Spot the trend, and ride it

When you are looking for a new business idea, use social and marketing trends to help you out. For an extreme example, Internet Marketers seem to use every holiday, be it January 1st, December 25th, 4th of July or even April 1st, to offer special deals and discounts in order to make a few more sales.

You can use the same strategy but come off looking good.

How?

Here’s how you can spot trends and profit from them.

1. Use seasons and times of the year to see when is the best time to launch your business. For example, if you want to sell customized t-shirts, when do you think it would be better to start? Summer? No. Start in winter so that you’re prepared for the spring wardrobe change. Now, turn this into an info product idea.

2. Look at developing interests through international events (sports, social, political, cultural and even economic) to use locally in your business. From simple things like using your favorite soccer club’s recent success by offering souvenirs and special discounts to elaborate business investments such as sponsorships and partnerships with other businesses, it’s always important to keep your business grounded in real-world events.

3. Movie releases, books, public events and seasons tend to increase peoples’ interests in various topics. And what is the primary method for people to search for information? The Internet! Cash in on trends by having the right ‘information’ ready in time, and then use that traffic any way you choose (hopefully to make a lot of money). In the next section I’ll tell you some excellent ideas on using public domain works to profit from trends.

Info products are perfect for capitalizing on ANY trend, fad, holiday, etc. Set out to find that right market and proceed with your info product business.

Marketing Your Info Product

If there is one bit of advice I can ever give you, whether it be about marketing or business success in general, it is a quote from Russell Crowe in Gladiator:

“On my mark, unleash hell.”

Yes, you might have heard one or two other marketers quoting this very same line. And with good reason. That one line epitomizes the very core of what all marketing programs teach you. Here’s a break down:

* Find your target Pick a market that is favorable for approach. It doesn’t have to be the perfect idea, just one that works on paper, and most importantly, something that you know you can do while maintaining interest.

* Prepare your approach
Mark out the main spots – what sort of advertising mediums can you use? What is your budget? What is your exact strategy for each medium? No need to go into excruciating details, but you should know, for example, your allocated monthly budget for your PPC campaign, your target keywords and the expected cost-per-click for each keyword. This will at the very least help you monitor your advertising and tune it based on the results.

* Intense marketing
There are two different approaches in this regard. Use the first one if you can afford to spend a lot of money on traffic, use the second if most of your advertising budget will be paid for by your business even at the start.

- All-out marketing, pulling out all the stops at once, complete blanketing of your target market
- Slow build-up, tackling different advertising mediums one by one, building to crescendo effect where at the end, you replicate the effect in the ‘all-out marketing’ technique.

Taken by itself, the term ‘unleash hell’ is also used to describe another valuable business lesson:

If you have a product, or a business idea, or a service to sell, GET IT OUT THERE! Take your business to the market first, worry about refining and managing later.

Essentially, don’t wait months to find the perfect idea. Pick an idea that’s good enough, and launch your business. If you are a resume writer and want to sell your services online, throw up a website, put up your basic contact and payment information and BEGIN PROMOTION.

Too often people wait too long until they have the ‘finished’ product before starting their marketing campaigns. A newcomer shouldn’t waste their time like that. The product will be developed along the way through customer interaction anyway. On the other hand, there is no way you’ll make any money without traffic. So go get that traffic, and ‘perfection’ will come in due time.

Go where the money is

If you are able to become successful without starting out by selecting your market, then it is almost pure luck that you didn't fall flat on your face. That is really how important it is to make this your absolute first step in creating your info product.

Equally important is the idea of selecting the "right" market. Ordinarily, I am of the opinion that there is no "right" way or "wrong" way, only "different" ways. The same is true with opinions. Well, with selecting a market, there actually is a right market and a wrong market. Select a wrong market, and you're actually worse off that if you would have created an info product without first locating a market. The right market is one that has buyers ... and lots of them!

The market you select to create your info product for must be hungry for information AND they must be willing to pay almost any price to get that information. By definition, a "market" is a group of people who come together for a common purpose. People by nature tend to belong to groups as they feel most comfortable associating with like minded people.

In order to achieve success with an info product online, you'll need to find the right group of like-minded people for your info product. In other words, those people who are buyers (not window shoppers) of information on a given topic. Then, and only then, can you create a product tailored to their specific needs. This will assure you of having people lining up to buy the information that you provide to them.

Marketers, especially Internet Marketers trying to sell you products, talk about ‘hot’ markets. Jimmy D. Brown calls it ‘burning needs’ (a mis-quote, I’m sure). Whatever you want to name it, it makes sense to target products and markets that have a heavy demand – lots of buyers. But that’s not all, is it?

Keep an eye out for the other side of the marketing equation – the supply side. Wading into a highly competitive marketplace is risky if you’re starting your first business. Find a market which still has room for more competition (the demand / supply ratio is high) and where the market is large enough to be profitable (targeting Ugandan farmers isn’t exactly a killer idea – targeting African farmers is a better idea scale-wise, but then you run into purchasing power.)

In other words, pick a market where:

· The buyers are willing AND able
· The suppliers are not too great in number (Internet Marketing is inherently a
tough niche to enter precisely because every one tries to sell marketing
products)
· The market is big enough to make a profit and expand in the future.

This is exactly what you learned to do earlier in this course. The same concept applies whether you are creating an info product from scratch or using other people's products to create your own ... you must still do your research before creating the product.

The Two Parts of the Equation for Finding a Target Market

When finding a market for your info product, remember that there are 2 parts to
the equation:

1. You'll need an information hungry market AND
2. You'll need that market to be willing to open their wallets.

You want to make sure that the market that you select has the money to spend on the information that you provide. You would not want to focus your efforts on creating a product that would be useful to homeless people unless you intended on making it a charitable contribution. That market would simply not have any money to spend on your info product.

Similarly, you wouldn't want to focus your efforts on creating a product for a market that usually gets their information from free sources. For example, creating an info product for a group that regularly looks for answers in thrift shops probably would not be a good idea. You'll have to put that much extra effort into selling to them. Why not create a product that is targeted to a specific market that has money and actually spends money in the first place?

So, once you've done some brainstorming and you've written down all of your ideas, you need to start focusing further on what might be saleable. You won't always have much knowledge on a subject that might be profitable. In that case, you will have to create a product on something that you know little about. Remember the goal is A product ANY product at this point - that has an info hungry market of buyers who will spend money.

Mark Hendricks, in his ebook "How To Find The People Who Will Buy Whatever You Want To Sell Them “ explained this well:

The absolute easiest way to catch fish is to put your bait in a barrel that contains ...

"a whole bunch of hungry fish."

Now I know that sounds like an over-simplification, but it's the truth, isn't it?

They're all grouped together. They're hungry. You've got the right food. You drop bait in. They bite.

Here's a little three step secret to the successful marketing of anything!

"You've got to ...reach the right market ...with the right message ...at the right time."

Simple as that.Think about it for a second.

Let's use our fishing example.

The right market - you've found them...they're in the barrel!The right message - fat and juicy wiggling worms.The right time - they are hungry - now!

Do you think they're going to bite?

Yes!

If you were to sit down and think about this idea, you would easily see that the number 2 reason why people on the internet fail to succeed, it is because they do not locate their market before selecting a product. Even then, it is 2nd only behind those who simply fail to take action in the first place.

Hold a Brainstorming Session

To start out, have a brainstorming session with yourself. Have a brainstorming session with your significant other. Have a brainstorming session with another marketer. Do whatever you can to get those creative juices to start flowing.

When doing your brainstorming, you want to focus on your goal. Remember that the ultimate goal is to produce a product. The interim goal, though, is to find a hungry market that is willing to part with some money to obtain the information that you are selling.

Don't limit yourself to any specific topic at this point. Anything can be a product! Not everything might justify a nice price tag, but everything can be a product.

What? You don't know how to brainstorm? It's easy really. Just throw out ideas. This early in the game, there are no bad ideas or good ideas - there are only ideas. Break each idea apart - combine a few together - follow one idea to another. This is what brainstorming is all about!

Now, it can be much harder to do when you are trying to create a product that you don't know much about. Then, topics are a bit harder to come by. Otherwise, look around you. Try thinking of everything and anything as a potential product.

One piece of software you can use to help you brainstorm is called the Complete Brainstorm Lab. You’ll find it at: http://www.InstantEzineContent.com .

If you just glanced across your room and you see a telephone, perhaps you could find a way to turn that into an info product. Let's brainstorm it. You could have an ebook about using the telephone to profit. You could have a software product that helps you use the telephone to profit. One way to do this easily is start thinking in terms of "How To". When you look at something, think of all of the "How tos" that could go with it. You'd be amazed at the "gazillions" of products that you can come up with!

The Importance of Finding Your Market: How and Why You Absolutely MUST Research Your Market FIRST

To create your own product, you must first start with a topic. This should be the fun part of product creation. How do you choose a topic? That’s easy! First find a hungry group of buyers and then find a topic that either solves a problem they have or benefits them in some way.

Many info product creators will just start creating a product on a given topic, and then, when the product is finished, they will look for buyers. Well, I'm here to tell you that this is the wrong way of approaching info product creation.

Wouldn't you be better off if you created a product specifically for an information hungry audience? Even better, create a product for an audience hungry for information who has money! That way, you would know that the buyers existed, even before you put all that time into creating your info product.

If you approach the creation of your info product using this method, you will GREATLY enhance the success of your product! By "success" I mean two things: the profitability of your product as well as the name recognition of you as the creator.

Let look at two examples:

Example 1

I know quite a bit about a specific subject. I decide to write an ebook that focuses on the subject. So, I spend a few days to a few weeks putting all of my knowledge into an ebook. When I'm done, I decide to start working on my website. Now, I go to do some research and I find that all of my keywords that are used throughout my ebook have less than 1,000 searches done per month. Not only that, but there are already over 20,000 sites that provide information on this subject!

Oh no! Now what am I going to do? How will my new ebook compete with over 20,000 sites to get those few people who actually search on the subject each month? I do the best that I can in optimizing my site for the search engines and I hope that I have really high conversion rates.

Example 2

I know quite a bit about several subjects. I could easily put my thoughts together into an ebook. To help me decide which subject I should select, and how to focus my thoughts on that subject, I do some research. I want to find a topic that has a number of people who are interested in the topic. I want to make sure that those people are actually willing to spend money to obtain that
information. I want to find unique ways of telling those people that I provide the information they want and need through my ebook.

Now, I do a bunch of research and I find that there are over 100,000 searches per month done on my topic. There are still 20,000 sites that provide information on this subject, but we are competing for the attention of a much higher number of people.

Next I go to the pay-per-click search engines and check to see how high the highest bid Is for the given keywords. The higher the bid, the likelier that people are already making money in that niche, which means that target audience consists of buyers.

Once my product is focused toward these people, I can easily create a keyword optimized website to submit to the search engines to sell my new ebook.

Can you see the subtle difference between the two examples? When you create a product for a specific market, the probability of your success and profitability is much higher. When you have to work in reverse, you are trying to create a market for a specific product.

Unfortunately, unless you are operating a company that's about the size of Microsoft, you are not in a position to become a marketer mover. Until your business is that big, you cannot create a market on your own. So, do yourself a favor and create your product for the market instead.

Ways of Selling Info Products Online

There are several different methods that you can follow when finding products to
sell online:

1. You can develop (or have others develop for you) the info products you are going to sell; or
2. You can purchase private label rights to products developed by others and modify them to sell as your own; or
3. You can locate info products in the public domain (more on this later) and package them for resale; or
4. You can locate info products already created by others and purchase resale or master resale; or
5. You can locate info products created by other people and sell them through affiliate programs.
   

Actually, my preferred method combines several of these models. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves right now. When you are just starting out, one of your biggest obstacles will be to stay focused. For this reason, you will want to pick only one model and follow it as closely as possible, at least in the beginning. Later on, you can try your hand at mixing up the methods to really maximize your profits!

One way of making money online is by publishing your own info products. Now, the way in which you accomplish this can be through items 1, 2 or 3 above. But, you can drastically change the profitability of your own info product by adding in components from item 4 or 5 above.

To create your own product, you must first start with a topic. This should be the fun part of product creation. How do you choose a topic? That’s easy! First find a hungry group of buyers and then find a topic that either solves a problem they have or benefits them in some way.

Until you are certain that you have a HUNGRY group of buyers who HAVE MONEY and are interested in either solving a problem or who see a benefit in your product, don’t even consider moving forward with your info product.

RESPECT + CREDIBILITY = HAPPIER CUSTOMERS & HIGHER PROFITS

When creating products for profit, think about the questions posed by Randy Charack in Chapter 2 of "The E-Code: 33 Internet Superstars Reveal 43 Ways to Make Money Online Almost Instantly Using Only Email" by Joe Vitale.

"Would you rather pay a little more money and get a lot more? or pay a little less and get a lot less?"

He goes on to explain:

"If the product you are considering buying is designed to make you more money, and you will make a lot more money because of the built-in extras and the added bonuses, you will be happy to pay a little bit more. Right?"

The idea here is based on the following equation:

RESPECT + CREDIBILITY = HAPPIER CUSTOMERS & HIGHER
PROFITS

The easiest way to illustrate this is with a few examples. Consider the following:

Digital Product A
An ebook consisting of a 10 page .exe file (this can only run on a Windows PC and cannot be printed) Looks like good information with a short sales letter Product sells for $27

Digital Product B
An ebook consisting of a 10 page .PDF file (this can be run on Windows PCs and Mac's)2 additional ebooks illustrating points made in the ebook (value over $100)2 pieces of software that can be used to implement the ideas in the ebook (value over $100)Looks like good information with an acceptable sales letter, and pictures of the bonuses Product sells for $47

Which product would you rather purchase? Even if the ebooks are identical, Digital Product B will likely sell a lot more copies, even though the price is higher, because of the perceived value. You are showing your readers respect by providing them time saving extras! You are also saving them money as well.

Of course, your site will also need to establish your credibility by providing testimonials and backing up your major claims, but you would have done this with either product. By adding the element of "Respect" for your customers, you make them happier and earn yourself higher profits in return!

So, how can you apply the equation to your own info products? Well, when deciding what product to create and what content to include in the product, remember to show your reader "Respect".

Also remember that you need to add "Credibility" to the equation by providing a sound basis for your assertions in your ebook. You will also want to establish "Credibility" through your presentation of the ebook itself as well as through your website. Provide testimonials; back up your claims, etc. When you put Respect and Credibility together, you will have a Happier Customer, and that will provide you with Higher Profitability.

There are a number of ways that you can make money providing information to people online. One of the most profitable ways to do that is to create your own info product and to maximize it’s profitability by combining it with other people’s products.

Niche Marketing

Many Internet Marketers have made small fortunes out of selling "niche content". A "niche" is a focused market segment. For example, there is the self help niche. Almost any topic can be a "niche" as long as there is a targeted market of people in that niche.

Those Internet Marketers that have made a ton of money selling niche content. are selling to the "online business niche". In other words, they’re selling to other internet marketers. (Although I wouldn't necessarily call that market segment a "niche" as it is really not focused very well.)

Those selling niche content to the internet marketers are making life easy for the new online business owner as the new business owner doesn't even have to create an info product. The only problem with that is that at any point in time, at least a hundred other people buy the same products, follow the same steps, and eventually, setup the same type of websites.

The end result? Nothing happens. Apart from a few early success stories, sales happen at a trickle, and people are left wondering why they bought something that an Internet Marketer thought was better to sell rather than profit from it on his own.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite enjoy the ease that pre-packaged niche content gives to starting an online business. The only problem is that if you don’t KNOW how to pick the right niche, you won’t ever be able to strike a fortune.

Quick Fact: Every single Internet Marketer has at least one niche business that is doing amazingly well.

How do they do this? They pick the right niche! Examples of some niches that could be profitable are the poker niche, the wedding invitation niche, the debt reduction niche, etc.

Aren't you seeking the same sort of success?

There are, as always, several solutions. One of the most profitable, though, is to create your own info products, and combine them with other people's products for maximum profitability.

Profiting in the Info Product Business

One of the fastest and easiest ways to make a living online is to go into the info products business. Do NOT listen to those gurus who say time and time again that the market is saturated. And, that the internet just can't handle another info product entrepreneur (info preneuer). Guess what? They're wrong!

Why would I say this?

The reason that people are on the internet in the first place is because they are hungry for information. Everyone wants information! Do you remember that movie a few years back about a robot? I think it was "Batteries Not Included". The little robot got his battery working again and all of a sudden started running around some big city saying "Input, Input". Well, picture the surfers on the internet as that little robot. They're all running around from site to site saying "Info, Info!"

These same people are more than willing to pay money for the information. After all, they routinely purchase magazines, newspapers, and print books, right? On the internet, they're even more willing to part with a few dollars if it will save them time or solve a problem for them. The secret is to make sure that the information that you provide either saves them time or benefits them in some other, emotional way.

On the internet, there is a lot of money that can be made by selling information to people. The way to do this is through ebooks. An ebook is nothing more than a book in a digital format. Sure, it can have pictures - but so can a real book.

The important part of having an ebook as opposed to a hard copy book is that the ebook can save the reader even more time than the hard book. This is because the ebook can incorporate audio, video, and hyperlinks to additional, pertinent information.

Most of the internet "gurus" have made their money by selling information online, in one format or another. Now it's your turn to take a share of the internet profit pie. You can do this by creating your own information product (ebook).