Markets and Products

There aren’t too many aspects to worry about here:

1. Find a lucrative market and product,
2. Make a place to sell it and advertise, and
3. Sell it and get paid.

To identify a lucrative market, you have to see what folks want to buy, find something similar and offer it to them. Or you can be a stubborn fool and try to get them to buy some crap they don’t want. Stay broke, I don’t care. This is one of the most important decisions of the process and you should make it consciously, even if you think you don’t need to.

If you can be passionate about your market and product, all the better. But Don’t-Give-A-Crap marketing (when disciplined) will always outsell Fool-In-Love-With-His-Dream marketing. No exceptions. If you can’t have both, take the first. Make some money. Then you can at least become a sucker and pay for it.

People pay the most when you solve a problem. So search for phrases on Google like “no solution” and “need help” and so forth. Forums are good, so add the word “forum.” See what comes up. Find the ones that come up most often. Do some reading. Then see if you can find or make a product that solves their problem. This will define your niche and product at the same time. (Niche means small specialized market.)

Also, you could look into desperate people (people with eminent money disasters, especially home foreclosures, spouses with fear of being cheated on, insecure people who cannot get dates, those with severe diseases, fat people, etc.). This is really predatory if you do not provide value, but if you do and you over-deliver, you will make good money and provide them a service they sorely want and need. Not everyone is suited to this category, though, and you could end up a nervous wreck who is unable to sleep at nights from guilt and empathy. Check whether you have more of an inner moral compass or a callous where that should be.

The best stuff is digital because there’s no overhead, but you know what you know. So if your product is physical and there is shipping, deal with it.

Then look on Amazon, eBay and other places that provide product sales statistics. See how the products sell for this problem and niche. There are all kinds of techniques for checking this, so look for them in the literature. The only important part is to be sure you are looking at closed sales statistics and not simply product searches or offers.

On keywords, you’ve got to do the donkeywork. Keep in mind that when a person types in a keyword on Google or a search engine, he is looking for something. You need to get him to look at your stuff and not someone else’s stuff. Do what it takes. It’s easy to lose sight of this when you start studying it because of all the math. There are a gazillion books on keyword strategies, but you can actually get the basics for free by searching Google.

Product names make the best keywords. Next come 3-5 word phrases called long-tailed phrases. The worst keywords are general terms like “make money” and the worst of the worst are ones nobody is looking for. You type them in and nothing comes up except
“sorry.”

Once again, make sure people who search for your keywords are people who buy stuff (do Amazon, eBay, etc., again if you need to). “Freeware,” for instance, is a terrible keyword. So are “cheapskate” and “free ebooks.”

The highest-selling niche markets are those whose keywords have:
1. A lot of search requests (over 200 a month on the free Wordtracker keyword tool), and
2. A low number of pages to search (under 300,000 or so on a Google search).

This is just a rule of thumb, though. If everybody is selling Wii’s and making money, then sell Wii’s, too. When everybody’s doing it, unless you want to specialize, don’t compete. Copy. Copy everything you can from top sellers and expose yourself as much as you can to their traffic. Expect modest earnings, not a fortune from this.

You can sell all kinds of stuff, both niche and popular. If you sell enough modest stuff, you make a fortune.

Next you need a site to sell the stuff on. Learn HTML sites, do Wordpress, or set up a free site like a hosted blog, Squidoo or a Web 2.0 site. Learn the options. There’s tons of assorted crap out there to teach you. For a small niche site, you need about 5-10 pages of quality content and your offer, which will send the reader to a sales page. Make it pretty to look at and that’s about it. You can pepper it with Adsense if sales are down.

Don’t be fooled by a lot of blah blah blah about blogging. Treat blogs as niche presales sites or backlink pages. End of blogging course.

You can make Adsense sites with blog farms, etc., but products give you more money per sale. Learn to sell products. Then learn to make Adsense sites. That’s the best sequence in my opinion unless you’re a real geek or math freak.

If you can learn the shit-through-the-snake sales page techniques, all the better. (This means your reader starts at the top, goes through a long scroll until he hits bottom and comes out by clicking to the order page.) Lots of hype, testimonials, fake high prices that you discount, fake reviews, freebies, big ugly “Buy Now” buttons all over, and other techniques. There’s oodles of stuff on this. They are usually called landing pages or sales pages. They are crap but they work. That’s why people use them.

If you have trouble learning the techniques, find a good sales page that impresses you and copy the damn thing. Then replace the dude’s stuff with your info. Sales pages don’t get any search engine attention, so you can copy up a storm.

IMPORTANT. Make sure you can get paid and accept credit card payments. Set up accounts with Paypal, Clickbank, some other places (look for them). Get a merchant account (the best option, but do the others as well).

Make sure you deliver promptly. For digital products, make sure there is a way to download it. Those who sell other people’s stuff online don’t have that problem, but they need to learn how to cloak their commission link (usually called a hoplink). It’s pretty technical but doable. Even if you don’t do it, you still make money. You are just ripped off sometimes.

If you are starting out with your own digital product, protect the download page, but not too rigorously. It’s good for Black Hatters and other clever fellows and gals to grab it for free and comment about it. Your name grows as it spreads. They’re going to steal it anyway, so don’t even worry about it. Just make it a little challenging to keep the newbies out. Of course, it’s better to get paid, but remember that if you completely isolate yourself and you are a nobody, you will get 100% of nothing.

As to physical products, like I said, there’s shipping and you have to deal with it. This isn’t rocket science, though and the literature is easy to find. Look for “drop shipping” and you will get all kinds of places to sell goods and let others worry about shipping.

I didn’t say too much about one aspect of your product: what you sell. You can sell other people’s stuff, your own stuff or try to get them to do stuff like click on an ad, fill out forms or install programs on their computers. I didn’t say much on purpose. There are gazillions of ideas, techniques and so-called secrets out there. Fin d what tickles your fancy, find the instructions for getting it or making it on a Google search and simply do that.

But none of this is nearly as important as making sure your product or information solves the problem of people who buy stuff. Or it tickles their dream or they think it’s cool. If you get to them and offer them they want, you sell. That’s the only real secret and any kindergarten kid can tell you that.

Make sure you choose decent profits, too. At least $15-20 a sale. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

On advertising, I will deal with this below.

White Hatters fall in love with their product and market regardless of sales. Gray Hatters do the market research donkey-work and sell what people want. Black Hatters sell home loans and penis enlargers and so forth by spam with no research, or try to get people to do stuff often by tricking them.

As regards customer profile, remember that it is easier to sell one person out of 2,000 an item (and a dream) for $2,000 than it is to get 2,000 people to buy something for a dollar. You only need to lay down some bullshit to get the first, but you need a whole lot of bullshit to get the second and the money is the same. There is a lot of literature on this so make sure you become familiar with it.

- Next in “The True Capitalist’s Approach to Online Business” :

Psychological Triggers

Technical Information

Writing

Conclusion

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Whitehats, Greyhats and Blackhats