The Birth Of A Business

Hello Folks

1stly, I'd like to take moment to thank all of you for your comments on my last post. Thankfully we're all on the road to recovery and, hopefully, this is the last time Covid touches us (but I'm not holding my breath).

OK, on to more important stuff.

To paraphrase someone else's quote: "Quit half-assing 2 things; whole-ass 1 thing!"

So, I am going to whole-ass this project (and judging by my reflection in my bedroom mirror, that's lot of junk in my trunk!)

I have been doing a lot of research into how current online business people say they would 'start over' if they lost everything and, in the main, their steps seem to be very similar but with variations.

There are a couple of 'foundational' steps that I intend to take:

1. Step 1: Choose a group of people that I want to serve and figure out a way to serve them
2. Step 2: Create a business plan for that service
3. Step 3: Provide value first with no expectation of return.
4. Step 4: Document the journey

Step 1: My Audience

Oh boy, how I have struggled with this in the past as is shown by the number of domains I have purchased and abandoned right here on WA over the years.

Well, I am 54 this year so I think the audience I resonate the best with are those people (of either sex) who are looking to switch careers later in life because they've hit a plateau in their current job and the motivation, desire and keenness has waned.

Now, how can I serve them?

Well, I could certainly promote WA itself as a way of starting their new journey but is there something more fundamental that I can provide to them? Right here is where my research starts - I need to identify some -graphics; namely: demographics, geographics and psychographics of my target audience in order to discover my ideal client.

Where to start, where to start, where to start?

One of the quickest ways to determine demographics of an audience is to find out which magazines they are likely to read. Most magazine publishers have some sort of data on their readership that they make available to advertisers; after all advertisers need to know who are likely to see their ads so they are not wasting money.

So, a quick search for 'business magazines' and I have a site that shows the top 31 magazines for business people.

Now, this is an educated guess but I believe my audience would read: Entrepreneur, Money Magazine, Forbes, Fortune and Success

Let's take Success magazine as our 1st research point:

To get the information we will 1st grab their website: success.com (awesome URL - got to be worth $$ - according to Godaddy's appraisal tool it's worth in excess of $25,000!!)

Scroll right down to the footer and I can see a link saying 'Advertise'

Clicking on that 'Advertise' link brings up a new tab that gives us access to Success magazine's media kit for 2022:

OK, on opening up this PDF document, the 1st stat I see is one that states their readership consists of 68% self-employed. This isn't a demographic I'm interested in (yet) so'm not going to explore this PDF any further.

So, I'll go and repeat the whole process with the other magazine titles I've selected and come back later once I've found something closer to my chosen audience.

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UPDATE

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OK, so my idea on the magazines didn't payout; they're all aimed at C-suite company people (C-suite means the Chief X Officer of the company so think CEO, COO, CFO etc.) with high personal wealth. So I went down to my local newsstand to see if I could find a magazine not on the list.

I found 3 but they're not exactly on point or they have the info I'm looking for not included in their media packs.

I think the nearest magazine readership to my ideal is that of Entrepreneur magazine (d'oh! go figure!) combined with that of Inc. magazine.

Now I need to discover that audience's psychographics and try to discover what makes them tick.

I'll divulge that info on here tomorrow.