Last Sunday, my mom and I were talking about other businesses that she and my dad could explore. She’d recently attended a talk by a 15-year-old who said that the best product to sell these days is information.

My mom knows a lot of things. She knows a lot about building and managing a successful photography business. She knows a lot about gifted education and parenting. She knows a lot about making big dreams happen, because she’s helped my dad with so many adventures. She knows about personal finance, success, entrepreneurship, and many other topics.

My mom occasionally gives talks, and she’s planning to teach the business of photography as a course at a local university. If she could package some of her insights, experiences, and stories into e-books and blog posts, I think she can create a lot of value for people. And maybe my dad will get into the act too, with photographs and anecdotes and advice.

The 4-Hour Work Week and other books that mention selling products or information online suggest using a tool like Google Adwords Keywords to study the market before investing time and effort into developing products. While looking into more information that could help my mom learn more about e-books, I thought I might do some preliminary market research. Out of hundreds of phrases suggested by the tool, I picked 19 that looked relevant, and 2 phrases that stood out because they combined okay search volume (a few thousand searches last month) with low advertiser competition. I sent the spreadsheet to my mom.

She was delighted! She said,

This is a wonderful list! I think there is a future for me in writing for the Internet! :)

I started to highlight the ones with the highest number of searches. I will continue picking up info from the list tomorrow.

my mom, after getting the Google keywords spreadsheet

Who knows, maybe my mom will become an awesome problogger… Any advice or tips for her? =)