In Glorious Bloggo Vision

IN GLORIOUS BLOGGO LAND

By kind permission of Phil Gosling better known as Phildee

I was so pleased on reading this message from Phil that I asked his permission to place it on my Blog Here Tis.

I was going to do a completely different blog this morning but a series of e-mails has prompted me to change the subject completely. If you are in the least bit interested in selling information products online, or indeed are doing any kind of marketing on the internet, or indeed anywhere else.., Then this is a vital information that you need to understand. If you know this already then please pass this information on to those who don't Would you like to know how I could make£1 million tomorrow? not you, me, and to be fair it would probably take me a couple of months.

All I need to do is to create a compelling product for others to sell, and to charge them for the privilege of selling it. The reason why this would work is because the vast majority of people are fixated, and I mean fixated, on the weird notion that all they need is a product to sell.

Every week I get several e-mails from people whom I am desperately sorry for and really, really want to help. They invariably ask me to give them a product that they can sell. The list of so-called experts who would be willing to sell them such a product would be long indeed, and I am not one of them because I know it's a waste of time.

The problem is compounded by the irony of also receiving e-mails from people who have spent large sums of money buying sets of products “ they can sell tomorrow” and ask me how to sell them, or at least how to get their money back. A meaner minded person than me would put those people desperate for products in contact with those people desperate to sell them.I don`t think so.

This fixation on products comes about because we've all seen experts and gurus all over the world selling software, books, courses –i.e. products, and making good money as a result. So the mindset is obvious. If “ Guru” is making money selling a product, then all I need is a product to become a guru.

Never in the lamentable history of home business rip-offs has such a notion caused so many people to lose money and hope.

I plead with you to take on board what I am about to say because it is the true secret of online or off-line success. If you approach the whole business from this new direction of then your chances of success have been magnified beyond all recognition.

The product means nothing unless you have someone to sell it to This does not necessarily mean that you need to have a list of your own customers or your own prospects to contact. It means that you must know where your potential customers are and you must know how to contact them. Above all if you have no idea of a product then it is absolutely wrong - completely incorrect – to start looking for products, never mind trying to flog somebody else`s product through their affiliate programme.

The absolute secret of success is to look for a market of potential customers first, for example, widget lovers. Then you look at ways of contacting this audience easily. Finally you should check to see if there is an abundance of potential JV partners available.

So let us assume that widgets is your hobby, interest, problem or area of expertise, or just something you enthuse about. There are two ways to sell widget - related products: direct to the customer [e.g. adwords ] or by creating a joint venture with someone who already has a large established list of widget enthusiasts. The most obvious place for this is an online news letter.

You can establish how big the widget marketplace is by typing widget, and widget news letter into Google. The sponsored links down the right hand side of the the Google page tell you that this is a commercial environment, which is good. If there are no sponsored links then it either means there is no market for sales or you have miraculously discovered a previously untapped market. This is highly unlikely.

Examining the main section of the Google page allows you to establish the kind of websites devoted to widgets. Do some of these websites have book stores within them? Do they have online news letters? what you're looking for is the potential for either JVs, publishing articles, or even placing adverts.

You`ll notice that at no point have I yet discussed products. That's because a huge range of products becomes obvious when you find a market first. In our example, having found out how to contact a large number of widget enthusiasts we can now do one of two things or both . We can either consider creating our own product, which may be an e book, course, audio-visual presentation or whatever, and/or we can go hunting for a wide range of affiliated products to offer to that market.

The most common, massive mistake to make when looking at a career in online publishing is to create, or buy -in a product without having a detailed plan of who to offer it to, and how too offer it. “ I`ll set up an Adword “is not a plan. It`s a shot in the dark.

This is easier to see if we move away from online marketing and talk about direct mail . Would you create a product, for example an educational course, and spend a year writing it only to find out that there was no lists of potential customers available from mailing list brokers? Completely crazy, yet this is what people are doing on the internet every single day and I am starting to get to the stage where I've stopped banging my own head against the wall and want to start smacking a few other people's heads against the wall instead.

I call myself a renegade lemming, but all the gurus are renegade lemmings. All the ordinary lemmings are trying to sell products they have no audience for. The renegades walk the other way and trade products to audiences they know are there and know how to contact both cheaply and easily.

So I beg you to get away from product mentality into market mentality. Embrace the notion of finding a market first, researching its potential first, researching the potential of JV partners first and then, only then, consider either your own product or someone else`s affiliated product.

Please do this, because if you don't you`ll stay poor and I will turn into a gibbering idiot.

Waddya mean turn…!

Many thanks to Phil Gosling [Phildee] for allowing me to print this on my blog for you.

Talk to you soon.