"What Do I Sell?"
By Shahnaz Rauf
Posted Friday, November 5, 2004
What do I sell? This is a very critical question that I get asked very often. Yes there are loads of people out there who have obtained all the right online marketing tools, they have learned all the concepts and techniques of online marketing, yet they don`t know what to sell. Yes they keep shuffling along from program to program hoping to strike it rich somewhere. They loose a lot of money along the way to ultimately get disillusioned. Now If you plan to operate on the internet, your first and foremost product should be yourself. Yes, you are your own product. You need to sell yourself to develop trust and credibility – the basic elements for any sales process. To do so you need to develop your own mailing list. This is not just a list of email addresses, this is a highly responsive list of followers who trust and respect you to the core.
Once you have got such a killer list, you may proceed to
Recommend other People`s tried and tested quality products and earn through affiliate commissions.
You can sell advertising space in your newsletter.
Or you may even convert your list into a paid membership site or a monthly subscription based list.
And ultimately Develop your own product line.
Of course there are people earning incredible fortunes just by selling other peoples products, but such top affiliates are really few and far between, countable on your fingers – they also usually have huge lists with a trusted set of followers. But to reach the ultimate bliss in marketing you need to develop your own product line. Here the big question is How do you come up with your own killer product line? here is the basic procedure:
1. Define What you really want to do
Here your own interest or what you really want to do is important. You may not be able to attain any great heights without that spark of passion driving you along. Also you do not want to get stuck in another dead end project where even getting started becomes a big challenge. So the all defining question is What do you enjoy doing? Or rather, What can you do effortlessly without taxing yourself too much – work on your strengths and weaknesses, which ones can you polish up to use successfully. Once you have sorted out your own inner turmoil and discovered what you really want to do, you have got your niche category or boundaries of operation. Next you need to proceed with the equally important second step:
2. What do the people want?
Or rather what do your potential customers want. To be able to sell successfully you have to find a problem/ need within your niche and provide the perfect solution. So here comes the part of doing the market research. No don’t be turned off, online market research may not be as complicated as the offline version.
How To develop your own killer product:
One conventional technique is to organize a questionnaire/ quiz/ Survey and promote it.
Another way is to lurk in forums related to your area of interest and find out what people are talking about. What problems they have and work out a solution.
Yet another powerful way is to capitalize on the concept of keywords. Discover what words or phrases are most frequently searched on the various search engines, what information are people desperately looking for. Here are some tools to help you out:
(http://www.goodkeywords.com) - fr*ee software to enable you get all the keywords relevant to your area of interest.
(http://www.wordtracker.com) - You can get a fr*ee weekly report of the top 500 frequently searched words on the Internet.
(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) - Here you can check the popularity/ how many searches are being made for any keyword of your choice.
Once you have short listed your search terms, use these terms on the search engines yourself, visit all the sites that come up and find out what is the missing element that you can capitalize on.
OK you have hit the raw nerve. Now do some brain storming/ mind mapping to work out what kind of information/ software/ website is needed. You may get incredible professional assistance to develop your product from (http://www.elance.com)
Now here are some insider tips for you to get your creative juices flowing:
All the newbies on the net are desperately searching for some realistic sure fire way to start earning a decent income easily and immediately.
All the oldbies with websites or products are searching for new ways to advertise/ market effectively and cheaply.
Also another killer idea/product is desperately needed to overcome the hegemony and over exposure of email marketing. As frankly the average person is not usually cut out to handle developing huge responsive mailing lists. And now the ugly sp*m filters overtones ringing in the back ground are heralding the impending failure of email marketing.
A brain wave anyone?
About the Author
Shahnaz Rauf is The Editor of The Monster Twister - a Newsletter helping ordinary web owners achieve extraordinary heights without losing their shirts. To Subscribe mailto:themonstertwister-subscribe@snzeport.com Or visit (http://www.snzeport.com) Shahnaz Rauf is a well published author and the editor of the Monster Twister. She has the distinction of testing her own unique marketing concepts and ideas at her website, with the result that her website (http://www.snzeport.com) is now ranked at the No.1 position on Yahoo, Google and various other search engines. Her articles are availaible freely at her website.
