How To Choose a Product to Promote - Day 1

How to Choose Your Target Market & Market Niche

Now - let's get started with the case study and get to actually do some work.

I would like this to be very interactive.

Marketing is about making it your own. There's a lot about following proven formulas, and testing to find out what works, but the major part of things is to get comfortable with how you do things. And then do them better :o)

So here's my disclaimer to cover off all of the info I am about to share with you :o)

Disclaimer: All the information I share with you is based on my studies of popular materials and my experience in the internet marketing field. They are not a promise for income generation, and I can not guarantee success if you employ them.

So this Case Study will be about how to choose your market and also how to chose your first product to sell. I'm combining the two as they are inseparable.

This method of making money online is about choosing what you want to sell, making it sell profitably and then moving on to the next product and doing the same until you have a portfolio of profitably selling products that bring you a steady passive income month after month.

Not all of the products you choose to test will be winners, but the method I'm going through here is quick enough to allow for volume coverage - i.e. you can setup a campaigns for a product, test it and decide within days if it is worth spending more time on or not.

You could eventually get to develop your own product and build an empire around that, but - I'll leave that up to you to decide :o)

So go to ClickBank (CB) - www.clickbank.com and sign up for a merchant account (if you haven't done so already). It costs nothing, and should take you a little bit of time.

Go on go get that done in another browser window and then come back here to continue reading…

A good starting point when thinking of what product or market to choose is to think of a few answers to the following:

What do you already know a lot about?

What do you feel passionate about?

What interests you?

What are you good at?

What experience do you have?

How big is the learning curve? In terms of - how long will you need to get to know the market?

OK, so thinking of those things you need to come up with a list of topics you're interested in. Make a list and prioritise them. So if you come up with 2 or 3 different things that you could do, then think of which ones you would like doing more than the others.

Here's my list (I've chosen the stuff I know about and I love):

Marketing
Psychology - self improvement
Design & usability
Sports & fitness
Business Development

And the one I want to go with at first is the Sports & Fitness.

I am a qualified fitness instructor (so I have the knowledge), I moderated for a weight loss forum and it is a personal hobby of mine to keep abreast of the latest in nutrition, and exercises. So you can see why I am pretty confident that I can get into the mind set I need to be in - i.e. the learning curve will not be very steep.

Well, by now you probably know that that is one of the most competitive industry on the internet…

Side Note: So if you're a beginner in online marketing (or PPC in this specific case) you should try and stick to a very niched area of fitness & health or just pick another industry to start with and come back to this when you have some experience below your belt.

I've chosen it for the fact that I am very familiar with the subject, and because it will be an example of an industry you'd be familiar with - so it's easier to explain.

Whatever your choice of market is though, once you've chosen it, you should go around the web and familiarise yourself with the market as a whole.

The reasons for doing that:

You will get an idea of what the market size is, and from that you can estimate how much competition you can expect.

You will get the feel for who and what is being sold in the market, and hence what is hot or not.

You will see if there's money to be made in this market - if there are many products being sold or sites selling products within that industry, you know there's money to be made.

You can get a feeling for what niches the market is already splitting into - that will help you if you had to make a decision on what to specialise in.

While you're looking around note everything you notice around the above points - build a picture of the market space you're about to enter :o). I usually create a spreadsheet in Excel and I store all my different types of information in different tabs. That way things are all in one place, easier to find therefore easier to use.

Here are also some of the places where you can start to look through:

Wordtracker - type in some generic phrases on the subject you've chosen. See the results that come back and note the most highly searched phrases - these are the ones that are generating the most interest currently.

Google AdWords - type in some of the terms you found into Google's search box and see how many Sponsored Search results you get on the right hand side. If there are many - you know you have a lot of competition, but that also there's money to be made. Ideally you want a medium on both, but it's not always the case.

Online Presence - what in general is out there on the topic you've chosen. Have a look for:
- Forums
- Blogs
- Membership sites
- Authority sites
- And normal sites
Offline Presence - this is not entirely necessary, but if you want the extra bit of work, you could go out to your news agent and see if there are mags on the topic you've chosen. It's a "nice-to-know" not a "have-to-know".

So I guess this is the time when I will finish off, to give you a chance to go and find out what your chosen market will be.

Make a list of possible markets like I did, so that when we get to choose the actual product in tomorrow's session, you can have a back up, in case there are no products that are suitable in CB for your first choice.

Tomorrow - we get on to the more interesting stuff - hands on stuff :o)

See you back tomorrow. Now go do your research!

Anita

Next Step: >> [Case Study 1 - Day 2->How To Choose a Product to Promote - Day 2]

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