Select Your Products and Target Your Market

This is the final lesson in our FREE Course. We hope you've enjoyed the ride and trust you've gotten some good, solid strategies you can use NOW to make your web site SELL better.

Frankly, targeting your market and choosing products may not sound as exciting as discussing search engine strategies or how to get free media coverage. Yet this is the most important topic of all.

In traditional business, the number one reason businesses don't make it past their first year is lack of start-up money. The Internet is a very low-cost venture. Money is rarely the problem. The number one reasons web sites don't turn profits is THEY DIDN'T TARGET THEIR MARKET and they DIDN'T CHOOSE THE RIGHT PRODUCTS to sell.

Now we know you wouldn't be reading all the way to the end of this course if you weren't deadly serious about having a good, successful business web site. That is why we've saved this vitally important topic for last. This lesson is for the truly dedicated entrepreneur who is determined to earn steady profits on the Internet.

People used to think that high quality was the only factor worth thinking about in selling products and services. That was the case until a young man name Woolworth got the idea of finding a bunch of items he could sell for a nickel and putting them on a "nickel table" at the front of the store. All the items sold out the first day. Woolworth's boss was amazed. People were grabbing up anything on the table. Even junk and items they didn't need. The concept became so successful that Woolworth built a huge empire of five and dime stores all over America.

His simple combination of TARGETING and PRODUCT CHOICE revolutionized business for a century. Here is what was different about Woolworth's idea.

Before, entrepreneurs had come up with a product, then tried to find people to buy it. Woolworth FIRST found a group of people who wanted to buy something. Then he developed products to fit their needs (in this case, things they could buy for a nickel).

FIRST find a group of people who will pay money for a product or service. This group of people must WANT to buy, now! They NEED the improvement to their life that your product or service offers. They have a PAIN that must be healed. They HURT with problems that take too much of their time, cost them too much money, prevent them from making enough money, and stop them from feeling good about themselves.

Your product or service offers the cure. Notice we are defining a specific group of people who want to buy something, THEN we are finding a product to satisfy their desire. That is the modern Internet formula that you MUST follow if you want to achieve big sales and even bigger profits.

Start with marketing, then move on to looking for products. Find a way you can successfully market to a group of people, THEN find something you can sell via that method.

How a young woman working at an ad agency made a fortune. I'll never forget working with Linda Sountrak, CEO of the big Soundtrak chain of electronics stores that dotted the Midwest in the 1970s and 1980s. She was expecting her third child in about a month. Linda only stood about five feet high and at this pont in her pregnancy she seemed almost as wide as she was high. Linda decided she would be more comfortable if she got someone else to appear in her TV commercials that ran in every show on every channel.

I got the job. Appearing as Linda's pitchman on the Soundtrak TV commercials was a huge stroke of luck. Within days my mug was house-hold familiar all over town. A woman even stopped me in the supermarket to ask if I would sign her cantaloupe. An even better gift came one day while we were shooting a TV commercial and I got a chance to visit with Linda back stage. "I've heard the stories of how you came to town and started your electronics empire on $500," I told her. Linda laughed. "You know Kevin, NONE of that is true. Somebody made up that story and it has been going around ever since."

She then revealed how she was a young employee at an advertising agency. On the job, she learned how to research a market, find out exactly what the most pressing needs were, then start a business that offered a solution to those needs. Of all the businesses she researched, she found there was a BIG need for electronics stores in two Midwestern cities.

Linda had no experience in this field, but the research clearly showed that if she wanted to earn a fortune, THIS was the time, place, and product line to do it. Linda first found a pressing need for a particular group or niche. Then she identified products and services that the niche would pay big bucks for.

What kind of buyers are on the Internet? A few years ago the Net was mostly men between 20 and 35 years old, well educated, and with above average incomes. Now just about every group is represented on the Net with women increasing in incredible numbers. There are now more women than men on the Net and you can reach everyone from every age, lifestyle, income, and education level.

First find out how to best reach your target audience on the Net. This must be a method that you can afford to use over and over again. Consider e-zine ads, opt-in mailing lists, ads on AOL, maybe even banners on sites that do a good job of targeting your specific audience (see the special targeted banner packages at http://www.linkexchange.com/.)

Next, identify the products and services that will sell best on the Internet. They must be something you deliver affordably over a distance. While you certainly can have a web site that sells only to local residents, you will find most of your prospects come from all over North America with a healthy number form Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia.

You should be able to mail or ship products and use e-mail to deliver information based services.

Still have no idea what to offer on your web site? No problem. One of the most successful business models on the Net involves affiliate programs. Pioneered by goliath bookseller Amazon.com, affiliate programs pay people a small percentage of sales in exchange for sending customers their way. You put a link on your site that leads visitors to the supplier's site. When someone from your site clicks over and buys something, you get a percentage of the sale. There are thousands of affiliate programs available. Some are better than others.

Get a big list of the best along with comments and ratings at http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/.

Things you can do NOW: What products or services can you offer on-line? Maybe they are things you offer in your existing business. Think of how you can affordably promote these items to a well defined niche market. On the Internet, a small narrowly defined group is easier to sell to than a big mass market. What products and services can you deliver effectively over a distance? Are these related items that can be sensibly bundled together. Your advertising will be most effective if it focuses on a single product or service or single GROUP of products and services.

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