Black Business Guide I: Why 99% of Online Businesses Fail

Hello, this is Tarek and today I’ll try to share some insight about my online business experience to help the other black persons who want to try to make a living online and develop the black community economic power. I am not rich by any means, but I still created Black Legacy Clothing with a budget of 0$, when I am writing this article it has a following of 80000 on Facebook and 35000 on Instagram and is the number one Black Power brand. So, I hope my experience and my advices can inspire or help some of yours that want to further the fight of our people or just make a living while not working for some oppressing employers that would mistreat you because of your skin color.

I’ll write several articles to focus on different points about the lessons I learned by myself by experience, the ones you don’t find in business books. If you are looking for more technical of specific topics related to online business (like SEO, social media management, business strategy…) just email me at contact@blacklegacy.co and I’ll forward you some really useful guides that some others wrote way better than me thanks to their expertise.

But for now, we’ll focus on the number one lesson I want to teach you today, and it is the most important thing to know even if you are creating a physical business instead of an online one. And that is the main reason why I saw many businesses failing around me.

So why do you think 99% of online businesses fail utterly?

It is because the vast majority of people don’t do a thorough enough market study or sometimes just don’t do one at all! Launching a business without a deep market study is like driving your car randomly in the streets while trying to get to a specific address in a very big city you’ve never been to. You can’t put your financial future and your projects in the hand of the fate, like you’re playing roulette at the casino. This is the most important part and must always be the first thing you do before anything else. I saw many first-time entrepreneurs losing time by putting too much time to study law status of company or making very complicated strategies while they should be doing two things: focus on studying the market and focus on selling (but this one will be detailed in another article).

Why is it so important? Because you need to know everything about the market you want to go in:

Tedious but vital if you don't want to go blind

• Is there a market for what I am trying to sell? Unless you have a huge amount of money for marketing you’ll never be able to create a need so you have to see what people already want.
• Will the people you target really spend their hard-earned money in the product you want to sell? Customers are way harder to convince than what you really think.
• How is the competition? Especially online, if there is no room because competition is too powerful already you’ll be relegated in the deeps of the 20^th pages of Google where nobody ever dwells!
• How hard is it to get noticed on this market? You can have the best shop and best product in the world, if it’s too hard to get some attention in the market it’s like having your shop in the middle of the desert.

Too many people make this mistake, they think people will just notice and buy their products because they convinced themselves it would happen. But in business, nothing happens like in your preliminary plan (those ones are just here to convince bankers in case you want their money) so you have to reduce the risk to maximum unless you’re ready to lose a lot of money and time.

So how can you do an online market research and know if you should launch yourself?

I won’t go into details are there are several really good guides that cover it deeply. You’ll find them on Google in minutes (read several of them thoroughly!) but I’ll give you a brief show up of a technique I use.

First, you need to see if people are already looking for what you are trying to sell. Use a keyword tool like https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ to have an idea of the monthly research volume on a term. It will give you an idea of how many people are interested in what you sell. For instance, If you type “black power clothing” you’ll see the monthly volume is estimated to be around 480/month (which is quite low, but something). Do that on many keywords query related to the market you’re targeting or the products you want to sell If you can evaluate if there is a demand for it.

This keyword analysis gives us several crucial informations

Then, analyse the websites that are already ranking up on these keywords. You have to know that only the first Google page is sharing the traffic, and that the first 3 ranks share 80% of it. That’s the positions you want to reach. So, use a tool like SEO Quake or the Mozbar for Google Chrome and analyse their SEO characteristics. You can use that to have an idea of the level of power of your potential competitions. Don’t try fighting with the huge specialized websites, a good entrepreneur has to choose their own battle.

You have several other things to analyse before having a definitive idea on your market and your competitors but it will already tell you if it’s POSSIBLE or not to make it. Use this technique each time you have a online business idea so you don’t waste time on anything else, then if the results are positive just go into a deeper market study and analysis!

To conclude, be sure to make the best market study possible before going into business. Having a good and growing market, with room to develop, is like an entrepreneur paradise! Not doing it good enough and ending up on the wrong market will just doom you to failure, and we need some people like you to develop the community economic power!

Hope you found this article interesting, and don’t forget to check our products if you enjoyed it! I wish you best of luck in your business!