Problems & Solutions
Lets look at it another way. We all have problems right? Products and services are there help us solve those problems, but when you’ve found a problem with the product that’s supposed to solve the problem in the first place, there’s your way in. That’s your little space there to recreate these products, but give them a twist. Make them better, faster, cleaner, more reliable, more cost effective, better presented, you get the idea.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you to go out, buy peoples stuff, and just clone it and give it a fancy new name and change the layout a bit and sell it on. Aside from probably getting you into trouble with copyright laws and such, it’s just not practical or ethical. What I am showing you though is that you can take basic ideas, and you can make them a better solution to a specific problem from the ground up.
Now, no matter how much I tell you this, nothing that I know of is better than a little bit of practical experience. What I want you to do is program this method into the back of your mind. I can’t guarantee that you’ve come up with something already, if you have, great, but it’s most likely that you won’t have. Not to worry. That’s because you’re probably not using any particular products right now aside from your chair, your glasses and maybe a drink.
Go About Your Business But Mix With Your Market
So here’s what I want you do. When you’re done reading this, go about your day-to-day business in the normal way, but notice everything. If you’re in online marketing, every time you use a product that doesn’t have an option or a feature that would make your life easier, note it down. Whatever your field of expertise, the best way to come up with ideas and innovations related to releasing a product into that particular market, is to get in there, and start using other peoples stuff, and really brining to the front of your mind the problems that you encounter when using them.
It’s hard when you’re looking from the outside in to come up with these ideas, so I don’t want you to worry if you haven’t come up with anything viable yet. It’s likely because you aren’t using other people’s stuff right now. Once you’ve been doing this for a few days, you’ll learn to spot things like this almost by second nature, and you won’t have to keep actually looking for problems and improvements that you could make.
Start practicing now, and once it starts to sink in, you’ll find yourself randomly stop, and announce that the product your using isn’t correctly addressing your needs, and you’ll be able to add something into that concept folder that does address your needs correctly, or more quickly, or more reliably. Keep it in mind, and practice it often. Mix with your market. If you’re not using a selection of products and services in the market you’re thinking of breaking in to, you won’t get any ideas. That’d be like me trying to come up with an innovative new idea to introduce into the field of Ice Hockey when I don’t know anything about it.
Never Dismiss Anything:
Now let me open your mind a little bit with something that I really think is the key to mastering this. I do not ever want you to dismiss an idea that you come up with. No matter how wacky or crazy it seems, no matter why you think it won’t work. Just put it in that folder for now. I’ll tell you why. Ever had a sudden idea about anything that you think “Hey! Wow, I just had this great idea” then you say something along the lines of “Oh, oh no. Never mind, that won’t work because of insert problem here“.
This is what blocked me when I first started trying to master this, and I was wondering why I wasn’t coming up with any ideas to put in my folder. It’s simple, and it’s natural. If you come up with an idea and instantly start finding problems with it, you’ll dismiss it. Kind of an ah well, that won’t work approach. This will get you nowhere. Open your mind a little, and don’t start dismissing things on a whim because they seem impractical or even impossible at first glance.
We’ll talk more about this later, but let me tell you, I have a concept folder, just like yours, neatly tucked up in my business documents folder. Some ideas in there, when I wrote them were impractical, there was no market for some of them, some I couldn’t afford, and some just needed large numbers of customers to pull off effectively. Today, right this moment as I type, and possibly years after I’ve come up with these ideas, I’m actively working on three of them.
Think about that, three ideas which seemed like they’d never happen last year, and one of them even stretches back over three and a half years that’s just now become a viable option. Things change quickly; times are moving faster than ever before. Never forget, keep an open mind, and don’t start placing these limits on yourself before you start. Once we remove those limits, the ideas will start flowing. Start recording them. One of them may well be the next big thing in your field of expertise. More on how to sort the good from the not so good ideas later, with some simple checklists that you can use.
Some Examples:
For now though, here’s an example of the above method. So here’s me, trying to put up my first website in which I just happened to opt for what was at the time, probably the most complicated website you could put out with regards to how many different types of resources you needed. It was a membership site, and I wanted fully functional affiliate management, fully functional access management and a totally automated system that would deal with everything for me, on autopilot, and that’s before we even look at the auto responder and advert tracking scripts that were in the membership area.
Now at the time, I couldn’t find a system that did everything I wanted it to do. Either it was too simple and there wasn’t enough customization, or it was super complicated, costs five thousand dollars to buy, and wouldn’t fit in with the other scripts I had up there. So, me being a bit of a dreamer and liking to play with money I don’t have, I started writing down ideas, and everything I needed, how much it was costing me to try and hook the six or so scripts up to function as I needed for my business. This is how my concept folder started.
Understand this was five years ago or more, and seeing as I was still working a job, and just got my own place back then, I couldn’t afford to go all out and get something built that I wanted. So anyway, the idea, and the picture of this perfect system sits in my concept folder, like the one you created earlier. Five years later and staring 2005 in the face, this very system is now over eight thousand dollars down the line in development costs, (including some very personalized scripts) and nine months into it’s creation.
So what would have happened if I deleted this idea five years ago because it cost too much, and it wasn’t viable back then. I’ll tell you what, I would have lost what’s going to form the base of my next two products, a product with a seven to eight hundred dollar price tag, which even if it only sold a rather shoddy seventy five copies in it’s whole entire product lifetime, would make a nice tidy fifty thousand dollar profit.
See how important this is? Not only would dismissing the idea in the first place have lost me a perfectly good product for the future, but dismissing it before it even got started because I didn’t have the funds at the time, or the resources and knowledge to promote this to a wide enough audience would have been a crime, and I wouldn’t have even known it. I hope I’ve also shown you how the idea came about originally and what I mean about mixing with your market, and solving your own problems with your own products.
There are so many other examples I can think of, this site for example. I’ve always wanted to share what I’ve seen, experienced and learned with other marketers, but I’d just never had the time to write and develop such a course before, but things changed. I could go on forever, but I think the point has been put across now, and it’s up to you to fill that folder with ‘maybe’ and ‘could be’ products without prejudice.
Now before we move on, I want to say, if you’ve been inspired, or this report has hit you hard and sparked your imagination so far, and you’re coming up with ideas already, go, go now and write them down, record them. Do this any time you get an idea for a new product. Drop everything, record it, then come back to what you were doing before the subject changes and your train of thought is directed elsewhere.
Method Number Two:
And on that note, we’re going to change the subject a little here to look at the second way of creating products. This time, we have a little twist on the improvement method we talked about above. This one is a little less general, and something you’re most likely going to come up with when looking at the ideas you gained in method one.
I like to call this one Nichifying. Strange, yes, and there’s no doubt in my mind that there is in fact no such word, however, for the examples I’m about to give you, there’s no other way to sum it up like that. So what is Nichifying? Well, it’s as it says really. It’s taking a product that has a wide audience, and twisting it, changing something about it again, but this time, instead of trying to improve it, you’re evolving it in such a way that you’re reaching a very specific, much more targeted market that may be untapped.
Lets look at some real world examples. The one that immediately springs to mind is the rise of alco-pops. I’m not sure what you call them in the US, or Canada, or wherever you may be, but over here in the UK that’s what they’re called. Now the drinks industry was real clever with this and took something that used to be marketed to an older generation of drinkers, and turned it into a colorful, soda-like tasting pleasant drink that is targeted at younger people. It’s still alcohol. It’s the same product; they just gave it a twist, added a little something, and voila, brand new market. A very clever move indeed.
Now this one is a little harder to grasp, and hurts my brain a little more than the improvement factor, so lets look at a few more examples. How about processors for computers. Just starting to emerge are the above and beyond processors that aren’t just for the mass market, but they’ve been tailored to suit developers, designers, multi taskers and servers specifically. It’s the same again, it’s still a processor, but it’s been tailored to a specific market. In this example, rather than change the target market completely, they’ve kept it the same but introduced and tailored their products to very specialized tasks.
One last example here, lets look at this in an online marketing sense. Looking around you, I’m sure you’ll find there’s no shortage of dodgy old e-books and a lot of very general products about, so us as marketers have started to do this, either by taking a specific set of tactics and tying them into an original named system to be carried out in a particular way, such as this site for example, or taking it to the major extreme and just extracting one single subject and creating a product around it. A whole course about copywriting for websites, a whole course about joint ventures or e-zine management and creation.
So there we have it, you can take an existing idea or concept for a product, and if you really can’t use method number one to improve on the job it does, can you either go specialized and target it at a specific market, or even totally change the product to appeal to a different, untapped market. These are generally the alternatives to mass-market products, targeting every computer owner, or targeting every online marketer isn’t always the answer. Use method one to come up with ideas, use method two to refine your ideas, and come up with alternative angles that may not have been immediately obvious.