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There’s a relatively easy way to make your marketing drastically easier and significantly increase sales (and hence profits). Unfortunately, the *majority* of businesses completely overlook a critical element of sales and their businesses suffer for it.

What is this critical piece of business wisdom and marketing prowess? It’s probably more obvious than you realize.

Sell what your market *wants* most.

That’s it. Are you let down? Seem to easy? Well then why do so many people get this wrong?

Here’s how most businesses go about product development and sales. Someone gets a great idea. Their positive it’s what people want. They fall in love with it. It the best things since sliced yak meat. They build it. Then they go try to find a market to sell it to. Maybe they succeed. Often they fail.

The problem is that this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they should do.

The surefire to creating a product that sells is to…

Find a carefully targeted, starving market. Determine what they
desire most. Give it to them better than anyone else can.

Let’s break this seemingly simple process down.

Find a Carefully Target Market

Know who it is you are trying to reach. Know what makes them tick. This is easiest if you’re a member of the target market yourself. Make sure the market is large enough and has money to spend. At the same time, the more carefully niched your market is, the easier it is to stand out and be THE go-to-guy (or gal) for your market.

Find a Starving Market

Make sure your market has a hungry passion, burning need or insatiable appetite for something you can provide. For example, golfers will settle at nothing to remove one stroke from their score. If you have acne that embarrasses you, you’ll pay good money to have it solved NOW. Make sure they have money they are willing to spend to scratch their itch.

Disgruntled employees get to the point that they will do anything to quit their job and find something else to fulfill their lives and reach their dreams. (This begs the question: what do GRUNTLED employees want?)

Determine What They Desire Most

Attract the market. Communicate with the market. Develop a relationship with them. Ask them what they want most. Don’t assume what they want and certainly don’t make the mistake of guessing or assuming what you think they need. You’ll more than likely miss the mark enough to cost you considerable money.

Keep in mind that what they *want* and what they *need* could be two different things. It’s much easier to sell someone what they want.

For example, don’t assume that your spouse needs a treadmill for their birthday when what they really want is flowers or a golf club…doh!

Give Them What They Want

If you communicate with your market, you’ll learn a lot. Survey them. Visit forums. Observe what problems and questions are raised the most. What is it they want but are not getting? The better your relationship is with the market, the easier it will be to get meaningful feedback. The ideal people to ask are your own prospects/customer/community.

This is how I chose the topic for my book. When I surveyed the podcasting landscape, the number one desire of podcasters (whether they were beginner, advanced, indie or professional) was that they wanted more listeners. Hence I wrote the book, Promoting Your Podcast.

Give it To Them Better Than Anyone Else Does

Your market may have multiple options for getting what they want. This is why it’s important to have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Answer the question: why should they get what they want from you over every other option available to them? Here’s a hint. If your reason is “because I’m cheaper” than time to get back on the thinking yak and come up with a new USP.

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Now it’s time to “practice what we preach” and “teach by example.” Yeah. I know. We’re cool like that.

We’re continually working on new products and services to help you launch an internet business and online presence that will:

• Bring you more freedom and fulfillment in life
• Make you a recognized expert (or even celebrity) in your field
• Create new revenue streams and increase your income by 100+%
• Make sales, marketing and lead generation easy (and even fun)
• Build a large community of loyal fans around your brand

We plan to launch a number of new things throughout the rest of 2008.

BUT FIRST, we need your input. This will help us continue to develop products and services that will best serve your needs…er…wants.

Please take a moment to fill out the following survey. It consists of one short page.

There are two reasons why you should take this survey.

1. To have your voice heard and ensure you get what you want from Internet Business Mastery
2. To flat out steal from us and save yourself the time and energy of coming up with a survey for your own market. Just look at what we’ve done and adapt it to your own market.

No worries…we won’t take it personally if you swipe from us. Actually, we might take it personally if you don’t.

We greatly appreciate your feedback. It will directly impact he creation of valuable new products/services for you.

Now, what say you on this matter? What have I missed? If nothing else, can you please offer me a definition for the word gruntled? Let’s hear it in the comments below. (BTW, a new episode of the podcast is coming next week. Promise.)

Here’s the link again for the survey

This post is in: Creating Information Products