In this chapter we’re going to talk about all the work that goes into creating a best-selling offer. Your product launch is only going to be as good as your product, after all.
Finding & Knowing Your Niche
Before you start creating your product or offer, what you need to do is conduct thorough research. Researching your niche and analyzing the current trends in the market will help you create a must-have product which is in demand.
Your niche, and the findings from your research, will determine almost every aspect of not just your product but also your launch campaign.
As a general rule of thumb, the online marketing arena is primarily dominated by these three umbrella niches –
- The Health and Fitness niche
- The Online Business and Internet Marketing niche
- The Personal Development niche
These three niches are wide and generic, with more specific sub-niches within them and when it comes to defining your niche, you need to be as specific as possible. Having a focused target will make your product easier to market, compared to coming up with a product which is too general. A product that isn’t focused can end up being a mix of too many things.
For example, let’s say you have a product for the Internet Marketing niche. The Internet Marketing niche has so many different aspects to it. You could talk about Affiliate Marketing, which has its own following or you could be talking about How To Perform SEO for Your Website. Each of these titles would have their own following and the clearer you can establish your product, the easier it will be for interested prospects to find your product later on.
You can search for established sub-niches by simply pulling up a search on Google. Type in your keyword or umbrella niche and see what comes up in the search results. Also, look closely at the “Searches related to” section at the bottom of your Google Search results page. It’s a goldmine of sub-niches which you can tap into. And remember – the more specific, the better.
Monitoring Activity
Once you’ve discerned your chosen niche or sub-niche, you need to check if it’s got an active following. You can ascertain how active a niche is by monitoring their online activity. You want to see how many people are talking about the niche and you also want to find out if they are also active buyers. This is especially important, because you don’t want to go into a niche that has a huge following but won’t pay for products.
When it comes to finding out how active a niche is and what their spending habits are like, doing a quick and easy Facebook search is one of the easiest methods.
What you need to do is look for groups on Facebook which are related to your chosen niche. You only need to use the Facebook search bar on the top of the page. For example, try typing in ‘affiliates’ or ‘affiliate networks’. Then, check through the results and if you can find many groups that have hundreds of members, that’s good. If most of the groups have got thousands of members, then that’s an even better sign.
Try to find open groups that you can join. Look at their newsfeed. When was the last post? How many new posts do they get on average? And most importantly, do they share and sell products? Are people talking about the latest products and items that cater to the niche? Do they talk about their purchases? If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of this then congratulations – you’ve found yourself a niche market that is definitely worth looking into.
Conducting Product Research
Once you’ve nailed down your niche (which you now know for a fact has a big following), it’s time for you to look into how you can effectively sell to that market. The best way to do this is by monitoring the products sold within that niche.
Do a scroll through on the Facebook pages again and look for the most talked about products. Try going one step further and read up on the common questions, dilemmas and problems that these active users go through. This will help you create a hot-selling product because the best products are the ones which offer timely solutions to common problems. It’s a supply and demand scenario – you need to know what your target market is looking for, so that you can create a product which caters to those wants and needs.
On top of this, you can also go ahead and find products that are related to your niche by doing a search on Warrior+ Plus, ClickBank, or JVZoo. These online marketplaces have an eclectic collection of products that you can search through. If there’s a niche for it, you’ll definitely be able to find related products on these three websites.
As you’re starting your product research, you want to focus on the products which are top sellers. You can usually find them in the main pages of all the marketplaces. Look for items that are of a high rank, especially if they’ve been voted as Pick of The Day or similar.
And the research doesn’t just stop there. Why limit yourself to just the product listings on these marketplaces when you can dive in even deeper?
First of all, you can go ahead and look at the sales pages of these best-selling products. This will help you understand a little more about the tone, look and feel which is considered attractive in your chosen niche and you can craft your product to match that.
To learn more about the type of content that appeals to your audience, get your hands on free content related to your niche. You can even consider going the extra mile by purchasing a product, so that you can conduct thorough research. Do this with as many products as you can for your niche so that you’ll learn what sort of information sells well in your chosen niche. This research will help you in so many ways – not just when it comes to creating your product. All this will come in handy when it is time to design your sales letter and create eye-catching sales copy.
If you look closely, you will be able to discern a pattern – some titles sell and some don’t. What you want to do is find inspiration for your product, so that your finished product profitable and worth the time and effort that you put into it.
Digital Products
Once you’ve done your research, you can move on to creating your digital product. But before you start creating content, you should consider the type of digital product that you want to create. Let’s take a look at the four most popular choices in the market today:
E-books are by far and large the most popular digital products sold online. All you really need to create an e-book is a great idea and Microsoft Word or any word processing program. E-books are easy enough to create and don’t necessarily take too much time to finish if you’re familiar with the topic you’re covering. It’s also recommended that you deliver the finished product in PDF format, so that it’s accessible across more platforms.
Video Tutorials can be done as live recordings or onscreen guides. Video tutorials about yoga, meditation, finance, entrepreneurship and online tools like WordPress and Google AdWords are especially popular. If you’re filming a live action video tutorial, you want to ensure that you have adequate lighting and a good microphone – sound quality is something that should never be overlooked, even if you’re doing an onscreen guide. Try to take your time when recording the video – you don’t want to rush through something, leaving your viewer unable to catch up or hear what you are saying.
PowerPoint or Keynote slides are also a hit online – they’re great for making information easy to digest. You don’t need fancy animations – in the best of cases, presentation slides are not cluttered with too much text and aren’t graphic-heavy. This is so that the slides are easy to read and don’t take too long to load. You could even turn your slides into a video presentation. Just create your slides, write your transcript and get a voice over artist to record your transcript for each slide. You can then market your product as a bundle – this will increase the perceived value of your product.
Software might not be as easy to produce as e-books, slides and videos, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth the effort. There’s a huge amount of cash to be made through well-made software. If you have an idea for software but don’t have the technical know-how to create it, you can always outsource the job to a developer. It might take longer to create, but it’s also something which you can sell at a higher price.
Of course, there are other types of digital products which you can choose to create – sets of graphics, photo collections, audiobooks, MP3 files and more. The sky’s the limit.
But before you get started, do ask yourself which of these types of digital products would appeal more to your prospects. While you might be thinking of creating an e-book, maybe your target market would benefit more from a step-by-step video tutorial? Maybe you’re dealing in the Personal Development niche, where a guided meditation video would do the job more effectively than, say, a PowerPoint or Keynote slide presentation.
Crafting High-Selling Content
Now, it’s time to craft the content that you are selling. As mentioned previously, specificity and focus can really make or break your launch.
To honor this, you need to pick topic and title that is focused. Vague titles don’t sell well because they don’t tell your prospects what they’re in for. For example, would you rather buy a book titled “Money Online” or a book that proclaims “Make $10,000 A Month With Internet Marketing”?
The second title is likely to sell better for a number of reasons – it very clearly tells people what they can accomplish, how long it takes and how they’ll do it. “Money Online” is too generic to really pull people in because it doesn’t give people a reason to purchase your product. In comparison, making 10,000 dollars a month is a pretty compelling reason for someone to buy your product.
On top of this, most products that sell really well are timely or immediately relevant and practical. This is content which speaks to people’s wants and needs NOW rather than later.
For example, if there is a huge convention or expo concerning your niche coming up soon, people will want to brush up on their booth managing and networking skills before the event. If you were to launch an e-book a month before the event about “Getting Your Booth Noticed at So & So Expo”, chances are that many people would find value in your content and be compelled to make a purchase. This is because they can see exactly how this book can help them and they put what they learn to good use immediately.
This is why planning your launch schedule and doing significant market research is very important. You can close thousands of sales with this type of content – granted that you cater to your target market’s urgent demands.
There are some categories of content which have proven to be highly profitable but it really depends on who you are targeting. “How To” guides and beginner’s guides have proven to be a hot sell, regardless of niche or industry. Content that highlights the dos and don’ts of a niche are popular for beginners and intermediates as well.
You could also create content that is very heavily technical or requires advanced knowledge on the subject matter. This type of content usually zooms in on a very specific topic– for example, “How To Manually Install and Set Up WordPress”. Though it may seem more advanced, this type of material has a good market standing – especially in the IM and Tech niches, where veterans are always seeking to improve.
PLR Content
Sometimes, it can take a lot of time to get a product ready for launch – from technical glitches to writer’s block, there a bunch of external causes that can delay your product creation efforts. Luckily, you don’t have to create your own product if you don’t want to.
PLR stands for Private Label Rights. PLR products or content are products which, once purchased, you are legally allowed to manipulate, publish and re-sell as your own. That is to say, that when you purchase PLR content, you then own all or most of the intellectual property rights to the said work.
Usually, you can claim full authorship to a PLR product and you can make as many edits, changes and additions to these products as you see fit. The rights which you gain from PLR products varies from product to product so be sure to check the included rights before you make a purchase. Most websites that sell PLR content will provide a list of rights which come along with the purchase of each individual PLR product.
PLR products are great starting points if you don’t want to create a product from scratch for your launch. They don’t even cost very much to purchase – you can find e-books for under 5 US Dollars.
However, you should always double check the quality of the PLR product you are purchasing to make sure you’re purchasing content which is marketable without you having to make too many edits in terms of fact-checking and grammar.
While you can just resell PLR products as is, it’s highly recommended that you customize the product a little before reselling – think of it as rebranding. This will help to add value to your product so that your prospects will be more inclined to purchase it.
You’ll find that most PLR products are relatively bare – e-books and slides tend to have little to no formatting or design. It’s kept very black and white. You can consider adding a few headlines or maybe inserting one or two visuals, even adding a whole new chapter if you want to.
You might also want to curate content from more than just one PLR source –purchase 2 or 3 PLR e-books on your chosen topic instead of one. This way, you’ll have more content and your end product will be more comprehensive.
You should also consider creating a new custom cover for your product – a bunch of other people might have bought the same PLR product and are reselling it as is, so you want yours to stand out and be perceived as different. Change the cover, change the headline and heavily edit. The point is to improve on quality.
While PLR products are purchased for really cheap, that doesn’t mean that you have to sell your product for under 5 dollars as well – as you edit and breathe new life into the purchased PLR content, the value of the product increases. During your launch, if you’ve put together a good offer, you can charge a lot more – think double or triple.
Bottom line is, whether you started with a PLR product or if you did all the content creation yourself, you have to make the end product in your launch look like a custom, one of a kind product. It has to be a product which is tailored to a specific target market, stands out from the rest and has a high perceived value.
