How I Tried to Make $800 in 4 Hours Without Any Existing Skills

Table of Contents

• Assessing Business Ideas for Viability Within Limitations
• Learning Google Business Profile Management Quickly
• Contacting Small Businesses with Incomplete Profiles
• Creating a Fiverr Freelancer Profile from Scratch
• Outreach Results and Key Learnings

Assessing Business Ideas for Viability Within Limitations

When coming up with a business idea to make money quickly under time constraints, it's important to assess the viability and validate that there is sufficient demand. Otherwise, you risk wasting precious time on ideas that won't be profitable or sustainable. Using Google Trends is an excellent way to validate interest and search volume for any niche or business concept.

Leveraging Google Trends to Validate Demand

Google Trends allows you to see search interest and volume for keywords over time, across different regions. This makes it easy to see if a business idea has consistent, high levels of interest. Simply go to trends.google.com, input relevant keywords, choose appropriate date ranges and locations, and assess the results. For this business idea of providing services around Google Business Profiles (formerly Google My Business), Google Trends showed consistently high interest over the past 5 years. This validated that focusing on this niche was a smart choice worth investing more time into.

Learning Google Business Profile Management Quickly

To provide effective services around Google Business Profiles, some quick learning was required since this was an unfamiliar area. Fortunately, Google offers free online courses and training materials around many of their products, including a 42 minute course on the basics of Google Business Profiles.

Taking this course allowed for grasping the fundamentals in less than an hour, providing enough knowledge to understand client needs and determine helpful services that could be offered.

Taking Google's Free Online Course

Google's skill shop contains many free courses taught by Google product experts across all their major platforms and tools. The course on Google Business Profiles covered topics like:

• Creating and optimizing a business profile
• Managing location and contact info
• Responding to reviews
• Sharing posts and offers Completing the 42 minute course equipped with a baseline knowledge to have informed conversations around how this tool works and how businesses can fully utilize it.

Contacting Small Businesses with Incomplete Profiles

Armed with knowledge from Google's training, it was time to find potential customers that could benefit from services optimizing their Google Business Profiles. The strategy was to search for brick-and-mortar small businesses on Google Maps in specific locations, and identify those with profiles that were incomplete, unclaimed, had few reviews, etc.

Promising targets were plumbers, painters, pet groomers, hair salons, coffee shops, and other service providers in small US towns. Sorting through listings and calling the businesses directly offered a quick way to make contact and gauge interest.

However, many businesses did not have phone numbers listed or were unable to reach the owners on first attempts. So expanding the search and calling list was necessary to connect with enough potential customers in the short timeline.

Calling Plumbers and Painters Directly

To sell services quickly, calling businesses directly provided the best opportunity to connect with owners, explain offerings, and answer questions. This approach yielded mixed results:

• Around 30 businesses were called over the span of an hour
• 7 calls successfully reached owners
• 2 owners expressed no interest
• 2 asked for assessments to be sent via email
• 3 agreed to further discussions and follow-ups

Creating a Fiverr Freelancer Profile from Scratch

To be able to charge potential customers for Google Business Profile optimization services, creating a freelancer profile on Fiverr provided a fast and easy way to establish a presence and collect payments.

Since existing skills could not be leveraged, the Fiverr profile had to be built from nothing. However, with familiarity around gig economy platforms, a suitable profile featuring relevant services was up fairly quickly.

Setting Up Payment Processing

Key elements of getting set up on Fiverr included:

• Creating a compelling profile headline and description
• Outlining a basic yet professional-looking gig for Google Business Profile optimization
• Selecting appropriate categories and tags
• Setting up a payment account to accept credit card transactions This enabled sending clients to the new Fiverr profile to purchase and pay for services directly on the platform. Removing friction from the purchasing process provided the best chance to convert conversations into sales.

Outreach Results and Key Learnings

In the end, directly calling over 30 small businesses to sell Google Business Profile optimization services yielded 3 sales:

• 2 painters in Atlanta purchased services for $250 each

• 1 Florida plumber purchased for $200

So $700 of revenue was generated, just short of the $800 target. Given more time to find additional customers, meeting or exceeding that goal would certainly have been achievable.

Key takeaways from this rapid business building exercise include:

• Validating demand before committing using Google Trends

• Leveraging free Google training to gain just enough knowledge

• Calling businesses directly for the highest response rate

• Removing payment friction by setting up a freelancer profile

FAQ

Q: What business ideas were considered initially?
A: Dropshipping, Amazon FBA, print-on-demand, and consulting were ideas that were ruled out due to time limitations or skill restrictions.

Q: How was demand validated for the chosen business idea?
A: Google Trends was used to analyze search volume and interest over time for Google Business Profile related keywords.

Q: What was done to gain necessary skills quickly?
A: A free 42-minute Google course was taken to learn about Google Business Profile management.

Q: What types of businesses were targeted?
A: Plumbers and painters with incomplete Google Business Profiles were contacted directly by phone.

Q: How were payments handled?
A: A Fiverr account was created to enable accepting payments without existing infrastructure.

Q: What were the final results of the challenge?
A: $650 of services were sold within the 4 hour timeframe. Key learnings were also gained.

Q: What was the geographic targeting?
A: Small businesses in smaller towns in the U.S. were targeted, especially around Atlanta.

Q: What indicators were used to identify promising targets?
A: Incomplete profiles, unclaimed accounts, few reviews, photos, no websites, and unavailable phone numbers.

Q: What follow up is planned?
A: A free downloadable guide will be created to provide step-by-step details for replication.

Q: What previous skills or assets could not be utilized?
A: No existing skills, knowledge, or business infrastructure could be leveraged per the rules.