Before I started my businesses online, my main skill and value-add to the market was finding the “golden needle” in the haystack within a given market that would result in a winning product or service.
I’ve done it for physical products, training programs, consulting services, software products, and just about any kind of digital product you can imagine from ebooks through to membership programs, seminars and full coaching programs.
So when the internet began to take off in the late 1990’s into the early 2000’s it was relatively simple for me to uncover “hidden” product opportunities.
That went for my own products as well as dozens of other licensed and affiliate products that each successfully sold a TON.
The difference being that many affiliate products were temporary – they either were run into the ground by their owner, lost their appeal and did not keep up with the combination or became mainstream products where the online opportunity transitioned to mainstream e-commerce platforms.
On the other hand, my digital products continued to grow, build my brand, provide me with thousands and thousands of suggestions and requests for information that helped me continue to roll out product updates and new products.
The difference was so noticeable that today I HIGHLY recommend to anyone that they should invest at LEAST equal time into producing and marketing their own digital products as they do to marketing or selling anyone else’s products online (I believe the ratio should actually be more like 75% of your time, but 50% is a good starting point.)
Back to what has helped us become so good at finding and coming up with killer product ideas…
Find The Pain, Market To The Pleasure
The principle I always found most simple to understand and yet so powerful in practice is to find a massive and urgent PAIN in a given marketplace and use that to design your business, products while your marketing then becomes focused on the post-transformation state of pleasure.
Here’s a quick example…suppose you find that people badly want to run their own webinars – they see webinars as THE new way to reach their market but the PAIN is one of two things: Astronomical cost and technical complexity.
As soon as you put your finger on a massive pain in a market and state it the way I have above, your mind (being the problem solving mass that it is…) immediately begins to think up better ways to overcome the problem or challenge.
If you could come up with a webinar solution that was both affordable (perhaps by leveraging a SaaS architecture) and make it dead-simple to not only record, but play back and share a webinar then you have a distinct advantage.
Your marketing campaign becomes directed around this distinct advantage AND the resulting pleasure this will bring to the aspiring online entrepreneur who has been losing time, money and energy trying to make the existing solutions work for them.
The exact same process can be used in any niche market – a desire on behalf of a middle-aged male to lose their belly fat…what is the PROBLEM with the approaches that are already out there and how can you change the game by focusing on the product allowing you to have an incredible marketing campaign focused on the pleasure associated with solving this pain.
It doesn’t matter if you are just starting to think about publishing your own digital products or have a few on the market already, you can benefit tremendously by making sure you have developed that product from identifying an urgent PAIN and then marketing it based on the extreme PLEASURE experienced once they transform out of that pain state.
P.S. By the way, for a limited time you can access a full 5-part FREE training program on becoming a highly paid digital product entrepreneur – the inside track that we have taken and that we have used to help thousands of others go from identifying their market through pain-free product creation on to advanced techniques to get attention and sales on the way to building your own digital product enterprise online. We hope to see you in the course soon.
