Be Guided by the Facts
Posted On: 2012-08-18
I just knew that today wasn't going to turn out well right from the time I stumbled into my office at home early this morning. My computer that I had put to sleep was awake and all those tabs that I had left open last night so I could jump straight back into them this morning were closed.
Yep ... good old Microsoft had come through in the night and done a bunch of updates .
Then there was the email from a client who wondered why no one was clicking on the Adsense campaign we were running for him and wondered if we knew what we were doing. He didn't seem to realise that he had niched himself to the max and the number of people in a year in the local area who wanted what he was selling could probably be counted on the fingers of two very deformed hands.
Although he had sounded very confident when he first came to see us I don't think that he had stopped to do any real research into the potential demand for his very narrowly focused product before he jumped in and had us start doing Adwords for him. Sure, across the country there was a reasonable number of searches done for this product each year according to Google but maybe not so much in the local area.
So how much research do you do into an adult product ... be it tangible or intangible ... before you start promoting it?
Do you actually do any research or do you just jump in and start pushing a particular because everyone else seems to be doing it?
These days it's more important than ever to know exactly what the challenges are going to be if you're thinking about trying something new. You need to know what the competition is like ... whether there really is a market for that particular product ... what the best way to get people to your website might be ... and a whole host of other things too. Any one of those things can either make or break you.
Back when bisexual sites first began to appear I wanted to be out there leading the charge and I had a marketing plan that was built around a free listing on The Hun and paid listings on Sleazy Dream's TGPs.
Everything went like a dream with The Hun but my marketing plan almost came unstuck when the people managing Sleazy Dream's sites decided that bisex was actually just another form of gay sex and that was not something that Sleazy's TGPs covered.
Fortunately, after a little negotiation my galleries were run and proved to be quite successful but if they hadn't I would not have made as much money as I did and that taught me a lesson.
I had presumed that everyone would understand the difference between bisex and gay sex ... but they didn't. The client I mentioned earlier has presumed that because everyone has one of what he's selling then there must be a steady demand for replacements ... but it seems that there isn't and that's put him in a difficult situation.
So before you commit your time efforts to producing something that you think will sell like hot cakes spend some time looking at what others are doing. The fact that there are a lot of people already out there selling what you want to sell is not an indication that you should jump into that marketplace too.
At the same time the fact that no one is out there selling what you want to sell is not an indicator that you should jump right in and push a new product.
Sure, at first glance both those indicators might seem to be signs that you should be there too but don't rush in. The fact that lots of people are selling the product you want to sell may be an indicator that it sells like hot cakes but it might also be an indicator that the marketplace is saturated and you're not going to make a cent.
The fact that no one is selling what you want to sell may be an indicator that it's a completely untapped market where you will make a fortune ... but it could also be an indicator that there is absolutely no demand for it.
All too often we limit our research to what we think is right ... we don't take the time to look around and see what is the real situation. We see the world through our own eyes and think that everyone else is seeing the world in the same way ... they're not!
Do some real research before you waste your time and money on a fantasy.