So, You want to be an Entrepreneur - Turning your Idea into a Business - Part 2 - Defining your product lines

Thanks so much for reading along with this "So, you want to be an entrepreneur" series!  Yesterday, I told you what you needed to be a successful Entrepreneur.  You can find that post here.  You may be saying out loud ... "But you didn't say you needed a great product, service or idea!"

Over my years of being self employed, I have seen thousands of great products and services never attain success.  I have also seen products and services become wildly successful despite them not being the best of the best.  The most common reason for these failures was the unwillingness to fully embrace the elements needed for successful entrepreneurship that I talked about yesterday, and not being able to fully define great product line.  A well-defined product line allows you the opportunity, to present yourself as an expert in your field, and to cross promote your goods and services.

You will want to start your entrepreneurial quest by having 1 to 3 product or service lines.  Some of you may have more, but we need to focus on only a small amount of those in the beginning.  Often, entrepreneurs will have a mass of product lines and due to the variety, it becomes very laborious to give each of them the attention they deserve.  Once you have fully developed your first product lines, then you can add additional ones as you wish.  The following paragraphs will help you to think about additional product lines in the future and make decisions to drop product lines that are either not preforming, or not representing changes in your business.

So, what is your business and what are your product lines?  For me, my main product lines are, magnet boards, organizers with pockets, and coupon organizers.  My business is providing stylish organizing solutions.  All the products in my shop are functional, stylish, and have an organizational flare to them.  I do have some seasonal items that may not be lumped into this category, those are things that I added after I had a good handle on my main product lines.  When I started out, I also had a line of items that were aimed towards children, but ultimately dropped them to focus on the organizational aspect of my product line, and to be able to better focus on my target market.  When I first started, my focus was on fun, stylish, magnets, but I discovered that my market was too broad and focusing was essential to providing an easier shopping experience.  I also did not start out with these three product lines.  Each of them has been added along the way as I listened to my customers and developed products they were asking for.  Along the way, I have turned down many requests, as I did not think I could provide a solution that would fit within my business and expertise.  Knowing where your expertise is, and when to say no, is paramount in your success.  There are however good times to say yes to new things, if you see an opportunity.

Dropping entire product lines is scary but can be essential and necessary if it allows you to focus on a more defined target market.  We will talk more about target markets later, and it may further help you on defining product lines when we get there.  Keeping your business mind open to change and adaptions will be invaluable to your future as an entrepreneur.

A good product line should have a specific name and variations.  For instance, if you crochet, what do you crochet?  If you crochet any and everything it will be very difficult for you to target a set of buyers who are most likely to buy your product.  It does not mean you cannot crochet any and everything, but you need to focus first and then add all the other things either later or never once you find what works best for you.  So, let's say you want to crochet children's toys.  A good shop may include 3 product lines sea animals, land animals, and imaginary animals.  Each of those product lines will include several different types of animals, and all those animals should have similar characteristics since they are made by you.  You may love to crochet blankets, however, having blankets for adults along side toys for children will leave you running after two very different target markets.  So perhaps, you need to focus on blankets for children, so the shoppers for children's toys and children's blankets will be more related than those looking for adult blankets. 

You may be asking ... but I want to have something for everyone that lands in my shop ... While this may be good in theory, it will leave you exhausted and grasping at straws.  We will talk about target markets another day.  Keep reading, as thinking about service providers may help to explain this more.

If you are offering a service, it is very important to define what services you offer and that those services are similar in characteristics for customers.  This will allow you to present yourself as an expert in your field.  You would not expect to have a plumber come to service your computer, or someone that cleans houses to put a new roof on your home.  It would be appropriate for a house cleaner to offer window washing at a separate rate, and a computer expert to help you with networking your devices.  You need to make a list of what services you would like to provide and organize them as they relate to one another.  So, if you service computers, what does that mean.  You may build computers or offer solutions when someone's hard drive crashes or they have a virus and need help.  You need to make it clear if you service all operating systems, only IOS, or only Windows.  If you are a house cleaner, what things do you clean, and do you offer different levels of services for different rates.  Being specific about what you offer will allow people looking for your services to make immediate decisions about contacting you, if you are not specific about services, people will most likely leave your site and not contact you even if you ask them to.  By listing services you provide, it gives people an idea of what your expertise are and gives the impression you are confident and approachable.

When thinking about becoming an entrepreneur as a blogger or influencer, having a solid theme about what you write and post about is also important. As people who want to advertise their business will want to know what readers you are reaching and being able to define your readers will help you attract advertisers.  Being a mommy blogger is not defined enough, you will need to think about what things the moms are looking for.  You may be speaking to busy moms looking for quick dinner time solutions.  Or moms looking for crafts and games to keep their kids occupied.  Think of your audience, what qualities they share, and what solutions they are looking for?  Bloggers don't necessarily have a need to list all of the things that you will blog about, but if one day it is about cleaning products, and the next day it is about computer games, your readers will be confused, and your potential advertisers will have difficulty in knowing what kind of people are reading your blog.

Well defined product lines, service options, blog topics give your readers and buyers confidence in knowing what to expect from you.  Studies indicate that it takes at least 4 or more visits to your website before a single person will purchase, so you want to make sure that person is confident that you are an expertise in what you do.  There are few exceptions to this advice, selling vintage items is perhaps one of them.  However, most successful vintage shops still have a general theme, such as housewares, comics, glassware, and clothing.

The suggestions above are just that, suggestions.  Your passion will be the driving force for what products you want to offer, and you should absolutely listen to what your passion is telling you. Hopefully, now you are thinking about giving more definition to your product line, however, if you are still having problems and need help, please reach out.  Tomorrow we will be talking about target markets more, and ways to find them.