Find What People Want...And Give It To Them

After receiving several emails, I feel it would be beneficial to present you with more information on Step 1 in the 3-31-2009 post.

Most of you understand the basics of identifying your target market through keywords, trends, sspecial interest groups, etc. I would like to offer one reminder. Think outside the box!

After listening to your questions, there seems to be one common thread. "How do I know this product will move? Short and sweet, You don't; but through the use of some simple research tools you can be very successful.

So let's back up for a moment or two and find a kickin' product to promote.

I had a Prof in my marketing class that had a favorite saying. When setting up our project businesses, he would always say. "Find what the people want and give it to 'em." So how do we do that?

First we need to understand that there are three main, well maybe four main ways to take a product to market.
1. Develop product of your own
A. buy the resell rights to a product
2. Become an Affiliate marketer
3. Buy wholesale/ Sell retail
4. MLM

The process for finding a product is very similar to find your target market. A couple quick examples would be:
1. If you perform keyword searches in Wordtracker or Good Keywords , you can identify products people are looking for.

2. If you have identified a special interest group, you can identify product usage that is common to that group.

Since most of you expressed that you would like to, "get up and running quickly",and you need to stay within budgets. We will discuss Affiliate Marketing first.

Briefly an affiliate gets paid commission each time he/ she refer a lead to a company and that referral completes a transaction with that particular company.

That's great! Wait a minute. How do we find a company that we can be an affiliate for?

Don't panic! Thousands on top of thousands of companies use Affiliate Marketers to promote their products. and pay some very nice commissions.

As I said earlier, "Think outside the box". Just about any product you use, or think of, offers an affiliate program.

The quickest way to get a list of, what we call, "Affiliate Networks", is to go to Google. Type in "affiliate networks" in the search box and you will get a list of companies that handle affiliates for thousands of companies. Some of these companies charge for signing up. I would recommend signing up for a free one when just starting out.

I use more than one "affiliate network". To start with you might try Commision Junction . They have a nice list of affiliate programs, with many categories. After you log in, click on,
Get Links tab and check out the list of affiliate programs.

In our next post we will have further discussion on Affiliate Marketing.

Remember, We're Here For You.

Cal Hardesty
mlminertia@live.com
http://twitter.com/calhardesty