Membership website opportunity for scrapbook fanatics
Perhaps the best way to sell volumes of information products, including subscriptions to member websites, is to follow fads and trends. Anticipate what the market wants, and then create custom products to satisfy the demand.
Most would-be information entrepreneurs get it backward. They create a product first, and then they try to figure out who to sell it to and how. This is not the best strategy.
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No one has a crystal ball, of course, but this is the kind of rabid market that appears to be poised and ready for leadership.
Professional infopreneurs stay in touch with pop culture, read magazines, surf the net, and generally keep an ear to the ground.
For instance, are you aware of the popular and relatively new hobby of scrapbooking?
A scrapbook, as we all remember from childhood, is an album into which clippings or notes or pictures can be pasted.
Sure, you might have had a scrapbook as a kid. What did you collect? Pictures of dogs and horses? Movie stars? Astronauts? Drum & bugle corps?
Historical note
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Mark Twain was the first to use the word “scrapbook” as a verb (in an 1879 letter to his wife), and is credited with inventing and patenting a self-pasting scrapbook.
Today, scrapbooking is an adult hobby.
In fact, the Hobby Industry Association, a trade association of craft and hobby manufacturers and merchandisers, calls scrapbooking the fastest-growing leisure-time activity in America.
It has emerged from a solitary to a social activity, often practiced in small groups where enthusiasts can make new friends and share ideas.
There are also more formal scrapbooking events called crops, often sponsored by and held at local crafts shops, where an admission fee may be charged.
Creative Memories, a St. Cloud, Minnesota, company founded in 1987, has more than 60,000 independent sales consultants worldwide who “teach the importance of and techniques for organizing, documenting and preserving their photographs and memorabilia in safe, meaningful, keepsake albums.”
This is big business. Creative Memories did more than $300 million in sales in the past 15 years—albums, refill pages, page protectors, cropping tools, adhesives, etc. And they’re not the only ones profiting from the popularity of this popular pastime.
- Scrapbook Escape has an opt-in mailing list and a discussion forum, but has no membership program and charges no fee.
- Get Croppin’ has a message board and newsletter but has no membership program and charges no fee.
- Great American Scrapbook merely lists scrapbook conventions but has no membership program and charges no fee.
- Scrapbooks Plus has a newsletter and message board but has no membership program and charges no fee.
Does this spell opportunity?
In my opinion, this market is not being adequately served with premium scrapbooking information and is ripe for a membership website.
No one has a crystal ball, of course, but this is the kind of rabid market (hungry crowd) that appears to be poised and ready for leadership.
The membership website publisher/ infopreneur /marketer who seizes this opportunity and figures out how to satisfy the appetite for additional scrapbooking information, events and products has the potential to make a fortune.
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December 4th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
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