In Part 1 (here) we discussed a somewhat sneaky but effective tactic to find out what your potential niche market wants. (I’ll call this their “problem list”). Now we’re about ready to create a product!

Incidentally, many people get this order wrong. First, they create the product, then they push it onto the market and hope they buy it. However, there’s always a risk that your market may not want your product.

However, if you find a buying market, ask them what they want, and then create a product based on those things, it’s much harder not to make money!

Now, when you have your “problem list”, there’s two different approaches you could take:

The narrow approach - this is where your information product goes into extensive detail about one particular problem faced by your market. For example, I’m sure there are lots of problems that budding musicians face, but the Pure Pitch product I recently wrote about that sold for $25,000 solely tackled the more specific problem of “pitch recognition” for musicians.

The broad approach: This is where your information product becomes kind of a “reference manual” on a particular subject - such as a How To guide for new musicians, or digital photographers. In it, you tackle all or most of the problems faced by your market.

So which is better? In the case of the Pure Pitch product, I think it sold well because, even though it had a narrow focus (i.e. “pitch recognition”), it had a broad market - basically, all musicians. So there was plenty of scope for advertising it, above and beyond the search engines.

So to answer the question of which is better, I would reverse it and ask, How big is the market?

There’s lots of different ways products can be marketed: search engine optimization (SEO) (where your pages appear on, say Google, for specific keywords), pay-per-click advertising (where you pay per visitor), through affiliates (where you pay others a commission to sell it for you), and advertising on other people’s sites, blogs and in their newsletters. (There are others, but don’t worry about them for now.)

Now, here’s an important understanding…

The narrowness of your niche and market will ultimately determine how much money you’re able to make for that product.

If you have a very narrow niche and market, then there may not be many magazines, blogs and newsletters in which to advertise, and there may not be many people wanting to promote your product as an affiliate. So you might be dependent on pay-per-click advertising on search engines. In this case, you’d need to find out if the cost of advertising specific keywords is cost effective or not. (I’ll write a more detailed post on how to do this another time.)

Personally, I like the idea of being able to sell more and more of my products as I advertise more, and I don’t like being dependent on search engines, which is why I prefer to create products with a broader market in mind.

So how do you go about making an information product? I’ll talk about that next, so make sure you’re subscribed to this blog.