Note: this is Part One in a 4-part series called “How to Launch Your Own Profitable Info Product in 60 Days”
So you’ve decided that you want to get into this “make money online” thing in a big way. What’s your first step?
Whoa! Hold on, Tiger! Sometimes it’s best to learn what to do by first learning what NOT to do. Let’s take a second to cover the most common mistakes I see newbies making.
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The title of this post is a bit misleading – in this post’s video I actually show you the following:
(1) How to use the “Advanced Search” feature in Clickbank to choose a product that is likely to convert AND that you can promote without getting killed by your competition. In the video I also show you one particular Clickbank product that I think has great potential and little competition.
(2) How to do quick keyword and competition research to figure out if a Clickbank product gets enough searches (but doesn’t have too much competition)
(3) How to use a cool (free) tool set up by Howie Jacobson to calculate the profit potential of a product. (You could also use the tool to estimate the profitability of an entire niche, if you have numbers for all of tool’s inputs.)
Here’s a screenshot of Howie’s Search Volume Market Profitability Calculator, which can be found by clicking here.
Click image to enlarge
This tool is awesome for (at least) two reasons: it allows you to quickly determine if you should promote a particular product, and it isolates a handful of key factors that you MUST always have in mind when deciding to promote a product online.
Your thoughts?
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Do you want to know what’s on the mind of your market, but don’t have time to do in-depth niche research?
Shame on you! Niche research is the most important part of an online business!
Okay, okay, so I’m biased. I love doing niche research!
But I know that sometimes we just want to do some quick-and-dirty market research to get a sense of what’s on people’s minds. That’s why I’ve whipped up a 15-minute video showing you five of the question-and-answer websites that I use to get a feel for a market.
In the video I take you briefly through these websites, and show how you can very quickly glean valuable insight into the needs of a niche.
Here are the websites I cover in the video:
How can you use the information that you get from these Q&A websites?
Well, I wouldn’t say the quality of info is good enough to develop a product from. But you could certainly use the information to quickly develop a free report for your blog/website, or use the information to figure out what the categories of your new website should be.
What tools do you use to do quick niche research?
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Do you have a website that just won’t make any sales? Or are you building your first website, and are puzzled about how to structure it? Then this post is for you!
In this post I describe an approach to structuring your website to optimize conversions – whether you define a “conversion” as a sale, email opt-in, donation, or whatever action you want your visitor to take.
But first, a refresher on how to put yourself in the shoes of your market – from marketing legend Eugene Schwartz.
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Did you notice all the “here are my 2011 goals” blog posts flying around last month?
I sure did – they seemed to be everywhere. And for the past month I’ve been putting off setting my own goals for 2011. For some reason, the idea of “goals” just doesn’t sit right with me.
For the past while I’ve assumed it was just me who thought like this – until I picked up my (well-read) copy of the 4 Hour Work Week yesterday and reviewed chapter 1 on “Definition” – the chapter in which Tim Ferriss argues that the questions “What do I want?” and “What are my goals?” are far too broad to be useful.
What Tim recommends, instead of asking yourself those two incredibly vague questions, is to pose this simple question: “What excites me?” Tim includes this question in a process that he calls dreamlining.
For me, this question hits the nail on the head – because it’s far easier to define what excites us. By planning our future by focusing on what excites us, we’re also more likely to achieve happiness than focusing on “goals” – and there’s scientific proof to back up my claim. Allow me to explain.
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Have you ever had a serious medical condition or been in deep financial trouble? If so, you probably spent a lot of time actively looking for a solution – whether that was talking to friends, consulting with trained professionals, or searching online for answers.
One of my sons has asthma, which flares up whenever he gets a cold. During the Canadian winter, kids tend to get a LOT of colds. So when my son was a toddler, we spent a lot of time in hospital, nervously waiting to see a doctor while our son coughed, wheezed, and gasped for life-sustaining breath.
In the eight years since our son was born, my wife and I have also spent much time trying to find a cure for his asthma. We’ve tried allopathic, naturopathic, and Ayurvedic medicines – and we’ve put a lot of energy into preventing him from getting colds, so his asthma wouldn’t be triggered.
Do you think we’d pay a lot of money if someone offered us a proven cure for asthma?
You bet we would!
When it comes to our son’s asthma, we fall into the “desperate buyer” category – a type of buyer that every Internet marketer needs to be on the look-out for – because desperate buyers can be the easiest to convert into sales (IF you have a proven solution to their problem).
In this post I’m going to describe 3 techniques that I use to find desperate buyers in health markets, which are the markets I operate in.
Let’s jump in!
3 Proven Techniques for Finding Desperate Buyers
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Did you know that there are over 1 million Clickbank affiliates, and 15,000 of them make a full-time income promoting Clickbank products? Quick math: that means 1.5% of Clickbank affiliates make a full-time income from it.
Now, there are two ways of looking at that number: glass half-empty, and glass half-full.
The glass half-empty folks say “What?! Only 1.5% of affiliates are making it?”
The glass half-full folks, on the other hand, say “Wow, 15,000 people is a lot! I’m going to be one of them.”
And when you combine all of the internet marketers who are successfully promoting products from other affiliate networks, or their own products, Adsense, eBay, Amazon, CPA offers, and a million other things, there are probably hundreds of thousands of people who have “made it” online.
And yet all of those people went through a range of emotions on their way to achieving their goals. I regularly hear from my blog subscribers about the emotions they are grappling with, the most limiting of which is self-doubt:
- Doubt in their abilities
- Doubt in their chances of succeeding
- Doubt that this whole “make money online” thing is even real
I get so many emails from people trying to overcome self-doubt in making money online that I got an idea one day: to ask as many successful bloggers as I could how they overcame doubt.
So here’s what I did. I emailed 100 bloggers and asked them a simple question:
“What is the #1 thing you did to overcome self-doubt in your early days online?”
Out of the 100 emails I sent, 31 bloggers responded (so far). Included in the respondents were some heavy-hitters, including John Chow, Yaro Starak, Shawn Collins, Chris Guthrie, Zac Johnson, and Daniel Scocco. Many “up-and-comers” also responded.
The text that follows is the responses from all 31 bloggers. In their responses, I think you’ll see a few themes emerge:
- Find a mentor, or someone successful to model
- Treat “failures” as learning experiences
- Take a long-term view (don’t expect quick success)
- Focus on one thing at a time
- Persist!
You might say that this post is a kind of mirror to my previous post on the 8 challenges facing IM newbies. And yet, if you look at the responses from bloggers who have “made it”, you still see similar issues cropping up.
So, in no particular order, here are the responses from bloggers:
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So you’ve selected an audience to serve, and brainstormed some problems faced by that audience. How do you zero in on the problems that have the greatest chance of making you a profit?
In this post I’m going to cover the key questions that I ask when researching a market. While answering these questions won’t guarantee that a niche will be a money-maker for you, filtering your ideas through them will GREATLY increase your chances of success.
So let’s jump in!
Is the Niche Large (Enough) and Stable?
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If you read my post on the challenges facing internet marketing newbies, you know that I’ve been digging through the results of the KeywordsBlogger survey lately.
The survey results have generated a great discussion about what’s really holding people back from making money online.
One of the things that has really struck me about this conversation is how common FEAR is in the minds if budding Internet marketers:
- Fear of making mistakes
- Fear of losing money
- Fear of looking foolish in the eyes of their family
- Fear of FAILURE
Here are some comments that people made on the post:
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If there’s one thing the Great Recession has done, it’s forced a lot of people to reassess their careers and how they make money (if they’re fortunate enough to still have a career, and still be making money).
The result? Well, one of the results has been a shift in people looking to start their own business – including an online business.
Check out this graph from Google Trends showing the gradual (but noticeable) increase in searches for the term “make money online”.
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Here's just a small sample of what you'll learn in this free report:
