Saturday, May 9, 2020
While this may seem like an unfortunate series of events, this type of unsought and painful period of time always seems to allow you to stop; and stopping is a miraculous gift. It allows you to turn off the faucets of your mind and turn on the river of your heart.
This opened the window of time to talk of life, love, fears and yes, of course, business.
Over long hours of coffee disrupted only by reruns of Friends, or the ingestion of pain pills, we dangled in conversation of business lessons learned and opportunities lost. We excited in strategies that worked and vowed to never again make the mistakes that had recently capsized our entrepreneurial ship. And we read a lot, mostly on business and marketing.
One thing we both knew was we shared a love of business and desperately wanted to start again, this time, hopefully, smarter and wiser and with some hard fought tools. This unsought open window gave us the opportunity to dust ourselves off and start anew, table rasa, a chance at a new beginning. And so we took the seeds of lessons learned and began tilling the soil of commerce and planting a new business.
I want to share these seeds with you.
sprout
Spirituality of Business: Building a business is a spiritual pursuit.
Only in a quiet space, could we begin to surrender our thoughts, doubts, fears, and agendas. Only by separating our fears from our calling could begin to pay attention to the magic that was within us.
We heard the sirens call of fear. We had bills to pay, retirement to consider and the kid’s college was not all too far off. Should we go back to our old life? This was the seemingly safe road, with my husband the lawyer and me the pharmaceutical rep. But that just didn’t feel right.
So we asked the question – should we follow that still small whisper? The one that says a ship is safe in the harbor, but is that what ships are for? Should we once again venture out onto the open seas of business?
In our hearts, we had a knowing that we were meant for building a business, one that called to our hearts and filled our spirits. Something where we could serve and love and we had a pretty good idea where to start.
seed3
Google Keyword Tool and a Pool of Hungry Fish
Right before my surgery, Doug made the comment that if he ever built another business, he would choose to first find a pool of hungry fish and feed them rather than build a product and go looking for an audience. His game company had created a mini game called, Chuck the Chilla, and he was struggling to get the publicity it needed against the 701 other apps being launched per day. I took this information into surgery and slept on it. When I was finally ready I asked Doug to teach me about SEO and how to use Google Keyword Tool.
Now if you’re building a business and you haven’t begun to look at this very important information, it’s a must. The key word tool tells you exactly how many people are looking for specific keywords on the internet. I began to enter any keyword that seemed nice to me at the time: vicodin, soft blankies, 1200 thread count sheets (which I don’t know even exist but definitely should).
I was looking for a keyword where there were lots of fish, a good sized pond and a lack of competitive fishermen.
During my pain and vicodin fueled search, I was always soothed by my nebulizer fogging the room with pure, healthy, delicious tea tree oil. I thought, “I love tea tree oil,” as I entered this essential oil as my key word. Eureka! The numbers looked pretty good. There were about 40,000 fish in this monthly pool and not too many people feeding them.
But how hungry were they and what could I give them to eat? I decided that with 40,000 searches per month for tea tree and low completion, I was going to find a way to answer both questions.
Note: If you’re interested in gaining more information about using Google’s Keyword Tool, Andrew Youderian at eCommerceFuel published a great article about investigating your niche called Uncovering High-Traffic Niches With Google’s Keyword Tool.