Last week, I read an article about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain. I found the article hard going but I forced myself to push on through. And boy am I glad I did.
Because towards the end, when summing up Twain’s life, the author of the article wrote about all the time Twain spent not-writing, and instead investing in and losing money on various hare-brained business opportunities. Says the article:
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Why did a talent like Twain waste so much time on extraliterary pursuits? The question assumes a distinction he scarcely countenanced between writing and other forms of commercial activity. If there is a constant in his life, it’s his labored obsession with labor-saving. He poured his earnings into schemes meant to spin off money like a perpetual-motion machine.
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That phrase, “labored obsession with labor-saving,” really got to me. It hit home.
So one possible conclusion to this email would be to say that the constant human drive for “labor-saving,” for “almost passive income,” for business opportunities, is what keeps so many people broke, stressed, and working too hard.
Reasonable conclusion.
And yet, business opportunities do exist.
I got into copywriting 10+ years ago because getting paid thousands of dollars to write a sales letter sounded pretty good. And it turned out to be pretty good.
Working on commission with clients and getting paid a share of their profits sounded even better. So I started doing that. It turned out to be even better that straight-up copywriting.
Creating a course that people had already paid for and that I could keep selling sounded still better than working on commission with clients. It turned out to be exactly that way.
So, how do you evaluate possible business opportunities? How do you decide that something is worth diving into? How do you avoid wasting your time, money, and self-respect?
I thought about it. I came up with three questions to ask myself, which maybe you can ask yourself as well:
1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”
For example, I hate the very idea of checking charts doing “technical analysis” or trading stocks or other financial vapor. I might be able to force myself to do it for 5 months. There’s no way I could do it for 5 years without throwing myself under a fast-moving train. But the chances that I would be so successful with trading in 5 months’ time that I never have to do it again are nil. Therefore trading, profitable bizopp though it might be, is out for me.
2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”
I recently thought of running ads to promote affiliate offers. Solid business opportunity, if you have good offers to promote, a good source of traffic, and copywriting skills to bridge the gap.
But what if it still doesn’t work? I have then just spent time and money to run ads to somebody else’s offer, without making money.
The solution in my mind is simple – get those people on a list first before sending them to the affiliate offer. For one, it increase the chances they will buy the affiliate offer in time. But more than that, it turns a black/white business opportunity into a gradually growing asset (an email list) that has value on its own, regardless of whether the direct business opportunity pans out.
3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”
I currently have a community on Skool. I was even thinking of starting another one. A lot of people are doing the same. After all, Skool already has a lot of users, plus they make it easy in some ways to run a group in a profitable way.
But what happens when Skool becomes a dumpster fire like Facebook? Or when it shuts down like Clubhouse? Or when it introduces new rules that specifically say, “no Bejakos,” like the r/copywriting subreddit already did?
In that case, I also have the email addresses of everyone in my community. I can simply send them an email and tell them that the community has been moved to a different URL. It would be an inconvenience, but not any kind of failure.
And with that, I have a hot new business opportunity to tell you about, specifically a bridge to sell you.
Well not really. Not even figuratively. All I have is my $4.99 new 10 Commandments book.
The underlying business opportunity there is more effective communication skills.
I don’t know if you’re ok with “more effective communication skills” as a 5-year business plan.
But if you are, it’s an asset that’s only going to build on itself, and one that will never disappear, as long as there are humans and as long as there is business. If you’d like to start investing now: