How to Find Money Making Products

By Armand Melanson 
© lessworkmoremoney.com .  

The most common question I get on starting an online business is: "What do I sell?". The answer is simple: Always identify an existing market, then pick a product/service to meet that demand!!!

1st find a market, then identify products that satisfy the demand already present. If you get caught up in product selection without tying to an existing high-demand market, you are dead before you have begun...This is the critical mistake that most business startups make. 

Test Market to Settle on a Product

Before you pick any product, do some surveys to establish the best product in a given class. This is step 1 in direct marketing & you will save yourself a ton of money if you do it. You start by picking a target market like health, biz ops, security, or whatever. Once you have the market picked, then you identify 6-12 products which fit that market. I know this sounds like a pain, but it will pay off big time.  

Go to http://www.overture.com/d/USm/adcenter/tools/index.jhtml & use the search term suggestion tool to see how many searches were done on the most relevant terms for your products. If the product is getting no searches, pick another product. This is absolutely key. 

An even better resource for finding untapped markets is here: Wordtracker

You must pick a product that is in demand. You can also review what the current bids are for the product's most relevant search terms. This will give you an idea of how much your competition is willing to spend to attract visitors. 

Then you do some informal product surveys to determine which is your best product. This is not rocket science - you invite some friends/relatives over & pitch each product ( even if you don't have the products, you can still describe it to them ). Get their feedback on what they thought of each one & then narrow your list to the best 3. Then do it again with only those 3 until you come up with a winner. You can get fancy with a basic questionnaire which your survey participants  answer. It can be something like:

1)Rank these products in order of preference

2)What would you be willing to pay for the top 3 products

3)What did you like most in each of the top 3 products


You get the picture... You want to get someone else's input on a potential product before spending any time marketing it. The more input you get, the more likely you will be to pick a product that will sell. If you can get people that fit the demographic that your are selling to, all the better ( women 40-60yrs for an anti-aging skin cream, men 35-50yrs for a specialty tool etc.). Basically, you want the survey participants to be as much like your potential market as possible.

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If you don't have any friends or family to help you with this, you can do it by cold calling people in the phone book. For every 3 people that hang up, you'll find one who will tell you what they think of your products. 

So now you have what you think is a winning product (even if it's an idea for a product that doesn't exist yet). Before jumping in with all guns blazing, you need to do some more exploration. Before spending time & money on developing a product or finding a supplier, building a website, getting CC processing setup, setting up your newsletter, etc. you need to further prove that you have a product that is in demand.


One relatively quick way to do this is as follows:

Once you establish that the product is in demand, setup a basic website that can be reviewed by editors at the major PPC engines I
( Overture, Findwhat, Google ). 

Then submit listings to these engines for your most important keywords. This will cost you money but it will be worth it. Then monitor your PPC clicks & determine if there is sufficient traffic to your site to warrant further work.  You can even have a buy link on the site which takes your visitor to a page which tells them that the product is in development but will be offered soon (or whatever). This way you can track the number of people who would actually buy the product based on the basic marketing copy you have setup.

Once you have proven that your product is a hot seller, then you take the time to establish & properly market it. 

This sounds like work!!??

Of course you can forgo all of this & jump right in, but your chances of success are increased significantly (I mean 6 figure success not a few extra hundred/MO). You don't have to do any of this, but the more you do of it, the more likely you are to end up with a product that will make some serious money. Experienced direct marketers only launch a product campaign once they know that it will make money. Since only 1 in 7 product ideas will be a winner, this is just good business. There is no get rich quick scheme that will make you rich overnight. But there are proven methods that have made millions of dollars for those who follow them. 

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One note of caution - setting up a website that says you can provide a product/service you can't deliver is a little dicey. This is called dry-testing & is regulated by the FTC. Here is an excerpt from their website:

Is it okay for a company to "dry test" a product?
"Dry testing" describes the practice of placing an ad for a
product to see if there is sufficient consumer interest before
actually going to the expense of manufacturing the item.
Although the Mail Order Rule doesn't specifically deal with this
situation, the FTC has issued an advisory opinion that such ads
must clearly disclose to consumers the fact that the merchandise
is only planned and may not ever be shipped. For more
information, ask the FTC for A Business Guide to the Federal
Trade Commission's Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule.

Source: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ad-faqs.htm


So if you want to comply with FTC rules you should do as stated. Since the method I am endorsing is generally for start-up home based businesses, there is very little chance that the FTC will be interested in you. What I'm talking about is on a tiny scale. And this method precludes you from taking orders during the dry-test which is a big no-no with the FTC.

Nevertheless, there are some ethical & legal issues at play which you need to be aware of. If you are not comfortable doing a full dry-test, then modify the process to the extent that you need to. Any test marketing is better than none.

see the follow-up to this article here: money making products part 2

Armand Melanson
Less Work More Money
Publisher
Ultimate E-Marketing & Dropshippers Guide
web: www.lessworkmoremoney.com
email: armand@lessworkmoremoney.com