eral. You need to be specific. Do you want to target readers and collectors of cookery books, football books, first editions of Agatha Christy?

You need to narrow your target market so you can focus your energies on becoming an expert. The advantage of this is that although your market is now smaller, it is more highly targeted.

This means your conversion rate, the number of people who buy as a percentage of total people who see your ad or sales letter, is much, much higher. If you do a mail shot for an ebook about Agatha Christy to a list of people who love books, your conversion may be 0.5% (1/2%). If you do a mail shot to people who love Ag

Hello again

Today we want to talk about your market. Your choice for this part of your business is crucial to getting it off the ground and making big money for you. :-) Indeed, if you don’t get this right, your business simply won’t succeed.

Your market
You need to think long and hard about your target market. This decision won’t come quickly or easily, but you must take all the time you need to get it right. I can’t emphasize this enough.

Grab your A4 pad and a pencil. Sit down in a quiet corner. Don’t get up until you are perfectly clear about who you are selling to. Forget about the ‘what’ until you have figured out the ‘who’ (this is where most people get it seriously wrong). Don’t create a product then go looking for a market, it simply won’t work (well, it will work, but it will take you years of effort and millions of pounds until you are in profit).

The gurus – the old pros in this business – said it all long ago. ‘Find a crowd of people with lots of money and fall down in front of them.’ ‘Find a large and easy-to-reach target market.’ ‘Find out where the market is and go there.’ ‘Find a hungry audience and give them what they want.’

Everybody who makes it big in this business does it this way.

Before we go any further, it might be useful to think a bit about what we mean by ‘direct marketing’.

There are two ways to sell things, through mass marketing and through direct marketing. Mass marketing is the kind of marketing you see on the telly, in newspapers and on posters along city streets. It is called mass marketing because it is directed at ‘the masses’, at everybody who happened to be watching or reading.

Direct marketing, on the other hand, is ‘targeted’. When you get a letter through your letterbox telling you to buy some homeowner's insurance or some double-glazing, you are being targeted as a homeowner. The classified ad in the back of your woodworking magazine advertising a new and improved wood chisel is targeted at you, a woodworker.

There are all sorts of advantages with direct marketing. We shall discuss these in more detail in later articles when we talk about fine-tuning your business to increase sales and profits.

It’s important to be very specific about your market. Let’s look at an example. Suppose you are interested in books – you eat books, you sleep books, you dream books – you love books. Now, it would be easy to decide that your market is everybody who loves books as much as you do.

But this won’t do – ‘everybody who loves books’ is simply too vague, too broad, too general. You need to be specific. Do you want to target readers and collectors of cookery books, football books, first editions of Agatha Christy?

You need to narrow your target market so you can focus your energies on becoming an expert. The advantage of this is that although your market is now smaller, it is more highly targeted.

This means your conversion rate, the number of people who buy as a percentage of total people who see your ad or sales letter, is much, much higher. If you do a mail shot for an ebook about Agatha Christy to a list of people who love books, your conversion may be 0.5% (1/2%). If you do a mail shot to people who love Ag

ured out the ‘who’ (this is where most people get it seriously wrong). Don’t create a product then go looking for a market, it simply won’t work (well, it will work, but it will take you years of effort and millions of pounds until you are in profit).

The gurus – the old pros in this business – said it all long ago. ‘Find a crowd of people with lots of money and fall down in front of them.’ ‘Find a large and easy-to-reach target market.’ ‘Find out where the market is and go there.’ ‘Find a hungry audience and give them what they want.’

Everybody who makes it big in this business does it this way.

Before we go any further, it might be useful to think a bit about what we mean by ‘direct marketing’.

There are two ways to sell things, through mass marketing and through direct marketing. Mass marketing is the kind of marketing you see on the telly, in newspapers and on posters along city streets. It is called mass marketing because it is directed at ‘the masses’, at everybody who happened to be watching or reading.

Direct marketing, on the other hand, is ‘targeted’. When you get a letter through your letterbox telling you to buy some homeowner's insurance or some double-glazing, you are being targeted as a homeowner. The classified ad in the back of your woodworking magazine advertising a new and improved wood chisel is targeted at you, a woodworker.

There are all sorts of advantages with direct marketing. We shall discuss these in more detail in later articles when we talk about fine-tuning your business to increase sales and profits.

It’s important to be very specific about your market. Let’s look at an example. Suppose you are interested in books – you eat books, you sleep books, you dream books – you love books. Now, it would be easy to decide that your market is everybody who loves books as much as you do.

But this won’t do – ‘everybody who loves books’ is simply too vague, too broad, too general. You need to be specific. Do you want to target readers and collectors of cookery books, football books, first editions of Agatha Christy?

You need to narrow your target market so you can focus your energies on becoming an expert. The advantage of this is that although your market is now smaller, it is more highly targeted.

This means your conversion rate, the number of people who buy as a percentage of total people who see your ad or sales letter, is much, much higher. If you do a mail shot for an ebook about Agatha Christy to a list of people who love books, your conversion may be 0.5% (1/2%). If you do a mail shot to people who love Ag

t be useful to think a bit about what we mean by ‘direct marketing’.

There are two ways to sell things, through mass marketing and through direct marketing. Mass marketing is the kind of marketing you see on the telly, in newspapers and on posters along city streets. It is called mass marketing because it is directed at ‘the masses’, at everybody who happened to be watching or reading.

Direct marketing, on the other hand, is ‘targeted’. When you get a letter through your letterbox telling you to buy some homeowner's insurance or some double-glazing, you are being targeted as a homeowner. The classified ad in the back of your woodworking magazine advertising a new and improved wood chisel is targeted at you, a woodworker.

There are all sorts of advantages with direct marketing. We shall discuss these in more detail in later articles when we talk about fine-tuning your business to increase sales and profits.

It’s important to be very specific about your market. Let’s look at an example. Suppose you are interested in books – you eat books, you sleep books, you dream books – you love books. Now, it would be easy to decide that your market is everybody who loves books as much as you do.

But this won’t do – ‘everybody who loves books’ is simply too vague, too broad, too general. You need to be specific. Do you want to target readers and collectors of cookery books, football books, first editions of Agatha Christy?

You need to narrow your target market so you can focus your energies on becoming an expert. The advantage of this is that although your market is now smaller, it is more highly targeted.

This means your conversion rate, the number of people who buy as a percentage of total people who see your ad or sales letter, is much, much higher. If you do a mail shot for an ebook about Agatha Christy to a list of people who love books, your conversion may be 0.5% (1/2%). If you do a mail shot to people who love Ag

ne advertising a new and improved wood chisel is targeted at you, a woodworker.

There are all sorts of advantages with direct marketing. We shall discuss these in more detail in later articles when we talk about fine-tuning your business to increase sales and profits.

It’s important to be very specific about your market. Let’s look at an example. Suppose you are interested in books – you eat books, you sleep books, you dream books – you love books. Now, it would be easy to decide that your market is everybody who loves books as much as you do.

But this won’t do – ‘everybody who loves books’ is simply too vague, too broad, too general. You need to be specific. Do you want to target readers and collectors of cookery books, football books, first editions of Agatha Christy?

You need to narrow your target market so you can focus your energies on becoming an expert. The advantage of this is that although your market is now smaller, it is more highly targeted.

This means your conversion rate, the number of people who buy as a percentage of total people who see your ad or sales letter, is much, much higher. If you do a mail shot for an ebook about Agatha Christy to a list of people who love books, your conversion may be 0.5% (1/2%). If you do a mail shot to people who love Ag

eral. You need to be specific. Do you want to target readers and collectors of cookery books, football books, first editions of Agatha Christy?

You need to narrow your target market so you can focus your energies on becoming an expert. The advantage of this is that although your market is now smaller, it is more highly targeted.

This means your conversion rate, the number of people who buy as a percentage of total people who see your ad or sales letter, is much, much higher. If you do a mail shot for an ebook about Agatha Christy to a list of people who love books, your conversion may be 0.5% (1/2%). If you do a mail shot to people who love Agatha Christy, you conversion may be as high as 20%. :-)

The gurus sometimes have conversions as high as 50%. Think about that!

So, between now and next time, do nothing else until you have identified your target market. Remember, it’s not people looking for ‘business opportunities’, it’s people looking to make serious money through ‘marketing ebooks about weight loss’. It’s not people interested in ‘music’, it’s people interested in ‘vinyl records and glass audio systems’.

Keep in mind everything we are talking about has to do with just this first project. After your business is up and running and earning you loads of money, you’ll probably want to start another, equally profitable business, then another, then another. People do this all the time. We pundits call it ‘multiple income streams’.

That’s all for this time. See you soon.

Next time we shall talk about the next most important thing you must do to build a profitable direct marketing business. This is your product.

Thanks for listening :-)

William Rice-Johnston

Copyright © 2006 Mary Rice-Johnston & Golden Goose Direct. All rights reserved.