Q: What I am doing is teaching individual people and small business owners about the advantages of inventing as well as patent protection. There are a lot of benefits besides just trying to create a product around it. I am struggling with a little with finding my market.

In the past I have always worked with inventors just in a one-on-one situation and usually in a corporation so I have no list to start with. I am having problems getting my message out. I have done one teleseminar and I had five people on it. I looked at some of the keywords on the internet like inventing and things and they do not have a lot of traffic. I am kind of trying to figure out what thoughts you might have about where to find my market or how to get the word out to people that do not even realize there is a benefit of being an inventor? I have a blog currently but that is it.

I have a couple of ideas right off the bat for you. One of them would be to really drill down and figure out what is the typical profile of the type of person that you help. My guess is that you probably come across a lot of small business entrepreneurs.

I would start by looking to find out where are small business entrepreneurs going online and how can I get in front of them. Now I know for a fact because this is a market that I am also targeting, there are a lot of different places that you can go. Now one of the first things that I would do since you are helping with the legal side as well as far as helping people protect their patents and things of that nature, I would start definitely writing articles. Now I know you got a blog as well.

After that I would number one, consistently take the post that you put on your blog and turn every single one of them into an article and start submitting those to article directories. I would also look to find some other websites that have your target audience coming to it. Now one of the biggest ones online is Entrepreneur.com. They are always looking for guest article writers and more specifically, ones they are targeting small business owners. Yours fits perfect there and you may want to get in touch with them and see if you can syndicate your articles there, but that is just one side of many.

Do a search online and look for small business forums, small business groups, or small business associations. I would look for small business marketing. Use all kinds of different keywords that way and start your search from there. In addition, I would also look at other people who are marketing products to the same type of person. This is one of my favorite strategies because it instantly turns up all kinds of potential partners that you can work with and either share articles, create products with, do promotions with, do teleseminars and much more.

Again, what I would do is take a list of keywords such as small business or marketing your business or small business advice and things like that. I would then start adding additional keywords like + eBook, + forum, + group, + teleseminar, + seminar, + newsletter, + ezine, + article. So now what happens is you have got a huge list of keywords and searches that you should conduct. So here is a good example. Our base keyword is small business and then our secondary keyword would be + eBook. So you type that in to Google and boom, you are going to bring up a whole bunch of sites that are targeting those keywords. Most often they are people who are selling eBooks to small businesses. If they are selling eBooks then they have got a list of small business owners that are buying that particular book, which is a great resource to have and a great partner that you want to look to partner up with.

So that is typically how I start. In addition, there is another place that I go called ClickBank. When you go to ClickBank I want you to do the same type of searching there. ClickBank is a huge directory of people that sell digital products and you can buy digital products from there and you can also sell digital products from there. It is a big marketplace. Now the great thing about ClickBank is you can search based on different types of categories. One of them is business to business and that would probably be a category that you want to take a closer look at. There is another one called computing in internet. There may be some products in there that people are promoting that would fit with your particular topic. Money and employment, money is probably one. Marketing an Ad is another.

You can see there are a lot of potential here. When I click on Business to Business just for example, it brings up all the top products that are selling in that particular category and you are going to find that there are many different types of products that are already selling online that already have a huge customer base. These would be great joint venture partners for you to conduct a teleseminar, teaching people about the benefits and protecting their ideas and pursuing their inventions and things of that nature.

I am just giving a whole bunch of things to think about but use the web because the web is a tremendous and powerful tool for finding partners and people to team up with to help you get the word out. The fastest way to really build your list is by teaming up with other people who already have a list, being of service and value to them by doing a free teleseminar or something of that nature. Then once you capture that recording you can turn them into a product and you can do a whole bunch of things with that.

In addition, you are also piggybacking off the list that they have already built by driving traffic from their list over to your opt-in page for that particular teleseminar of which you then collecting the names and email addresses.

The other thing that you could do even if you do not have a product is say, “Look I think this teleseminar would be of great value to you and to people on your list. In addition we could also turn it into a product that we could sell together and therefore you have a back end product teaching people how to protect their ideas and likewise I have a product that has you on it and is also promoting your particular product as well.”

Make sure that you give great content throughout the whole call, but then you also what I call lay seeds throughout the call. Something like this “Hi my name is Stu. My website is www.MyIdeaGuy.com. You want to do several of those things throughout the call. I like to give a free resource whenever I am doing a free teleseminar. What I mean by that is like some type of checklist, reference guide or something that people can go download for free but they have to opt in for.

No matter how many times that the person that you partner up with gives out, sells that recording or whatever, throughout that call, in that audio somewhere you are referring people back to another one of your websites to pick up a free resource. So it virally takes some life of its own and you will have people coming back to that site opting in for your free resource.

Be very strategic in the way that you conduct these calls. You want to give great value but you also want to make sure that you are promoting yourself by referring to your website and so forth and I like to be obvious about directing people back to a website of mine by giving them the url and a reason to go there.

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