How To Create A Successful Information
Product In A Weekend

September 7, 2005

The key to success is to start with the market, not the product. If you make sure there is a "starving crowd" of people wanting to buy a certain category of product or information, then you know there's a market for it before you even create the product.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it. First we want to find hot markets, then we want to create our product, then we want to test it, and lastly roll it out.

Find A Hot Market—Method #1. Go to a store that has hundreds of magazines and look for niche magazines that have direct response ads in them (they are asking for an order). Then look to see if the ads are good or not. If all the ads are high-quality like in the muscle magazines, that means it's a hot market but that a lot of savvy marketers are already in it.

Not good. We want an easier way. So keep looking and find magazines with direct response ads that suck. Then look at a year's worth of back issues to see if their ads continually run. If they do, you have a winner. If any ad is run in many issues, that means it's working. If it's a bad ad too, then there's your opportunity for an information product.

2.  

Find A Hot Market—Method #2. Go to a major city library and get a copy of Standard Rate & Data's "Direct Mail List Source". This book has something like 60,000 different direct mail lists. This means lists where people have bought something by mail. The info on each one tells you what they are selling, how many customers they have and what the average order is. Pretty handy.

Take the number of customers for the last 30 or 90 days ("hot line" customers), and multiply the number of customers by the average order size and then multiply that number to get annualized sales. Do this for each list and you'll know how big each market is.

Look up product categories that interest you and see how many lists there are of people buying that thing. If there are 100 lists of buyers of golf products or info—you know it's a hot market. You can rent all these lists for your own mailing.

3.  

Decide On A Theme for Your Information Product. From looking at your market, what do you think people might want to know that is not readily available?

4.  

Go To The Library. You are going to find and read every book in the library on your topic. Here's how. Say you are looking at golf and want to create a report on how to hit a longer drive. Look at the table of contents in each book and the index in the back for anything in the book about hitting a drive further. Ignore everything else. Then read and copy or take notes on everything you find.

5.  

Go Online—and do the same thing—research your topic with as many key words as you can think of and note everything you find on your topic. After these two steps, you have the information to be a world-class expert on your topic. This can be done in one day!

6.  

Make An Outline of your information product from all the information you found and group all your info into sections matching your outline. Make a list of all the benefits this information will give someone.

7.  

Write Your Sales Letter To Sell The Product. Do not create the product yet, write the letter to sell it first focusing on the benefits to the purchaser.

8.  

Test Your Sales Letter. Either use Google ad words and do it in a few hours or rent a email list of buyers or rent direct mail lists and send out your letter to at least 3 lists to see if it sells. If it does, great. Create the product. If not, return everyone's money and try another product. There are FTC rules about selling something you don't have, but if you are just doing a test and refund 100% of whatever people paid, I wouldn't think there would be complaints but you might want to check with your legal advisor as I'm no lawyer.

9.  

Revise Your Outline. If it sells, or if you decide to do the information product first, revise your products outline to deliver on all the promises you made in your sales letter.

10.  

Turn Each Of Your Chapters into 4 to 5 sub areas. Then write 3 topics for each sub area and then rephrase those as questions.

11.  

Use A Digital Recorder that can give you an MP3 files, then record the questions and answers.

12.  

Pick An Online Service To Transcribe Your Audio and have it transcribed at 1 to 1½ ¢ per word.

13.  

Edit It, and you're done!

The key point to all this is that you have found a proven market, picked a topic that is in demand in that market, researched all the available information on it, and finally prepared your info product from all this info giving the customer something better than anything else available.

In the info products business, it's also nice that your cost of goods will be anywhere from 10% to 0% of selling price. If delivered electronically, your cost of goods is 0 and if sent by mail, I set up the shipping & handling cost to cover product printing so cost of goods is still 0.

For More Information Contact:

Joe McVoy
Profitable Marketing Systems, LLC
1100 Nautilus Court
Lafayette, CO 80026
Web: www.ProfitableMarketingSystems.com
Email: Joe@ProfitableMarketingSystems.com
Phone: (720) 890-8760
Fax: (303) 604-6839