Selling Pies to a Starving Market

One of the most important ingredients for successfully creating a flood of sales from your own products is choosing a money-pulling niche. You can write the greatest book in the world, but if nobody wants it – it won’t make you a cent.

One of the best ways it has ever been stated was by master copywriter Gary Halbert, when he posed the question, “Where’s the best place to open a hamburger stand?” with the answer “Wherever there’s a starving crowd!”

This goes for both online and offline products. Online, it’s easy to find that starving crowd. People log on all hours of the day and night searching for answers to their problems. You are no longer restricted to the country, city or suburb you live in to sell to, the world is open to you now. A world of people with a world of problems can make a world of difference to your bank account.

You’ll have plenty of people tell you that you should follow your passion and personal interest when choosing a topic for your product. However, this only works if what interests you comes equipped with a following of people desperate for information on this topic – with bank account number in hand, ready to click on the BuyNow button.

I myself write for a ‘starving’ market. These are the people who come online in the middle of the night desperate for answers. I choose topics that quite literally sell themselves; I just have to lead my buyer to the BuyNow button.

You may have noticed the topics I have that sell well on TradeMe, these are all targeted at people desperate for this information. People who are desperate to lose weight, quit smoking, eat well for baby, get rid of their head lice, get traffic to their failing business website to improve their bottom line etc.

The subjects I choose are ones where I have been there myself and have found the solution to our problems. Everything I say on my sales pages is true (this is not always the way, I might add). I choose these topics because these are problems that have people tearing their hair out to find solutions to. I know because I have been there.

People are compulsive buyers of some of these subjects also, sometimes buying many different products on the same topic. I see it all the time, I will be checking through the feedback of someone bidding on my weight loss product, only to find they have also bought another of the other popular weight loss products being sold on TradeMe.

For me, it has nothing to do with my ‘passion,’ or following my ‘heart.’

Why you ask? Well, because my ‘hobbies’ do not put money in my bank account at regular intervals throughout the day. Personally, I am an avid photographer. But I would never bother to write a book on how to take the perfect photo, or which SLR is the best. Basically, I want people to be beating a path to my PayNow account to gladly deposit $19, $27, $47 or $97 into it; because I have an answer to their pressing need that they are desperate for.

People simply are not desperate for my information on how to take a perfect photo, or what cameras I am using. This does not keep them awake at night. People are not going to scramble over one another to get to the computer to find this information. But you can bet a young guy is going to cross hot coals to their laptop for answers when their girlfriend doesn’t want to come back to bed because of the waft of feet in there. He needs answers to that problem, fast. You will be there with good sales copy (that you will soon learn how to write) to convince him it is your product that he needs.