Your $100k A Year Business Blueprint Part Five
This is the final part of the $100k Business Blueprint. We’re going to go through together a few more things about the types of products that you need to be selling in order to achieve the highest returns possible and I’ll also give you a few examples to get you started.
Products that mean ‘profits’!
To give you the very best chance of succeeding you absolutely must have the right
kinds of products. These are products that have the potential to generate high profit margins, while also having low development costs and overheads. At the same time, you’ll need a marketing strategy that maximizes the chances of success while minimizing the chances of failure.
Here is my own personal ‘secret’ checklist that I use to select products – followed by examples of four different products that meet the requirements of this checklist:
Product Idea Selection Checklist
Pass Fail Product Component Being checked
High Price: Your product should be capable of selling for at least $50. $100 would be better. (This means you can sell low volumes of goods and still make a lot of money.)
High Value. The customer must see your product as having a high value. Put simply, the potential value of the information must be many times more than the actual cost of the information.
High Profit Margins: The raw cost to deliver your product should never be more than 10% of the retail price – so a $50 product shouldn’t cost more than $5.00 or so to produce. Overall profit margins should be 100% or more.
Pass Fail Product Component Being checked appeals To Qualified Customers: Your product must appeal to people with a credit card, money to spend and the desire to buy. And, ideally, people who have bought similar products before.
Strong Benefits: The product must offer the buyer good, strong benefits – so giving them very good reasons for buying it. Creating strong benefits should be uppermost in your mind when putting the product together. Better still – think of the benefits first and then create the product!
Product Control: You should be the only source for the product. Most important of all, this means that competitors won’t be able to jump in and undercut you on price. Ideally you should be able to control the method of distribution, the price, the availability, the delivery and the support systems.
No Or Low Support: The product should ideally require low (or ideally no) support in order for the customer to use and benefit from it. (It’s expensive to provide support and products needing a lot of support can lead to low customer satisfaction levels.)
Easy Delivery Shipping: The product must either be able to be delivered digitally (or at the very least they should be light, compact and easy/low cost to physically ship to the customer by mail or courier.
NOTE: When starting in business ‘digitally delivered products’ that can be downloaded from the Internet or delivered via a membership area are best.
Pass Fail Product Component Being checked:
Not Too ‘Time Hungry’: Fulfilling orders shouldn’t be too demanding on your time. Here’s why: If sales suddenly jump from two to a hundred a day you won’t be able to cope with the demand easily and your whole low cost/high profit pricing model will fly out of the window. By selecting products where orders can be delivered quickly and easily there are few limits to your income potential.
Be Legal, Honest And Fair: I haven’t mentioned this before, but it’s an important aspect of every successful product. Businesses who rip customers off don’t succeed in the long term (apart from it being illegal of course!).
Perfect product examples: To finish off with, here are examples of four great product areas which fit in with this checklist. One or more of these could soon be a big moneymaker for you….
Example 1: Information Products. How to videos, audios, books, manuals and home study courses.
These products have a high value, high margins, offer the buyer lots of benefits and, once created, don’t use up a lot of your time.
Example 2: Membership or Subscription websites. These have a high profit margin, high perceived value, need very little support and involve no shipping/delivery in the normal sense of the word.
Example 3: Special purpose tools and software. Software tools developed to achieve one specific purpose, delivered over the Internet, generally using a web vending business model like www.WPDownloadPageProtector.com Ideally you’ll need a computer programmer to develop products like this yourself. But even if you need to outsource this type of programing to a freelance coder, it can be done a lot cheaper than you might think. With effort you could probably do something for just a few hundred dollars.
Example 4: Web based utilities. The so-called ‘app on tap’ or SaaS services. Web based utilities deliver some kind of useful service which can be accessed through a website. They have all the advantages of high prices, profit margins and perceived value with low operating costs and low support. For example, AWeber helps marketers to send autoresponder follow up and broadcast emails to their list of email subscribers. It’s a good example of a web based utility, but there are lots of others.
Now it’s up to you! In considering these examples I can hear you asking… But which of these is best for me? At the end of the day only you can decide that. Obviously examples 1 and 2 are the easiest and quickest to get started in. But my advice would be … try all of them!
Work towards developing different products for each business model and see which works out best.
And remember – it’s usually a great idea to have several different product lines at the same time. Because customers for one will often also be customers for the other – so you can make extra sales for very little time, effort or expense.
Follow what I’ve told you in my $100k Business Blueprint and before you know it you could have several lucrative $100k businesses in one!
If you’d like to take a look at a several examples of how the author of the book you recently purchased put together his recent collection of products, then you can also take a look at the following examples.
Lazy Way To Email Riches – how to make money online using email
One Letter From Retirement – how to write a message that’ll sell
Make Cash Like Clockwork – how to set up profitable membership sites
Product Licensing Formula – how to get the rights to sell other people’s stuff
There’s a lot there to take a look at and add into your business plans should you want some extra help and advice. But whatever you decide to do… I look forward to hearing about your success with what you have learned so far, over the weeks and months ahead.
Regards
Shelia Lirette
