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.