Finding Product Ideas Almost Guaranteed to SELL

One way to make money online is to find a need, create a product that fills that need and then sell it to the people that need it. It’s relatively easy to come up with product ideas, but you cannot always be sure that there is a market of people willing to BUY it. What if there was a way of brainstorming product ideas that practically guaranteed that your product would sell?

I’ll show you how to do just that in this post.

Bringing Specialised Skills to the Individual

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This idea is actually very simple - there are thousands or even millions of skills that people possess and they sell their skills as services to other people. If you can create a product that teaches the individual the skill, they will be eager to buy your product because it will save them from having to pay somebody else for the service.

Let me give you a few examples from the Internet (these are BAD examples, keep reading!)

• Web Design
• SEO Consultation
• Graphic Design
• WordPress Setup

Look at the last one - WordPress setup. I am a fairly technical person and I can setup a WordPress site / blog very easily and I have built several for myself and for my friends. I even wrote a book on the subject and since then I have had quite a few people email me to ask if I provide this as a service.

What does this tell me? There will always be people who want to pay somebody else to do the work for them - these people are not your potential customers. But on the flipside there will always be people who begrudge having to pay somebody else a premium for having to do something and they would much rather be able to do it themselves - these are your potential customers!

Taking it Offline

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One of the problems with all the topics that I mention above is that those areas are saturated in just about every way possible. Not only are there a ton of people offering the service, but there are loads of “teach-yourself to <blank>” resources already so the markets are fairly saturated. That’s not to say that you can’t compete but what if there was a way of finding such products that weren’t anywhere near as saturated?

Ask yourself, what do you currently pay other people to do in the offline world? Here’s a list of services that I personally pay for:

• Car washing
• Window cleaning
• Tree / shrub pruning
• Cat grooming
• Car maintenance

A few notes on this list. I would never want to do my own car maintenance - that’s what men are for! I don’t care how good a car maintenance product was or how cheap it was, I would never be interested but I know other people who really hate not knowing how to do their own basic car maintenance and would love to be able to take the mechanic out of the equation and do some of it themselves.

Cat grooming is a different thing altogether though. I have a Persian cat who needs a lot of brushing. I can do the basic brushing but really she needs her fur trimmed and I can’t do that. It’s very expensive to take her to the groomers to have it done so that is something I would like to learn to do myself.

It’s All About Outsourcing

Life is complicated and there are millions of ways in which people interact with other people to live their lives. No one person can do everything, we all need other people to survive. This is how the world goes around. We all outsource a certain portion of our lives to other people who can do that job better than us.

The trick here is to identify those tasks which are outsourced through necessity and not out of will. Let me explain… The top two items on my list above, car washing and window cleaning are very simple tasks that I am quite capable of doing myself. However I don’t like standing outside in the cold getting wet - I’d much rather sit indoors and write a blog post! So I choose to outsource these jobs. These kinds of tasks are not suitable for building a product around.

What we are looking for is those services that require special skills that only certain people possess and that other people are forced to pay a premium for. If we can find those and wrap up the knowledge in a home study product that can be applied by the individual, then we are just about guaranteed to have a product that will sell!

Look in the Yellow Pages

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You’ve heard of the Yellow Pages right? In the UK its a big physical book that gets delivered to every household that lists local businesses and services. I assume it works the same way in the US and other countries.

So here’s the method - you get your copy of the Yellow pages (or other similar business directory) and you look through it searching for services. It’s that simple! There are a few points worth looking out for:

• Can the service be carried out by one person? Customers are individuals so if they can’t do the job on their own they are not as likely to buy.
• Does the service require qualifications? You have to eliminate these ones unless you have a way of providing proper qualifications. For example, in the UK a plumber who works on boilers needs to be ‘Corgi registered’.
• Is equipment accessible? If the service requires an investment of hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of equipment your customer will be unlikely to be able to provide the service and will thus feel cheated. On the other hand if the only required equipment is relatively cheap you may be able to generate some additional income in affiliate sales of that equipment.

Creating the Product

Ok so you have an idea for a product but how on earth do you create it? There’s a couple of issues here - firstly the technical one of what format to offer the product in and how to physically do that and the second one of actually gaining access to the knowledge required to create the product.

Finding the Knowledge

If you look for ideas in a local resource such as the Yellow Pages then you will have access to people in your local area with this knowledge. If you can find a way of working with these people to produce the product then you don’t have to go very far to find the knowledge. Approach these people, ask them if they would be willing to work with you to help develop this product in return for a cut of the profits.

I’m sure many of them would refuse; perhaps they would be worried about the product being competition for their own service. In that case, you can go the extra step and promote their service within your product. After all, just because you teach somebody how to do something, doesn’t mean that they will have the skill to do it well! If I try to trim my cat she might end up looking like she had an argument with a lawnmower! If that happened I’d be straight back to the groomer…

Capturing the Knowledge

Photo by Brassard

When I think of the word ‘infoproduct’, an ebook immediately comes to mind. Ebooks work well for online, computery type subjects but I don’t think they work as well for offline skills. A lot of the services that I have mentioned in this post are very ‘hands-on’ and as such I feel the best format would be video.

If you have access to a digital camcorder you can film somebody doing the actual work, have them talk you through the process as they work and then you can do the editing with a computer later. The beauty of this approach is that it is not very intrusive for your subject because you can simply allow them to work as they would normally but they’re just talking to you as they go about it.

Also, think of the benefits for them - if you had agreed to promote their service within your product for those people who just cannot do it themselves, what better ad than a video showing the master at work? It’s a win-win situation all round. Of course you need a camcorder for this approach.

If you don’t have a camcorder then you could do something almost as good with a digital camera and a audio recording device. You continue to observe the subject at work but this time you capture their audio with your recording and take photographs as they work. This is more effort for you because you would probably need to transcribe the audio into some kind of written form but you may also want to do that with video content too.

How to Sell the Product

I said at the beginning of the post that this method would allow you to create products that would be almost guaranteed to sell. However, that doesn’t mean that they will sell themselves - it just means that there is almost guaranteed to be a market of hungry buyers out there. You still need to work your way into that market.

My chosen method (and one I intend to pursue in an upcoming project) would be to build a niche site around the topic of the product. I would drive traffic to that site using all of the methods that I know about such as SEO, article marketing, StumbleUpon, and so on. I would probably offer some small report or email based course and use those resources to promote my product. If the conversion rate of the site was good and the product started selling, I would then look to paid methods of driving additional traffic such as PPC. I would also explore other ways of selling the product such as on eBay.

Once you have a product there are many ways to promote it. People these days seem to take the opposite approach of trying to build a website, get a load of traffic to it and then try to figure out how to monetize it. Often these monetization methods are small change - AdSense clicks, affiliate sales, CPA offers and so on. If you have your own product you get to earn 100% of the profits and that can be a lot more lucrative than those other methods.

Conclusion

Find a need, find a way to fill that need and then sell it. A simple concept and in this post I have given you a method of finding lots of needs waiting to be filled. If you have the inclination and a little bit of equipment you could create products around these needs and you’d be almost guaranteed that they would sell because these are services that people already pay money for.

I’ve not seen this idea mentioned before but it strikes me as something that is very obvious. Is this something you’ve thought of yourself? Would you try to develop a product in this way in an area that you previously knew nothing about? Would you feel uncomfortable with the idea of working with a small business and not having total control over the product? Would the technical aspects of creating it worry you? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this idea, and I may follow up with further posts on the topic.

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