How Do You Find A New Product Or Service

Number one. Read everything you can find. You\’ve heard the old saying fish where the fish are. If you\’re looking for new products, services, or business opportunities, read the magazines and newspapers and go onto the internet sites where they are offered. Read all the trade magazines in your field and in business in general. Read all the business magazines, newspapers, publications, and even newsletters in your area of interest. Subscribe to everything that you can find. Don\’t be cheap or lazy in this area of market research. Sometimes one idea in one specialty publication in your field of business can save or make you a fortune if you recognize it and act quickly.

For example, one of my businesses came from helping a past client start a successful business after completing my online business growth and marketing training. We started an online academy and made over millions of dollars in businesses I didn’t have any interest started: www.HealthcarePracticeAcademy.com and www.HHLogisticsAcademy.com. I didn’t think about helping others build online academies until a client suggested it. Now, I seek out other ways to build academies in other industries!

Number two. Ways to find a product or service, attend trade shows, fairs and exhibitions in your field in reading newspapers and magazines. You will learn about trade shows being held all over the country in your area of specialization. Currently, there are more than 5000 trade shows per year. The people who attend these trade shows are there to demonstrate the latest breakthroughs and products or services. They seek to make direct sales to professional buyers and find licenses for their products in other markets. You can learn more about what is going on in your industry by walking around the floors of a trade show for a few hours. Then you could if you read and reviewed and ask questions for an entire year.

Number three, read the business press. Look for new product or service ideas featured as news stories. Read Forbes, Fortune, and Businessweek. Read The Wall Street Journal and Investor\’s Business Daily. Read the business and business opportunity sections of your local newspaper. Be prepared to look at many opportunities before you find the right one for you.

“The strategy listed in my number one opened the door for me to think outside the box. I used that same giving more strategy to open up additional streams of income. One of my customers was reviewing one of my websites: www.HealthJourneyPro.com, she asked me did I write the eBooks on this website I said yes. I have researched, studied, read 100’s of books, and written over 250+ eBooks. She asked me if I had considered “ghostwriting” for those seeking to sell eBooks on their website? I said not at that time. I thought about this question for about a week and now I offer these services in my website development and design business. I release all rights to eBooks that allow other business owners to start selling products and services on their website immediately at the launch of their business. They purchase business class website hosting on www.GetOnlineWebHosting.com or in the website design and development agreement an offer of an eBook is part of that marketing strategy”

Number four. Keep your eyes open while you\’re traveling. Many new product or service ideas are never sold outside of their home markets, local or national, or even international. Many people have become wealthy by seeing a product for sale while traveling overseas, inquiring and getting the rights to distribute it exclusively in the U.S. or their market area, and then starting a successful business as a result. Fully 95 percent of products manufactured and sold successfully in foreign countries are never sold overseas. The main reason is that the manufacturers or producers of these products are so busy making their businesses successful at home that they have no time or ability to expand into other markets. Consulates and embassies of many nations include economic divisions. The purpose of each being exclusively to promote trade between the country that it represents and other countries. These economic divisions of the consulates and embassies carry catalogs, brochures, internet information, and other information from manufacturers of products seeking distribution in other countries. You can often find a tremendous product opportunity by simply phoning or going online to contact the foreign services offices of countries like China, Taiwan, Korea, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Britain, and Italy in any company that manufactures and wants to export. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of products that are well-made, attractive, and selling well in their home markets. Often you can get the exclusive rights to distribute these products simply for the asking.

Number five. Study demographic trends in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Peter Drucker says that one of the major sources of new product and service ideas is demographic trends. Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, discovered a new product in this way. His children and grandchildren were continually playing boomboxes around the house, seemingly unable to go anywhere without listening to their loud music. Morita, in a fit of exasperation, began wondering if it was possible to develop a technology that would enable people to listen to their music without disturbing other people around them. He brought this challenge up to his engineers at Sony Corp. As a result; they came up with the Sony Walkman. They took a technology that had developed far enough so that they could produce high-quality music and small earphones connected to radios and other audio players. The Sony Walkman went on to become one of the best and most profitable product launches in history, eventually leading to the Apple iPod of today, which sold 70 million sets in its first three years on the market and generated billions and billions of dollars. Keep your eye open for trends in consumer tastes of all ages and incomes. There are trends in health and fitness that you can capitalize on. There are trends in aging and senior citizen requirements. The Baby Boomers, 78 million strong, the most affluent and educated generation in history, have decided that they want to live forever and to be beautiful and fit at the same time. This is creating unlimited opportunities for people who can provide health and fitness products, vacations and leisure activities, resort and retirement communities, and a variety of other products and services. Could there be an opportunity in these demographic trends for you?

Number six. Look into your own field or skills. Remember the acres of diamond concept? What you are looking for might be right under your feet. It might be within your own knowledge, education experience, within your own interests, or current job. You may have a million-dollar idea staring you right in the face. The most important thing is to get started in some way. Most businesses succeed in unexpected ways, offering products or services different from what they originally anticipated. They often find that a product or service they had brought to market does not work. Still, with some modifications, it develops into a different product or service that works for a different customer. The key is to do your homework, identify a potential product or service market, and launch quickly. As soon as you launch, you\’ll immediately get feedback that will enable you to correct your course, modify your product or service, and make it more acceptable to a larger customer base. Once you have an idea for a product or service, you must determine how much it will cost. You must determine the direct costs of acquiring or producing the product or service. Plus, all indirect costs of marketing, selling, and running the business for that product or service. It comes as a shock to some businesspeople to learn that you can go broke with a 100 percent markup. You can pay $100 for a product that you can quite comfortably resell at $200 and still lose money by the time you\’ve calculated the actual cost of the product and added in the cost. Mark. You’ll often be amazed at how your margin has shrunk by advertising, selling, shipping, delivery, breakage, loss pill, fridge, and product returns. Then you have to calculate the cost of operating an office with staff salaries, rent, utilities, telephones, transportation, travel, postage, computers, and a dozen other factors, all of which are essential to getting the product to the customer satisfactorily.

Once you have a clear idea of your costs and the price that you must charge for it to make sense to go into this business in the first place, you should do a one customer test phone or visit a prospective customer for the product or service you\’re thinking of bringing to the market.

Ask if they would buy it. If so, how much would they pay for it if you could produce it and deliver it for a certain amount? How many would they purchase?

Some people think that they must be secretive about a new product or service. This can, however, often lead to a disaster. A friend of mine was on a business trip to Hong Kong. He went to a toy store to get a gift for his son and found a creepy crawly spider-like toy that when you threw it against the wall with a stick and then walked down the wall just like a spider. He became very excited about this toy. He bought one and then contacted the Taiwanese manufacturer. The Taiwanese manufacturer offered to make him a distributor for the U.S. if he purchased a minimum of 10,000 units at $3 apiece. This was in June. He immediately signed the agreement, borrowed and scraped together $30,000, and ordered 10,000 units without telling anyone. His goal was to seek delivery by August or September and then sell them in large quantities to department stores, toy stores, and other outlets for the Christmas season. As soon as he took delivery and had 10,000 units in storage, he phoned the buyer for a large department store chain and told them they had a fantastic new toy product that would sell like hotcakes at Christmas time. The buyer invited him to come in and demonstrate the product when he arrived. Full of excitement. He took the toy out of his briefcase and threw it against the wall, where it promptly walked down the wall exactly as it was supposed to. What do you think of that? He asked. The Myer said, Hey, it looks fantastic. We could sell thousands of those during the Christmas season, but as it happens, the buyer said, we’re already carrying that product. We have purchased them in quantity from a Taiwanese manufacturer for fifty-nine dollars each. How much are you asking for yours? It turned out that the Taiwanese manufacturer had arranged distribution rights for numerous companies throughout the U.S. and Canada, each of which were purchasing 100,000 or more and getting rock bottom prices. My friend was both shocked and dismayed. He had estimated that the product could be sold for 495 each. But the department stores were planning to sell them for 299 exactly his cost price. Needless to say, he lost most of his money. The mistake that he had made was not testing the market thoroughly in advance by going to a potential buyer and getting an immediate opinion. Some people say, Well if I tell someone else about my idea, they\’ll steal it. Don\’t worry. This seldom happens. Most people in business are so overwhelmed with their day-to-day responsibilities that they have no time or interest in someone else\’s ideas.

They\’re working full time just to be successful with their current products and services. Now, before launching your product or service or any new business venture, you must spend considerable time in research. The payoff will be more than 10 to one in the time saved, and the money saved is earned.