The second thing you need to know is your marketplace. You have to know your marketplace inside and out. You have to know what they want. You can’t take a square peg and try to put it into a round hole. You can’t force your product idea on the marketplace. You have to know what they want.
This is why I tell my
coaching clients to write their sales copy first before creating their product because they’ll have a good idea if they can sell it or not. It’s much easier to put a couple of hours into thinking about your sales message than it is to putting a couple of months into creating a product that nobody wants.
What you think the world needs is probably not what they want. Don’t make that mistake. I’ve seen it made too many times. Even Amazon writes before creating. Amazon writes press releases for all their products before any are created, before any specs are even written up because they know they have to be able to sell it and hype it up before anybody is going to be interested in it in the first place. That’s very important.
Getting to know your marketplace is as simple as subscribing to magazines. For example, if your product deals with women and nutrition, subscribe to Women’s World magazine. It shows up every week. Get a subscription to Oxygen. It shows up every month. These are golden for getting to know women and nutrition.
3) K
now Where Your Customers Are
You also need to know where your customers are, who’s got them and how you can get them. That’s the most important aspect of what you need to know about your customers. That might mean advertising to somebody else’s Facebook fan page or getting somebody else to be an affiliate for you.
Dan Kennedy had a good quote that said,
“People’s problems are their hobbies.” Make Sense? If you buy one diet book, you’re going to buy ten diet books. Many people often don’t have success because they keep buying different books and they’ve turned their problem into a hobby.
Now you want to come along, solve their problem and be the last person they ever need to go to for information. But, it’s very important for you to understand that other people have your customers.