Are You Looking at Internet Marketing Backwards? by Jason Lane

in Online Promotion (submitted 2009-12-07)

If you love guitars, stay away from Guitar Center! I accidentally went into one yesterday and the next thing I knew, 4 hours had passed. I played with their guitars all day! Suddenly my old beat up guitar doesn't seem so special anymore! I have a feeling that I'm going to sneak back over there today and buy a couple new ones....*ugh*

In this article I want to talk to you about products and how to pick the ones guaranteed to sell like mad...

So I was being interviewed for a book or magazine article or something last week and one of the questions asked was this:

If you had to start over tomorrow... what product would you choose to market?
....or something like that. That question got me to thinking. Most people look at things backwards when it comes to marketing. And it gets them into trouble, huge, massive, horrible, end of the world type trouble.

Let me explain....

You should never ask yourself "what product should I market" instead you should look at a group of people (a market) and ask yourself...what product are they desperate for.

You look at a group of people and determine what they all want or need....that's how you decide what to sell. That's the ONLY way you should ever decide which products to sell online.

Marketing isn't about products...it's about people and their wants and needs....find out what those are, and everything else drops into place as easy as pie!

Yet too many people look at it the other way around...they come up with a great "new idea" for a product...they plunk down a lot of money to develop it...they spend a lot of money building a web site and putting in shopping cart functions etc...

And then they look around and say "Now, how do I market this product?".
They've got it all completely and totally backwards!!

More often than not...they've sunk all that money into developing the product and then they start spending money on advertising and promotion, only to find that there's no need or desire for the product they've created!

So if you want to be assured of success at marketing (both online and off), you should always find an eager market, determine what they want and need....and then simply give it to them.

Heck, I'll often advertise a product BEFORE I build it. If enough people order from the advertisement, I'll then rush to develop the product (as long as you get it to them in less than a month, you're ok).

If not enough people order to justify building the product, I just contact the few people that did buy it and explain that the product is no longer available and let them know that they won't be charged.

About the Author

Jason has been writing articles online for nearly 14 years. When not writing about internet marketing, he also runs a popular quality office supplies web site where he finds awesome deals on a variety of legal office supplies and other office accessories.