea completely. That is just a need, for which, you have to find a profitable way (a business model and a product/service) to fulfill.

Google Search Auto Complete

As you start typing at the search bar, Google starts giving you instant suggestions that complete your term. This feature helps users to enter the term faster or directs them to complete the search they started with the most common searches done by other users. The results will you get with this feature are similar with the related searches described above but with the distinction that it really offers related terms (synonyms), but  you can get more suggestions instantly since you can change terms or the first letters as you type. Using the feature you can find much more ideas to narrow your niche or discover new niches you didn’t think of before.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a great tool that can help you generate more ideas, compare ideas head-to-head or initially test your ideas.

The tool shows the popularity of a search term trough time. It doesn’t show the absolute number of searches done, but uses relative scale from 0 to 100 based on the peak time.

To use Google Trends in your benefit, enter your initial business ideas (or terms used to describe your offering) as search terms. You can also set filters by country or state, time range (we suggest 5 years), category and search type (web, images, youtube and shopping). As a result you will get a graph (a trend line) that will show you if the demand for your offering (your potential idea), is rising, is steady or fades away. You can also notice if there is some type of seasonality of your offering, like peak times during summer/winter or during holidays.

By comparing two (or up to five) search terms you could see which term has higher popularity or higher demand. Naturally, the terms with higher popularity could be better business ideas (if we assume that the competition is at the same level).

The rule of thumb, when entering in a new business, is that you go for ideas that have rising demand and stay away of ideas that have declining trend, however, that’s not always the best advice. For example, the tool may help you find rising niche in a fading industry like “healthy dessert” vs “deserts”

Using Google trends to test ideas will be discussed later, but at this point you can use it to get a good perspective if some business is viable or not. You can simply use it to eliminate some ideas, especially when you compare them with other ideas and topics in the same or similar industry. The tool will also give you up to 25 related queries and topics that you can use to discover new business opportunities.

Note: Do not use this tool to eliminate ideas by comparing mainstream ideas to niche market ideas (earrings vs. handmade earrings). Obviously, the mainstream idea will have much higher popularity but will also have much higher competition, something we can’t check with this tool.

Google Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner Tool is part of Google Ads, the online advertising service. In order to use this tool you have to create an account there but you won’t pay any fees until you start advertising.

The distinctive features of this Google tool, compared to the others described above, are that it gives a huge number of related keywords (search terms), it gives the approximate volume of monthly searches, the level of competition (low, medium, high) based on number of advertisers, the range of bid in $ to get top position of the ad.

The huge list of related keywords may give you additional ideas for more niches or it could help you to narrow your niche. The volume of monthly searches will give you a general idea of the demand for your offering. The price range for a bid to get a top position in the ads gives you an idea how profitable your niche is, but it also is an indication for the level of competition. Higher bids mean higher competition.

The high bids are usually a great indicator for profitable business ideas, for example if you want to start an informative web site in a specific industry and run Google ads where you can make high earnings per click. Anyway, the question here is if you could bring any visitors to your site since the competition is enormous, especially for these industries.

As you can see, with the use of Google Trends and the Keyword planner for generating online business ideas you actually start the testing of your business ideas too, what is something we want to do next.

Filtering your ideas

At the end of your quest for generating online business ideas you should get a list of reasonable ideas that you are interested and willing to implement. Your list may reach as many as 100 ideas but you should start filtering them using your common sense or some of the above mentioned indicators (preference, rising trends, high volume, high bids, variety of niches you could cover in an industry/topic and so on).

Before you begin to test your ideas you should narrow you list to no more than 10 ideas (5 would be ideal) since testing each idea could take much time and resources. Anyway, you may start testing your ideas one by one, and choose the first idea that meets your expectations and goals. If none of the pre-selected ideas passes the feasibility test (the next lesson) you can always go back to your longer list and test some more ideas.

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In-depth readings:

Must-Know Sources of Business Ideas for Entrepreneurs: Examples Included

9 Unusual Business Ideas We Love

Frighteningly ambitious start up ideas.

Five start-ups that are tackling life’s annoying problems

29 Creative Thinking Exercises on How to be Creative