Selling products. Really what more needs to be said? Oh, OK…

1. Find a target market.
2. Find out what they need to make their life easier.
3. Create whatever it is, and sell it.

What could be more straightforward? Nothing really. There are some areas where potential product sellers fail though; there is no point creating a product which will have no buyers. You MUST find a market first.

Finding the Target Market;

My latest product (unreleased as yet) is a small tool which allows a person (with no HTML skills) to create a piece of HTML quickly and easily. I came up with the concept after someone moaned at me because one of my templates was too hard to understand, so she could not amend it easily. The only part she struggled with was one piece of HTML(Css)…as a beginner to site building, this is a good target market for me to have an adventure.

Find out what they need to make their life easier;

So I thought, how can I make this slightly easier - I find it hard to put myself in the shoes of a person who cannot code - I asked my subscribers for their thoughts and my new product is directly taken from the few people who took 5 minutes to reply to me.

Create whatever it is, and sell it to them;

The finished product is basically a desktop tool which takes a number of inputted options and then spits out a piece of HTML for them to simply copy/paste into their webpages (or templates). Very simple. My subscribers will receive this tool free of charge and anyone else will be able to purchase it at low cost, it really is such a simple script (for such a small piece of HTML/Css knowledge) that I would feel bad putting a high price on it.

Of course, for us as AIS'ers, we tend to talk about digital products - after all, you need to only make the product once, then sell it time after time. Examples; templates, ebooks, videos, full new software, content packs (articles), widgets, script modules for existing software, updates to older software, podcasts, site flipping, website making… The list is endless.

This method of income accounted for fully 73.5% of my income during 2006. A massive percentage.

But I don't know how to create a product…

You may think that is true, but I guarantee to you that it is not. Everyone has an eBook or content pack within them - what skills do you have, what friends do you have who you can mine for information? Write, write, write (or in the case of video/podcast) record, record, record.

I have no knowledge and no friends…

OK, perhaps you don't. So, all you need to do is find a person who can create you a product - pay them to do so. Or purchase an already made product (there are sites which give away a product for you to resell). The possibilities are out there, ready for you to make a go of.

An example;

Just this year, I posted on a (webdesign) forum asking for people to get in touch if they had any old webdesigns available for sale. perhaps they were mockups, unused by their webdeisgn clients and so on. I ended up purchasing a few templates (with full ownership rights to me). I then amended these and sell them as article packs for a few different pieces of software.

The one big mistake that is made;

The one mistake that I see time and time again, is people trying to get into product marketing without having found a target market. Without buyers, you are doomed to failure. A recent example is someone who wrote a packet of articles about a subject and then had absolutely no idea where or how to sell them. D'oh!

Make sure that you have a market to sell to, and make sure that you sell them something which satisfies their needs.

Other Benefits of selling your own products;

1. You get to keep 100% of the profit.
2. You are not reliant on 3rd party services (such as adsense)
3. You make a "name" for yourself.
4. You can (if done correctly) incorporate other streams of income directly into the product (thereby making it a double [or triple] whammy). I'll talk more about this in another post.

I must also mention the downside;

1. It is possible that your product will not sell. I posted some weeks ago about an eBook which I paid to have written for me which did not sell.
2. You must provide ongoing support to your buyers. believe me when I say that some buyers do not read Instruction Manuals and do not read FAQ's.

All in all, product selling is just about the easiest, quickest and most cost-effective way to AIS. You should try it sometime.