Using Backend Products to Create Lifetime Customers - What Kind of New Products Can You Offer?
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Michael Porter wrote two books which explain product expansion and competitive advantage. They are Competitive Strategy and Competitive Structure and were published by The Free Press, a division of Macmillan Inc. How do they relate to SEO? They give excellent models for creating products that will have an advantage over the competition. For simple product strategies for online businesses, however, keep reading.
Information Products. Whatever your web site sells, whether it's software, SEO tips, or shaving cream, you can write an e-book or create a training DVD on it (I'm not sure how you would do that for shaving cream, but I know it can be done). You can constantly offer new books and DVDs; indeed, this is all that some sites do, they just get your name on their mailing list, and send you a new book or DVD that they or a partner have written every month. You can promote this kind of material by offering a teaser (a free e-book or pod casts), then you can offer potential customers your "special discount, one week only." This looks great on your site and in your ezine.
Supplementary Products. This is where you can run away with market share, especially if your original product has gained a widespread following. Excellent models of this include Microsoft, who first created operating systems, then started building applications that run on their operating systems (supplementary applications). Now they create "bundled packages." Since people that use operating systems will use office applications, such as spreadsheets, database packages and word processing packages, Microsoft offers such packages. In a similar fashion, web design companies offer hosting, database administration and security, ezine creation and emailing services, and search engine optimization.
Complementary Products. These are products which are actual complements to your main product; they are needed along with your product. For example, if your site offers books and CDs for sale, then offering book and CD racks is complementary. If you offer tutorials on Apache, then downloads to new versions of Apache count as a complementary product.
Upgrades. This is a no brainer for software development and hardware companies. It is very possible with info products also; e-books can be upgraded as new information come up.
Note that while you are developing your products, you have to stay in touch with what the rest of the competition for your back end product is doing, or you could make errors in service delivery and pricing. A good way to keep your product line fresh, however, is by selling other people's products. This saves you the time and the energy of creation, and you can concentrate on the aspect of marketing and promoting your products (which is what we will go into next). A good place to find some products (a lot actually) is http://www.clickbank.com/.
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