Finding And Creating Products To Sell

- Strategies for working net-smarter -

WORK THE NICHES

Before we go into this let's get a context here.  The web has [an estimated] 16.6 million web sites on it, and the estimations of actual pages vary widely  (billions, perhaps?).  The numbers are irrelevant.  The key thing here is, 'it's BIG'.

The point I'm wanting to make is that you just can't compete with these numbers using an "offline" marketing head-set. This is why the dot.com's crashed.  They "threw" promotional money at the 'wall' hoping some of it would stick. It didn't.  They crashed (using other peoples money of course). 

However, the web has CHANGED the marketing paradigm.  To prosper you don't win by competing.  You prosper by SHARING.  You just cannot compete with over 16.6 million web sites.  It's impossible.  However, if you were able to SHARE with 16.6 million web sites [or even a small fraction of that number] you'd be a very wealthy person.

Now, how does this information help you find or create products to sell?

First-up.  Give them what they WANT!!  Not what they need.

For example, if we all ate food that was actually good for us (what we need) there would be NO fast food restaurants!  We NEED good food that nourishes our bodies.  However, we WANT fast food because we're all to busy, to lazy, or we aren't educated about good nutrition. fast food restaurants understand our inherent laziness.. and profit from it.

So, how does this want/ need equation [and the fast food analogy] apply to finding/ creating products to sell on the net?

RESEARCH!!  [Interesting thing that isn't it?... 'Marketing 101']

Now, as this is a rather convoluted subject (in this particular article) we're only going to focus on research related to creating your own product for sale on the net.

ASK The NET... Need to know anything about anything then 'ask the net'.  Here's what you do in relation to determining if your grand idea is actually saleable... or will just end up in the digital dump.

1. Go to Overture's [the biggest Pay Per Click Search Engine on the net] 'tools'... http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/adcenter/tools/index.jhtml 

Use the Term Suggestion tool to find out how many searches there were for a term that describes your grand product idea last month.

Next: Check out the Bids Tool to give you an idea of the cost of that particular key term. This will give you information on how much people are paying for that term.  If it's a high amount [in relation to the volume of queries I'd found with the Term Suggestion tool] then that would tell me that I had a good key term here.

Next: I'd go to http://www.yahoo.com and key in the same key term.  If there were a lot sites that were using this key term that information would tell me that I had a lot of potential Joint Venture partners...  sites with which I could SHARE a percentage of the unit cost of my product to leverage exposure to their lists and their traffic.

Of course if the data doesn't stack up here then what I've just found out in 10 minutes is that I do not have an in-demand product OR... that I have to find another way into the [web] market.

My secret weapon:  Now, even though I use the same tactics I've just outlined above to identify if there's a market for a product (in addition to these tactics) I also use my own secret weapon, SBI Manager, which comes with the Site Build It! system. 

SBI Manager identifies for me the demand, supply and profitability of key terms within a theme context.  

I can then use these highly profitable key terms (meaning lots of people searching, few pages available) to build content for my own SBI site and/ or to identify the web demand for a particular product.  

This data SBI Manager finds is then compared to the Overture results, and the number of sites (within theme) listed on Yahoo and Google.  If the numbers stack up I then know that I have a profitable product... BEFORE I create it.  I also know the content that will appeal to a particular market BEFORE I write it!! "Give them what they WANT... Not what they need!!"

RESEARCH!! ... RESEARCH!! ... RESEARCH!!

After this it's a simple matter of using ZEUS to find my joint venture partners [while building my reciprocal links directory at the same time... AND/ OR posting an add on jvAlert, where the big players hang out.

Cheers

Kenneth Doyle - e*Analyst