By Michele Scism
The Results Lady

The old adage advises against what the title of this article says, but sometimes it is a wise thing to do. As you work to grow your business, it is important not to put the cart before the horse (another wise saying). Here we are talking about:

Your Product Offerings and When to Present Them to Your Audience

Okay, you have decided on your business idea and niche. You have investigated and found a product that your target customer will be interested in. But, to diversify your business, you decide to gather a few other products to also promote.

What’s wrong with this picture? At first glance, nothing appears to be wrong. But, if you are trying to grow your business in the right way and not spend all of your savings in the process, starting with one product is best.

First of all, with several products, you will spend time and money creating and promoting each one. To interest people into buying, you’ll want to give each product its due with a sales page, landing page and all the other goodies that go with it. Not the least of which is quality!

To save time and money, begin with one product.

Work on your sales pitch, your content to promote it and other marketing tools to get the word out. Creating a quality product will help generate sales and also inspire the type of trust and confidence you need to build a strong customer base. Then, once you’ve started receiving some of your investment back, you can explore the option of adding other products and growing your line.

Here is another tidbit for you. Online businesses that offer downloadable products have another advantage. You can take one product and turn it into several others while technically still promoting one product.

Most of you may already know this but here is an example. If you start off with an eBook on fishing, that single document can become an e-course, a packet of PLR fishing articles, a special report on fly fishing, etc. That is only the beginning too – the possibilities are endless. Since you are promoting all these aspects of fishing in your eBook, most of the work is already done for you when it comes to introducing the others.

Just so you know, here are the disadvantages of offering too many products at one time:

• Uses up valuable monetary resources you don’t necessarily have right now
• May not perform as well as other products, wasting your money
• Too much to handle at one time, which will end up burning you out. This is never a good thing because your efforts will naturally be less and therefore, quality will suffer as well.

There will be time to diversify. As we said, building your customer base, email list and traffic will all play into your business success when you are ready to move to the next level.

If you want to save money and continue to move your business in the right direction, start off slow and  build up your product line only when you can devote the time and expense to make each one great!