What's The Product?

[BootstrapBill]

This month I've given myself time to learn more about marketing as a general subject and one of the first principles of marketing are the 4 P's (product, price, place, promotion) and it got me wondering - for those of us trying to build authority websites - what's the real product?

Will this be defined as the website and the content that we produce or will it be more any ebooks/courses/membership services that we create?

 

[c4yrslf12]

Will this be defined as the website and the content that we produce or will it be more any ebooks/courses/membership services that we create?

Product - what you are selling
Price - how much you are selling it for
Place - where you are selling it
Promotion - how you are attracting buyers

If you sell your ebook, it's a product. If you sell courses, they're your product. If you sell services, they're your product.

However, if you give all those for free, they are your promotion.

 

[BootstrapBill]

Perfect, so with an authority website the product is any "content" that's being sold and the place is the blog/marketplaces.

 

[c4yrslf12]

Perfect, so with an authority website the product is ANYTHING that's being sold and the place is the blog/marketplaces.

FTFY

If you trade anything for revenue, it's a product/service.

 

[CCarter]

The person that gives you money is the customer. If you have display ads (Google Ads), the advertisers of those ads, which your visitors see and click, are your customers. Basically the product is your visitors and the advertiser is your true customer who pays you for access to those visitors.

The question is who's pockets does the money come from? They are your customer.

 

[stargazr1968]

I always thought with a niche info site that the product was the content and I'm giving the product away to the "customers" who are the people visiting my site.

 

[CCarter]

I always thought with a niche info site that the product was the content and I'm giving the product away to the "customers" who are the people visiting my site.

If you are running adsense then that's backwards, since Advertisers are advertising on your info site and the money comes from their pockets to your pockets. Your advertisers are your TRUE customers and access to visitors on your site is what you are selling to them. The product is what is being sold - the visitors, the buyer is the advertisers since it's their money.

Whoever pulls out the money from their pockets is the customer. And with adsense you are getting paid from the advertiser's pockets.

It's like Facebook, their customers are advertisers and their product are people that waste time on facebook browsing all day. If those same people stopped browsing Facebook advertisers would no longer pay them, cause they don't have any product to sell them anymore.

 

[CCarter]

Let me continue on that note, if you are running Amazon affiliate ads and a visitor on your site clicks on the ad and THEY pull out their wallet, and then you get paid the customer in that case is the visitor. It's different with adsense since if a visitor clicks on an ad, they aren't necessarily going to pull out their wallets, so they aren't really your customer.

Who's pockets did the money come from amazon, your visitor so THEY are the customer. In adsense it's the ADVERTISER since you get paid no matter if the visitor converts on the other side or not.

 

[stargazr1968]

@CCarter I get what you're saying it makes sense but it still sits strange with me that when I spend all afternoon writing a great blog post to publish that I'm writing that post for "the product" (the visitors) to enjoy, instead of writing it for "the customers".

But if I think of the visitors as "the consumer" instead of "the customer" like I previously did then it gets less fuzzy.