The Business Lessons I Learned When a Ten Year Old Girl Beat Me at Monopoly

By Glenn Leader

Over the last Bank Holiday weekend in august here in the UK I visited Longleat Manor with my girlfriend, her daughter (Jade) and her niece (Jenga). I had planned to return home the day after the weekend was over, but the girls asked me to stay another day and play Monopoly with me. They are lovely children, so I readily agreed to stay until mid-afternoon. This should easily give us enough time for them to have a girly lay-in, and we’d all play a relaxed game of Monopoly in the late morning.

Jade brought her Monopoly set out. This was interesting. I was expecting a traditional Monopoly set, but Jade had The Simpson’s version. The same basic concept, but twisted into a new niche. That got me thinking, and after a little research when I got home, I discovered that there were all sorts of Monopoly versions, several UK cities, and several other countries had their own city versions too. Star wars, stock exchange, football (soccer) clubs, like Manchester united. The list goes on. It’s easy to see how you can use the same product, give it a new spin, for a whole new market. If I sold cookery ebooks, I could have several versions of the same basic product.

- 100 Quick And Easy Recipes For The Busy Housewife
- 100 Quick And Easy Recipes For The Busy Business Woman
- 100 Quick And Easy Recipes For The Busy House husband
- 100 Quick And Easy Recipes For The Busy Business Man
- 100 Quick And Easy Recipes For The Busy New Wife …

Experts suggest that you could find 52 new markets or profit streams for an ebook…I’m not sure you’d find 52 for some niches, but if you had a brainstorm session once a week for a new market for your product, and you twisted your product, you’d pretty soon have a huge potential market for very little extra work. Certainly better than having to come up with new ideas all the time.

This made me take a second look at the products that I’ve developed over the years. I’m very well known for a content creation system called ArtiFact. ArtiFact (short for Article Factory) was designed to make sure that every version of an article that my system generates makes perfect sense when you read it.

In its original version, ArtiFact displayed a fresh article on the screen every time you hit the refresh button. You simply copied and pasted the screen into your blog, or article submission windows. But now, you wouldn’t believe the directions in which it’s evolved.

In one version, it’s the backbone for my first (of many I hope) membership site. It creates all the content for websites for my members on selected Clickbank products. I normally create at least 30 content pages based on keyword research. The sites are delivered complete, all our members do is add their Clickbank ID’s and run the customization script, once uploaded. I’m planning of creating a similar membership site for Adsense too.

In another version of ArtiFact I can build as many keyword rich pages for offline niches as I want. These pages are built organically, with the sole purpose of renting them to local businesses once I get them ranking well in Google. It’s much easer than trying to get local clients websites ranked on their chosen keywords, and a much easier sell too. Put these niches on their own domain, and you have an instant offline niche directory. I concentrate on one niche at a time.

In the latest incarnation, I can post unique articles directly into blogs. With a few tricks on getting good CTRs, this will make my affiliate marketing plans soooooo much easier. Just setup several Blogger blogs, and enter the details in my system, the rest is automated. Just adding a couple of blogs a day covering the niches I want to exploit, will soon build me an empire.

I do have other ideas about how to exploit my technology, but these are hush hush ;o)

My question to you is this… What are YOU doing to ensure the future of YOUR products?

Anyway, I shot off at a tangent there… Back to the game of Monopoly. I was playing against Jade (14), and Jenga (10). Jenga was a nickname Jades’ cousin was trying out for the weekend. Now, I’ve played Monopoly for most of my life, and I’m pretty good at it. I’ve not lost since the ’80s. I adopt a strategy where I get some prime real estate, and prevent others from doing the same. In fact, I can sometimes get some of the other players to give me some of their cards. Even though I was playing a game I knew I’d win, I did allow the girls to bend the rules a little to give them an advantage. My normal plan was working, and my opponents had no plan. Their portfolios could never be complete because of the way they were playing.

But then after lunch something strange happened. The girls realised that I was certain to win. They teamed up with each other, pooling their resources. Now they had some complete sets, and more money. They owned more than two thirds of the board. Within ten turns my fortunes had changed. A few hundred dollars here, few more there, and landing one of their big money properties had now virtually cleaned me out. They had JVed with each other, and were earning small amounts out of lots of ‘little oil wells’. They certainly taught me an interesting business lesson.