Posts belonging to Category Product Development

Well there’s definitely a head of steam building on this project.

Having submitted my suggested headings, I had another telephone conversation with Neil Stafford of Internet Marketing Review fame to discuss next steps!

To be honest the couple of weeks since our last discussion gave me time to absorb the concept we had come up with and I’m delighted to say that it still feels like a really good idea. Luckily Neil felt the same way and very quickly we had agreed the content of the e-book and have enough information to brief the writer.

Whilst we await the first draft – with a lead time of something like 30 days, my next ‘homework’ is to think about writing my own introduction to the e-book so that it is personalised to me. We are also starting to think about the first upsell product (which is likely to be an audio product) and I need to think about 15 possible areas within my niche to investigate as research material.
I really pleased with the way this is progressing. I’m trying really hard to stay relaxed and simply do what I’m told. The funny thing is that with the coaching, I am relieved of the responsibility of worrying about ‘whether it is a good idea’ and can just get on with the implementation.
Hopefully the next update will be to say that my 15 areas have been submitted to Neil and that the e-book brief has been accepted by the writer and work is underway.

Cheers

Good grief I did it – my homework that was. OK it was a couple of days late but that is because all of a sudden there has been the chance of stopping my compulsory redundancy from the bank with just 6 week to go – won’t know for a coupe of weeks, and to be sure I’m not sure what is for the best. Probably only a 50% chance but instinctively I think if I can keep a salary then doing this project will be a bit more relaxed? But end goal does not change.

Anyway, I have now drilled down into my niche, described the primary subject matter and target market and outlined the main features and benefits. I’ve even written the headings for the chapters – so exciting!

This has been submitted to Neil who will compare it with his own thoughts and hopefully we will then have another telephone conversation to agree the brief for the writer. My concern at this stage is that the subject matter needs to be written my an expert rather than a researcher – and that I guess is why I’ve not previously progressed on my own?

Well after much apprehension I finally had my first telephone consultation with Neil Stafford from Internet Marketing Review as part of the New Power Profits coaching mentoring programme.
The reason for my apprehension was that I had quite a lot was resting on the outcome of the conversation. I may well be unemployed by the end of the year (or should I say more positively self employed but no income!) and this mentoring programme is a major plank in my survival plan.
It had been a little over a month since I had submitted 4 possible niches to Neil and frankly I was beginning to feel that none of them was worth pursuing – but meanwhile I had gone back to the drawing plan and begun to identify other possibilities.
Now here is evidence of one of my (many?) weaknesses – according to the famous Myer Briggs personality test, I am a strong creator/innovator with hardly any implementation instincts! However I did also come out quite strongly on ‘Inspector’ which I guess means that whilst I don’t want to do it, I can spot the error in someone else’s work! (Maybe I was well suited to being a Bank manager after all!)
So true to form, I was looking to move on from my previous ideas and start thinking of some more.
As a great coach, Neil was ready for me. When I told him I had come up with some more ideas he said great – why not progress some of them yourself whilst we press on with one of these 4 you’ve sent me!
So with that we started to evaluate my suggested niches and Neil’s main question in each case was ‘why’ had I come up with the idea.
In all 4 examples he felt that there was a good market but that in order to make it work, we would need to differentiate our product with a marketing angle, and ideally, that angle would be my personal experience with the subject.
For example, one of my suggested areas was stress management. A huge area and a lot of competition, but a hungry market none the less. Neil’s comment here was that the products (in our arena) that tend to work best are where the author has a personal story of how they came up with the own formula for solving the problem. Thankfully I do not have such experience.
He also pointed out that you would need to be comfortable emerging yourself into a topic and that some people should exercise caution with some of the ‘darker’ topics – the analogy I drew here was that a recovering alcoholic would be well advised not to get into the Beaujolais niche!
Anyway we moved through my ideas and settled on one where I had come up with the top line topic but hadn’t realised, until we talked it through, that our family experience would provide a good angle for an information product.
The next steps are for me to flesh out the idea a little more and to come up with some suggested chapter subjects and identify some suitable sources of information. For his part, Neil is going to check out some related magazines whilst he is in the States and have a chat to a contact he has who is in a similar niche. My work is due to be done by the end of the weekend and hopefully our next 1-2-1 will be within a couple of weeks when we should be in a position to agree the brief for the writer – and that sounds frighteningly close to an implementation plan for a creator/innovator like me!

Whilst preparing for my big telephone consultation with the 2 Neils of Internet Marketing Review I’ve been trying to find some other ways to practice some Internet Marketing techniques – baby steps but good fun:-

A friend of mine reckons he can tip horses and was trying to work out how to market it. Lets do a blog says I and when we’ve generated enough of a following we’ll move it onto a paid e-mail service with a bit of Adwords to help generate traffic. No rush, just see what happens.

www.horseracingbettingtips-blog.com went live end of September – for October my only objective was to get the site indexed and maybe start ranking. For the fun of it I decided to use Twitter (@horseracingbettingtipz) to promote the mostly daily updates.

Using Twitter as the only means of promoting the site we’ve generates 238 unique visitors for the month with an average of 3.15 visits per visitor and 36 Twitter followers.

For November we will strengthen the Blog with some related articles to try and lift the ranking (page 14 out of 13000 competing pages for the main domain name phrase) although I was chuffed to bits for a number one ranking (not out of many) for the search “1525 aintree sat 24th oct” (broad phrase match).

Hopefully my friends tipping form will continue on it’s current trend which will increase pressure on me to try to increase traffic!

On track I guess. Having joined the New Power Profits coaching programme, I attended a Blueprint day back in September. At that, 2 other attendees and I met up with the legendary Neil Stafford and Neil Travers of the Internet Marketing Review for an intensive day of training. That was really good – my inner skeptic was expecting just another rehash of old information – but that was not what we got. Of course much of the underlying information reflected the contents of the New Power Profits DVD set – but much what made the day so enjoyable was meeting the guys face to face and hearing their interpretation of the information and more importantly how to make it work.
Our homework was to go away and identify 3 potential Niche areas and submit our research to the Neils by the end of September. They would then double check our research and follow up with 1-2-1 telephone calls in October to agree which Niche to take forward.
For me niche research has always been my entry barrier to this business. I have lots of interests but somehow none of them seem to fit the bill. I am now the proud owner of several note books filled with various ideas created over the years, none of which seem to have got off the drawing board. However the focus of trying to hit a deadline really did work and in the end I got there and produced 3 niche topics, each of which met the required metrics of keyword search volumes, competing advertisers, Youtube traffic, Twitter traffic, Hubpage links and competing Clickbank products. Phew!
Well that put me ahead of all my previous efforts with my deadline met and  I’m looking forward to my telephone consultation a little later this month. As I say, on track!

Can a 47 year old bloke with an online career earnings history to date of $37 and currently no products to sell, go on to build a sustainable online income of $100,000 within 12 months?

My name is David and I’ve just received my compulsory redundancy notice from my employer, a UK Bank, for whom I’ve worked for the past 9 years. This morning I should be preparing for an interview I have this afternoon, but instead I’ve just defined my first clear Goal, which is embedded within the question above.

Funny, after a night of wobbles, just reading the question makes me scream the answer – of course I bloody well can!

Not that I’ll be telling my parents when I see them later today – it’s not easy to explain internet marketing to my 84 year old father – I think I’ll just say I’m getting into the porno business!

I’ve taken some help though – I’ve joined a coaching program from Neil Stafford and Neil Trafford – the Two Neils of the Internet Marketing Review.com fame.

The coaching programme is designed to take me from zero to hero in a few months – with their help I’ll have an e-book product up and selling within a couple of months and a backend product too. They also help with the marketing.

They aim is to get me earning £1000 per month within 60 days and then accelerate that towards my goal within 9 to 18 months. A tall order but then I working with 2 of the best on-line marketers in the UK!

So, if they do what they say on the tin – and I do what they tell me to, then the coaching programme should take me a good way towards my year 1 financial goal.

Fancy joining me for the journey – I’m planning to post the thrills and spills of my internet journey over the next 12 months and I’d welcome some company!