200-Proof Marketing

Never, and I mean Never, tell another marketer what your niches are and how well you are doing. If you do you’re only hurting your self. All you’re really doing is telling them to hurry up and become a competitor, which will hurt your profits.

I got this advice directly from John Reese right after I created my first successful niche product and experience has shown he was 100% right. I desperately wanted to show it off but if I had, it would have cost me alot of my future sales because 10 people would have immediately created competing products.

The first available media for advertising was paper(ex. Direct Mail, Magazines, Newspapers, etc), for which Print Advertising was developed.

Then came Radio, and along with it came new types of advertising that made use of it’s unique capabilities.

After that came TV which adapted yet another new set of techniques for selling(Image Commercials and Infomercials) that fit the capibilities of TV.

Now we have the Internet and exponentially more capibilities than any other media. Why are we trying to turn it into a peice of paper?

The most powerful aspects of the Internet are that it can be Interactive and Adaptive. We can do almost anything we want with a little programming but I’ve yet to see anyone put this to good use in selling. I’ve seen some try but nothing close to what I’m talking about.

People have tried using Infomercials on the net but they aren’t very effective when used alone. However, when partnered with a traditional long copy sales letter they often excel.

So is that the future of Advertising on ‘net? Long copy sales letters with infomercials included?

It makes sense as the next step but it still doesn’t use the real capibilities of the ‘net.

I’m talking about something that learns from the visitor and adapts throughout the sales process to offer the most effective sales message possible. Something that allows the visitors to focus on the information which excites them the most.

I guess the best way to decide how to make such a thing would be to first decide what the most effective sales method is. Sales Letters? Infomercials?

If I was in a “gun to my head” situation where I HAD to make this one sale or die, I wouldn’t pick either of those.

What would I pick?

Face to Face Selling… Without a doubt!

When your selling to a person that’s right in front of you, you can adapt your sales message to fit their concerns, push the right buttons for their personality type, and focus on the benifits that excite them the most.

You just can’t do that with any other type of selling.

How would you make this happen on the ‘net? I have no idea.

You may have heard this story before because it’s kind of common, but I really like it so I’ll add it here anyway.

One day, while walking through the wilderness, a man encountered a vicious tiger. He ran for his life, and the tiger gave chase.

With a tiger above, another below, and two rats continuing to gnaw on his vine, the man tasted the strawberry and found it absolutely delicious.

Do you get it? It’s probably the most important lesson you could ever learn. I’m not going to tell you what it is either. I want you to really think about it and then leave a comment with what you think it is.

Steps to Creating a Profitable Niche Product:

1. Find a Hungry Market
2. Find out what that market desperetly wants.
3. Develop or have developed a product that fills your markets needs.
4. Write a Sales Letter for your product.
5. Get a Domain Name and create a Website.
6. Setup a PPC campaign and send traffic to the site.
7. Seek out affiliates and possible JV’s within your Market.
8. Begin Optimizing your Advertising.
9. Start Testing to improve your conversion rate.
10. Write some articles for your market to get free traffic.
11. Create or find backend products.

I’m going to cover each one of those steps in detail. Some are simple and some are too complicated for me do justice(like Copywriting).

I think I covered the first two steps already so I’ll go to the third step.

On to Step 3 - Creating your Product

Like I said before, I’m creating a niche product while I write this so that I’m less likely to miss something.

This is the step I’m currently on. My product is in a specialized niche and I’m not going to trust a freelance writer to do the topic justice so I’m writing it my self.

This is where I should tell you that the quality of your product is very important. If you want to get good testimonials (that will increase your sales) and if you want anyone to buy your backend products, you need to overdeliver.

That doesn’t mean you can’t outsource the creation of your products. The product I’m working on is kind of an exception to the rule because I’m positioning my self as an expert in a rather large market by creating several niche products and I can’t do that if I’m not really an expert can I?

There are three ways to create your product. Actually there’s probably more but I can only think of three right now.

The first and most common method is to create the product your self. That might seem a little scary to some people but it’s not that bad and most people are surpised at how much easier it is than they had thought.

The most common type of niche product right now is a Ebook so I’ll talk about that. I recommend you use a good word processing program to write in. Something like MS Word is fine or anything with spell check.

Now the first thing your going to need to do is become a expert on the topic you will be writing about. Lazy people spend a few hours reading about the topic on the net and then try to create a product, that ends up “under-delivering”. I recommend you put in some extra time and go get at least one book about the subject, and preferably two or three. Read the books and take notes from start to finish. Write down any important information you learn as you learn it. When you’re finished with the books, do some research on the ‘net and get a few notes from that.

Now you should have a ton of notes and great information about your market. The next step is to create the Table of Contents for your book. Once you have it laid out the way you like it, organize your notes according to the chapter or section they will go into. This pretty much writes the book for you but you’ll need to expand on many of the notes you took.

All that’s left is to start writing. For each chapter you now have a pile of important information to include. Just write freely, don’t worry about spelling errors or anything like that, just try to include all the notes you took in a clear, easy to understand way.

Using this method I can usually write a book in two or three weeks.

Once you’re done, you should proofread it two or three times yourself and then have someone else proofread it for you because you will miss errors. I proof read one of my books about 10 times and somehow missed the most easy to spot typo’s. I found that my most common typo, was writing “you” instead of “your”.

The second method is to have your product created for you. There are a ton of Freelance sites out there but the most popular right now is Elance.com .

The large amount of Freelance writers looking to write for money is outweighing the amount of work available, and competition for jobs has driven the price down to sometimes absurd levels.

Don’t be too quick to jump on the lowest price, try to verify that other people have been happy with the writer before you decide.

That’s about it. Tell the writer exactly what you want(like which questions need to be answered or what problems need to be solved).

The third way is to use Public Domain material to create your product. I haven’t done this so I can’t help you with it. There’s a lot of good information out there about it though. Just do some research.

The definition of Niche is: a position particularly well suited to the person who occupies it; “he found his niche in the academic world”

But that’s not really what I’m talking about when I say “Niche.” Maybe it should be called “Highly Targeted, Small Market Marketing” instead because that’s what it is.

The Golf Market is not a niche; it’s too big to be a niche in my opinion. But you can find niches in that market, like “30 Days to Tiger Woods Putting” or “10 Steps to Getting on the PGA Tour”. Products like this aren’t targeted at the entire golf market; instead they focus on smaller markets within the golf market. It’s a fact that the more targeted your visitors are, the more profitable your business will be(better conversion rates, ROI, etc).

When you advertise a niche product like “30 Days to Tiger Woods Putting” you don’t advertise to people looking for golf clubs, golf magazines, golf balls, or how to fix a slice. You advertise only to the people that want to putt better, or maybe even the people that want to improve their overall golf game.

I should probably warn you that unless you get Tiger Woods’s permission, it may be a bad idea to create that exact product.

Tip: If you use PPC to advertise a niche product for keywords that aren’t very targeted(like “Improve my golf game”), you could qualify your prospects in your Ad by writing it so that only those interested in putting better click on it. That will greatly increase your ROI and Conversion Rate because you won’t have untargeted people clicking the ad.

The first step to creating a profitable niche product is finding a hungry market. The niche product I’m working on now kind of fell into my lap so research wasn’t done in the normal way. It’s related to another one of my successful niche products so the main research I did was on a competitor that appears to be making a lot of money.

When it comes to finding a niche, the most common advice is to use one of those search tools that tells you how many times a keyword or phrase has been searched for. That’s not a bad thing to do, and it’s definitely useful information. What it doesn’t tell you is how “hungry” that market is.

To find out how hungry a market is, you should check out forums related to that market and look at what people are asking. Are there a lot of people looking for answers about specific topics? Are they getting good answers? Do they look desperate for answers or help? Forums not only tell you how hungry the market is but they also tell you exactly what that market wants, so you can create a product that contains everything your market wants to know.

To really understand which niche products sell and which ones don’t, you need to look at some good examples. One place you could do this is the Clickbank Marketplace. Go through each category and sub category and look at the top 10 or 20 products. Those are the ones that are selling.

You don’t have to be original or innovative. Don’t “reinvent the wheel”, when you can easily see what’s working and create a product for an already proven market.

Now pick something that you know is selling, that has a hungry market, and that doesn’t have too many competitors(but some are good).

Besides being a computer geek and marketer. I also like to read philosophy(it’s good to get a new outlook on life).

Here’s a well known chinese story that really hit home for me several years ago. Next time you get upset about things going bad in your life, think about this story…

In the northern frontier of ancient China, there lived a man who was particularly skilled in raising horses. People knew of him and called him Sai Ong - literally “Old Frontiersman.”

One day, for some unknown reason, his horse got loose and ran off into the Hu territory beyond the Great Wall. The Hu tribes were hostile toward the Chinese, so everyone assumed the horse was as good as lost.

Horses were very valuable to the people living at the frontier, so they regarded this loss as a great financial setback. They visited Sai Ong to express their sympathies, but Sai Ong’s elderly father surprised them by remaining calm and unaffected. Much to their puzzlement, the old man asked: “Who says this cannot be some sort of blessing?”

Months later, the horse returned to the stable with a companion - a fine steed of the Hu breed. It was as if Sai Ong’s wealth suddenly doubled. Everyone came by to marvel at the new horse and to congratulate him, but again his elderly father showed no great emotions. He said: “Who says this cannot be some sort of misfortune?”

Sai Ong’s son enjoyed riding and took the new horse out for a ride. An accident occurred, causing him to fall badly and break a leg. Again sympathetic people came to console the family, and again they saw that the grandfather remained as calm as ever. Just like before, he told them: “Who says this cannot be some sort of blessing?”

One year later, the Hu people amassed and crossed the border into China. All the able-bodied young men were summoned into the army to take up arms in defense. Fierce battles ensued, resulting in heavy casualties. Among the inhabitants of the northern frontier, nine out of ten men died.

Sai Ong’s son did not go into battle due to his broken leg. Because of this, he was spared that terrible fate, and his family survived the war intact.

Everyone can think of one example in their life where what seemed like the worst thing that could ever happen turned out to be blessing in disguise.

If something bad happens in your life don’t look at it as a set back. Look at it as an opportunity.