I was recently in attendance at Mike Filsaime and Tom Beal's outstanding 2007 Figure Business Workshop on Long Islandy and one of the hot questions for the expert panel the last day of the event was "Are Interview Products Dead?" With yours truly being just one of the around twenty 'experts' up on the stage I didn't have an opportunity at the event to put in my two cents on this subject so I'll do it now.

Interview products in the Internet Marketing niche are not dead if and only if you have a unique slant or marketing approach that will stand your interview product apart from the crowd. If you're doing another "me too" product that is nearly identical to bunches of other products already done your chances of having great success with that interview product are pretty slim.

Great marketing alone can give you a chance - but are you a great marketer? How are you going to distinguish your interview product from the dozens of Internet marketing interview products that already exist in the marketplace? It's a tough challenge and one that relatively few marketers are equipped to handle.

If your interview product is in a more specialized niche then you'll probably find very few interview products even exist in your area. So you stand a better chance for success. Can you can identify the top experts in your niche (not Internet Marketing)? Then an interview style product is still quite viable. So what niche can you stake a claim in?

Here's an interesting note. Speaker Fulfillment Services duplicates and fulfills products for a lot of information marketers. Here are the top 5 topics which we currently ship products on:

1. Nutrition
2. Stock trading
3. Dating women
4. Playing the guitar
5. Cake decorating

What don't you see on that list? Internet marketing. I find that very interesting. There's a reason for that. There is more money to be made in specialized niches rather than in more Internet marketing interview products.

Find your niche and avoid the overcrowded markets with all the "me too" interview products. Take advantage of the keyword tools like inventory.overture.com or Good Keywords to help you identify those segments that have hungry buyers. If possible, match one or more of those segments with something that you are passionate about.

Interview products are not dead. You just need to be careful where you choose to play.


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Bret Ridgway is co-founder of Speaker Fulfillment Services, a company dedicated to helping authors, speakers, and information marketers maximize their time by taking care of their product duplication and fulfillment needs. For more information visit http://www.SpeakerFulfillmentServices.com or call 812-235-8050.