Direct Mail Order Business – Your Product

This is the fifth in a series of articles to do with Direct Sales and Marketing for the month of February. So let’s learn more about choosing your product……..

Product selection is very basic, and thus the most important first step. Stop and think – look around yourself – and listen to what the people are most clamouring for. You will find that the least expensive way to produce your product and fulfill orders to make a high profit is to put together and sell information. To do this, first test the market potential with photocopies of the report or booklet. Or, if you haven’t written your own book or report you may be able to revive an out-of-print publication by someone else.

In this day and age, much of the noise in the air has to do with: How can I find a job…. How can I put together a resume that will get me a job when I spot an opening…. Where are the jobs… If I can’t get a job, perhaps I can start my own business. But how do I do that?…… With these thoughts in mind, the person who writes, publishes, and gets an instructional manual or even a newsletter that is relative to these questions to the people, will sell as many as they can produce.

So, step one is to ‘listen’ to what the people are wanting, and then to satisfy those wants. You do this by spending some time researching the subject. Research on the internet, visit your local public library, interview a number of people involved who have succeeded in satisfying their wants, conduct a few ‘dry runs’ for personal experience and then write your manual.

As an example, if you were to stage seminars for the unemployed in your area, to help them to find and land jobs, you would undoubtedly make a fortune very quickly. But you would be committed to a certain expenditure of time every time you prepared for, and staged, a seminar. Thus you would be making a lot of money for yourself, but at the same time, you’d sustain a loss of time to enjoy your wealth doing the things you always wanted to do, once you became well off. The only way around this would be to train and hire other people to prepare for, and stage, the seminars which would mean you would then be dividing your profits.

At the bottom-line then, the only way is to write something that can be duplicated as often as necessary, and sold virtually forever. Look at it this way – you spend a few months organising your material and writing a decent sized training manual that if the customer wants a hard-copy costs you four to five dollars to produce in quantity, and if they are happy with a pdf version of your book, then it costs nothing to produce. You sell it for around $30 – $50 per copy, and over a period of three years, you sell 30,000 copies. Taking into account the cost to produce the printed product, you will earn between $900,000 – $1,350,000 profit for around six month’s work!! So, writing something that the people want is the only way to go.

But, be careful. Make sure you have done your homework and that what you write about is what the majority of the people will stand in line to buy. Listen to what the people want, and then give it to them. This is the product selection part of your market research. By listening to the cries for help, and catering to them, you will not only have discovered the proper product, you will have also identified your buyers. Don’t try to interest the people in something that does not specifically fulfill one of their needs or wants. Don’t mistake a casual interest or complaint as the voice of the masses. Spend some time listening, and then write what the people want.

If you want to distribute a product, contact several manufacturers that can make the merchandise and get competitive quotations. Investigate ways to make the product with less expensive materials without losing quality. Check the reputation of the firm. Is their merchandise known for quality? How soon can they deliver the goods once you have ordered?

For the first few months of testing, you may have to pay higher prices for small quantities of the merchandise – do not invest in large quantities until you are sure there is a demand. Try working ‘on consignment’. You work with someone else’s product that is perhaps sold elsewhere. You try the item and make the sales. You get a percentage and the other people get a percentage. Then you work out a viable business relationship.

Please read more in the following article……..