How many times have you been told the following?

You must create you own product and sell it or give it away to build your list.

This is great, but there is one big mistake many people make.
Has this happened to you?

You started off enthusiastically creating your guide and when you finally completed it have no idea where to sell it?

You struggled with different traffic generation techniques using blogs, squidoo, twitter, facebook, forums and still get no sales?

Why is that?

One answer is you went about it backwards. You create what you wanted to without
knowing that there was a market for it.

The key to success is Traffic. If you have no traffic you have no sales.
Instead of creating a website selling product and then trying to drive traffic try this:

1) Find A source Of Traffic.
2) Discover What They Want.
3) Create It And Give It To Them.

For example a busy forum could be your source of traffic. If you have already identified the niche you would like to be in you probably already know of forums that will work for you. If not then search for them and join them.
Other good sources of traffic are websites such as eBay or Amazon.

To discovering what they want you can ask them if it is a forum, or ready posts people make to see what common problems people have that require solutions.

You must test ideas out before you go ahead and do a lot of work for nothing.
If eBay is you traffic source then look at what other people are successfully selling, or carry out research using eBay pulse or terapeak.

You should still not go ahead with creating your product though.
First of all you need to make sure you can use the traffic that is there. If you’re using eBay then create a test classified advert or auction. Test out titles and measure the visits to your listing.
You will have to have something for sale, but you can easily use a PLR product to create an eBook (for classifed ads) or eBook on CD (for auctions and buy nows).
You don’t have to re-write it – just add your name and links to your site or blog.
It’s only a test to see if your main product is likely to sell.

The same kind of idea can be used for other traffic sources.
If you don’t get the traffic you want try something else.

This method will save you creating a product that doesn’t sell, and help you find a success faster, with less effort.