The key to success is to start with a group of people who are proven buyers of what you want to sell (the market), not with the product. If you make sure there is a "starving crowd" of people wanting to buy a certain category of information, then you know there’s a market for it BEFORE you create the product.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

1. FIND A HOT MARKET - METHOD # 1:

Go to a store that has hundreds of magazines and look for niche magazines that have direct response ads in them (direct response means they are asking for an order). Then look to see if the ads are good or not. If all the ads are good, that means it’s a hot market but also that a lot of savvy marketers are already in it.

Not good. We want an easier way.

So, keep looking and find magazines with direct response ads that suck. Then look at a year’s worth of back issues to see if their ads continually run. If they do, you have a winner. If any ad is run in many issues that means it’s working. If you find bad ads getting run over and over, that’s a great opportunity to do a good ad and take over the market

So how do you know if an ad is good or not? If you have no experience in direct marketing, you want to look for ads with a good headline that catches your attention and then a long letter format with a lot of copy. The copy should have subheads and flow easily from one paragraph to the next. Lastly, there should be an easy way to order and a compelling reason to act now, not later.

2. FIND A HOT MARKET - METHOD # 2:

Go to a major city library and get a copy of Standard Rate & Data’s "Direct Mail List Source". This book has something like 50,000 different direct mail lists. This means lists where people have bought something by mail. The info on each list tells you what they are selling, how many customers they have and what the average order is. Pretty handy.

From the information given on each list, take the number of customers for the last 30 or 90 days ("hot line" customers), multiply that number by the average order size and then multiply that number to get annualized sales.

This tells you how much sales the list you are looking at did in the last year. Do this for each list and you’ll know how big the total market is.

Look in categories that interest you and see how many lists there are of people buying things in that market. If, like with golf, there are 100s of lists of buyers of golf products or info - you know it’s a hot market. You can rent all these lists for your own mailing.

3. DECIDE ON A THEME

for your information product. From looking at your market, what do you think people might want to know that is not readily available?

4. GO TO THE LIBRARY

Yes, the library. You are going to find and quickly read every book in the library on your topic. Here’s how. For example, say you are looking at golf and want to create a report on how to hit a longer drive. Look at the table of contents in each book and the index in the back for anything in the book about hitting a drive further. Ignore everything else. Then, copy or take notes on everything you find.

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