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Coming Up With Product Ideas

Do you have trouble coming up with good product ideas?

That’s a complaint I hear sometimes from clients, but it’s often simply because they’re being too hard on the ideas they have.

You already have a lot of potential product ideas. It’s likely you’re simply “deleting them” before giving them a shot. Instead you simply need to sit down and make a list of all the possible ideas you have.

The first step I start with is making a list of all your current skills. What are you good at? What do you have job experience in? What have you accomplished in life? What do others rely on you for?

You don’t have to know more than everyone on the subject. You simply need to know more than 90% of the population about the subject. What if you’re just creating a “beginner” info product on the subject (if you’ve been doing anything for a while you likely know much more than the brand new beginners)?

Don’t stop there. It’s often easier to start with something you have an expertise in, but you don’t have to be an expert. You simply have to have a desire to learn more. Remember over the past week I’ve covered how you can get started with your first information product simply by interviewing other experts.

What if you still don’t have any ideas? Take a trip down to the library or a local bookstore. Go through the best selling non-fiction books. Then go through the magazine sections. What all topics are coming up. What are the titles? What about the titles of articles in the magazines? There are an abundance of ideas to come up with for your new products.

When Glenn & Sharon Livingston, Fred Gleeck, Mr. D., and I did our Infoprofits Truthprints recording, we spent over an hour on how to come up with product ideas (and how to check them for possible profit potential).

When we created this product, one of the bonuses was a series of blueprints I put together to go with each section.

Here is a PDF for the Product Idea Blueprint/Truthprint (right click and choose save target as to download it to your computer)…

You’ll notice on this blueprint that I mention how we did a “paradoxical exercise” to come up with more product ideas.

It’s a simple exercise. We just spent a few minutes coming up with product ideas that WOULDN’T work. In other words, we came up with all kinds of products that we knew there was NO WAY we could possibly sell them in a million years online.

While the exercise was simple, it wasn’t that easy for a couple of us. No matter what the idea was, it seemed one of us could come up with someway to sell either that product idea OR something very similar to it. A lot of times it was simply from changing the angle or the target market for the product.

The next step in an exercise like this is to turn the ideas around into good ideas. We were doing it naturally from having so much experience online.

If you’re still stuck for ideas, go through this exercise.

If you’ve followed all ten of the steps for coming up with ideas, you should have at least a full page of possible ideas now. The next steps are to go through and pick ones that have already proven to be successful online.

I have no desire to be a trailblazer or a pioneer. I’m not looking for challenging markets. I’m looking for a market others have already proven to be successful in selling to. Go through the next 6 steps on the blueprint to determine if others are selling successfully to that market, and if they are a natural fit for follow-up products (in other words my goal for choosing any market is to make sure from the beginning I can sell multiple products to the same group of customers).

Check out some of the other blueprint sheets included with the full Infoprofit Truthprints course:

* Secrets to the Million Dollar Mindset
* Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up Your First Adwords Campaign
* Adwords Optimization for Advanced Users
* How to Achieve a Top Quality Score In Any Market
* Running a Profitable Content Network Campaign
* Research Your Market
* Finding Your Prospect’s Emotional Marketing Compass
* Copywriting Preparation Guide
* How to Write Winning Web Copy
* Using the Right Tools and Team Members
* Free Traffic Explosion
* Create Your Profitable Product Funnel
* Beginner’s Guide to Professional Speaking Success

Written by Terry · Filed Under All 

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Comments

7 Responses to “Coming Up With Product Ideas”

  1. 100 Visitors/Day In 2 Months on March 9th, 2009 2:01 pm

    Thanks for the informative article Terry.

    The tip on coming up with product ideas that would not work is great. It’s not common but I think it’ll work. I’ll try it the next time I create new products.

    Sometimes you can also find new product ideas just by simply paying more attention to your surroundings. Be sure to write them down somewhere so that you don’t forget the ideas.

    Thanks also for the leaked pdf.

    Leanie Belle

  2. semmy @ minisite Design Service on March 9th, 2009 10:43 pm

    I really like Terry product, especially this one. Why? Because of Terry give step by step system how to create it, brainstorm it and how to promote it. Together with his partners give some excellence information!

    I think Terry out of his mind, because he sold only for $97. I don’t know what he is thinking. LOL I think he always want to give a value to his customers.

    Cheers

    Semmy

  3. Richard on March 15th, 2009 8:12 am

    I just got a great new product idea from the Blueprints series. I can’t imagine investing $100 any better than this. Again you prove yourself to be the honest info marketing success guru and what a great niche for you.

    What do you think of this services product idea — a service using tech-savvy home workers for a little more than the going rate for “assistants”. By tech-savvy, I don’t mean MS Office skills, etc. but rather those skills plus knowledge of PPC, SEO, blogging, backlink building and copywriting and that is available on weekends?

    What do you think?

  4. William Bakhos on March 17th, 2009 4:59 pm

    Great post Terry. I have downloaded the Blueprint and will post a link to this on my Blog as I believe the concepts are valuable.

    Can I make a suggestion? I would stay away from Advertising based revenue streams as being a primary source of income. This is a big mistakes that many businesses make as they believe it is easy money. Look at Facebook and Myspace, for all their size, they are struggling to make money because they have based their business model on Advertising.

    The key is to find and build something extraordinary which will appeal to a select few who will then spread the word and do the marketing for you. This is both sustainable and profitable.

    William Bakhos

  5. Richard on March 17th, 2009 5:03 pm

    After adjust for info from Blueprints, I’m up to 3-4% on search results for PPC on important keywords and about 1% on content. Does anyone have metrics for this? Is this good? I don’t have conversions yet, so I can’t measure that.

    Richard
    Christian Technology Evangelist

  6. Greg Pawlik on March 19th, 2009 5:04 am

    Thanks for the awesome tips!

    May I add one more: Ask your spouse (or friends, etc.).

    Not a long time ago I was sitting in bed and taping on my laptop – brainstorming ideas for a product. My wife noticed my frustration and almost through her sleep she said: “How about….?” And that was it!

    Just wanted to share it with everyone.

  7. Dustin @ Beating the Grind on March 25th, 2009 4:35 pm

    Terry -

    Great article with a very unique angle of ideas. You are right on the money – ideas aren’t the problem as much as lack of consistency and follow through is. Ideas will be sharpened and developed by spending time working with them.

    Thanks for an article that has something unique to say!

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