This is a continuation of my article entitled “Five Easy Questions That Will Ignite Ideas For Your Business”. Answering five more questions will surely indeed get your imagination pumping and ideas flowing!

The first five questions were: 1) In the next week, seven days, what can i do to…fill in the blank 2) In your industry, what marketing ideas are being used successfully? 3) Potential customers, what are five ways to acquire them? 4) What people do I know that would be able to assist me in converting my idea into reality and what can I do to make that as easy as possible? 5) How could I only spend $10 and still wow blank?

So without further ado, lets begin with Question six: How could I automate XYZ?

The stage in which some people get caught in is coming up with product ideas on a regular basis. That’s why I asked Armand Morin, “Where do you get your ideas for all of your products?”

His response was simple but made complete sense. “It’s simple. If something is taking me too much time to do, I ask myself, how could I automate this process? Ninety percent of my product ideas come from my ability to recognize what’s draining my time. I’m lazy. I want to automate everything.”

Wanting to automate everything is where he gets his product ideas from! It is a powerful question, so make sure you ask yourself it.

Question seven: How could XYZ be simplified?

From my own experience, some processes that you have to go through in order to purchase a product are extremely difficult. Have you ever tried to buy your own product? Is it complicated to buy from you?

This happened to me recently actually. I was trying to purchase a server, a new dedicated server. The process the company was trying to make me go through just to purchase made me so frustrated that I ended up giving up and choosing a different company.

The first company needed to ask themselves; How could they simplify their purchasing process?

It’s the same question you could ask yourself, and it can be a very powerful piece of stimuli to spark all kinds of new processes for you.

Question eight: Thinking about my target market, what product should I create to solve one of the problems they are experiencing?

Alex Mandossian created a phenomenal piece of software, a phenomenal tool called the Ask Database. For those of you who have it, use it. Constantly ask people what products they’re having. Find out what problems they’re having and solve them.

Being able to find problems and solve them is an attribute that all creative thinkers should have and use. Being able to solve someone else’s problem will always keep you in demand.

This website is extremely powerful and useful when finding problems. Make sure you write this down - it is www.Answer.Google.com

When you go there, I want you to click on the category that is most applicable to you and your business, and find out what questions people are asking. Those questions are problems.

After looking through the questions if you notice a commonality amoung them, than that would be a clear indication of a problem needing to be solved. With a problem in hand you can now create a product which solves it.

Ask yourself this question on a regular basis: What product can I create that will solve the problems my target market is experiencing?

Question number nine: Alex Mandossian brought this question up at a recent Big Seminar - How can my current products or services be residualized?

It makes sense when you think about it - if your products and services are residualized then you will have a constant stream of cash coming in. Every week, month, whatever it is, you should be looking to getting paid more than once. You won’t have to worry about always finding new customers when you can leverage your existing ones.

Ask yourself that question: How could I residualize my current products or services?

Next question, and the final question I’m going to leave with you is: How could I increase the value of what I’m currently offering?

Think about this and when you do ideas will come flowing out because you will now be thinking from your customer’s point of view.

Thinking from your customer’s point of view will really ignite ideas that benefit your customers. Your existing customer base is a fantastic source and you really should take the time to think about how you can benefit them. If you do, they are more likely to buy from you, tell others about your products and services and therefore create more revenue for your business.

That one question helped me get a 100% satisfaction from my very first seminar. Before anybody stepped in to that room, I asked myself: How can I increase the value of what I’m currently offering? And the people who came to that seminar got bonus after bonus after bonus. By the end, they were so wow’d with the experience of being at the Idea Incubator, that I had all of them coming up to me saying, “When is the next one? When is the next one? When is the next one?” And now they’re evangelists.

Even at the Big Seminar they were telling eveyone about the amount of value they received at the Idea Incubator and what a great time it was.

The only reason that happened was because I put forth the effort and mentally asked that question. How can I increase the value of what I’m currently offering?

Your services, products and your business will only be opened up to new opportunities when you do this.

That’s a wrap!

Hopefully you got as much out of this information as I did.

May ideas come to you when you need them most.