Newbies’ Guide to Niche Marketing

It is important to make sure you enjoy the product. It makes your life so much easier. If your passion is fishing, great, go for that, if your passion is some type of sport, go for it. If like me, you get a kick out of business based products, then go for that.

The reason that most people will tell you to go and create products for stuff you enjoy is simply because it’s easier to do something if you’re enjoying it, and the result is generally better than if you’re bored out of your brain trying to create something you don’t particularly care about, but there’s a deeper reason for this too, and that’s the connection we talked about earlier. It’s far easier to come up with products if you’re mixing with your market, or if you are in your target market. It’s not easy to get ideas for solving problems that you know nothing about. So there we have two, real reasons related to your productivity, success and happiness to pick a market you’re passionate about.

Which brings me on the final point in the product creation section, and probably the most important. The more you do, the more products you release and the more you mix with your chosen market, the more ideas will present themselves to you. It’s up to notice it’s happening. This will come with practice and experience.

So I don’t want you to worry if you’ve come through all this, and find that although you’ve been inspired, and a feel a little more alive about your business, and have a fresh new objective, that that concepts folder is looking a little empty right now. I assure you, if you follow what we’ve talked about to the letter, it will start to fill up and gather momentum.

The methods we’ve talked in the last few posts take minutes to put into action, and become second nature once you’ve mastered them. Not only that, but it gives you total confidence in what you’re doing. You don’t need to ask anyone else if you’re doing well, or if your product is good anymore, because you know how to work it out yourself logically and methodically. And trust me when I say. It’ll show, in your pocket at the end of the month, and in your customers’ eyes.

Question 5. Can I adapt the system?

To make it easier on my resources, reach a bigger or more targeted market? Something you should always ask yourself. How can I make the product or service better, reach a larger or more targeted number of people? If it’s not affordable, how can I make it affordable? If I don’t have the time to manage such a monster, can I automate it?

It’s all about asking yourself how you can improve your concept to make it either easier on yourself, or more viable to sell to your target market. If you can’t pull this off, and something can’t change, go back through the first four questions again. When you can answer yes to the first four, and be happy with the outcome through question five, you have yourself a viable, ready to go product that you can get working on right away. Of course, we’ll talk about the specifics of this later, but for now, just keep it in mind, and remember how to create such ideas.

If you find that one of your concepts isn’t viable right now, don’t worry. At least eight out of every ten of the ideas that I come up with personally don’t make it out of the planning stages for some time, if at all. Not to worry. Like we talked about earlier, when you remove the boundaries that stop you coming out with ideas, and start looking at the limitations of your resources before you’ve even give it a chance, the ideas will flow, but of course it’s likely that a lot of these ideas you dismissed aren’t usable right away or in there present form.

This is why it’s important to file these, and take a look over them, even after you’ve discovered that they’re a no go. Your environment may change, your financial position, or the market may change. It’s just a case of waiting for the time that the answer to those five above questions become positive ones, meanwhile working on the things that do work, and are viable. If you’ve got this method down, you’ll probably find that you’ve never got nothing to do, and have an abundance of new products that you can bend and weave to make them suit you and your personal resources.

Question 4. How can I package and present?

Often, you’ll find one of your product ideas turns into two or three when you look at this question. If that’s the difference between earning twenty and sixty thousand dollars from one product, I’d say that’s a pretty important factor. Remember when you’re looking at these to develop and evolve your products. They’re not set in stone, and often just one viable concept is more useful than at first glance. How you package and present is very important.

Here’s an example for you. If you’d sat here , researched and written a training course, what else could you do with it aside from plant it on a website as an intensive course as we’ve done here? Lets see, we could have made it into a membership pay monthly site, then at a later date taken the whole manual set and sold it as one for a big price. What if we recorded the whole thing in audio and video? We could deliver it as an intensive course through Fed-Ex along with the written manual.

Something we talked about earlier too, how about re-sale rights? When I release the next product, if it’s meant to replace this one, expand on this one, or present it in a fresh exciting way, what’s to stop me selling this whole course off with resale rights for a thousand dollars to seventy five people? See how what was originally an idea to display our knowledge to you has multiple delivery methods tied to it. Some are the same, some could be pro versions or enhancements, and the resale rights cries out to a whole new market, even though the base product is the same.

Always look for ways to develop your good ideas. If it’s successful, don’t stop there. Follow it through, offer pro versions, offer taster versions, offer full audio, video training manual through fed-ex versions, offer re-sale rights, membership sites, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Now obviously we’re not taking the same product and selling to the same people over and over, that’d be pointless, and no one wants to buy the same info product five times displayed in different ways, but always look and adapt your delivery methods, and versions of your product, and it’s likely that your one good idea that makes you twenty grand in a year could turn into three good ideas that are aimed at entirely different people. Clever huh? Even better, that little tidbit is going to make you a heck of a lot of cash if you get these product creation methods down. Don’t forget it, and you’ll have fuel for your business for as long as you want.

Question three. How much money will this take to create?

And make it the best it can possibly be? Asking yourself how much cash it’s going to take out of your pocket before you start is definitely a good thing, but you don’t want to know how much it’ll take to create and get running, but how much it will take to create and get it running effectively, so you can really wow your customers and get them to talk about you to other people. Quality is so important nowadays with the flood of products out there in all markets.

Here’s an example for you, again from my personal experience and my very first site. The very first site I put up featured forums, a fully functional and independent auto-responder and ad tracking system for each individual member, not to mention all of the hooking up with the affiliate software, access management and tying this into recurring billing and a two level affiliate program, with custom commissions for individuals that I’d met and were up for joint ventures.

Now bear in mind, at this point I had no big list of people I could sell to yet, I had none of these scripts or systems already, and this was at a time when people were first coming up with the idea of selling auto-responder and ad tracking scripts so they could install and use them on their site. Now looking at the concept, this was going to be a monster of a site, totally mind-blowing, so I went for it without really looking hard into what I was getting myself into financially, and the time commitment such a site took, with things like tech support, being on hand non stop to sort out problems, being there at the right times for conferences, and managing pretty much every system there on my own.

I don’t need to tell you that that’s a heck of a big first product, and there’s nothing wrong with doing, or being ambitious. Just before you start, make sure that when you ask yourself if you have the time and money to pull this off to a very high standard, otherwise you might just find yourself overwhelmed half way through the actual process of creation.

After getting all your Ideas down, now is the time to evaluate your product ideas. Ask your these questions:

Question 1. Does It Help Solve A Problem?

So, the first thing that you need to do with your concepts is ask a very simple question. If you followed the first reports inspirations and carried them out as we talked about, you’ll most likely be able to answer this one with a solid ‘Yes’. The most important question you’ll ever ask yourself about your products is simple. Does it solve a problem, help the buyer avoid pain, achieve happiness or entertain?

Although this is widely known already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve heard this before, it still applies, and probably always will. What worries me is how many people know this, but don’t directly ask themselves this question until it’s too late, then all they end up with is a bunch of unrelated things they had to stuff into their new package to make it look more valuable through solving more problems.

Question two. Is there a market for my product?

And can I reach them? An important question indeed, because incidentally, if there’s no market for your product, or you have no way to reach them, then no ones going to find out about your product, and you simply won’t sell any.

It’s easy enough to head over to google.com, and do a search for your product, or a different version of it. Not only depending on the fact that if you have a problem that needs to be solved, it’s highly unlikely (if not downright impossible) that your problem is going to be unique.

Also, when running your search, if there’s other products out there offering either the same as you, but in a different way, you can bet your life that there’s a market out there. Also are there any publications that are related to your product? An even bigger sign that there’s a market there, and of course, can you reach that market? Specifics and how’s aren’t really important right now, as long as you know not to go launching a product that’s going to be impossible for you to reach the people that want to buy it, or even worse; there aren’t any people who want to buy it.

Three things I’m going to brush over in this section for future reference. Firstly, think about the saturation. If you’re buying a re-sale product to sell on, how many copies are they selling, and what kind of rules do they have in place? Always ask this question. I don’t want you going off and buying a resale package with full rights for eight hundred dollars, designing and putting up a website and sales system, then finding out that the product you’re about to try and sell for two hundred dollars is being given away as a free bonus on hundreds of other sites, because the original seller didn’t have a rule in place preventing this devaluing of the package.

The second thing I’d like to talk to you about is quality. Look for quality in resale products. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had seen random ads through e-zines, or landing in my inbox from people trying to flog a one hundred dollar product to me, only to find out that the date on the front cover of the report is 1996 or something stupid like that. Watch for this if you’re looking to sell something on. You don’t want to get your hands on an old shoddy product that you can’t shift for that reason.

You may call this method of getting yourself a product to sell is a cheat. If you do it right, it is a lucrative business. The sad fact is most people I see get this totally wrong, and wind up not selling much at all, or even losing cash on their initial investment to get the product in the first place.

The reason I put this at the end here is really because It’s far more valuable for you to come up with your own ideas using the above methods, especially the improvement one, as that gives you total freedom as to when, where and how you release products. And if you’re not in online marketing directly, you could have a job finding them in the first place.

So, lets get the lowdown on re-sell rights. They’re a quick way for a product owner to make cash, by selling rights allowing others to sell their product for 100% profit. That’s all very well, but if you’re going to sell a resale rights product be careful, and don’t fluff up like so many seem to do when they see dollar signs floating in front of their eyes.

The other method of product creation is the most exciting, but to this date still escapes me. That doesn’t mean it has to escape you though. If you make this one, you’ve hit it big. That is to create something totally new, original, unseen and unique.

If you pull this one off, it’ll be nothing short of amazing, and I don’t suggest you lay awake at night trying to come up with totally new ideas for products either. It’ll drive you nuts. What I will say is that know that pioneers of particular products I envy. They come up with brand spanking new ideas, and they launch them to a hungry market looking for something fresh. It’s a little like being an inventor you could say. It sure is a rare thing. How many inventors do you know that come up with ideas that are in every day use today?

But look at it this way, if you come up with a solution to a problem that you think could possibly sell to customers, or create a product out of something that hasn’t been done before, don’t tell anyone the details until you launch or get a patent.

It’s definitely not unrealistic or irrelevant for me to be mentioning this though, as there are people out there who have done it. I remember reading a report a year or so back about a mother who had a problem feeding her baby, so she came up with this new type of device, patented it and it’s selling world wide today, and it’s all hers for the taking. There are some successful modern innovators. If you end up being one of them, I salute you. Be aware though, that this is both risky and expensive in most cases.