The Bass Player’s Secret Of Getting Into Your Customers’ Heads

This is a guest post by Paul Wolfe.

If you’ve thought about creating a product or service to generate revenue for your online business, you’ve probably heard some version of this advice: create something that there is a demand for and you’re guaranteed to make sales.

Michael’s take on it was to create a persona to get into your prospective customer’s heads.  And use that persona to identify their needs and wants – and based on that you can design products or services that will cater to your prospective customer’s needs.

But It’s Not The Only Way

One of my businesses is an online bass guitar business – and I have various products that I sell online to my potential customers.  I’ve got three eBooks for sale, plus each year I run two instructional courses on different bass guitar topics that run for 22 and 30 weeks respectively.

The eBooks sell OK, and the limited places I offer on the courses always sell out.  So I know I’m doing something right.

Here’s the thing though – the seed for each of those eBooks and Courses came from a simple brainstorming exercise:

I literally imagined myself at different stages of my bass playing journey and asked the question: what kind of book or course would have accelerated my learning at this stage of my bass playing?

Here’s why this can be a powerful tool for creating books and courses that YOUR audience will pay for: the core of your audience is already like you.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t stick around to read your posts, or watch your videos, or listen to your podcasts.

But there’s one crucial difference between this core audience and you – you’ve been there, done that and got the T-shirt.  And they’re still on the journey.  And you can leverage that by providing them with something that will help them get over the humps that you had to get over.

And you can even use your experiences as part of your sales story.  Done well, your potential clients will resonate with your description of the problems you encountered.  Once you make that connection with them, it only takes the words: ‘Here’s the solution that I wish I’d had back then, that would have saved me thousands of dollars or thousands of hours…” and they’ll sit up and take notice.

And maybe take action.  And go from being a potential customer into being a paying customer.

Here’s How You Do It

So what you do is this:

1. Imagine your younger self – and then pick an arbitrary point on your journey.
2. And ask your younger self this: what book or course or training would turbocharge your journey now?

The answer(s) to that question will form the seed of a product or service.  Of course there’s still work to be done, you have to flesh the idea out, you have to make sure that your answer is not something that’s been done to death by everyone else in your market.

But I’ve found this exercise a good source for generating ideas for books and courses that my target market needs – and more importantly, books and courses that my target market actually buys.

Layering In Client Feedback

You can take this process a step further.  You often hear people recommend that before you create something you should ‘survey your market’ – and then create a product or service based on the results of that survey.

The problem with that approach is that in many markets – especially if you’re teaching something – the people you’re surveying will lack the experience to actually tell you what they need in anything other than vague generalities.

And you still run the risk of creating something that few people will buy.  So what I’ve done with my last two products is use the process of generating a seed idea, and then I’ve fleshed that idea out and emailed some of my best clients and asked them what they thought.

If I get positive reactions I go ahead and create the book or course.  If the reactions are lukewarm, I either tweak it and try again.  Or put it on the back burner.  By the way, you know you’re onto a winner if people email you back and want to get on it now.  When I did this exercise with my latest bass guitar course, I had one guy email me his all his credit card details and asked to be signed up to make sure he got on the course.

Another Tool In The Toolbox

This process is easy to understand, easy to visualize and easy to use.  You can use it to generate ideas for books, courses, structured consulting, and even non-paying content like blog posts.  This has worked like gangbusters for me with my bass guitar site – my subscribers chose the next course I’m going to create from a list of 5 ideas I generated with this method.

Take it for a test drive and see what you can come up with.  If you do it right it’s a great way to create products and services that not only do your customers need, but that they’re happy to pay for.

Paul Wolfe runs two online businesses – one that teaches how to play bass, and one that teaches the lessons he’s learned building the bass business!
You can find him online at http://www.onespoonatatime.com. Or follow him on Twitter – @Paul_Wolfe