Small Business Idea

There is always a market for selling truly new and remarkable products. Here are 3 criteria for making this strategy work:

1. The product must be reasonably new (the marketplace isn’t saturated yet)
2. The product must actually be remarkable (this provides repeat sales; consumptable products are best for this)
3. You have a simple, low-risk profit model (no complicated pyramid schemes, no huge upfront-costs, and no other wacky ‘business necessities’)

When these elements all line up, there’s a potentially great win-win-win opportunity.

For giving an example of a great new product (and for sharing a decent small business idea…) consider this: selling silver sol from your home.

Although this specific example may become less juicy over time, selling silver sol from home is currently a great opportunity for small-scale entrepreneurs. It will also serve as a great example for recognizing the trends of spotting other good small business opportunities.

Step 1: Find a great product

• Try to find something you feel good about selling; something that will improve the life of your customer. This will make client relations way smoother than selling junk.
• Try to find something you can reasonably expect to sell to people you already know (neighbors, acquaintances, etc.)
• Try to find something people are already concerned about. (Trying to create a need for a product is way harder than just selling something that people are already concerned about.)
• Try to find something that doesn’t already have a saturated market.

Example: Silver sol makes people healthy.  Almost everyone is concerned about their health.  Plus, many people haven’t even heard of silver sol yet (let alone know where to buy it; yet folks are still dying of MRSA, malaria, and all sorts of other things this stuff kills…)

Step 2: Gather product information / sales collateral

Often, emerging products already have marketing materials available. They do this to make it easy for others to sell their product. Ideally, you should have to do almost no work in creating sales material.

Example: Silver sol already has several fact-filled resources and videos available. With videos like these, making sales is as easy as showing your customers a website and offering a price that beats the website (which is easy to do, considering the cost advantages of buying in bulk.)

Step 3: Figure out the financial model

If you can’t make money, what’s the point of doing business? Look for low-risk opportunities where you won’t end up with a garage filled with product and no way to sell it. Also, beware of complicated commission schemes and multi-level profit-sharing systems. These systems can work, but they often leave small business owners scratching their heads wondering what happened. Preferably, there should be a simple gap between what you can charge and what you pay for supplies. If there’s a bonus for selling increased volume (you can reduce your costs, thus increasing your margins), that’s good news for you. It also makes accounting easier, which leaves more time for concentrating on real business growth.

Example: Silver sol can be ordered in increments as low as 10 bottles per sale, but can be purchased in larger quantities with decreased cost (as far as I can tell, Guardian is the top source for this…) If a bottle retails for $25 but you can get it for under $18, that leaves $7 in your pocket each time a customer comes back for another bottle, which in the case of silver sol may be every week or two. Do the math for what happens when you raise the price or get 100+ customers

Step 4: Start selling!

If you’ve made good decisions in steps 1-3, this part of the process shouldn’t be very difficult. A great new product should almost sell itself. However, if you’ve taken a shortcut and are trying to sell something that doesn’t work, something that people don’t need, or something where the market is already saturated, you’re going to need a ton of perseverance or luck to make sales grow.

Once these 4 steps have run their course and the product is no longer enough of a niche to effectively market to new customers, it may be time to find a new remarkable product and then let it dominate your business for the next few years. The chances are good that you can simply keep your existing clients from the first business (if the product is consumptable, it works, and it makes people happy), which means that you can soon graduate to running 2 small businesses instead of 1!

Good luck selling your new and remarkable product!