Great question. In the Traffic and Sales Maximizer Audit, we take a critical, expert look at your Strategy, Website, Traffic, and Tracking to find places where you can increase performance and fix things that are broken. However, it seems counter-intuitive to audit something that’s not complete, so I’m going to suggest that you take advantage of our ResearchMyMarket.com service where can get your research done, set up your survey page, kick-off a Google Adwords campaign, and get you going over a 30-day period.

This way, you gain valuable insight and can start in a market sooner than you thought. Don’t let your website (or lack of a website) cause you to delay your marketing. The facts are, your website will be worthless if you don’t know EXACTLY what a market wants and EXACTLY what they are looking for. If you miss on this, you’ll have wasted a lot of time and money on your website and you’ll have to start over. So get the survey going and learn your market – you’ll be able to get your website finished in parallel.

Bob.

What an interesting and thoughtful question! This is someone who will go far in life, and business.

First, if you are a beginner, most likely you are in the process of gathering a lot of resources, meaning spending time and money on information products and education. Good. I’m all for it. However, don’t be like most people who read a book, listen to a CD, or attend an event and leave it alone. Worse yet, don’t be like a majority of the people that buy information products and never break the seal on the shrink wrap!

My advice to you is to steward your knowledge. Perhaps you never heard this before, but stewarding what you learn means to implement. Knowledge without action is just knowledge; however, knowledge with action is wisdom. When you grow in wisdom, you will always be more successful, avoid roadblocks, and be more profitable in your business.

Secondly, leverage every asset to the fullest. If you have a website, track everything people on it and make changes to see if they result in an increase in response. If you are paying for traffic, make sure you are getting positive ROI on every keyword. If you have a list, cultivate that list and develop a solid relationship. Basically, you want to optimize EVERY asset you have in your business. 

My Traffic and Sales Maximizer Audit offers you this kind of insight. We’ll help you take a critical look at the 4 steps of successful online marketing ( Strategy, Website, Traffic, and Tracking) and see where we can find ways for you to improve. Quite often, having someone help you do this analysis will help you discover things you never would find on your own!

Bob.

Webinar is less than 24 hours away!  I will easily, quickly and positively test your idea online, giving you X-Ray vision into your customers’ desires and what they’re willing to pay for.

Date: Thursday, January 22, 2009
Time: 7:00pm - 8:15pm CST
Register at http://www.TestMyMarket.com

The fact is no matter who you are, whether you are a seasoned, novice or advanced online marketer, I can test your market and business idea and show you exactly where the opportunity lies and what traps to avoid.

REGISTER NOW AT http://www.TestMyMarket.com

I can prove to you the validity of your business idea and show you without the inconvenience or loss of valuable time and money the exact opportunity in the market.

Watch the video, then enter your name, email, address and phone and you’ll be registered for my 74 minute webinar on Thursday January 22, 2009 at 8 PM EST, where I’ll show you how to research your market before you write one letter of copy, put up one landing page or offer a service to your prospects.

Good question. When we start out, we always get a bunch of ideas, and we often try to implement ALL of them hoping one will stick and we get rich.

For your own sanity and chance for success, you want to abide the following rules. (Note, I didn’t invent these rules. They have been taught by the best business minds over the years, and I’ve heard them from Dan Kennedy, John Reese, Eben Pagan, Peter Drucker, Gary Halbert and countless others.)

I hear the “duhs” from here! Of course this makes sense, but we all break it. “Everybody will want this!” Yeah right. I promise you, you will go broke long before you convince everyone to buy your product, in fact, you will die from aggravation. The facts are, that it takes Millions of dollars, correct me, Billions of dollars to influence and some blind luck to shape and create demand out of thin air.

So do this – Sell to customers who are in pain, irrationally passionate, proactively looking for solutions, , have fears, and few perceived options. Basically, people who will exchange money for a solution. This is much easier for a business owner, especially one that is starting out and has a lot of ideas.

Personally, I’d pick the idea that has the most passionate, hurting, solution seeking, rabid buyers available. Asking the most important question – can I reach them? If so, that’s your plan. Go spend a couple hundred dollars to test the market. Run surveys, do your research, and generate leads. Find out if your idea has merit, and if so, go deep and wide.

If you have a lot of ideas and need direction, you would be perfectly suited for our very hands-on, insightful service ResearchMyMarket.com where we’ll do the heavy lifting of going into your potential market and doing the research for you and then coaching you on the possibilities that market has to offer, or if the market is a dud, and you should move on. This will save you hundreds of hours, and thousands of dollars. I guarantee it.

Bob.

The easy answer to this is sell other people’s products. Do this by contacting other businesses in your market, preferably by phone, and let them know you are building a list and would like to offer their product to your list.

Now, there will be some challenges with this because you don’t have much to offer this partner. You have little or no list, and no way to reciprocate unless there are sales from your offer.

So, the better way is to open up a free account at Clickbank.com and CJ.com (Commission Junction). Clickbank offers digital products and CJ.com offers mostly physical products. So depending on your market, you can offer one or both. Once you begin to investigate, you’ll see how much there is to offer your list. 

Note – you won’t get rich doing this on a small scale. People who make big money doing “affiliate marketing” treat this as a business and spend a lot of time and money building a list and promoting all the time.

For my money and effort, I believe it’s in your best interest to have a product of your own, so no matter what, focus on the needs of your market and develop a product to solve their problems.

One last idea – you can always offer consulting or coaching to your list if you have some expertise. This is a good way to build rapport in a market, but also gives you a chance to generate some cash and will probably be forced to generate content and it can also help you build product!

But remember my post from last time — don’t ever create a product unless you’ve done the Research!  You need to know who your customers are, and what they are willing to pay for. 

Let me show you the type of Research you need to do. I’ve posted a video for you on http://www.ResearchMyMarket.com

Till next time.

Bob.