by Deepak Raj on May 17, 2012
The world is exploding with product options. People are not able to keep up with all the brand names around them. So they create ‘boxes’ or categories of products and put a few brand names in each product.
For example if you take the category of ‘Smart Phones’, you will get only up to 7 names in mind. iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Sony Xperia, BlackBerry, Nokia Lumia 900 and? Actually I got only 6 out of my mind.
So the idea is that if you are launching a new smart phone product in the market, it will be VERY VERY difficult to make it a success because the customer’s mind is already crowded with options and it does not let more brand names or product names to enter the mind.
Unless your product shocks the world with some extraordinary feautre, it is a losing battle. You may get a few sales here and there but you can never get an exponential growth curve in sales.
So what do you do?
Create a new category or a subcategory in the existing category and dominate that ‘box’. Let others compete with you in that category but they can never win because you created that category. In this case the category can be something like cheapest smart phone or thinnest smart phone. Your product may not have the all the features of iPhone and competing phones but you will have the thinnest phone. People looking to buy thin phones will remember your name. And congratulations, you have created a new ‘box’ for yourself. [click to continue…]
by Deepak Raj on May 12, 2012
A minimum viable product by definition is a product which is not fully developed and is used to test the demand for the product in the market. Many startups including the famous Dropbox application have incorporated this type of strategy and it works effectively in most of the cases.
The general idea is not to spend time, energy and money on developing a perfect product that people may never want to use. It is hard to find out what people want sitting in a desk or with strategy meetings in the office. In many cases people do not know what they want until a product is presented to them.
When testing a new product idea in the market, instead of developing a fully functional product and releasing it to the world with just hopes that it would sell well, a prototype of the product can be introduced to a smaller group of people at a cheaper price and if there are some sales of the product then it would clearly show that people want it and are actually willing to buy it. [click to continue…]
by Deepak Raj on May 7, 2012
If you are not satisfied with your income right now, the only way to increase your income is to use leverage. When you consider a manual worker using his strength to do physcial work, he is not using any type of leverage. He works, he earns and that’s it. The next day he cannot get money unless he works again.
With the following three types of Leverage, you can make more money. You may be already using those types of leverage but learning about them deeply makes you focus more on it and leverage the leverage to the next level.
The three types of Leverage are Intelligence, Man Power and Time. I can’t think of any other type of leverage, let me know if you do.
Knowledge and Intelligence
This is the most commonly used type of leverage. If there are two guys in an office earning the same salary and if one gets a promotion, he probably got it because he performed well. He could have been more sincere, intelligent, informed, disciplined or anything along that line. We will put all those characteristic behaviours under the umbrella of knowledge and intelligence.
Our society places a great importance on this type of leverage because it is the only type of leverage available to the masses. If you gotta make more money, you need to get better grades, better university degree and so on. There are some exceptions in this rule – people who dropped out of colleges also succeed in life but they still use the leverage of intelligence to succeed. [click to continue…]
by Deepak Raj on May 7, 2012
If you are an internet marketer, you should have a blog for yourself. This article will tell you why. But before we talk about why you should have a blog about IM, let’s talk about what it is not.
There are hundreds of internet marketing blogs out there which are not the online journals of internet marketers. Their business strategy is to make money from the blog by teaching people about marketing, though they may never have enough experience in what they are preaching. I am not recommending you to start a blog like that. Such blogs boast how much they earn only to sell a product about Internet Marketing or one of the sub topics of IM. Because of the existance of such blogs, many real internet marketers hesitate to have a blog.
Now let us look at some of the reasons why having a blog about Internet Marketing is good…
1. A blog by definition is an online journal
Blogs originally originated as online journals. But nowadays the meaning of blogs have changed. People start multi author blogs and are more of content portals than a single man’s public journal. But all these changes does not mean that one should not have a blog exclusively as an online journal. I consider my internet marketing blog as a place to organize my thoughts and learnings. It is a “notes to myself” blog. Instead of scribbling in a notepad, publishing thoughts online means you format your ideas well and is much easier to review months or years later than having to go through your physcial paper notes. [click to continue…]