I have a four year old daughter and recently my wife and I had been discussing with her (and almost reasoning with her) the difference between a need and a want. I recall in high school during business class, that this was the very first thing that was taught. How as consumers, we need to realize the difference between needs and wants. My daughter realizing that the new Barbie doll is really a want and not a need is a challenge in itself.

One of the first business ventures that I started with was importing consumer electronics into Australia. When I first began to research this I was looking at different eBooks and courses I could purchase online. At one stage, I purchased an eBook and it was only a nominal amount of money but it was advertised as the “get everything you need to know and start making money yesterday” philosophy to importing and drop shipping.

This situation just highlights to me how we live in an age and a culture of “we want it now and we want it upsized”. We look for the easy answer, the quick solution to our problem and it in this age of purchasing information; we still have trouble distinguishing between what is a need and what is a want.

When a customer is searching for our product or our service, they can often overlook the perfect solution because they are searching for the wants and not the need.

I have created some great information products previously, that in my opinion were gold in terms of content and what people needed to know to get started or to get producing. The interesting thing is that they often did not convert well; actually the truth is they did not convert. Selling an information product that tells people what they need and not what they want did not end up being a viable solution or product for my business.

Recently I have actually found more success in giving the product away for free and then selling a service that targets the “what people want”. As someone who enjoys creating content and producing this type of information and sharing the knowledge that I have gained, it actually pains me to put a lot of effort into creating an information document and then giving it away for free whilst throwing a simple solution together and producing an income off that.

But it is human nature; we will look for the path of least resistance. If we are offered in one hand a guide on how to write the perfect job description for your workers, and on the other hand we are offered the completed form where we simply needed to fill in a template, we would take that.

It might be what we want but it’s not what we need, as in most cases, we need to learn and understand what went into creating that template and not just ending up with the outcome.

Put human nature aside to help your products become more successful in converting, look to target what people want and include for free what they actually need.