Class Four, Week 1

Session 1

Researching Products, Finding Ideas,

Making sure ideas are going to sell

Introduction

I'd like to welcome you to the Product Creation Workshop. My name is Armand Morin, and this is session one in our six-session workshop on product creation.

Each session will cover different topics. Some of them may contain multiple topics as far as product creation, and some will only contain one topic.

For example, when we talk about developing software that will take the whole session because it's going to take more time to go over the details.

In this session, we will talk about researching products, finding ideas, making sure that the ideas are going to sell before you actually go ahead and put all of the time, energy and money into developing a product.

Also, we're going to talk about the different types of eBooks and literally why everyone on the Internet today is producing them 100% wrong. You're going to see exactly what I mean. There are two different types of eBooks, which are EXE eBooks and PDF eBooks. There is a distinct difference and distinct advantages to both.

Also, there are a couple of other smaller, lesser-known types of eBooks that exist on the market. I'm going to explain those to you and some of their advantages. Some will give you a competitive advantage, some won't, and we're going to talk about why.

It’s the best selling type of product that’s ever been created because information never gets outdated. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Information does get outdated, but you can always update it.

Let me rephrase that again. Information always gets outdated — there’s always new information that people need to know. You can always update your information so it creates additional back end revenue for you.

The how-to types of information products are the most popular and the reason is because there’s always something that people want to know how to do. There’s always new information out there, so there’s always going to be a market for it. There are some common things that most people want when they create a product. They want money — they want to actually profit from the product that they create. That’s the natural thing.

There are several other reasons. You could use your creation for brand name recognition just to get your name or build brand awareness out in the marketplace. You can create a product to form an opt-in list, to target traffic for your web site, or target traffic to market other products and services with.

Product creation does not have to take a long period of time — it doesn’t have to take forever. It doesn’t have to take months — it could take a very short period of time.

Here are the four keys for product development.

• It must solve a problem.

• It must already be in high demand.

• It must have a built-in market.

• It must be simple for the end user to use, so don’t complicate it

The first and foremost thing that you have to do when you are creating a product is that it has to solve a problem. This is the bottom line. If it doesn’t solve a problem, you’re probably not going to be able to charge as much for the product.

The second thing is that it must already be in high demand. Ask yourself, ‘Is there a demand for the product already in the marketplace? Third, do I have competitors?’ Having competitors is important. It’s not a bad thing. Competition in the marketplace is good because it means that people are already buying what you’re trying to create.

If you’re the first person to create it, your job becomes educating people on why they need it. If a person doesn’t know what it is that they’re buying, it’s harder for them to make a buying decision. If you’re a pioneer — the first person to put it out on the marketplace — your biggest objection is going to be, “What is it? How does it work, and why should I buy it?”

If you have competitors who are selling a similar product already, then you don’t have to go through that. You can simply ride the wave and say, “You’ve seen all these other products, now here’s mine. Mine’s better for this reason, this reason, and this reason.” You have to understand why they should buy yours.

Fourth, You need to have a built-in market of people ready to buy it. Through the product research that you’re going to do to create your product, you’re going to find out if there truly, in fact, is a built in market for your product.

Part of this whole process is getting you to expand your mind. Think about what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to get you to think differently. You see, I will look at something and I’ll look at a set of information and I’ll immediately think how can I create a product out of that. You may look at the same information and wonder why did they design their website like that or why did they write their headline like that or you know, this site looks bad or I don’t get it.

You may not get it at all. I’m looking at information and the way that I’ve automatically started thinking of how can I create a product based around that. What are the options? What are the opportunities in there?

When you start thinking in an opportunity type mindset, you start seeing things that other people aren’t seeing. Other people merely look over them. What you need to do is essentially train yourself to do that.

If you don’t know how to do something, find someone who does. The biggest secret to product creation is to outsource. Outsource everything that you possibly can.

Niche

Let’s start off with that one particular point right there and that is a niche. First of all, the smaller the niche is the more profit you’re going to make, and the reason why I say that is this. I read somewhere one time that its better to be a big fish in a small pond, and I truly believe that.

So eBook software is not a huge topic, but it’s a very targeted topic. You would think that with only a few thousand people searching on it every month that that product wouldn’t be profitable. Not true — that one product generates over six figures every single year, year in year out without a lot of marketing and without a lot of doing anything to it. So, again it’s a very targeted niche and that’s what you need to be looking for.

It doesn’t have to be a huge niche. The biggest mistake I see that people make online is not picking a niche. There are some well-known marketers, and I’m not going to mention their names, because I haven’t asked their permission, but there are a couple well-known marketers that I know and that’s their biggest mistake that they’ve made on the Internet is to not niche themselves.

Now that’s a pretty important statement, I mean this one particular individual is one of the more popular individuals online and he said his biggest mistake was not niching himself on the Internet, meaning he doesn’t have a specialty, so to speak.

Internet marketing is an easy subject because we all kind of live and breath within that market, but there is a whole world outside of Internet marketing that I want you to look at that and I want you to concentrate on that outside world. What do I mean by the outside world? I mean anything not having to do with Internet marketing or marketing itself.

For some of you, that may be your niche and that’s okay, but for the majority of you if you’re thinking of going in that direction I’m going to tell you right now STOP, turn around and find something else. Why would you want to compete in the most competitive arena there is on the Internet today with the people that have been doing it for quite some time. It doesn’t make sense.

You can choose who your competition is going to be. Personally I’m pretty wimpy. What I want to do is choose a market that has very little competition online and I want to find the markets that are just the low hanging fruit. What I mean by that is that I can go there, I can advertise and I’m not going to have 1,000 people advertising against me.

I’m not going to go out and pick a subject like mortgages or gambling or something like that because it would cost me a fortune just to advertise in that particular market. What I’m going to do is pick very simple topics.

I want to pick a topic that people are currently looking for. See I don’t want to just try to create what I refer to as a P-U-T-S. A P-U-T-S is a product you’re unable to sell. That’s the last thing I want to create.

I’m saying I don’t care what you niche market is, become a specialist in the sub-category in it. I’m not saying your going to become an expert in the gardening field and then become known as an Internet marketer.

Those are two different industries that have nothing to do with each other. Not everyone on line is into Internet marketing. There are some very specific niche markets on the Internet. My point to you is no matter what your niche market is, go figure out what your specialty is going to be in that field.

If we are talking real estate, then figure out what your niche market is going to be inside real estate and then don’t leave it at that broad span. Don’t try to become the expert at everything. It’s not going to happen, and you don’t need to know everything. There are so many things in the smaller market that you need to know anyway; you can’t possibly become an expert at everything. You are going to know something’s better than others and then focus on those things and become the person who knows the most information about it. You want to be the go to person for that niche.

Find something different that everyone else isn’t doing. That’s the thing, I mean, recognition, notoriety, is going to help you in what niche market field that you are looking at, what you need to do, you need to become well known, obviously, the more people know who you are, the easier it is to make sales, the easier it is going to be to sell products.

I’m not the person to help you as far as picking out your niche, but I can tell you what you should do to pick out your niche. Let’s just say it’s real estate, for example, and you want to become the foreclosure expert. Then you are going to create a category for that, and you are going to learn everything there is to know about that topic, and you are going to go at it full steam and be recognized as the person in that industry and you are going to become well known for nothing else at first except for foreclosures.

Then if you’re going to go on for something else then you can, but now you have established yourself as an expert specified in the real estate industry, but sub-category of foreclosures and you are the go to person, if anyone has a question, people tell them to go and see you.

Fred Gleeck is an example of someone who made himself an expert in multiple fields. Fred is actually a very good friend of mine and Fred actually became in expert in several different categories, but what he did was picked categories where there wasn’t an expert currently present at all

For example one of Fred’s categories is the self-storage industry. I mean lets be real, who wants to be the expert in the self-storage industry? Well Fred did, and he found out all that there is to know about the industry and became the only person at that particular time to be an expert in the industry. He took it over very rapidly.

He does a lot of research himself into various different topics. For example, he is known in the speaking industry because Fred is an excellent speaker. He has created products for over 250 industries, but he didn’t become the expert in 250 industries.

He is known in four or five different industries as the recognized expert. He is the expert at creating a niche market. He definitely created niche markets and he can locate niche markets that are highly underdeveloped. That is one of the things that you need to look for. It’s a great profit model and you know what I think what you can learn from Fred is that to define a category where is there is no recognized expert. Pick some obscure piece of the market that no one is even thinking about and take it over and all of a sudden you make it famous.

Some people look for others to help them do it. They feel like they need a super affiliate to make it for them. Don’t look for the person that is going to help you do it, be the person that does it. You see, that is the difference about the person who will or who will not make it.

The list is important, but you have to count on yourself. Let’s go way back. Okay I think this is going to give you an example of what I did personally, when I released my first software, eBookGenerator. Back then, not too many people knew who I was on the Internet. I advertised consistently — I was averaging two to three ads a week and it was only costing me $35-$65 per ad, so I wasn’t doing a whole lot of business but, here was the most important move I made.

The most important move I made was and you can still do this to this day, cause they still do it, is I actually went out on a limb and I advertised, I spent a lot of money on an advertisement in ClickBank* newsletter. Now most people don’t know that you can buy an advertisement in the ClickBank newsletter. Most people don’t know that ClickBank has a newsletter, because they don’t send it out very often.

Anyway, I went out and spent and I believe at the time it was about $2000 on this ad. I never spent that much money on an ad before, but I thought okay, if I can reach 100,000 ClickBank people, then this will be worth it.

I was very optimistically thinking that if I could get a small percentage, I could make some significant money. Well here is what happened, I put together the $2000 and $2000 was a lot of money, but I threw it out there hoping. So here is what happened.