If you have a lot of ideas for various products or ways of marketing your product, the way to success is to focus your efforts. You may be very creative and have many ideas for new products or ideas for marketing your product. If you have a lot of ideas, you must learn to focus your efforts on the most profitable and viable ideas that you have. Being able to focus your attention on the most productive activity is a key to success.

Multi-tasking is a buzz word that gets a lot of attention these days. When you are building a business, you can only successfully work on a few things at a time. Having a lot of ideas can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you treat the ideas. Don’t become too attached to your ideas. Analyze them with the business part of your mind (left brain). Step away from the idea for a new product and ask hard question about how many people will buy it, how much will it cost to produce it, sell it, and promote it? What resources do you have to produce and market this product?

It is not easy to be objective about your own ideas. You may want to ask others their opinion. Most ideas seem like they are the best idea ever, when you first think of them. If you are going to make an idea a successful reality, it takes a lot of time and effort. If you start with a flawed idea, you can waste years of time trying to make that idea work.

Maybe you have what you think is a great idea for a product but you do not have the money needed to buy equipment or raw materials to make that product. You can borrow money from banks or private sources, or you can look for investors. If you look for money for your idea, you will need to do the research that will prove to others that your idea will be profitable. You should do this kind of research even if you finance the project yourself. If you do enough research to prove to others that an idea will work, you will have a much better chance of success.

Bounce your ideas off of others. Don’t just present them to people with your own taste. Get feedback from people with different likes and consider what they have to say. Ultimately the decision is yours concerning which items you are going to make and sell, but you may receive some valuable input from someone which will help you to sell a lot more products. Some designers believe that if they consider input from others, they will not be making something totally original.

I am not advocating copying someone else’s idea and calling it your own. But if you want to make money, you have to do what smart business people do. You have to get as much information as you can and make good decisions about what products to make and market. Your products are the foundation for making money with your designs. The time spent up front to research the potential market for your product is time well spent and will make the difference between making lots of money or being a “starving artist”.

Look at your ideas for products and your possible avenues for marketing those ideas objectively. If you have identified what you believe will be good saleable products, be sure that you are not trying to do work on too many products that are very different in nature. For instance, if you are making beaded jewelry, it is fine to make necklaces, bracelets, earring, or other jewelry item that compliment each other. The problem comes when you try to do jewelry and other products that are unrelated at the same time. If you can build your jewelry business to where you have people making and marketing your jewelry, then you could start your interior design products line.

Focusing on one product line at a time and how you sell it. This is an essential key to making money with your products. Once you are successful at selling your first line, you can expand your market and increase your sales by selling your product in different ways. Do this and you will have a good foundation for success.

John and Kay Jacobs
http://www.pizazzworks.com