Question: muse creation for non-business types

[last mechanic]

I am all ready to get started in making my dream of a 4 hour work week a reality. I only have one problem.

I can't seem to brainstorm a product that will work. I've been using the criteria in Chapter 9, but am really stuck. I come from social work, not business, so trying to think in terms of a hard, shippable product (as opposed to selling a service) is new for me. I can identify niche markets, but every time I come up with a potential product idea, my first reaction is "Nah, that'll never work." It seems like there are already many competing products in existence, the product I imagine is too complicated to make, or I just draw a blank. I am having a lot of trouble getting past this stage.:(

Can anyone recommend good resources (books, magazines, websites, others?) for someone like me to help with brainstorming good product ideas - ideas worth taking to the test marketing stage?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[mjm]

I am with you on that. My background is in budget/adventure travel, hospitality, and customer service. Most things I think of are service-based industries that would require a good bit of my presence for their operation and quality I think. It would be nice to find a saleable physical product but my brain also doesn't go in that direction. Do recall that in the book Tim said that information is one of the best products to sale so that is one thing I am trying to focus on while creating my muse(s). Regardless, I'm going to give them a shot since there's a 0% chance of success without actually trying.

[rwl4]

Information, if compelling enough, seems like the clear winner. From what I hear, most drop shippers tend to mark up products beyond what you could make a profit from. I noticed, after spending $250 that the DropShipSource, which is now World Wide Brands, tends to have a lot of the stuff that I have never heard of. Doba (another drop shipper) has stuff you'd find on Amazon, but is marked up almost to the price of Amazon, so it makes it a really tight profit margin. I think information or web services (like the next MySpace) is the real key, if you can pull it off.

Of course, I come from a web development background, so maybe it's just my bias speaking here.

Ray

[Matt West]

Here is quick and fast way to find a product to sale:

1. Go to clickbank.com and select a category.
2. Visit each website.
3. Pick a product you think you can easily copy.
4. Buy that product.
5. Review the product and write down all the good and bad.
6. Pay someone at elance.com, rentacoder.com or guru.com to make
you a better version of that product.
7.Use clickbanks affiliate force to promote your product for you.
8. Pay out at least a 55% affiliate commission and make sure your
affiliates make at least $27 or more per sale.

Let me sum it up real quick. Find out what's aleady selling in any
given market. (The more competition the better) Reverse engineer what
the top sellers are doing. And just make your version better. That's it.

The reason why you want to use clickbank to sale your digital base
product is because they have an affiliate force of over 100,000 people
and the more people you have promoting your product the faster you
climb up in the rankings for whatever category you chose in clickbank.

Your goal is to have the number one selling product in your chosen
category because people who are listed in the top 10 make anywhere
from 200 to 300 sales a day in that particular main category.

Say you have a $67 product and you make roughly $30 everytime someone
on clickbank makes a sale for you. Imagine doing that 200 to 300 times a
day? How would that make you feel?

Matt

[last mechanic]

um, do you work for click bank? i've never heard of it before.

[Matt West]

No. I do not work for clickbank.

[ffeingol]

ClickBank is a very popular affiliate web site. One of their "specialties" is digital goods. "Publishers" setup the program (create an e-book or something similar) and then the "affiliates" sign up to promote it. The "affiliates" (usually) get a percent of each sale. The "affiliates" are people that run web sites where the product/e-book will (hopefully) sell.

There is a pretty good chance you've already seen / clicked on a ClickBank ad and just never realized it.

[last mechanic]

thanks for the responses.

do either (or both) of you have products at click bank? is there any way to get stats on what types of products there actually make money? there are so many i wonder if a lot just sit and get no business.

and does it make more sense to sell through click bank and give them a bunch or your profit as opposed to just doing google adsense, etc?

so many questions! never took a business class in my life. i'm an entrepreneur of sorts, but my "product" is my time, and there's a very limited supply of that. i'm thinking of doing an info product using my expertise, and am trying to research some avenues for that.

thanks again. :)

[ffeingol]

last mechanic,

I am not an affiliate or seller on ClickBank. We just have lots of clients (hosting clients) that use them. If you look at the ClickBank marketplace you can see their categories if items. Under the items they have several metrics for items that are doing well or not well.

The biggest difference that I can think of is that AdSense is PPC (pay per click) while ClickBank is an affiliate program (typically) when means you only pay for sales. Depending on the market you are in and the words you are buying clicks can be very (very) expensive. And a click is just a click. Not guarantee they will signup, buy etc.

[mdfloyd@gmail.com]

I have my niche market and am designing an informational site for it. But I'd like a good dropshipper so I can get some income from products. The one dropshipper I do have is good, but by the time he adds 10% handling, 5% for dropshipping, and then shipping I'm only making a few cents -- and that ain't worth the trouble.

And no, I don't want to spend $200 or more on a book.

Anybody got any info or experience with dropshippers, or ones to avoid?

[adaum]

last mechanic,

Something you have to keep in mind is "Adsense" is not a REAL business. It is a real business for Google... but not for the rest of us.

I define a real business as one you can scale and sell. You cannot sell a business based on Adsense income... but you could sell a business that created information products sold at clickbank, Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

My own personal rule of thumb is if whatever it is I'm doing cannot be scaled (grown) or sold... I will not do it.

And yes... I have one product I sell at Clickbank. It is a new product I just put up a month or so ago (not an affiliate link - link to clickbank page)

https://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm?method

I'm going to get the actual 4 Hour book tomorrow - have the audio now. But just the information on GetFriday has my mind racing.

Think about the tasks they could do for you. They could post comments to other blogs that naturally reference your blog/site. Not blog spam... real comments. If you gave them an ebook you wrote or had rights to... they could post content to your sites - promote your affiliate program via forum posts... the list is truly endless.

Heck... I have not checked to make sure... but they could even call or email sites in the same niche as yours to do joint ventures. Like my site above... they could call other Video oriented sites (or email them) and say something like I am calling for Mr. Jones... he is interested in doing a joint venture. When would a good time for him to call you?

They could weed through all the people who are not interested, and at the end of the day you could possibly have more people wanting to JV with you than you thought possible.

We have not even hit any of the other stuff... we've just touched on the outsourcing.

Time for Corona... look forward to hanging out here and sharing ideas.

Andrew

[ffeingol]

Something you have to keep in mind is "Adsense" is not a REAL business. It is a real business for Google... but not for the rest of us.

I define a real business as one you can scale and sell. You cannot sell a business based on Adsense income... but you could sell a business that created information products sold at clickbank, Barnes and Noble and Amazon.


I have to slightly disagree with you here. It may not be a "real business" but it can be a useful source of income. I see dozens of sites built up over a period of a few weeks to months or years and then sold for many times their current adsense income based on "potential". The closest thing I can equate it to is property flipping.

Frank

[adaum]

Hey Frank... selling crack can be a useful source of income as well :-)

Never said you cannot make any income from doing it. Lots of ways you can generate income that is not a business - a JOB working for someone else is the first thing that comes to mind.

I made in the low 5 figures with Adsense in the hay day. Now in the low 3 figures (2 to 3 hundred a month). I'm even a famous author (joke) on creating Adsense income: http://www.google.com (http://www.google.com/search?q=7+Steps+Of+Mega+Adsense+Earners&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)

And anyone that purchased an Adsense site based on its "potential" income today is a fool. If there are any people in this forum wanting to purchase a few of these sites... I have a few I can sell you :-)

My statement said "Adsense" is not a business - it is not. It could be a smaller component of a larger plan, but by itself - having a site where you "depend" on the income you generate from Adsense is far from being a real business.

If you want to "slightly" disagree... so be it :-)

Thanks,

Andrew

[last mechanic]

I think the way to go is to have multiple income streams, and I appreciate everybody's ideas here. I've learned a lot quickly by reading the posts and checking out the resources.

I'd like to do an information product, now it's just doing the research to see what will sell, writing it and then getting it out there! It seems clickbank is the way to go - has anyone had any luck selling these through say ebay or other means?

I'm actually also now researching dropshipping some items - it seems hard to believe anybody has actual success with this though. Seems like mdfloyd also has had some trouble making actual money that way, so if anybody has experience with this being successful I'm all ears.

There's also another product I'm interested in designing and manufacturing. I figure, start with the least risky product and try to encourage small wins in order to build up the nerve to go for some others.

I've got a lot to learn yet, so thanks for all the feedback. I'll be hanging around asking for more.

[jetpacklife]

Well, just like Timothy, it took a few tries for me before I found a successful one. Think of a few ideas and don't pin all your hopes on one. Test things out first.

For me, with websites, I was able to leverage new sites and ideas off the (minimal) success of the previous site. However, in the end, there's really only one site of mine that makes any money, and with the 80/20 rule, have eliminated the others. Don't waste your time on too many streams when you can succeed with just one.

[Vacman]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the great ideas in this thread!

I really like the Clickbank idea, and if I were to develop a product to compete with the top sellers, how do you market this?

Basically, how would you recruit affiliates?

How would they know you have a new product?

How do you climb the ranks of Clickbank?

Thanks!

[Eyeth]

I am interested in what was stated in the above post. If anyone replied to him answering his questions, I'd like to hear the reply also if you don't mind. Thanks.

[Vacman]

Eyeth,

No replies yet :)

[jetpacklife]

"Something you have to keep in mind is "Adsense" is not a REAL business. It is a real business for Google... but not for the rest of us."

I'll just have to disagree with you on this one. AdSense is my primary income (I also get substantial income from other, similar sources), and I have been for YEARS. They are only improving it, I don't see it going away. This is for large content sites that aren't there "gaming" the system.

There are many businesses using adsense, just look at sites like digg.com and other 2.0 sites.

I'm sorry that your revenue has been going down, but, it's clearly been going somewhere else. Just look at google's revenue numbers. http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html
They've spent $1.1 Billion this past quarter for traffic aquistion (read adsense content and search partner payments). AdSense scales faster than any other ad solution, and it's making people and companies Billions.

[searstower]

Wow, thanks Matt. That was an excellent Clickbank gameplan. Thanks!

[Drewkerr]

I like it!!1

[Erik]

Here is quick and fast way to find a product to sale:
8. Pay out at least a 55% affiliate commission and make sure your
affiliates make at least $27 or more per sale.
Matt

Can you elaborate on this Matt, I understand it's good to have a good margin and for the affiliate to se that they're getting good money and I also understand it's a good idea to sell "premium" product as Timothy mentions in his book.

But setting a price of 50 $ on a ebook (the product I'm thinking about doing) seems to be a tad bit steep no? I understand that there's the whole concept of perceived value as well. Thankful for any explanation.

Best
Erik

[Tetsuo]

I can identify niche markets, but every time I come up with a potential product idea, my first reaction is "Nah, that'll never work."
Do a dry run like Tim outlines in the book - get a website set up and do an AdWords campaign; run an eBay auction for the product with an unrealistically high reserve to test demand and kill it near the end; maybe try advertising on Craigslist, specialist websites dedicated to the niche, or something similar. Then if it looks like there might be a market, you're golden, otherwise you've spent maybe $100-$200, maybe less, for certainty.

Sure, your instinct might be right, it might not work. What's the worst that could happen?