Dear Web Business-Builder,
Probably the biggest pain point for aspiring info-product marketers is product creation.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked to people who are slaving over their first info-product for months, sometimes years.
Others seem to start one project after another never finishing any of them.
And still more bring dud products to market that never should have been born.
There are many reasons for these common afflictions …
Three of the biggest are the idea that your first info-product has to be a runaway best seller … that you have to personally create the content that goes into your info-product … and that it has to be perfect.
If you can sidestep these paralyzing erroneous conclusions, you can have your first product done and selling in mere weeks. It can be like picking up a dime and watching it turn into a dollar before it reaches your pocket.
The Lazy Man’s Way to Info-Riches …
One of the fastest and easiest ways to create a niche info-product that sells is to interview published authors. If you can find a topic with 20 or 30 different books written on that topic, it means you probably won’t have too much trouble selling information built around that same general topic. And you can get the authors of those books to do most of the content creation for you.
Most books are written for broad general audiences. What you’re going to do is niche the topic down so it appeals more specifically to a certain niche within the broader general audience.
For example, if there are dozens of books on the subject of Yoga, then you might create an info-product about Yoga for Busy Executives, or Yoga for New Mothers. That way you can charge more for your product. It will be easier to sell. And your media costs will be lower.
Here are the steps:
Step 1 – Market Research
Select a niche topic and then head over to Amazon to search for published authors who cover the topic in general.
If you can find a nice juicy list of authors, go to Google and check out how many people are searching on some of the more popular keywords related to the niche topic you’ve chosen to cover. Then figure out how much advertisers are bidding on those keywords. You can get an idea at www.spyfu.com.
If there are plenty of searches, and you can put an ad in front of them cheaply — relative to what you figure people will be willing to pay for your product — you may have a winner.
Look at competing products to help in your assessment. And yes, competitors are good. It means someone else has already proven your idea can make money. If there are no competitors, it’s a big red flag.
Let’s say after doing this research you think you can sell your product for $100. And you can buy clicks for $.50. Well that means you only have to sell 1 out of every 200 visitors to build your database of future customers for free. Don’t get all bent out of shape if the numbers don’t look outstanding from 30,000 feet. That’s your worst case scenario. And Google is only one place to get traffic.
If you have a house list of people to sell your product to — or can borrow one — you’ll want to discover their biggest questions, problems and goals about the topic. You’ll also want to inquire about the level of difficulty they’re experiencing in finding help and answers. This helps you to zero in on interview questions that will make your info-product as relevant and salable as possible. SurveyMonkey is a great tool for getting this done.
Don’t have a house list? Do your survey using traffic sourced directly from Google. Get a web host, an autoresponder or shopping cart account to collect responses, and put up a simple webpage with your survey questions. Promise respondents a free copy of your product as soon as it’s available.
You’ll also want to make a list of high traffic websites, e-zines and potential joint venture partners where you can advertise and promote.
Step 2 – Round Up Some Experts
Once you’ve got a good list of questions, e-mail your list of published authors and explain that you’re an online publisher who does expert interviews. Tell them you would like to interview them for 35 or 40 minutes for your audience.
In your e-mail, compliment them on their book if you’ve read it, tell them briefly what you would like to interview them about, and make it clear that you will give them ample opportunity at the end of the interview to promote their book.
Out of a list of 20 authors I would be very surprised if you didn’t get 10 to agree to an interview. That’s more than enough.
Remember, published authors are used to doing free interviews. That’s how they sell their books.
You also want a couple of them to be big names for the credibility it brings you.
Step 3 – Put Together Your Pitch
While you’re waiting for the authors you’ve contacted to get back to you, it’s time to start writing your sales copy. Take the questions, problems, and goals you’ve uncovered in your survey as being most important to your target audience, and promise to answer, solve, and fulfill them.
Until you actually find out who you’ll be interviewing you won’t be able to finish, but you can start working on coming up with a theme, headlines, lead story and so forth for your sales page.
There’s plenty of advice on copywriting in hundreds of other posts on this blog to help you so I won’t go into much detail here.
Step 4 – Plan Your Interviews
When the e-mails start coming back from the authors accepting your request for an interview, establish a date and time for each interview. Then buy those authors’ books and read them.
For each author, relate the questions you’ve pulled out of the market to their specific background and the angle of their book. Add a couple of additional questions the book inspires that you feel would be of interest to your market.
And in no time at all you’ll have 10 similar but different interview scripts to use on the agreed upon dates with your stable of contributing authors.
Step 5 – Record Your Interviews
You don’t need any special equipment. I use a service called Black and White Communications to record my interviews. I’ve also used Budget Conferencing, and there are plenty of other low cost providers.
When you dial into the bridge, make sure you turn off the call waiting feature on your telephone so the audio isn’t interrupted by a third party trying to call you during the interview.
Once the interviews are recorded, you may want to edit them slightly. I use an inexpensive software program called WavePad for this. Be sure to ask your bridge line provider to encode your audio files in MP3 format in order to keep file size to a minimum. You can also convert them to MP3 in WavePad if you have to.
Step 6 – Turn Your Interviews into a High Perceived Value Downloadable Product
Next, you’ll want to get the interviews transcribed. The quality you get back from various transcriptionists is all over the map. Etranscriptionist is the best one I’ve found.
Still, the transcripts won’t come back perfect. I used to edit them but I don’t anymore. It’s just too time consuming. When the transcripts come back, you may want to get a graphic artist to pretty up the cover page. I usually don’t bother.
What you should definitely do though is write a short forward explaining what the reader will get from the interviews and how to best absorb the material. What I usually do is go through the finished interviews and create a summary, cheat sheet, or list of action items. This is another opportunity to brand yourself and borrow some of your contributing expert’s mojo.
When you’re done editing, convert the finished MS Word files to PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat, and FTP them along with the audio files up to your web host. If you’re technically challenged, there are plenty of people on Elance and other sites like it willing to help you. Many are in developing countries so it’s incredibly cheap.
Step 7 – Putting it all Together
At this point, send your survey respondents a copy of your material and ask for testimonials. Send it to other people you know and ask the same of them. Then finish your sales page.
As soon as you’re done, it’s time to create your website. You don’t need a fancy, shmancy one. Just a couple of pages will do.
Drop your sales copy into Front Page or Dreamweaver or one of the other HTML editors available (MyFreeWebSiteBuilder.com is a really good free one) and upload it to your web host along with any images you’ve decided to display on the page.
You may want to create a squeeze page as well to collect leads. Give one of the interviews away free on your squeeze page to get people to opt in to your list.
You’ll also need a fulfillment page where people can download your product. Make sure and put a link to some other product on your fulfillment page, even if it’s an affiliate link. Just having a text link that says “CONTINUE” at the bottom of the page will give you additional sales.
Those two or three pages are really all you need to start collecting money.
Link your sales page to your shopping cart or payment processor, (you can use PayPal if you don’t yet have a merchant account) … link your payment processor or shopping cart to your fulfillment page … link to your PDFs and MP3 audios on your fulfillment page … and hook your squeeze page up to your autoresponder.
Use bits and pieces of the interviews to create autoresponder “lessons” that follow up on non-buyers. Put a call to action driving those leads back to the sales page. And Bob’s your Uncle. You’re ready to take orders!
At first glance, this may sound like an over-simplification. But it doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to get done. You really can create a salable info-product in just a few weeks with these seven simple steps. And you can use the same simple formula over and over again to create a whole catalog of products.
The main thing is to bust your damn cherry and get some product out there building your database of prospects and customers. Now you’re ready to buy traffic, create joint venture relationships, and start making money.
Don’t waste another minute!
Until next time, Good Selling!
Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE