Part 11: How to Create Your Own Information Product to Sell.

In the last part of this course I hinted that one of the uses of your shiny new blog would be to promote your own ebooks or special reports. But is it really so easy to create a product of your own?

The answer to that is a resounding ‘YES’!

While selling other people’s products is a great way to make money online – and a method that I’ll cover in a lot more detail later in the course, I don’t want you to fall into the trap of thinking that creating products of your own is in some way beyond you. In many ways, it is actually the easier option – and certainly it can be the more profitable one.

When you sell your own products, you get the entire cost price – not just the affiliate commission. And that difference can really add up.

In my book, ‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ – http://www.plrsecrets.com – I discuss ways to create top quality information products – ebooks and special reports – from private label sources. In other words, you don’t even have to write them – other people will do that for you. All you have to do is shine them up, add a few personal touches and turn them into a PDF file and you’re set to go. It really couldn’t be easier. And the excellent PLR ebook membership site at http://www.urlnex.us/PLRproEbooks/ is one of the best places to get them from.

But even if you do create your ebooks and reports from private label source material, it is very useful to have made a product that is entirely your own first. That way you’ll know the ropes and be familiar with the pitfalls and procedures.

Below is an article I wrote a while ago about how to create your own info products. It is still very much on the money – and describes a process that I’ve used many times to great effect.

Before we get to that though, let’s consider briefly what the difference is between a report and an ebook.

In my mind, an ebook contains a series of chapters that each examine a different aspect of the book’s topic, whereas a special report tends to be just one extended chapter – delving into just one facet of the subject. As to length, there are no hard and fast rules. My rule of thumb is that anything that is less than 20 pages tends to be report material, whereas an ebook would usually be longer. However, I’ve seen reports that were 50 pages long and ebooks that were 10. It all comes down to the information they contain.

Another possibility is a ‘factsheet’. This can be a resource list, a diagram or a bulleted step-by-step guide that gets right to the point without any verbiage to slow down the reader. These can often be just one or two pages, but can still command relatively high prices.

A good example would be the instructions for a magic trick. It could easily be just one or two pages long, but avid aficionados of the conjuring arts would easily pay $20 or more for the information it contains.

Information is valuable. Don’t undervalue yourself!

#~#~#

How to Create Your Own High-Octane Info Products.

Like most things in life, there are ‘secrets’ to being successful. Creating info products is no different. And like most things, the ‘secrets’ are there for all to see.

The first problem that most people face when starting out as an ‘info-producer’ is in coming up with ideas to write about.

Initially, you have to be a thought recorder. Write down every crazy (or not so crazy) idea that fleetingly crosses your mind. Carry a notebook. This not only lets you capture the brilliant ideas that have a habit of disappearing, but also starts to train your mind into an opportunity state.

Opportunities are like cosmic rays: they are everywhere, but most of the time we can’t see them. With the right training, our brains can easily become very sensitive opportunity detectors.

At some point you will start to notice that many of your brilliant ideas are rubbish. Don’t worry. Keep on writing them down. Even a bad idea can sometimes be adapted later.

You will notice that a lot of your ideas fall into patterns. This is your subconscious mind’s way of pointing you in the right direction. If it keeps on returning to a theme, the chances are that somewhere, buried deep inside you, is gold. Now go digging.

When your notebook is growing, start thinking about your ideas bank. Be objective and ask yourself, “If this was the only project that I could ever do, would I be happy?”

Take all your top scoring ideas. Take a little time and expand each one. Write a broad synopsis of each so that you have a concrete idea of what the final product will look like. Don’t try to write it – just outline it.

What do you put in your outline?

Remember the old adage: ‘I take advice from five wise men: Mr Who, Mr Where, Mr What, Mr Why and Mr When.’

Add to those two more: How and How Much.

Make every section or chapter answer one of these seven questions (and you can ask each of them in different ways) and you have the outline of your book.

Now you should have a shortlist of realistic, doable projects – any one of which you would be happy to run with.

Next comes the most important step of all: do your homework. The best product in the world is worthless unless there is a market for it. So how do you find that out?

1. Take your shortlist and talk to 5 good friends. See what they have to say. Do they all favor one over the others? Why? What is it about it that captures their imagination? Would they buy it? Who do they think would buy it?

2. Pay attention to their advice, but don’t even think of acting on it. Even if they all think every one of your ideas stinks, it could easily be them that is wrong: they may simply be the wrong audience.

3. Write a very detailed description for yourself of exactly who you think will buy your products. Really try to get inside the mind of someone who could use what you have to say.

4. Write down at least ten words (or 2 word phrases) that most sum up each of your possible products. Define your keywords, in other words.

5. Get yourself online and search every search engine you know for every one of those key words or phrases. Check out as many sites as you can that the engines throw up (and don’t just look at the first page of listings either). Get a feel for the market. What you are doing here is trying to find out if there is already a market for your product, and what the people searching for it are being offered.

6. Be brutally honest with yourself. If Google only comes up with 10 sites for one of your keywords, and none of the sites are particularly relevant, then you can bet that right now, there isn’t much of a market. If this is the case, ask yourself honestly if you have the staying power and specialized knowledge to carve a completely new niche. And where would you go to reach them?

7. Find newsgroups and forums that are relevant and lurk. Are people asking questions that your product will answer? Can you discern a need?

8. If you can, you may have the next super-niche product all ready to be written. Congratulations!

9. If you can’t, move on to the next project on your list and repeat.

This might all sound rather long-winded – and it certainly flies in the face of the proponents of ‘create a product fast’ philosophy, but it needn’t take all that long.

At the end of the day, you will have achieved three things. You will KNOW which project to work on, and why. You will KNOW who to target. You will KNOW what your future projects (and backend sales) will be.

And, as a by-product, you will have become a super- powered opportunity magnet in the process.

As you can see, the real secret is taking action. But if you are like 99.9% of people, you will find excuses for not taking action.

Every single excuse is ‘getaroundable.’ For example:

“I don’t know if anyone will be interested.”

It certainly helps to write about your passions – if only because your time spent in research will be minimized. But it isn’t strictly necessary. Do you really think that people who write fascinating fact- filled articles in magazines are all passionate about their subjects? No, they are just writers who are given an assignment.

If you can’t find a subject that YOU are passionate about, find one that SOMEONE ELSE is passionate about. Maybe that someone else is a friend or family member – great! Start a joint project.

Or maybe you don’t have friends who are passionate about anything (hard to believe, but possible). Then go and find a subject that a lot of people are trying to find out about. Do a search on the most popular keywords. I just did that and these seven all came in the top 50:

* Weight Loss
* Jobs
* Prom Dresses
* Travel
* Recipes
* Dogs
* Baby names

Now, I’m not passionate about any of those, but I can clearly see how any one of them could be turned into an information-packed special report that would sell for 10 bucks or more. Can you?

* Weight Loss: What are the most popular diets in America today? Go to newsgroups, find out what people are saying about them. Find two or three people who have succeeded in losing serious weight on each diet. Interview them. Package the whole thing up as an ‘insiders guide to today’s diet plans.’

* Jobs: How about a state-by state analysis of unemployment figures. A regional plan for optimizing your chances to find a new job. A directory of job- seekers resources. A book on 101 thing you can do if you are laid off. A report on ‘home workers guide to surviving the recession.’

* Prom Dresses: Now I know nothing about dresses, and I’ve never been to a prom, but this subject is not only highly important to those involved, it is also emotionally charged, and perennial. What more does a business need? Subjects that could be included: this years styles and colors. How much should you pay? The best suppliers. It is highly researchable and I’d bet, very much in demand. This search term came 28th out of 500 so the market is pretty big!

* Travel: Where do you live? Folks come there. They want to know the best places to go. You can tell them. I’m not going to labor this one, the scope is so huge.

* Recipes: This is a big field, but you can narrow it down. Everybody loves cook books. Take a look in any bookstore. And there is a world-wide market. The secret here is to link it with something else that people want. So, to use our example above, you could produce a series of recipe books for each of the top diet plans. See where I’m going?

* Dogs: Dog lovers are obsessed. If you own a dog you’ll understand. If you don’t, you will be baffled. Yet canine = cash. You can write about breeds, training, behavior, exercise. Just go to the library, or search on Google and facts will fall at your feet. Pick them up and put them in your book.

* Baby names: Okay, there are books in the stores with lists of names. SO WHY ARE PEOPLE SEARCHING ONLINE? There is a market. People want the answers NOW. Not next Saturday when they can get to a bookshop. What can you do that is different? How about a list of all the names celebrities have called their kids in the last 5 years? What about a list of names with all the meanings, plus the numerology forecast for each one?

See what I mean? You may not be passionate about any of these things, but if I told you that when you have finished writing your book 1000 people will pay you $10 each to read it – will that spark a little passion in your belly? It does in mine!

“I can’t write that well.”

That is really just an excuse for not doing it.

It doesn’t matter one little bit if you can’t spell – the software will sort most of it out for you.

So what if you don’t understand grammar? Most ebooks are written in a very conversational style. Can you talk to your friends? Write like that. Totally correct grammar is often a disadvantage online.

When your book is written, give it to a few friends to read over for you. Listen to their suggestions because no matter how good at writing you are, other people will always spot your mistakes. You can even post on forums for people to review/critique your work.

“It’s not that easy. I have been trying for six months or better to find something to develop and cannot seem to find that one big hit-that home run.”

The problem here is that you have paralyzed yourself by wanting to see the end result before you have put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard). That is where you have gone wrong. If you tell yourself that you can’t do it, then GUESS WHAT? You CAN’T!

The only way to finish a project is to start it.

To summarize:

# Create your own ideas bank.
# Find out what people are interested in.
# Find a subject that you like (passion is optional).
# Write your 7-question outline.
# Research until your eyes hurt – looking especially for facts that are not easily accessible.
# Write, write, write. Don’t even think about if it sounds good, or reads right. Just get words on paper.
# When it is done, read it over and then put it aside for a week or two.
# When you come back to it, re-read it and then start to rewrite it.
# At the point that you feel you can’t do any more, ask other people to chip in.
# Then, if you have done a little each day, you will have a product to sell.

There is an old writer’s mnemonic: WRITER

Write Read Ignore Trash Edit Rewrite

Do you want to have an information product of your own to sell? Then congratulations, it is right there for you to take.

Or do you want to find more excuses for not doing anything? It is your choice.

Go and get your book started. You know you can.

1 Comment »

Part 10: On blogging and what to write.

Today’s installment, part 10, of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is the last that is specifically aimed at newbies. Up to now I’ve been covering the basics of how to get a blog up and running – a skill that I believe every budding Internet marketer should master. Thankfully, as you will have seen, it is really quite easy.

Armed with this knowledge, you can build as many websites as you like – there need be no more excuses!

After all, making money online may not be as easy as some so-called experts may have you believe, but it really isn’t all that hard either – but without a website of some kind, it is a whole lot more difficult. Blogs are the ideal ‘first websites’ for absolute beginners as they are easy to build, simple to maintain, need no technical knowledge to speak of, and are loved by the search engines.

Later in the course we will look at how to build more traditional websites, including squeeze pages, sales pages, product download pages and all that good stuff, but for now, if you are just starting out, stick to cutting your online teeth on a blog.

The video today will show you how to start making posts (it is very short, so no time wasting here!) but here in the text let’s take a moment to talk about what your posts can and should consist of. http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video7/

The term ‘blog’ is a shortened form of the phrase ‘Web Log’ – the original term coined to describe a type of website that acts as an online journal. The idea was that you would post to a blog a bit like you would a pen and ink diary or journal, recording events from your life.

Of course, that soon expanded to include posts about all kinds of things.

In fact, it didn’t take long for people to realize that a blog could be used to display almost any kind of subject matter that needs to be updated or added to on a regular basis.

Blogs started to appear that were, in effect, product catalogues. People saw that they could post about their latest products – or affiliates learned that they could post reviews of items that would get them commissions.

The line between ‘traditional’ website and blog started to blur. And as the software that blogs were build upon (for example, WordPress or Blogger) became more sophisticated, and the third-party addons such as visual themes and plugins became more useful and user-friendly, so the ways in which blogs could be used has increased.

Alongside all of this, and probably driving it to a large extent, the search engines quickly came to see that blogs were an answer to their prayers. Search engines have long struggled to provide searchers with that Holy Grail of objectives: up-to-the-minute results. Google and their friends want to serve up the most relevant search results, but they also are desperate to serve up the most recent. Blogs, they quickly saw, are updated all the time. People are posting new stuff on them every minute of every day, and while the content of the posts may not always be totally on-topic, they were certainly up to date.

As a result, the search engines found ways to monitor when bogs are updated and as soon as they find new material appearing they send in the bots and the spiders to see what it is all about.

Whereas a traditional website can often take weeks or months to get into the search engines, blog entries can regularly be found on the top results pages within a few minutes of being written. I’ve regularly had product reviews that I’ve written appear in Google’s top five results within 15 or 20 minutes of my posting them to my blogs.

There is no sign of this phenomenon slowing down either. It is still a win-win situation for both the SEs and bloggers.

So, while it is easy to get your posts into the search engines – and initially into high rankings – keeping them there can be a challenge.

It seems to me that the search engines like to get the most recent blog posts listed very fast, but then, over the next few days, they take a harder look and decide if the content of the blog post is really as good as it needs to be to warrant high rankings. That’s were your skill as a blogger comes in.

Writing blog posts is a very similar skill set to writing articles. You have to stay on topic, have a coherent theme, make your primary keyword both obvious and focused and, increasingly importantly, have a good range of LSI words within your post so that the search engines can accept you as an ‘authority site’.

If you are unsure about what LSI words are, or how to find them, my Keyword LSI Spy tool is the answer – you can learn more about LSI in general, and take a trial of Keyword LSI Spy at http://www.keywordlsispy.com

Blog posts can be as long or as short as you like. If you write short ‘snippet’ posts, consider writing them more frequently and showing more to a page (10+). For longer posts, you can blog less often and show fewer posts per page. For this course, I’m displaying only one post per page – for the reason that I want the search engines to see that each page is on a focused topic.

Another kind of blog that has become popular with Internet marketers is rather rudely called a splog – a spam blog. These consist of little in the way of fresh, personally written content and are usually just autoposted private label articles, directory articles or ads. Purists decry them, but I don’t. They have their place. Sometimes they can achieve good search engines rankings in their own right – especially if they latch on to a keyword or niche that isn’t well served with ‘full-feature content’ blogs. Oftentimes, though, they don’t get highly ranked in the SEs, but they do provide you with a platform to link back to other ‘money’ sites that you may have in their niches.

Neil Shearing’s 10 Day Cash Secret WordPress plugin – http://www.urlnex.us/10daycashsecret/ – and Kim Standerline’s excellent EasyBlogsPro scripts – http://www.urlnex.us/easyblogspro/ – both automate the production of blogs that are based on externally sourced information. Both work very well indeed – but some people are still wary of creating blogs that are not personally written. To that comment I say that there is nothing at all stopping you from using either of these scripts to augment your own blog. Sometimes you can’t write blog entries every day – in some niches, once a week would be pushing things – but with affiliate ads being fed in regularly (using Neil’s script) or well-written, on-topic articles being posted direct from the main articles directories, your personal blog can be kept fresh, updated and enticing to the search engines while you are waiting for inspiration to strike!

The very best kind of blog to start out with is one that covers a topic you are personally knowledgeable about. My uncle is in his 70′s, doesn’t know a blog from a burger, finds NotePad too complicated, but has still managed to build and maintain a very creditable blog at http://magicderris.com which has, in a few weeks, already started building a list of regular visitors. His latest stats show an average of over 20 unique visitors every day – and growing. And with absolutely no publicity. It is almost all coming from natural search engine traffic.

The next step for him will be to add a few monetization ideas – primarily AdSense, affiliate products and an ebook or report of his own.

Anyone can become a blogger – it just takes a commitment to succeed.

This installment has been much longer that I anticipated, so I’ll stop here. Next time we’ll look at a different aspect of Internet marketing, but meanwhile, you can now review the whole of this course so far at http://imkickstart.com/course/ – please feel free to visit the blog and leave your comments!

No comments »

Part 9: WordPress Plugins – and pinging. 

The basic WordPress installation is great. It does all the things a basic blog should do – allows you to make posts and manage them quickly and efficiently. The developers, sensibly, decided that they would design WordPress with an open framework so that third-party developers could build small additional programs – called plugins – that would add all kinds of extra functions.

A few of the more specialized plugins are commercial programs in their own right and are sold as such. Neil Shearing’s 10-Day Cash Secret plugin that I recommended in Kickstart is one such. That one allows you to use datafeeds from affiliate management programs to feed hundreds or thousands of affiliate-linked product posts into your blog.

But despite there being a few plugins that you have to pay for, the vast majority – thousands in fact – are completely free for you to download and use. You can find over 1600 of them at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ – some are brilliant and some make you wonder why anyone would have bothered to create them, but all are free and easy to install, so experiment!

Most bloggers never need to pay for a plugin at all – you’d only do so if you needed the functionality it offered, and were pretty sure you could use it to make your blog more profitable.

In today’s installment of this course I plan to show and tell how easy it is to install and use plugins and how to go about finding some of the best ones around.

When you become more proficient with WordPress you will start to wonder ‘how can I get it to do this, or how can I achieve that’. More often than not, someone has had the same thought before you and has created a plugin to get the desired effect.

The video today is short, but it shows you exactly how to install three of the main plugins that I use on all my blogs. As time goes on, we’ll look at other plugins and how they can enhance your blog and your visitors’ experience of it.

http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/

In the video I mention my ping list – you can download my list from http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/ping.txt

In the next installment I’ll start making blog posts – in fact, I’ll put all the installments of this course on the blog.

See you then.

No comments »