How To Make A Ton Of Money

From Noami at IttyBiz.com:

There’s a lot of talk these days about creating the business, product, or service of your heart. Kind of like business as self-actualization tool. We’re all supposed to create the thing that would bring us transendental bliss to make. Create soulful stuff, they say, and people will come.

Yes. Fair enough. If you create exactly what makes your heart sing and publicize it adequately, your odds are good that eventually, somebody will show up and buy your sh*t.

Alternatively, you could look at the people you have now and solve a problem they already have.

You see this a lot in, weirdly enough, craft businesses and techie types.

Read the entire article at:
http://ittybiz.com/selling-what-people-want-to-buy/

I heard about a friend of a friend recently who had a bunch of ideas for businesses to start. All of the ideas were bunk. (Yes, bunk. I said it.) It seemed that all of the ideas were about what they wanted to do and had no relationship with what anyone else, their customers, might want. They wanted to sell where there was no market. They wanted to produce a product that no one wanted.

“It’s great that you want to sell this thing, but you realize that no one will pay you any money for it, right?”

I was talking with another friend recently who had one idea for a business they were starting. It met a specific need for a large market. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t “fulfilling”. It did save a lot of money for the clients and could possibly make him a lot of money. There was the possibility of a million dollar deal in the works.

“Do what you love and the money will follow” has been going around for years. There is some truth to that. There’s a lot more truth to “Find a problem and solve it.”

Marketing, at it’s core, is about what your customer needs and meeting that need.

Forget about yourself. No one cares what you want. It’s not about you.

The craft people she mentions love doing their crafts. They add features and make products that they love to make. It makes them happy. If you want to be happy, make the nice things that you love. If you want to make money, make the nice things that other people love.

I’m a techie type, so I know what she’s talking about with us. We love to add cool features because of the cool technical challenges. We think that everyone else is as interested in AJAX and PHP and databases as we are. They aren’t. No one cares that the database is UTF8_Unicode compatible. They just want it to work. “But, dude! This is 64 bit!”

I once read a study that asked people what they most valued in supermarkets. I figured the number one issue was price. I’m always looking for the cheapest price on stuff. I was wrong. The top priority for stores where people buy their food is “cleanliness”. Woah, I guess that’s right. Me too. I didn’t think of that. What aren’t you thinking of? What aspect of your service or product do people care the most about, but you didn’t think of?

Think about who you are selling to. It’s time for a little market research. Ask. Watch. Listen.

Here’s a practical way to find out what people want, by looking at what people search for on the Internet.

Click here: adwords.google.com

What is your client’s greatest problem? How can you solve it for them? You may think this is a simple question, or that you’ve heard it before, but if you don’t have an answer, then you don’t have a successful business.

Find a problem and solve it. If you do that, you’ll make a ton of money.

What problem have you solved? Tell us in the comments.