How To Create Your Own Info Product

byTheCatherine

14K followers

3 years ago

This information could have been a complete training but I have put it as a blog post so everyone can access it.

A lucrative way to earn money online today is by creating and selling information products. An information product can be in the form of an e-book, audio recording, video, drip course, webinar, or a combination of these.

An information product usually consists of content that teaches. It is specific, you are talking to a targeted audience. Examples are solving a particular problem, enriching someone's life, or even help them make money. What’s even more exciting about information products is that you can actually sell them even before you make them. That’s right. You can come up with an idea, sell the idea, and then after you get paid create and deliver the product.

Information products have been around for a long time, long before the internet made digital products a reliable and straightforward way to get information to consumers. In the old days, if you wanted to learn something you might find a course or other type of information product for sale in the back of a magazine or sold online via a television infomercial, usually packaged as DVDs or CDs. These types of products were created and then marketed after the fact. This carried a lot of risks.

What if the audience didn’t want or need that information? What if you didn’t sell enough to break even, much less make a profit? By selling the idea in advance you’ll know if you have a good product or not, not only for the first group of buyers who paid before you created it, but for the buyers who buy the product later after you’ve repackaged it. This is a double-whammy income boosting tactic that will make a massive difference in your bottom line.

Today, due to the advances in technology you can find information products and have them delivered to you instantaneously, by drip, or by attending a live events and webinars. This fact offers a huge opportunity to any business owner who has something that they can teach to their niche. As an expert in your niche you have a lot of knowledge that you can pass on to your audience.

Plus, by creating information products in this manner, you can truly begin the process of making passive income which can help you develop a more sustainable business. Before you can make information products that sell, you’ll need to do a little homework first but you should realize up front that you don’t need to have the product created before you start selling it. You can pre-sell it, make it, then repackage it and sell it again and again.

Sell First Then Create

Since your product is delivered electronically, that leaves open a lot of opportunity for you to sell in advance before you even create it. You’ll only need to have an outline of what you want to teach to your audience in order to create a sales page, set the launch date, and start making money.

Making money before the creation process makes sense. It opens up a different new income stream opportunity, rather than just after the fact. Thus, helping you get paid now and later rather than only later. Plus, no more risk in trying to sell a product no one wants. If no one buys it, or you don’t meet your sales goals, you don’t have to make it at all. Simply refund the money to those who did buy and move on to the next idea.

In order to create information products that sell you do need to follow a process but that process is simple and requires little advance work.

Identify Your Audience

Like with most things, it’s best to make something your audience already wants than to try to create something without an audience and then try to convince them that they want your offering. It really doesn’t matter what your expertise is now, you’ll easily be able to figure out something to teach your audience.

For example, even if you’re a service provider of some kind, such as a virtual assistant specializing in community management, you can get to know that audience and find something that you know enough about to teach them. In this example, maybe you’re an expert at using a particular software, or you know the exact steps it takes to build up an active community, you can create an information product for the do it yourselfers within your niche. And, you can deliver that information product live after you’ve presold it. What could be better than that?

Some business owners who offer services are afraid to create info products. They are worried that their audience will not want to use their services if they teach them to do it themselves. Instead, just let that idea go and focus on what you can teach them because you won’t lose your audience if you do it.

The truth of the matter is that some will buy the product and still hire you to do it for them. So, not only will you get paid for the information product, you’ll get paid by the client who wants the work done by you. Right now, just figure out who your audience is, and what types of things they need to learn that you know about, and how you might want to deliver it.

Learn About Them & Their Pain Points

It’s important to learn about your audience as much as you can before trying to create an information product. The more you get to know your audience the more your information products start to create themselves. After all, any product you create needs to focus on what your audience wants and needs.

You can find your audience on social media, join the groups they’re part of, start your own groups, and engage with them by asking and answering questions. As you participate in the groups, your audience will literally let you know what they need to know about, which will make it a lot easier to create in-demand information products for your audience. Being a participant will help you identify all your audience’s pain points and give you plenty of information as to what type of product you’re going to presell to them.

As you learn about your audience you can begin to get known as an expert in your field, and build your email list. Plus, you can also develop an understanding about what your audience needs and wants to learn so that you can start devising the information product idea and sales page in order to make sales.

Outline an Information Product

Once you have the technology in place to have a website and an email list, now you need to use the information you gather to outline your information product. You’re not creating the product now; only outline what you’d like to teach to your audience so that you can make a good sales page.

Even before you have all the minute details figured out you can start marketing it and selling it. You can use the money you make to finance the creation of the product if you want to. Alternatively, if you don’t sell enough, you can refund the money you do collect but you won’t have to create the product if you don’t want to, if you didn’t make enough sales to justify the work. That way you can finance the creation of the product with your customers’ money instead of your own.

You don’t have to make the outline like you did in school. Instead, take a look at some competitors’ sales pages for ideas of what you want to include in your information product. Make a list; try to make it comprehensive and in a logical order. Even if you’re giving a webinar as your product, or you’re doing a drip course. It’s important to systemize, do things in a logical order so that when you are teaching the information it makes sense to everyone.

For example, if you’re teaching them how to create a WordPress website you’ll first need to teach them, or point them to the right information on how to choose the right website hosting service and how to load the software onto their server space. If you think of things in order that way, it’ll be easier to design the outline of your product.

Remember to answer your audience’s potential questions by asking yourself, “who, what, when, where, why and how” for every stage of the information product outline process as you’ll be using this outline to market your product before you make it.

Ways to Organize an Information Product

Let’s talk a moment about the types of products that work as information products and the different ways you can organize an information product. You can create a variety of types and formats of information that can be used by your audience. You can do one or more than one, it’s up to you.

· Drip Courses – A drip course can be delivered via email on a periodic basis such as daily, weekly, or monthly. You can take an eBook or Report and break it up to easy to digestible bits of information to repurpose into a drip eCourse. Again, no needs to create the drip course until you’ve collected enough money to make it worthwhile.

· Small Reports – Along with the drip course you might want to include a small report for them to read such as a case study. This will give them added useful information to consider as they move forward.

· Video Lessons – If you want to really be fancy you can include videos with the other information. For example, let’s say you want to show someone, rather than just tell them, how to install a particular plugin to their WordPress; a video is a great way to do it. Video is an excellent choice for pre-selling because your buyers will participate live in the actual creation process which brings its own special type of energy to the product.

· Audio Lessons – Podcasts are popular because they can be taken on the road easily. People can listen to them on a drive, a walk, or a run while they’re doing other things. Adding audio lessons to your other information is a great way to expand the usefulness of your information product to your audience. Again, this is a great format as it lends itself well to pre-selling and creating with a live audience.

· Checklists – On their own checklists are really great items to give to your audience as freebies. But, you can also include them in any information product as a way to help them follow the steps easier.

· Cheat Sheets – These work great for certain types of information. For example, a list of keyboard commands to use for particular software can be great information to put on a cheat sheet. It all depends on the audience.

Using more than one format to teach your audience the information is a great way to take into account all the different ways that people learn. Some people learn best by reading directions, others learn best with hands on work.

By giving your audience a variety of ways to digest the information, you’ll be creating a situation where all types of learners actually learn from your information. This is going to make them that much more satisfied with the product. You can also make your customers happy in other ways by giving them just a little bit extra.

Choose Your Delivery Method

Before you get started you really need to choose your delivery method. You have an outline of what you want your information product to include, and now, you need a delivery method. In most cases you’re going to want to deliver your information product via a combination of email, live video, live audio and download pages.

Once you have determined the delivery method you can set up a sales page along with the other technology and start marketing your information product before you’ve created it. As long as you know what you’ll create, and you have the ability and expertise to create it, you can get started right away earning money from the product. Be sure to set a launch date so that your customer knows when they can expect to attend the event or receive the information.

Software and Tools

There are many different software options for you to use to deliver your information product -such as self-hosted WordPress, e-junkie.com, clickbank.com, Aweber.com, and others. First, you’ll want to set up each so that all you have to do is insert the information product for your audience into the system when it’s ready.

Since you’ll be promoting it in advance of product creation it’ll look kind of like this:

· Webpage – If you already have a web page you can stick to what you have but start blogging about the information product you’re creating. The best software to use for creating a webpage inexpensively and easily is self-hosted WordPress. You can also create a page just for the product.

· Email List – It’s important to always build your email list full of people who want what you have to offer. You might want to build a special list to promote the information product. A good platform to use for your email list is Aweber.com. Note: Everyone who buys the information product will also be put on a buyers email list using the same software, which can be used to deliver download information and promote future products and services.

· Freebie / Low Cost Entry Product – Develop a freebie or low cost product based on the information product you’re going to create so that you can get the right audience on the list. The freebie should also be something that will fit right in with the actual product you’re creating. You can easily create a freebie from private label rights (PLR) reorganized and rewritten a little using software like Canva.com.

· Sales Page – You may be wondering about the sales page, but you can use the outline you created for what you’re offering your audience to create a sales page for it. A great software program to use for this is Leadpages.net which offers awesome templates that are high converting.

· Delivery Platform – If your product is small enough you can deliver it via email or you can use a download page on your website. You can use server space via your host or you can use services via Amazon S3 to host your videos, audio and other deliverables. If it’s a live online webinar you simply need to give them a link to where it’ll be. If you chose a live event at a particular place, it’s much the same. Give them the information, time, date and so forth so they know where to show up.

· Payment Gateway – You have to have a way for your audience to pay you for the information product. There are numerous ways to do this but one of the best ways is by using software like Amember.com, JVZOO.com, e-Junkie.com or others along with PayPal or Stripe.com to collect payment. One thing to remember is that you should not make it too hard on yourself. Test out various software and choose the one you like best. But, try to choose methods that are as automated as possible. You want payment and delivery to be seamless and hands off.

· Extras – If you’re offering a message board, Facebook group or other extras a great way to tell them about it is to send the links via an email message to buyers. For example, you can send a link to your Facebook Group in the welcome email. You can also send a link to your webinars or teleseminar information right before each goes live. What’s more is, due to the email autoresponder system it will be all automatic once you set it up.

Getting all of these aspects of your information product set up right will be instrumental in making it possible for you to actually promote and sell the information product in advance of creating it. Setting up a way to earn as you create is a wonderful way to get started with information products. You’ll be able to finance the creation better with the money you collect.

For example, you may have a team that you outsource to for each product. If you pre-sell before you’ve created the product, you can collect that money and use it to pay your contractors. Plus, you can also tell pretty quickly if the product is worth creating at all depending on how many sales you make and how fast.

Marketing Your Information Product

Once you have everything set up, start marketing the information product. This will work especially well with an info product that will be delivered in pieces. For example, a 12 week course doesn’t have to be done before you sell it. In fact, you don’t need to do any of it in advance. A webinar lends itself well also to being presold and then delivered on the date the live webinar is to be held.

Social Marketing

Today, marketing can be done via social media, webinars, paid ads, and more. A really effective way to market your information product is to start with marketing your freebie or low cost entry level item, collect email addresses and then market the information product to the people who sign up. But, if you don’t have a good list yet you can also market the info product directly using social media ads like Facebook Ads. If you can’t find your audience on Facebook, you may not even have a good audience and the idea might not work. That’s okay since you haven’t spent time creating the product yet.

Affiliate Program

Another way to market your information product is via an affiliate program. Clickbank.com, e-junkie.com, Amember.com, and JVzoo.com all offer affiliate program technology that’s easy to use. Ask people who market to your audience complementary goods and services if they’d like to earn extra money with the program. If you give a good commission, especially if it’s more than 100 dollars per sale, you’ll find that you get a lot more traction with an affiliate program, especially if you’re somewhat known as an expert in your niche.

Build an Email List

Your email list is a great way to disseminate information to your audience about your information products and your expertise. In order to attract your audience to the email list, create a freebie or low cost product such as a report, a short mini-course, an eBook and even a webinar and give it to them in exchange for their email address and signing up for your email list. If you know the topic of your information product already, make sure they relate. If you’re not sure, you may want to develop a topic first, and then build your email list around that idea.

You want to start marketing in the ways you choose right away, before you create the product after you’ve developed the outline for the information product and know what will be included. Let’s talk a little more about creating the information product after you’ve sold it.

Create After They Pay

If you want to presell your information product you need to ensure that you create a product where this is a possibility. For example, if all you’re going to sell right now is a big book, preselling won’t necessarily work well unless you’re going to be done with the entire thing at launch. This kind of defeats the purpose of using preselling as a means of determining if there is audiences for the product before you create it.

But, remember, what you create now can be repurposed, repackaged and resold later. So, keep that in mind as we move through this process.

· Webinars – Obviously, there is no need to create webinar content in advance of the date of the webinar other than an outline of what will be discussed during the webinar. A webinar can be recorded then be repurposed in numerous ways from transcribed into a document, to edited and enhanced for distribution later and more. But, you can sell the webinar in advance and only “create” it at the live recording event.

· eCourses – Courses are dripped to the audience a little at a time, daily, weekly, monthly or some other schedule of your choosing. No one needs to know that they’ve not been actually created yet. As long as you and they know the general idea of what will be in each delivery, you can sell the information product in advance to your audience, and then create it after the fact.

· Challenges – A great information product idea is getting your audience involved with challenges. For example, perhaps you own a weight loss coaching business. You can host a 12 week weight loss challenge in which you offer weekly teleseminars, perhaps daily email motivation such as uplifting quotes, and a private Facebook group. With a challenge there isn’t much to do in advance other than set up the technology.

· Live Events – Events in fun cities like Vegas, Austin and Toronto are really hot right now and one reason is that no one has to pay anything until enough sales have been made to be sure the event will happen. If enough buyers haven’t purchased by a specific date, the money is returned, the event cancelled and little time or money has been wasted.

By selling in advance you will know whether the interest is even there for your product idea. Plus, it circumvents the blockers that often get in your way of creating amazing products. Many people get caught up in perfection which causes them to never put their information products or other ideas out there in the first place.

With this method, you will not be caught up in perfection because once your audience pays for the information product you’ll need to deliver on your promises or refund the money. The most exciting part of creating your information products in this manner is that you’re more likely to get done, and you’re more likely to create something amazing because you’ve got the ear of your audience in a manner that you might not otherwise.

Advantages of Creating Your Product after You Sell It

The most exciting aspect of creating information products in this way is the ability to create something new and amazing while getting paid. You don’t have to spend months trying to get something created that will be out of date by the time your audience receives it. This is especially true when your knowledge has something to do with technology.

Information on Auto-Pilot

Information products are supposed to be a type of passive income that you can earn from again and again. But, no one talks about the fact that creating and marketing takes time. No one talks about the hits and misses. Creating a product that never sells is costly and time consuming. This method ensures that you will create something amazing that your audience loves, and then once it’s created you can then put the sales and marketing on auto-pilot and move on to another product.

Easily Repurposed

An added benefit is that you can repurpose the information product that you create. You can transcribe a webinar into a book. You can turn information into a PowerPoint, and even make an entire book out of what you’ve created and resell it later as an entirely different product. You’ll know this product will sell because it already sold under a different format before you even made it. The topic is hot, so you should strike.

Repurposing Example: Weekly eCourse to Book

Once the course has been created, regardless of the format -- you can put it into print form to repurpose into an eBook. You can put that eBook into various formats from Kindle to PDF to sell separately under a slightly different name.

For example if you created an eCourse on How to Build a WordPress Website in 12 Weeks that you delivered it in weekly webinar format you can hire someone to transcribe each webinar as a new chapter of your book. Then, add in some case studies from your students, a few images, the checklists that you used during the webinars and a beautiful cover and you now have an entire book to sell.

Put it On Auto-Pilot

Back to the course idea, once you’ve recorded all the webinars for your first signups who already paid you, now you can now put the course on autopilot after the fact and resell it again and again. Take some time to edit the videos, add some extra special touches, and then set up the course to deliver in drip fashion to everyone else who orders it. You can even up the price of the course over the live version now that you’ve perfected it and added some extras to it.

Whereas the first people who paid you attended your course live on certain dates, everyone else who signs up will be able to do the course on their own time due to automated delivery via an email list and download pages that you’ll create using Amember.com or another membership style platform.

You’ll have students at different levels on the course based on when they signed up. This enables you to make even more money because your presence isn’t needed anymore once the course is made.

Expand the Information

Whatever you’ve created can always be expanded on. You can always move to a new level and add on more information. If you start with beginner information, there is a long way to go for yourself and your audience to get to expert information.

For example, using the idea above How to Build a WordPress Website in 12 Weeks, you can look through what you taught during the 12 weeks and see if any one week can be expanded on to create a brand-new course that offers more advanced and in-depth information to your audience.

Let’s say that week 12 touched on marketing your WordPress website. That might open up an opportunity to do a course about marketing your website effectively. This can become another 12 week course that you can create as you go, use again and again as well as repurposed and repackaged into another format and then expanded on later. As you can see, you can turn information products into a full time career that builds upon itself, allowing you to increase your income exponentially.

Setting up information products and selling them before you create them is one of the fastest ways to get started in the information product marketing field within any niche. But, the best thing is that once created it can be sold again, and again putting your business into a whole new level of profitability. All from selling something you haven’t made yet.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to do if you want to be paid to create information products is to figure out who your audience is and what they need to learn. Once you know that, you can quickly outline the product, determine the ways you’ll add value (checklists, cheat sheets, private groups, VIP access and so on) and then use that information to make the sales page.

Then just jump right in marketing your product, collecting payments from your audience in advance of creation, leading up to the launch date. This is genius because it prevents you from making a product that no one wants.

It all boils down to these steps:

1. Get Your Technology in Place – Website, payment processing, delivery platform, email marketing, social media marketing, landing page software, download page, affiliate program, etc.…

2. Solve a Problem for Your Audience – You should know them enough to pick a problem that you can solve. If not, do your research.

3. Create a Freebie to Help Promote – A nice checklist or cheat sheet will come in handy and you can re-deliver it into the actual product too.

4. Promote Your Freebie – Use Facebook ads, or your current email list, social media networks and so forth to promote your freebie so you can build a new list.

5. Build Your Email List – You’ll build your email list in more than one way by creating products after you collect money. You’ll get people on your list even if you have to refund the money. People who are ready to spend money with the right product. Plus, you’ll build your list through other promotions too.

6. Determine the Type of Product -- To make it easier if you pick one that you can create live there is even less preplanning and work to do. But, you may choose a course, webinar series, challenge, or even email coaching as your information product.

7. Outline the Full Product Including Value Added Items – Make an outline of all the different things you’ve decided to include and let your audience know (and yourself know) what will be included in the product. Remember, you can always add more later as you create when you get to that point.

8. Create a Sales Page – Once you know what’s going to be included you can go right ahead and create the sales page based on the outline. Include what they’ll get, the benefits of it, and when it’ll be delivered.

9. Start Selling – Now that you have all of that information you can start promoting and selling your information product. Promote via ads, affiliates, and more.

10. Create – At launch, depending on if you sold enough to justify creating the product, start creating it. Webinars are ideal because you will create it live as your audience watches and learns.

11. Deliver – As you create each aspect of the information product it’s important that you deliver it on time if you chose a drip course. If you are doing a webinar, don’t forget to record it, if it’s another format be sure to make it look good.

12. Follow Up – After delivery, it’s important that you always follow up with those who have used your information products. You can collect testimonials, referrals, and more ideas by listening to your customers.

You can create it all on your own or you can hire someone to help you. You can also incorporate old blog posts, old videos, old teleseminars, and even private label rights information into your information product to make a comprehensive product for your audience that solves a major problem for them. In fact, the more types of information you include the more value will be perceived.

Wow Them with a Little Extra

Once a customer has signed up for and paid for the product you can start sending them messages via email. As soon as you know you’ve met your income goals you can start sending them extras that will make them excited for the main event.

Extras make them feel like they’re getting a lot for their money and it increases the perceived value of your information product to them. Since your best bet for future business is to make your current customers happy, this is a great way to ensure future sales for future information products.

· Message Board /FB Group – Most people love using forums or message boards and Facebook Groups has taken full advantage of this tendency. You can still use software to put a message board on your website if you want to be ultra-exclusive but right now you will likely get more traction out of a private or secret Facebook Group where your customers can congregate to discuss the information and ask questions.

· Webinars/Teleseminars – During the length of your information product depending on how you plan to deliver it, you can also offer live and replay webinars and teleseminars as an extra. It’s a great way to open up questions and answers for the audience, plus you can record them and reuse them.

· VIP Access – Another really great way to add to your bottom line and increase customer satisfaction is to offer some sort of VIP access such as one-on-one calls or emails for a little extra money in a limited fashion. For example, you might open the VIP access up to only five people every month or two.

These little extras can add up to more orders and more satisfaction from your customers. Plus, you can use these items to add on to the course as you get more recordings and ideas from your audience. You’ll create these before you launch, but nothing takes much time or effort, and remember you can outsource some of this.

Getting Paid In Advance is Always Better

The fact is getting paid in advance will make it easier for you to create an amazing information product for your audience. You won’t be worried about how you’re going to finance the creation if you’re outsourcing, and you won’t need to skimp on resources depending on how many people purchased the product.

Instead, you can focus on delivering excellence now, and then recreating the information into something new for later. As you can see the income potential is exceptional. What are you going to create?