Marketing: What comes into mind?
When people think of marketing, they think of ads, logos, brochures, and of course, the latest addition, web sites.
These forms of marketing are understandable. People see ads and brochures everyday, may it be in their home or as they go about their work. It is common for people to usually form opinions of the products or services just by looking at the print ads they see.
In the trend of today, marketing is taken into web sites. Since everyone seem to have their own computer nowadays and have internet connection to match, marketing in sites have been more advantageous and beneficial.
So it is important that web site owners try to make their site appear its best, almost perfect. Just the thought of the many people that into them and scrutinize the contents is enough to want to make your site look perfect. Also, there are those who form a general opinion from just a single basis. So your site will probably be the thing that will
encourage or discourage the people of trying to contact you personally and choose you from among the many others.
So when people and business decide that they want to do some web site marketing and be effective in that field, they really get caught up in the many processes required to achieve the goals of a good marketing tool.
If you want your site to be an effective marketing tool, you should know the factors that make people read more and visit your site. There are lots of books or articles already written that help people to know the important points how to go about site marketing. Majority of them have proven their worth and usefulness.
The process of designing has many considerations before going into the process itself. They are not only about making them look cool or sexy. Or using the latest and trendiest tool. Sometimes making use of what others are already using does not earn points for you. Readers are always trying to find something new and seeing the same things is not am choice they would make.
The purpose of marketing is to attain and retain profitable customers. This is the end prize and no other reason is more important. Oftentimes companies tend to be so caught up in just the internal appearance of their site that they forgot that the contents are more important.
They are also forgetting the fact that marketing is generating revenue. Anything other than that is not marketing.
How To Create Your Own Info Product
In the last article we talked about why informational products are the best type of products to sell online. An informational product can be a digital book (known as an e-book), a digital report or a white paper, a piece of software, audio or video files, a web site, an ezine (electronic magazine), or a newsletter.
Any product that’s informational, instructional, or educational in nature can be considered an info product.
If you missed last week’s column you might want to un-line your birdcage long enough to read it first so that you have a thorough understanding of what we’ll be discussing this week, which is how to create your own info product.
As covered in detail last chapter, here are a few of the reasons why information is the best product to sell online:
* It’s fast to create, fast to market
* There’s no inventory to stock
* The startup costs are low
* You can automate the sales and delivery process
* There are no shipping and handling charges
One of the best things about information products is that you don’t need a product designer or a manufacturing plant to crank out the goods. You also don’t have to spend months and months doing product development.
If you have a computer and a word processing program you have everything you need to create a best-selling info product in a very short amount of time.
Great, you say, but I’m no writer. How the heck can I get into the information business? The good news is you don’t have to be a great writer to create a great info product. If you don’t have the ability to create the product yourself there are several avenues you can take to info product success.
Co-author with a writer
In my opinion, expert knowledge is much harder to come by than great writing skills. If you are an expert on a subject that people will pay to learn about, you just need a good writer to take your expert knowledge and put it in a saleable form.
I know many subject matter experts who can’t write their names in the snow and many excellent writers who don’t have the expert knowledge required to create an informational product that will sell. Co-authoring can be a match made in Heaven if an equitable co-authoring arrangement can be made. Co-authoring means that you both get credit for creating the product and share in the revenues.
If you are an expert on a topic, but not a writer, find a writer to co-author the project with you. Conversely, if you’re a writer without specific knowledge, find a subject matter expert and partner with them to create the product.
Hire a ghost writer
A ghost writer is someone who will write the ebook for you anonymously, with the writing credits going solely to you. You supply the expertise and guidance and the ghost writer puts it in a readable format. You can hire ghost writers on an hourly basis or for a flat fee, depending on the scope of the project.
There is no shame in using a ghost writer to put your thoughts to digital paper. You don’t really think all those pro athletes and Hollywood actresses can write 300 page books now, do you?
Publish a directory
Can’t think of a subject that you’re qualified to write about? Try compiling a directory. A directory is nothing more than a listing of specialized information that you target market to a particular segment of the buying public. For example, my company publishes a dropship and wholesale industry directory that is a listing of company names, addresses, phone numbers, and website addresses. I simply have someone research the industry and compile their findings in a directory format, package it nicely, and sell it online for $27.
Sign on with an affiliate program and sell their info products
There are thousands of companies that sell informational products and most have affiliate programs that you can sign on with. Becoming an affiliate basically means you become a reseller of the company’s products. You promote the product, you make the sale, the company delivers the product, and you earn a commission.
The key to creating a successful info product is this: the information must be worth far more than the price of the ebook itself. If you’re charging $27 for your product, it must give the buyer many times that price in perceived value.
I asked info product expert Jim Edwards, co-Author of “How To Write and Publish Your Own eBook in as little a 7 Days” for his advice on how to create a killer info product.
Here are Jim’s Top 5 Tips:
* Niche It - Make sure you are targeting a highly defined niche audience… don’t try to sell to everyone. You can get a lot more money showing life insurance agents how to find more customers to buy $250,000 policies than you can trying to sell a product on generic sales skills improvement.
* Hit Their Pain - Make sure your info product hits a painful problem that members of your target audience will do just about ANYTHING to solve. The more intense the pain, the more they’re willing to pay to get rid of it.
* Give Them A Taste - Give people a taste of what you offer in your info-product by giving them a sample. Just like the wholesale clubs get you to buy tater-tots in a 50 lb. bag by giving you one to try, you can induce people to buy your information by letting them read the first chapter or listen to the first few minutes of an audio.
* Entertain Them - People hate to be bored. Increase the power of your product by adding humor, drama and other entertainment elements that make them want more and more. This will not only help with future sales to satisfied customers, it will also keep your refunds down and increase word of mouth advertising.
* Keep it Evergreen - Don’t make the mistake of creating a product that hits a fad or a fleeting market. Create info-products that can be updated with very little effort. This allows you to create a product once and keep the sales rolling in for years (literally) to come!
Simple Product Creation Process
There are several reasons you would want to create a product. Some reasons could be cost reduction on existing products, more functionality than existing products or simply to solve an obvious problem in a specific market.. There is a simple process that I will share on product creation that will give you a start on the way to great success.
I will use three basic steps to explain this.
Step 1. Research the market to established what is in demand and the dynamics.. While this is not only about products on the web or Internet, there is a lot of tools available online to allow you to do this. The one powerful one that I will share here is Google Insights. It basically allows you to check on search terms associated with your market. Check out this video I found on Youtube to help you..
Step 2: Outline the format of your product. Whatever your product you need a specification as to how it would be laid out and how it would solve an existing problem. For example, lets assume you are trying to compete against existing products in your market, you would look at pricing and features of existing competitors then layout your product based on how you want to beat them at their game. The important focus is to solve the problem that exist in the market.
Step 3. Find components for your product. Now in the case of information products such as seminars, online reports and courses, the best step would be to use search engines to discover whats out there on the topic. The key is to find authoritative information that would dictate how you craft the product. If its a physical product, you would search for components from related suppliers and evaluate prices and other factors.. You would then focus on how you can build a prototype of the product and see how it turns. Here is another Video to review.
That’s enough to get you started. In my next post, I will focus on how to explore a problem to discover the best solution.
Technorati Profile
Why would you want to Create Products?
There are many options to make money both online and off-line. Consider stuff such as affiliate marketing online and Franchise business thats mostly off-line. I will try to convince you today that the best approach long term is to have your own product.
Getting Started
This is probably the most challenging part of the equation. How do I get this going? The most important thing to get going is to have an interest and perform research around that interest. This research would lead you to understand common problems associated with the market that you have in mind. The Internet has made it much easier to perform this research whether you want to do business online or off-line. One tool I will mention here is Google Insight. This tool shows you the trend in general and searches in specific markets and locations. It’s a really powerful tool and yet it’s free..
How much money to start?
I will try to cater for those who literally has no money but to get across an important point, it’s to make an assessment, develop a business plan and spend money on the right areas upfront. If you try to bootstrap without spending money, you end up spending a lot more time which in effect is money anyway. Almost what I realize is to get really good advice from experts to succeed faster you need to spend some money. Lots out there for free but again, it takes time to put it together.
Lets say you have no money at all. One simple approach is to check out Affiliate marketing. This means you sell other people’s products through your website/blog. The good news is that you can use free sites to build this sort of business without too much out of pocket expenses. You can then use the proceeds to fund your product development process or operations.
Testing your Market
Once you do some research as we will discuss later, you need to test how good is this particular market for spending money.. Again, typically use affiliate products to do this. The best resources that covers most markets would be Amazon.com. You can sign up as an associate with amazon.com for free. Then you can get a free blog at several sites especially blogger.com and wordpress.com to discuss the topic at hand. Obviously, you need to write something useful and related to the specific market then recommend your affiliate product at the end.
Developing the Product.
First of all, this product could be anything. It could be a physical product, software, videos or written information. The first step you want to focus on would be a blueprint or specification for this product. This specification should match the problems you are trying to solve with features. A good way to do this would be using a mind map and a good tool for this is freemind.
Once you have your specification ready. You could do everything yourself or you could outsource various pieces of the puzzle. There are several websites such as guru.com or elance.com that allows you to find very good help. Another approach would be placing a request in your local paper or craigslist.com ad. You then negotiate your rate and make sure you communicate exactly what you want and when.
The next step is to test the product by either paying someone to provide feedback or put it on a website as a beta or alpha product and get real people to sample and comment.
How do you sell the product?
Selling is always a big challenge. The first simple way to do this, would be to setup a basic website explaining the product and its use. Then use search Engine or Pay Per Click traffic based on specific keywords. This approach would help regardless if your product is off-line or online in nature.
The other powerful option is to find partners that can help you sell the product. These partners would be persons with an established customer base in your specific market that find your product helpful to their customers. The catch to this would be the need to pay a commission for each sale. The advantage is that you get more customers faster than doing it yourself.
Another means would be viral marketing, where you let your customers pass on the word about the product for some additional incentive.
That’s it for now. I will have several more posting on the topics method above and in detail. You can also check out the Product Creation Mini-Course for Free.
What you need to build Products..
Coming very soon.. We will explore this in more details later.. We will learn how to create products