Choosing Your Career Path Wisely
If you are into as many hobbies, topics, or curious about just about anything like me…you’d probably agree it’s difficult to find the area or thing to focus on.
This applies to everyday life, but also when it comes to financial freedom… Your Career. You see being an entrepreneur by heart, I find it difficult to work for others doing a job that just pays the bills… But that’s not fulfilling…
The older I get the more I crave to find the thing that truly satisfies me beyond money… Of course money is important, especially if you have a family to provide for… But I truly believe if you follow the path of the solopreneur made famous by Justin Welsh, we can achieve both.
I am not saying it will be easy… but it’s doable. Dan Koe is a great example of someone who was “ordinary” and made a name for himself by writing online.
If Dan and Justin can do it, so can you! There are many many many more examples of successful soloprenuers who do just that I didn’t mention.
Focus on what you enjoy
Lets start with an exercise… start jotting down all the things you find interesting, are currently exploring, or want to explore in the future…
Here’s my list of top of mind topics I find interesting, love, and currently practice…
- Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Writing
- Books
- Art
- Tech
- Web Development
- Ai
- Psychology
- Behavioural psychology
- Fitness/strength training/diet
- Jiujitsu
- Financial Freedom
Now, let’s rate these topics (the topics you identified) by asking yourself…
- Could I see myself offering a solution or helping someone in this topic?
- Could I do it for a long time?
- Would this fulfill my needs (ie, helping others)?
- Could this topic support me financially?
- Does this topic offer stability?
The topics listed may be too broad and require you too niche down further. For example, Marketing is a broad topic that can be drilled down into further. For example, Marketing for SaaS or marketing for SaaS that is in the travel niche and so on.
The advice you see online is niche first and expand later… To be honest I am not sure that’s the best approach.. but a lot of entrepreneurs found success using that model.. For the sake of simplicity, let’s use the niched topic going forward.
Utilizing a table format lets assign each topic a value for each question.
The perfect score would be 5*5 = 25. To truly get the most out of this exercise, you really have to be honest with yourself. Fill out the template, give yourself two or three days and return to it… Are the numbers you assigned still accurate? Or would you change the values?
Only after that, then create a new tab with any ideas that are rated 4+. These are the ones that reach the next stage.
Market research…
Each topic now needs to be vetted by interest. Building a statue that no one cares about isn’t a statue is it?
Start by heading to Googletrends.com and look at all time traffic. Try different keyword combinations to get a more realistic average. For example, let’s say I want to help video creators with email marketing, I would search that term creator email marketing, YouTube email marketing, and creator email… As you can see creator email has some legs to it.
What’s more interesting is the breakout terms… It’s given me additional ideas to concentrate on. TikTok email wasn’t something I thought about initially.. My idea was focused on YouTube only. But, now I have another area I can dig into.
A this stage, lets say you found the topic, validated its interest what next? Now its time to start creating content areas this niche. Start reaching out to various creators either by cold email outreach. I would test on different social media platforms; X, LinkedIn, Quora and so on. I also would begin to cold DM creators who may benefit from your services or product.
There’s always this guilty sales feeling that comes over some people, me included. But, if you really do have something of value to offer your prospect, that can help achieve a result that would benefit them, then you aren’t being salesey, your being helpful.
Whatever you offer can be free at first, but I would suggest starting to put a price tag on your work.
Especially after you’ve got some results and testimonials to help solidify you as an authority in the niche.
At this stage, it’s really dependant on where or how much you want to continue providing your product or service.
Do you want to remain as the face of it?
Do you want to automate the workflow?
Do you want to scale quickly and exit?
Do you want to scale slowly and hang onto the business?
Do you want to hire and expand or run lean?
All these questions are what to consider as you begin to scale.
Lastly, but importantly stick to any path you’ve chosen for at least 9 days! Make that commitment right now… Don’t be like me and pivot way to early, only to keep iterating on the next idea and repeating the cycle…
If you have any questions or comments please feel free to reach out to me anytime info@paolotrulli.com
