Product Ideas

Jan

2010

The 2010 Challenge

This coming year I’m going to help you in three ways. At least.

In response to a survey I did in the middle of last year, it seems there are three things that concern most people, so I’ve set myself a challenge to provide all three, and get you into “the game”.

This is what I’ve been told by people over and over again.

#1 – You WANT your own product to sell, and preferably not another ebook found in some enormous PLR library that’s already being touted by thousands of people.

#2 – You WANT to be given a plan for online success, and you want it to be step by step and clearly achievable.

#3 – You WANT to know how to generate traffic as you realise it’s the life blood of any web site.

Based on those three desires that YOU’VE told me, that’s what I’m going to give you. Taking my own advice about 30 day projects, I’ve broken the plan down into achievable chunks, and the first part is coming sooner than you think.

If all goes well in the next couple of days, then 100 (and ONLY 100) fast movers will get access to the first part of my plan in a deal that I think will blow your socks off. If I’d had exactly this a few years ago, then things would have moved a lot faster for me, so pay close attention.

This is a reward for you for being a subscriber, no-one else will get this, and like I said this deal will only be for the first 100 people to claim it, so make sure to keep an eye on your email over the next few days.

As I said above, the money is (without a doubt in my mind) driven by having your own products you can sell. At some point in the path that got me to where I am today, I realised that software has a much higher perceived value then ebooks.

Think about it.

Software is much sexier because it generally saves you time and lets you automate and do cool things that would normally have to be done manually or not at all. Usually not at all.

I’ve found that people are more likely to part with money for software than they are for ebooks or videos – with very few exceptions.

So what I’ve done for you is I’ve arranged for a group of developers to provide you with a high quality software package each and every month.

Each month you will have at least one new really cool product that with a little tweaking you can call your own. By tweaking, I mean renaming. And I’ve made sure it’s easy to do too. The software will usually be a PHP script or a WordPress plugin, but not always.

Let me explain what you can do with a product like this. I’ll give you an idea.

When I release a new product, I usually run a cut price nickel sale to engender some interest, get the market seeded with the product, and attract affiliates. Word gets around and I typically make $2,000 – $3,000 in a couple of days and then see a steady trickle of sales after that once the official site goes live and affiliates start promoting.

It’s really cool, and there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do this too. I’m not a developer, I pay other people to do the coding for me, and that’s exactly what I’m offering you too.

I come up with the ideas, I pay developers to come up with the product, and you get to do almost anything you like with it.

All for a fraction of the price it would have cost you if you’d done it on your own.

More importantly you haven’t had all the heartache and pain that comes with dealing with developers. Please believe me when I say that it can be a nightmare to find someone who will do what they say when they say they will, and the fact is most developers just don’t get sales and marketing and will tell you so.

That can make it very hard to get a finished product that meets the bill, and I’ve certainly had more than my share of frustrations over the last few years.

You can easily avoid all that heartache simply by allowing me to take all the hassle out of it and letting you take all the profits.

The deal I’m setting up for you is to offer you membership to a new site that will give you at least one brand new software product each and every month with almost completely unrestricted Private Label Rights.

In fact there’s only TWO very reasonable restrictions for the products you’ll get from me.

#1 – You can’t sell or offer PLR to any of them.
#2 – You can’t offer them as part of a mass product membership, paid or otherwise.

The reason is simple – that’s what I do.

In most cases, one sale a month of just ONE product will pay for your entire membership – you’ll be getting a new one EVERY month.

Even if you decide to give the product away in return for a name and email address, or as a loyalty bonus to your existing subscribers, you’ll still make money on the deal when you promote other products.

And because I’ve made sure it’s EASY to rename the product, you can call it anything your imagination can come up with to differentiate your version.

To me this is a no-brainer, especially at the special deal price I’m offering to just 100 people. I just wish I’d had something like this when I got started a few years ago, it would have made life a lot simpler.

There’s one other point I want to make before closing.

Some people say that having the same product as 100 other people is no good because you’ll all be competing with each other. I used to think the same thing – let me put you straight on that.

First of all, I’m supplying all the products without a name. The product name is the BIGGEST differentiator to any product, so by not supplying you with any idea of a name, you’ll have to use your imagination to come up with something that works for you.

Secondly, the marketplace for software is HUGE! The chances of anyone spotting that you’re selling the same product is unlikely. The closest you’ll get is someone might notice and compare features, but a bit of creative thinking will give you the edge.

Finally, and this is an eye-opener if you’ve never seen anyone say this before. The product isn’t as important as the marketing. You may be sceptical about that, but I know 100% for a fact that it’s true, and that most marketers won’t tell you that.

You pitch the product right, you generate traffic to your site, and you’ll make sales.

And as I said, just ONE sale of ONE of the products per month will pay for your membership. And each month you’ll have another product you can market which will give you nice steady growth.

Okay, that covers all I want to say for now for part 1 of my 2010 Challenge to get you into “the game” – all based on what you’ve told me you want and what I know you need.

Parts 2 and 3 – training and traffic – will come over the next few weeks. I hope you understand that I had to get part 1 running first to generate the initial income needed to fund the other parts. (Frank Haywood Projects Rule #1 – All projects must fund themselves ASAP.)

There’s no doubt in my mind that the total three part package will put money in your pocket.

Okay?

Watch for another blog post and another email tomorrow. The product membership will be open in the next couple of days – in fact as soon as I can get the last few wrinkles sorted out.

And of course as well as the very low price, there’s also a bonus for the 100 people who take up this special membership offer.

Offline Gold And WordPress Affiliate Pages

Just recently I’ve found myself going a little crazy. I’m trying to settle down to do TWO particular tasks.

#1 – Create another highly targetted automated list builder.
#2 – Sort out the free learning site.

In both cases, I know exactly what it is I need to do, and while #1 should only take me about 4 hours or less, and #2 several days to get up and running, I find myself unable to do either one.

And it’s driving me mad.

The last 3 days I’ve sat down in the morning fully intending to to do #1. But each day I’ve just had a “play” with another little project that’s taken my fancy. And each day it’s ended up turning into an all day session.

What is it that’s got me so distracted?

Simple. “Offline Gold.”

In case you don’t know what that is, it’s turning your marketing skills (you have some right?) away from the internet and instead targetting local niche businesses such as dentists and plumbers etc.

The more I’ve looked at this, the more I’ve realised there’s very little competition, far less than there is online. And the number of small businesses that don’t even have a website is ridiculous. It’s like they’re living in a time warp – at least that’s what I thought initially.

I’m now beginning to realise that most of them would probably like to be online, but don’t have a good reason to invest possibly thousands doing so.

From what I can tell, that seems to be the perception of the costs involved. Thousands.

Now I know that’s amazing to you and me, as it’s dead easy to create a WordPress blog and then choose one of the many free themes that are knocking about. Add some text and a few photos and you’re done. Hey presto! A niche website.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

There are any number of sites that are selling “web designs” to small businesses, but sod all that are selling marketing to them.

The fact is, pretty designs don’t make a sale, it’s the words that do it. It’s the words that pull in search traffic and it’s the words that turn a prospect into a customer. Yes a nice looking site certainly helps, but I’d guess less than 5% from my experience online.

What does that mean to you?

Well. If you can take the time out to educate businesses local to you about the power of a website to convert visitors to prospects to customers, they’ll look up to you and you’ll become the local marketing authority.

Ray LaFoy said to me a couple of years ago “our internet marketing skills would make us gods offline” I took that comment for granted at the time, but looking at the HUGE potential around us, and the fact that it’s crunch time for many businesses given the economic climate, isn’t this the perfect time to be investigating selling a few simple services to businesses local to you?

For instance, it should be relatively easy to ask small local businesses such as dental practices for $50 month in return for registering a domain and building a web site with a sign up box, all centred around WordPress. The $50 would be for “maintenance and backups” and is zilch in terms of costs to a dental practice charging $500 for 30 minutes work.

But it’s funny how thoughts can differ on subjects like this.

Discussing this with Paul (the developer of SmartDD), he said “isn’t that a bit much?”

Discussing it with my wife, she said “that’s nowhere near enough!”

Paul takes his enviable technical skills for granted and so doesn’t see any great value in his abilities. We ALL do that. We ALL underestimate how valuable our particular skill is to other people that wouldn’t have a clue how to get started. You have to put yourself in the right mind set and imagine yourself as not knowing anything about the subject in question.

My wife thought that $50 wasn’t enough for acting as a marketing consultant to small business, but that wasn’t my intention at this price point, and a quick and heated discussion sorted that out.

I think $50 per month is just right for a “foot in the door” product.

For $50 recurring each month you could afford to put aside 8 hours to put together a WordPress blog fully loaded with the plugins required and the content supplied by your client.

I won’t break down my thoughts behind those costs in this post, but 8 hours or less seems to me to be a reasonable amount of time to do the necessary work once the client has supplied all the content.

If you rate your time at a paltry $20 hour, then you’re losing money on the deal for the first 3 months. From month 4 and beyond you’re in the black.

But the REAL benefit is that you have a client who trusts you and sees you provide excellent value for money. From their perspective they’re paying you a pittance in return for a good looking website that they can go and add content to themselves.

If they want YOU to add the content, then as part of the deal you’ve already told them up front that you normally bill at $50 hour, including phone calls and other hand-holding tasks. My guess is that at least half of them will do it that way, but I could be grossly underestimating that and it might well be all of them.

That then becomes easy money for the skills involved.

Anything is easy if you know how to do it. For instance, if you’re a dentist and you know how to fill teeth or fit crowns, it’s not hard to do, but it IS worth a lot of money.

What I’m saying is, don’t underestimate your individual skills worth to other people.

Once you get past that additional money earner, then the next bit is to educate your clients about marketing and SEO. THIS is where the real money comes in.

When you have their interest you can start to give them quotes for additional “on page” optimising of their web sites. Then you can offer them backlink packages, for example you could offer an “ongoing SEO campaign” and add 10 incoming links per month (easy), and just add it to their existing payments.

Most small businesses will start to see results almost straight away from even the smallest link campaign as it’s very targetted – think “[your town] dentists” and you won’t go far wrong.

And as you educate them more and more about marketing, you can offer more and more such as setting up an autoresponder sequence. Once you’ve emphasised the money angle to them and the fact that a good sequence builds trust, it’s as good as sold.

And I have a few ideas about how you can do that to prove what you’re telling them is true.

Next, sell them on the concept of a sales page on their blog (completely unheard of by small businesses and will blow their minds) and add in my WordPress Affiliate Pages method and you have a winner on your hands.

The upshot of all this is I’ve clearly had my inquisitiveness “gland” tickled and I’ve been doing homework on the whole offline gold thing.

So what do think? Is this something you’d like to see me pursue and put together a product for?

It’s certainly something I’m up for, and I’m trying this out locally whether you say yay or nay. The difference is, should I put a bundle together for you to try out for yourself?

I’m very confident I know exactly where to go with this, and what kind of bundle would be useful to you as I’m running into my own issues already.

Yes. I’ve started building a site to launch this new venture from.

I couldn’t help it. I can spot a good money spinner a mile away, and I know this is one of them.

Multiple Income Streams.

That’s VERY important, just remember that phrase.

Comments please.

-Frank Haywood

Jul

2008

More More MORE Product Ideas…

A couple of weeks ago I ran a promotion for something of which a handful of people thought was a bad deal. I think it was more of a case of it insulting their sensibilities than a bad deal.

I had a small amount of criticism.

A lot of people bought it.

I’ve been downloading more of the material today (I’m up to 2.8GB at the moment) from the 365 PLR (Private Label Rights) items, and I’ve been spending a little time browsing through it.

I have so many product ideas now, I don’t think I’ll ever have to engage my brain again on that front.

This is a GOLDMINE. And I know even as I write that, some will say “no it isn’t, it’s trash”.

I completely disagree.

Purely from an ideas point of view, it’s worth the piffling $27 I paid for it.

And the bulk of this material is Private Label Rights. That means that within reason, I can do what I want with it. So I can take the autoresponder package that’s in there, rework it and sell it as my own.

Or I can take one of the many marketing ebooks, use it as a base point, and write my own. Many successful marketers have done just that.

Here’s an idea for you.

Search through the material until you find something you know about and it’s a subject matter that you know your target market will be interested in. Read what’s been written, validate the material to check to see if it’s relevant and write your own version, correcting any inaccuracies and bringing it up to date.

While you’re doing that get an ebook cover made, or do it yourself if you know how.

Next, set up a squeeze page – that’s a page that requires a name and email address. The deal is, if people enter their name and email address and agree to receive emails from you, you’ll give them a copy of your new ebook.

Finally, start moving traffic to that page and watch your list grow. If you don’t know how to get traffic, here’s a few realistic ideas.

o Join a free traffic exchange.
o Create a blog with no adverts on it other than your free ebook, and then start making relevant comments on similar blogs. Make a post on your blog on your target topic every day for 30 days, then 3 times a week thereafter.
o Buy a solo ad in a relevant ezine. Around $60 should buy you a mailing out with your offer to about 20,000 opted-in email addresses.
o Sign up to a giveaway and give your ebook away in return for a sign up.

Okay there are lots more ways to get traffic, and I’ll cover them in another post if you want me to.

Here’s the cruncher.

You have next to NO competition.

Only 1 person in 100 will do anything about this. Of those, only 1 in 100 will get as far as re-writing an ebook. Of those, only 1 in 100 will use a traffic method to start building their list.

That’s ONE person in a MILLION will actually start building their list.

Somewhere along the way, the rest will drop by the wayside.

Don’t overestimate your competition. Don’t think they’re better than you.

The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for you to succeed where they will fail. And the bigger your goal, the fewer people will pursue it, making it even easier for you to achieve. There’s less competition for the bigger goals.

If you’re an eternal Newbie, now’s a good time to shake off that N-word and become a player. Not tomorrow, today. Now.

If you haven’t already bought this bundle, then go and get it now, and do as I’ve suggested. Don’t let anything distract you. Break the task down into smaller goals if you need to, and reward yourself for each achievement.

In a week or less, you could be building a mailing list just by taking a little bit of action each day for the next few days.

Don’t wait until the time is right, because it never will be.

Just start now, and pick up the pieces as you go. That’s one of the defining characteristics of successful people.

Ignore the people who try to tell you there’s only one right way to do things because there aren’t, there’s as many as you can imagine. But NOTHING happens until you take action.

-Frank Haywood