In This Issue:

From Timothy A. Gross, President - Internet Profit Systems

Before we get started: I received an email from a subscriber last week that made my day. He'd emailed about a year ago, describing himself as "severely disabled" and unemployed. Based on how he described his skills and past work experience, I gave him some very general suggestions, a little encouragement, and wished him well.

Fast-Forward to last week, when I received the following email:

Wow! Fantastic. ;-) But listen, I didn't come up with some "genius plan" to help this gentleman, I just offered a little encouragement and practical advice. I never would have imagined he would take the time to email me a "thank you" after he'd turned his life around, and frankly, there's not much to thank me for.

- But it really hit home with me the power that *each one of us has* in our daily communications and interactions with one another. A kind word, a friendly smile (even a goofy computer one ;-) ...Can have an impact on others that we'll usually never know, and with the increased tension most people are feeling these days due to current events and increased insecurities, keep this in mind:

We don't always have to go the extra "mile" to make the world a better place; If we all just go an extra INCH, it could help more than you'd ever imagine. (friendly smile)

OKAY, LET'S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

I received ANOTHER email last week from a subscriber that made me nervous. The initial email to me basically said:

My initial thought: Uh-oh, this person may be in trouble. He's already committing to printing thousands of books, and my suggestions and questions may be too late...

These are my questions when I'm discussing someone's plans for a new product that will be costly, both in time and money. Did they:

Since I knew this person was moments away from sending his new book to be printed, I cut to the chase, and asked him about one thing he might still have an option to change, which is crucial: "What is the name of the book?"

(More on the importance of the title in a minute.)

Now, I'm not going to tell you the subject matter of the book I'm talking about, and it really doesn't matter. For hypothetical examples, let's say the book is on dieting and losing weight.

Book On Dieting - An Automatic Best-Seller?

It's true that the diet industry is enormous, however it's also true that there is fantastic competition for "diet dollars". To think that you can write a "not bad" book on dieting and make a fortune with a "not bad" ad for it is simply incorrect. How would we put this diet example through the checklist I made earlier?

Step 1: Make Sure There's A Hungry Market

- Yes, there IS a "hungry" market for diet books (no pun intended). So it's a question of how to tap into that preexisting market.

Step 2: Check competitors' product offers, price points, method of sale, successfulness

- You're up against Richard Simmons, Jenny Craig, the "Zone Diet", and a wide variety of other top-dog competitors. You're also up against other direct competitors on the internet. Research the websites. Work at understanding the sales process they're using. What can YOU offer to differentiate yourself from the rest to maximize sales of your soon to be released product?

Step 3: Test at least 5 - 7 different titles/headlines to your
book (or whatever product you may be developing)

- The title of your book can make or break its sales! If it's on a shelf in a bookstore, the title on the spine is its sole "classified ad" to get someone to pull it off the shelf. I'm sure you've heard that the headline is the most crucial part of an advertisement... Well a book's title is the headline for the book. Its importance CANNOT be underestimated.

Let's say we test the following titles for this hypothetical weight-loss example:

"Weight-Loss Drill Sergeant In A Box" - Turn Your Life Around In 45 Days Starting Tomorrow With Your In-Home Diet Bootcamp. Take The Challenge!"

"The Busy Mom's Sure-Fire Gain Energy & Lose Weight Rocket-boost Program"

"How I BECAME The Other Woman - My Friends And I Used To Be Jealous Of All Those Slim Sally's That Turned Our Husband's Eyes... Now My Friends Are Jealous Of ME!"

"I Finally Lost Weight After 19 Failed Diets - And You Can Too With This No-Fail System!"

"Supermodels Make Me Puke... But Unlike Them, I Don't Want To! The Get-Fit-For-Life 57 Day Action Guide To REAL Results For REAL People!"

Now: Can you GUARANTEE me which of those headlines will out-pull the others? You can take a guess, but you'll never know without testing it on YOUR potential customers.

Are your potential customers ex-marines? Then the drill sergeant ad might be best. Are your potential customers mostly overworked, frustrated moms who don't have as much time to spend looking their best as they'd like? Do they watch a lot of TV? Do they want to make their friends jealous?

You'll never know - Unless you test.

The Difference Between "Selling On The Internet"
And "Internet Marketing"

That's where the term "marketing" comes in. If you're "selling" on the internet, you're just "trying to get a bunch of people to buy your stuff". If you're an "internet marketer", you're in one of two groups:

a) You already have a group of subscribers and potential customers who you're in contact with.

b) You're just starting out and have no pre-defined target audience.

How To Find Out What Your
Customers Want From You

If you already have a large group of subscribers who are interested in health/fitness/weight loss, ASK THEM what they want from you.

Email your subscribers, and direct them to your website, where the five headlines you've created are active links. Tell them that you're giving them the first chapter or two of your new book free as a "thank you" for being subscribers, and give them an option to click on any of those five links to read the report.

Once they've clicked on one, on the next page ask them not to click on any of the other links, and explain that each link went to the same information, you were just testing which headline appealed to them the most to find out what appealed to them the most, then give them the information you promised.

ALTERNATIVE TEST

An alternative to that is to have an "exit pop-up" page that offers a free first chapter incentive with the same five links. I've also used this test with excellent results. When a visitor leaves your website, have a popup box come up that says:

Whichever way you choose to test, you of course need to put a counter on each linked page, to gauge the difference in clickthroughs. The results you get should dictate the title of your book! (Or name of your product)

If You're Just Starting Out
And Have No Target Audience

If you don't already have a customer or subscriber base to "tap into" when creating new products, you have more freedom. The question becomes not "What do my customers and subscribers want", but "Where can I find the best-defined, quantifiable amount of qualified prospects for my potential product?"

It's not enough that your potential prospects are "out there", you have to be able to get the attention of qualified prospects at an affordable price. In other words, it's time for more research.

NOTE: How to do complete market research on the Internet is beyond the scope of this article. Part of what you need to determine is where your potential customers "hang out" online, and the viability of being able to reach them with your sales message at an affordable cost, whether it's through paid advertising on specific targeted websites, joint ventures/co-ops with other business owners who may be willing to endorse your product for a percentage of the profits, effective search engine listings, etc.

Hot Tip On "Niche Marketing" Possibilities

Here's A Hot Tip: By trying to be "everything to everybody", you often don't get anyone's attention. In other words, the headline, "How ANYONE Can Lose Weight GUARANTEED" doesn't really make people think, "Who, me?" (More likely than not, it elicits the response, "Yeah, right.)

But by focusing on "niche markets" within a specific industry, while you're on one hand limiting the number of potential buyers, you're at the same time increasing the interest of buyers within that group. And the "hot tip" is that you can target several niches simultaneously.

In other words, say you have a weight-loss book that's written to help "everyone" lose weight. Instead of trying to sell that one book to everyone, with a little modification you could create different versions:

* The New Mother's Guide To Dropping Those Pregnancy Pounds In 6 Weeks Or Less

* The Over-Fifty Metabolism Program To Burn Away Unwanted Pounds And Feel Thirty Again

* The Teenager's Guide To Popularity Through Better Self-Image Through Dieting

Each one of those titles speaks more directly to a specifically targeted reader.

Step 5: Develop a winning sales letter/process
IN ADVANCE of the printing

Marketers don't try to figure out how to sell something to their audience, they figure out what their target markets want to buy. I would never print up thousands of books before I'd already written, tested, and proven the winning ad with which I would sell them!

How do you test a product you haven't even finished yet?

Option a) Sell a "prototype" or rough draft of your product at first. (If it's an informational product, have it printed at Kinko's, burn it onto a CD-Rom, or make it a downloadable product.)

Option b) Create and put out your sales letter first before you've even created your product, and fulfill on the orders you receive with one of your competitor's products during your initial test. That's right - Buy a comparable competing product to the one you plan on creating, and sell IT instead of your future product to whoever purchases from your test ad. If there's no single book/product similar to yours to meet the promises of your sales letter, then you may have to buy two or more books/products to fulfill on each order received.

You shouldn't worry about the cost of fulfilling orders on these initial test sales, even if you're losing money. I once did a test for a sales letter I'd written for a product I hadn't spent one minute starting to develop, and I ran an ad with a selling price of $25 that I had to spend $45 to buy a competitor's product to fulfill on every $25 I received during the test.

It was a small price to pay... I learned priceless information about response to my sales letter, response to the classified ads I posted, and the viability of the product overall - Before I'd spent even one minute actually creating the product.

I could go on and on about the subject of product development; It involves some of the most crucial decisions a business makes, but it's too-often made on a whim or an assumption that may not even be correct. With the scientific testing tools and methods at our disposal on the internet as astute marketers, that's just crazy.

In conclusion, I wish the person who sparked this article in the first place the best of luck with their new product... I wrote this to try and help you take the luck OUT of your product development.

We all have a lot to feel lucky about, but lets not make our BUSINESS depend on luck (smile). How depressing to test titles of your book AFTER you've printed thousands of copies and find out that an alternative one out-pulled yours by 400%. "Marketing" can be as easy or as hard as you make it.

I hope this newsletter edition helps to make *your* job a little easier.

To Your Success, Tim Gross