Selling Your Own Product

You cannot just choose a product idea from thin air and decide to start marketing it. There are tragic stories around of budding Internet marketers spending a lot of time and money developing a product only to discover no one wants to buy it. Well, of course if you are lucky you may even make some dollars but it would be more due to luck than good sense.

When choosing a product or service to sell over the Internet there a few important questions you should ask yourself:

1. Are people going to buy it? Not too many houses are sold over the Internet (although that's rapidly changing). If its too big and therefore expensive to ship or just too expensive you may struggle to get buyers. On the other hand, if the price is too cheap people may not want to pay a shipping cost greater than the product itself. And you would need to sell large volumes to make money. But you could package it with other products. My point is be sure you choose or create a product that you would or your family would or your friends would or people in general would be likely to buy over the Internet. Ask them!
    

2. Is there much competition? You may find it difficult to go up against well established companies with a strong Internet presence. Or it may be difficult to stand out from thousands of other similar products. Do your research.
    

3. Are you going to enjoy being involved with it? The success you enjoy in life will be in direct proportion to your passion for it. Is it something you are passionate about.  Will it drive you to work, work and work some more......because that's what it may take to realize your dreams.
    

4. Is it a good product? A simple but powerful question. KNOW your product.
    

5. What will be my profit margin? It won't do you much good to sell a product that sits well with all of the preceding questions if it is only going to make you 2 cents per unit (unless you can sell astronomical volumes).

The best resources for this kind of research are:

Wordtracker - Wordtracker is an excellent tool that every webmaster should use. The great thing is they let you have unlimited free trials. This site can help you determine how competitive a particular Internet niche is. Think of a type of product you may like to market and choose a few words that relate to it. For example, if you are thinking of selling pet supplies you may want to search for "dog grooming kits" or "cat scratching pole" etc. The results you get will tell you how many other sites are using the same words (keywords) to attract visitors from the search engines and how many people searched those terms in the last month. Then visit the sites with the top rankings and see what they are doing. This tool is also very useful when looking for good keywords to write into your webpages.

Your friends and family - in most cases they represent the kinds of people that buy over the Internet, making them an excellent source of research data.

The Internet - have a look around. See what's out there, who's offering it and how they are doing it.

Chatrooms and Forums - these can be a great insight into what people want. For example if you were to visit a forum for nutrition you may notice a lot of people asking questions about using food to achieve a particular goal. So you have identified a need, now do some research and see what products are available. If there is nothing then there is your product idea, or if there is something then maybe you could improve on it.

A Good Internet Marketing Course - you must, must, must keep learning. The more you learn, the more you earn. A good course will give you the guidance you need to start thinking seriously AND realistically about what you will do. For an overall look at every possibility on the Internet I recommend Cory Rudl's comprehensive manual and his Secret's to Their Success web site. These are the materials I used when I started.

The best tool for setting up to sell your product, including everything from initial brainstorming to banking the money, is NPOD. Developed by Joshua Shafran, it is a complete 20 step product development and marketing tool that has proven itself to work extremely well, hence the price tag (its not cheap).

Neil Shearing's  Internet Success Blueprint
Neil has a Phd in cancer research and is a very successful Internet marketer. It was while using the Internet as a student he became interested in marketing. This course is a 15 step plan for creating and marketing your own info product that Neil himself has successfully used to sell several of his own products.