How to Find Your Starving & Very Hungry Crowd

Guest Contributor: Shannon McCaffery
Shannon's Posts - Shannon's Site

There's a great story by the late marketer and copy writer Gary Halbert. He often asked a group of people this question, "If you were to open up a fast food business, what would you want?" Some people said they'd want a great location, others said the best secret sauce. And what Gary said was, "You guys can have that stuff. All I want is a starving, and very hungry crowd." This IS exactly what you want- a huge massive starving and hungry crowd. You need to find people that are desperate or who will do anything to simply get their hands on your product or services and then all you need to do is give it to them. Your potential customer is that "Hungry Crowd."

So then the real question is what comes first? Do you create your product first, then find your hungry crowd and sell it? Or do you find that hungry crowd first and then create your product? Well, the debate about this one in the information marketing business is pretty hot and heated and almost as passionate as to what came first, the chicken or the egg?! The funny thing is that the majority of people I come across usually have already created a product or in the process of creating it and then they look to build their list and find their hungry crowd. The real truth and honestly THE best way to go about this is finding that hungry crowd FIRST. This is really the key. There's no need to spend all your time, money and effort creating a product to then find out that it's not a real "hungry" market and there's no real "need" for your product.

I'm going to spend a few minutes here this month and give you some excellent tips I've discovered on how to go about finding "your hungry crowd" first, then later in the coming months I'll give you some insights and great ideas on how to go about creating your product.

Here's step #1, after you have your product area, you need to do RESEARCH. Best way to do it is go online to Google. Put your key words right into the search area and check out the right side of the page. These are paid advertising, and also the top of the page there might be some ads. Are there products or services already being marketed to this niche? If the answer is yes, that's a good sign. It means people are looking for solutions to their problems and are willing to spend money to buy them. Look for trends, and top performers in your category. For example if you create a product on house training your dog, put that into Google's search engine and see what comes up. Sometimes there are too many products in a field. So if you decide you want to enter, I'd recommend buying the top products that are your competition and read through them and figure out what's missing from the product. Figure out your competitor's weak point. So when you create your product, make it incrementally different, than your competition and have a specific marketing hook that's different from them. Also, sign-up for their newsletters or free reports and see what they're selling, and how they're selling it. Knowing your competition is good.

Other places to do your key word research: www.technorati.com - search blogs for your topic or idea, www.Wordtracker.com (they have a paid and free service) You could also go to Google Adwords and see your search volume on actual words people are using surrounding your product idea. Just go to Google, on the bottom of the page that says "Advertising Programs." (If you have an adwords account already, you can read on!), then click on Google Adwords. Scroll down to "Create your ads" and click on "Get key word ideas." Add as many words as you can and hit "get key word ideas." When you get your results, look at the "global monthly search volume," and you can even sort by this column. This will give you a good idea on how many searches were done with these key words. Plus it will give you many other key words that people search. There's so much more you can do with this, however, I just don't have the space here. And there are also volumes of other great resources on Google adwords that could help you as well.

Something else to keep in mind is that very successful products come from these 3 Super niches:

1) Money in Business

2) Health & Fitness

3) Dating and Relationships

Look for markets that are evergreen; is it a fad that will last? Is this a seasonal market and do I have time to enter it? How much money can be made in these niches? Remember you need a little bit of lead time to create and then sell your product.

Next, do you have a sense of what it costs them NOT to have those problems solved? If not, find out. This can be a key selling point in your favor, you will appeal to this crowd on an emotional level, and you feel their pain and want to help. Do you know what they are willing to spend in order to solve their problem? You can find out by going to the web sites of the current vendors within the space you are pursuing. Check out the products and services they sell, paying special attention to the pricing.

We've just scratched the service on how to go about researching for your product idea. I hope this was helpful. I'll give you some more great stuff on research and product creation next month too! In the mean time, if you have any questions, email me, I'm happy to help!