Are You Ignoring Your Customers’ Requests?

Copyright 2006 Willie Crawford

Many Internet marketing specialists will tell you that the high-quality manner to find out what your customers want from you is to ask them. While that may be real, I accept as true with that an excellent more accurate manner is to just pay attention to what they may be telling you, and to what they’re asking you for.

To illustrate my point, I’ll use a couple of examples from certainly one of my very own niches… The recipe and cookbook niche. If you have already got even a minor foothold in any area of interest, my experience must be somewhat instructive.

In-case you’re unexpected with my background, I earn six-figures from a soul meals cookbook that I wrote and self-published. I wrote that cookbook due to the fact my site site visitors asked for it.

The full story at the back of my first cookbook is that, once I first got here on line in 1996, I was informed that I should recognition on a gap. After constructing your normal "Internet advertising and marketing" website, which didn’t in reality take off right away, I sooner or later determined to construct a website across the "soul food" recipes that I discovered whilst growing up on a farm in North Carolina. I posted a few of my preferred recipes on line as search engine bait, after which advertised associate merchandise around the site … Generally with banners.

I was also informed that I wanted a mailing list to deliver traffic back to the web page, and to stay in contact with ability customers. With a recipe web page, it made perfect feel to me to create a listing wherein humans could exchange recipes. That list become an instantaneous hit, and has been going robust for over eight years.

While the recipes sent out through the list had been on the whole from web page visitors, list participants grew to partner me with amazing recipes. They finally started asking me if I had a cookbook. I informed them "no" however that I would write one if they would buy it. I also introduced that I become taking improve orders (to confirm the demand). I had over 100 orders before I wrote the first phrase. That cookbook has provided me, and my circle of relatives, with a comfy dwelling for YEARS!

Over the years, I tried to sell the ones website traffic, and list participants, a variety of various backend products, but not anything bought in addition to my cookbook.

For the ultimate six years,listing individuals have regularly instructed me what my following few products need to be, but I wasn’t truly listening. List members regularly emailed me pronouncing that they cherished my recipes, but that they were on restricted diets. They regularly requested if I had diabetic, low-fats or low-carb recipes. They additionally frequently wrote to inform me that they’d been diagnosed with excessive blood pressure, and asked if I had any recipes for humans with hypertension.

When I sooner or later started out listening, I knew precisely what my subsequent 4-five products need to be. They should be versions of my cookbook providing diabetic, low-fat and coffee-carb recipes. I additionally needed to write a cookbook for people with excessive blood strain. All of those cookbooks could be rolled out to my listing and sites within the subsequent 2 months!

What’s also instructive is that over the years I constructed up this HUGE asset… Human beings who’ve offered cookbooks from me after which asked if I had more. They have been telling me what to promote them. They had been telling me that if I simply offered them what they WANTED they could buy it.

The above is just making use of simple common experience and a touch little bit of advertising knowledge …Which most Internet entrepreneurs already possess. Let me percentage with you a few extra insights that you probably already have but aren’t the use of.

1) The simplest way inside the world to make extra cash from a tested, worthwhile niche is to "pass deep." Produce multiple episodes or versions of the product. That’s what film producers do. That’s what traditional book publishers do. Look on the "Chicken Soup For The Soul" series! That instructed me that if I produced additional versions of my cookbook, it would promote. My listing contributors also "informed" me that.

The manner that I will apply this is through re-labeling my first cookbook "Volume 1" at some stage in the subsequent printing. Then, I will introduce "Volume 2" and as many volumes because the market will bear over the years. Labeling the authentic "Volume 1" tells my clients to search for additional volumes. It sets up collectors to collect the entire collection.

Speaking of collectors, another model of your product that you can launch is a constrained creditors’ edition… If appropriate on your market. The co-manufacturer and host of the tv cooking display that I’ll let you know about later is doing simply that. At my prompting, he’s released a "Limited Edition Autographed Version" of his cookbook, "The Devotional Cookbook." You can see how he did that with my help at: http://Chitterlings.Com/devotionalcookbook.Html

What will make the confined editon of the cookbook, in the instance above, sell out simply speedy is the fact that it really is simplest being launched in a completely limited quantity, and that a tv character is autographing copies. Ask your self how you can observe a similar idea in your product. I’ll admit that this idea isn’t always something that I dreamed up… It is somethings that I heard a speaker use for instance at a seminar. All I did become have my patron APPLY the idea!

2) Go deep by means of providing more variations of your primary product. For example, with my cookbook, I offer it in PDF, print, and on CD. In some months many of my recipes will be to be had on DVD due to the fact that I will percentage them on a television cooking display that I’ll be co-generating.

My mentors lengthy ago instructed me that I wished not most effective a cooking show, but a full line of spices and sauces. Instead of being attentive to them, I went off on the lookout for greater exclusive markets… In large part ignoring the hungry marketplace that I already had (pun meant).

It took one among my clients, coming to me with an concept for a cooking show that he had, to get me into the tv enterprise. When you sincerely reflect onconsideration on it even though, producing a cooking show is just repackaging the records that I already have right into a exclusive format.

Listening to my marketplace, will not simplest permit me to triple my ebook income, it’ll additionally generate millions while the display is nationally syndicated. The display is just starting manufacturing now, however will develop rapidly. You can follow our progress, and research from the technique, by frequenting our weblog at: http://TheDevotionalChef.Com/blog

You can also see how I broaden and market a complete line of cookbooks and related merchandise with the aid of traveling my cooking website online at: http://Chitterlings.Com Go in advance and be part of the mailing list, as this is where I announce new merchandise and location news.

A few human beings may additionally ask why I percentage so much of what I’m doing in my cooking area of interest with you here. You may marvel if I’m no longer afraid of competition. The fact is that there are MILLIONS of webpages accessible presenting unfastened recipes, yet I earn six-figures selling them. The truth is that there are hundreds of people who’ve written cookbooks and are having issue selling them. I do not need to fear about opposition due to the fact by way of studying Internet marketing I even have found out the way to dominate my area of interest.

What need to you do with the information that I’ve simply shared with you? Ask yourself how you could practice it to your area of interest. Ask your self in case your website site visitors and subscribers aren’t already telling you what they need to buy!

Once you find out that your product is a success with the marketplace, listen to them as they tell you a way to improve the product, and how to sell greater matters to them. Instead of going off looking for new and extra glamorous markets, serve the only that you’ve already mastered. Apply the many marketing strategies you know for your present area of interest. It will pay off handsomely!

× How can I help you?