Are Your Products Viable?
It’s a real simple process, and it’s all about asking the right questions at this stage to avoid problems later. If like many others out there, you don’t do this, you’re going to come up against financial strain, time strain, and resource strain, all making things incredibly hard and expensive to even get off the ground in the first place, and when it does, there’s no telling what the quality is going to be like, and we all already know how important that is.
Question 1. Does It Help Solve A Problem?
So, the first thing that you need to do with your concepts is ask a very simple question. If you followed the first reports inspirations and carried them out as we talked about, you’ll most likely be able to answer this one with a solid ‘Yes’. The most significant question you will ever ask yourself about your products is simplistic. Does it resolve a problem, help the customer avoid pain, attain happiness or entertain?
Although this is widely known already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve heard this before, it still applies, and probably always will. What worries me is how many people know this, but don’t directly ask themselves this question until it’s too late, then all they end up with is a bunch of unrelated things they had to stuff into their new package to make it look more valuable through solving more problems.
Question two. Is there a market for my product?
And can I reach them? An important question indeed, because incidentally, if there’s no market for your product, or you have no way to reach them, then no ones going to find out about your product, and you simply won’t sell any.
It’s easy enough to head over to google.com, and do a search for your product, or a different version of it. Not only depending on the fact that if you have a problem that needs to be solved, it’s highly unlikely (if not downright impossible) that your problem is going to be unique.
Also, when running your search, if there’s other products out there offering either the same as you, but in a different way, you can bet your life that there’s a market out there. Also are there any publications that are related to your product? An even bigger sign that there’s a market there, and of course, can you reach that market? Specifics and how’s aren’t really important right now, as long as you know not to go launching a product that’s going to be impossible for you to reach the people that want to buy it, or even worse; there aren’t any people who want to buy it.
Question three. How much money will this take to create?
And make it the best it can possibly be? Asking yourself how much cash it’s going to take out of your pocket before you start is definitely a good thing, but you don’t want to know how much it’ll take to create and get running, but how much it will take to create and get it running effectively, so you can really wow your customers and get them to talk about you to other people. Quality is so important nowadays with the flood of products out there in all markets.
Here’s an example for you, again from my personal experience and my very first site. I’ve always been a big believer in wowing people with stuff I do. If it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done properly, it’s going to be sheer quality, and the best it can possibly be. The very first site I put up featured forums, a fully functional and independent auto-responder and ad tracking system for each individual member, not to mention all of the hooking up with the affiliate software, access management and tying this into recurring billing and a two level affiliate program, with custom commissions for individuals that I’d met and were up for joint ventures.
Now bear in mind, at this point I had no big list of people I could sell to yet, I had none of these scripts or systems already, and this was at a time when people were first coming up with the idea of selling auto-responder and ad tracking scripts so they could install and use them on their site. Now looking at the concept, this was going to be a monster of a site, totally mind-blowing, so I went for it without really looking hard into what I was getting myself into financially, and the time commitment such a site took, with things like tech support, being on hand non stop to sort out problems, being there at the right times for conferences, and managing pretty much every system there on my own.
I don’t need to tell you that that’s a heck of a big first product, and there’s nothing wrong with doing, or being ambitious. Just before you start, make sure that when you ask yourself if you have the time and money to pull this off to a very high standard, otherwise you might just find yourself overwhelmed half way through the actual process of creation.
Question 4. How can I package and present?
Often, you’ll find one of your product ideas turns into two or three when you look at this question. If that’s the difference between earning twenty and sixty thousand dollars from one product, I’d say that’s a pretty important factor. Remember when you’re looking at these to develop and evolve your products. They’re not set in stone, and often just one viable concept is more useful than at first glance. How you package and present is very important.
Here’s an example for you. Lets take this course in hand, and ask yourself, if you’d sat here like me, researched and written a training course, what else could you do with it aside from plant it on a website as an intensive course as we’ve done here? Lets see, just off the top of my head here, without even thinking about it, we could have made it into a membership pay monthly site, then at a later date taken the whole manual set and sold it as one for a big price. What if we recorded the whole thing in audio and video? We could deliver it as an intensive course through Fed-Ex along with the written manual.
Something we talked about earlier too, how about re-sale rights? When I release the next product, if it’s meant to replace this one, expand on this one, or present it in a fresh exciting way, what’s to stop me selling this whole course off with resale rights for a thousand dollars to seventy five people? See how what was originally an idea to display our knowledge to you has multiple delivery methods tied to it. Some are the same, some could be pro versions or enhancements, and the resale rights cries out to a whole new market, even though the base product is the same.
Always look for ways to develop your good ideas. If it’s successful, don’t stop there. Follow it through, offer pro versions, offer taster versions, offer full audio, video training manual through fed-ex versions, offer re-sale rights, membership sites, and that’s just off the top of my head.
Now obviously we’re not taking the same product and selling to the same people over and over, that’d be pointless, and no one wants to buy the same info product five times displayed in different ways, but always look and adapt your delivery methods, and versions of your product, and it’s likely that your one good idea that makes you twenty grand in a year could turn into three good ideas that are aimed at entirely different people. Clever huh? Even better, that little tidbit is going to make you a heck of a lot of cash if you get these product creation methods down. Don’t forget it, and you’ll have fuel for your business for as long as you want.
Question 5. Can I adapt the system?
To make it easier on my resources, reach a bigger or more targeted market? Something you should always ask yourself. How can I make the product or service better, reach a larger or more targeted number of people? If it’s not affordable, how can I make it affordable? If I don’t have the time to manage such a monster, can I automate it?
It’s all about asking yourself how you can improve your concept to make it either easier on yourself, or more viable to sell to your target market. If you can’t pull this off, and something can’t change, go back through the first four questions again. When you can answer yes to the first four, and be happy with the outcome through question five, you have yourself a viable, ready to go product that you can get working on right away. Of course, we’ll talk about the specifics of this later, but for now, just keep it in mind, and remember how to create such ideas.
If you find that one of your concepts isn’t viable right now, don’t worry. At least eight out of every ten of the ideas that I come up with personally don’t make it out of the planning stages for some time, if at all. Not to worry. Like we talked about earlier, when you remove the boundaries that stop you coming out with ideas, and start looking at the limitations of your resources before you’ve even give it a chance, the ideas will flow, but of course it’s likely that a lot of these ideas you dismissed aren’t usable right away or in there present form.
This is why it’s important to file these, and take a look over them, even after you’ve discovered that they’re a no go. Your environment may change, your financial position, or the market may change. It’s just a case of waiting for the time that the answer to those five above questions become positive ones, meanwhile working on the things that do work, and are viable. If you’ve got this method down, you’ll probably find that you’ve never got nothing to do, and have an abundance of new products that you can bend and weave to make them suit you and your personal resources.
Wrapping Up.
That about wraps up the practical work. I hope I’ve given you some sort of vehicle to get ideas flowing thick and fast, and how to sort the good from the not so good, and downright crazy. Don’t worry about those crazy ones by the way, I’ve woken up in the morning on occasions and said to myself ‘What the heck were you thinking when you came up with that one?’We’ve filled a big gap. You should now have something pretty special, and that’s the ability to come up with ideas of your own, even if you don’t think your imagination is up to much, through practical use of these methods you’ve got a big wad of ability now that you may not have had before reading. You’re ready to get creating the fuel for your business. Far from the days of staring at blank pieces of paper and not having anything to do, you’re now set to turn that blank piece of paper into a fully fledged product, that people want to buy and will recognize you for, build a sales system around it, get the word out, and make a whole lot of cash.
Before leaving this section, there’s two more points about product creation that I’d like to show you, which will make you totally comfortable with the process, and help the flow of ideas even further, and inspire a little bit more confidence if you’re not convinced in what you can achieve with this yet.
© 2010, Work At Home Covert Opps!. All rights reserved.
Shared Post
Unique visitors to post: 2
Related Posts - Super Fast Product Ideas: Info-Product Generators Part 1 Professional Interview - You would ask an expert for an interview in exchange for free publicity. The interview would be about their professional life. You...
- REMEMBER the RULE: 98% of all buys are made emotionally and vindicated logically! The fact is that sometimes the higher the price the more emotional the decision is because much more is at stake! But not 1 in...
- The Non Doers Group two are the non-doers as I like to call them. They're going out, buying guides like this, skimming them, deciding that either yes they're...
Related Websites - Whats Up With All The Systems? It seems every day a new "system" that is going to blow away all the other systems comes out. Almost weekly! The real question to...
- Introducing - Aquarists Online Articles Both John and I are exceptionally pleased to announce the introduction of a new service to Aquarists Online, a service called Aquarists Online Articles. We...
- Beat The Recession: Get Your Business Online Around our area a local news station has a segment on Beating the Recession where they give advice on surviving these tough times. So in...
Comments
One Response to “Are Your Products Viable?”
-
uberVU - social comments on November 2nd, 2009 6:07 amSocial comments and analytics for this post… This post was mentioned on Twitter by KristenArnold: Are Your Products Viable? http://bte.tc/jmW #RTW…
Leave a Reply
