John Reese wrote a very concise blog post about how to confirm a market you want to enter is viable, take a look, it’s very good advise. I like to take it even a step farther when I can, and here’s how:
In old-school marketing lingo it’s called a “dry run”, essentially you write an actual ad for your future product and try to generate sales for it. (This is AFTER you’ve taken the steps John outlined.)
From there, you either actually take orders and fulfill them with the alternate product(s) you’ve put together. (Tip: The last time I did this, I ordered 3 books from Amazon.com that fulfilled on all the promises in the sales letter. It cost me more to buy the books than I was charging for the initial sale, but that’s not a concern when you’re testing…)
If it’s not feasible to fulfill on the sales letter with another product, then capture the beginning of an order form signup and then announce that the product’s not ready yet and that they’ll be notified when it is, thanking them for their interest.
(One caveat: I’m not a lawyer, and there are certain legalities to “dry runs”, like you can’t take someone’s $$ before you’ve created a product if it takes more than xx days to deliver the product… That’s not what I’m talking about.)
Why do I do this? Because creating an information product is time-consuming. I once spent a solid month writing a book/manual that I never tested first, and it was a huge failure. Since then, I write my sales letters first. No sales letter – no product.
Happy hunting! -Tim
PS -Writing your sales letter before creating your product also helps you tailor your product to fit in advance. When you think if a killer bullet-point for your sales letter, you add that point to your product. If you create the product first, you’re stuck with whatever you can squeeze out of it to create the sales letter.
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About Tim Gross Tim Gross is an online marketing consultant, direct response copywriter, author, and video training developer. For the latest free training videos, free advice, and additional resources, subscribe now at http://InternetMarketingCourse.com or at his blog http://TimGross.com |
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