Doing the Info-Twist:
Variations on the Info-Product Theme
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by Sunil Tanna
You've heard the buzz - Information Products - are the
hottest most profitable item to sell on the Internet. All the big
names in Internet Marketing, virtually without exception, will tell
you that the really big profits come with selling your own original
information products, especially "How To" guides.
As usual, the gurus are right - but what is not always
considered - is whether every aspiring Internet millionaire really
has a book in them - or even if they do - whether a "How To"
guide is the best info-product that particular person could create.
Different people have different skills. You know it's
true. There are six billion people on this planet, and they ain't
all writers.
- Some otherwise intelligent people just can't string more than
a few written words together.
- Some people don't have the patience to sit down and write a
book.
- Some people who can write, feel their strongest talents lie
in other areas.
- Some people just don't want to write a book.
Even if you're determined to succeed, maybe you want
to succeed your way, rather than attempting to follow a formula.
Take a long hard look at yourself. Think about where
your strengths lie, and try to work to them. Everybody says write
about what you know - but I'd go further - and say "Don't put
writing at the core of your info-product if that's not your strongest
talent."
- If you're good at research - uncovering information that is
hard to find - sorting golden nuggets of wisdom from the background
noise - and organizing it into a coherent form - then you ought
to get book-marking for bucks. A focused and well-organized resource
guide (whose main value is the Internet links) can be extremely
valuable. Writing a few sentences of commentary on each link is
a whole lot easier than writing a whole book from scratch.
- If you're good at designing graphics there's a big market for
specialist high quality image libraries. Just remember to be careful
in your product positioning - find a niche which isn't covered
by the "half million images" commodity clipart packages.
- If you're good at designing forms, or Word or Excel templates/macros,
this is a skill that a lot of people don't have. A lot of small
businesses just don't have the time or talent to create their
own administrative tools from scratch - so help them out.
- If you're good at programming then even the smallest utility
(meaning potentially easy for you to code) could be a life-saver
for a person who needs it - especially if accompanied by documentation
that shows them how to apply it to their situation.
None of this means you don't have to write at all -
without documentation most products are worse than useless. But what
it does mean, is that the amount of original written material you
have to create, can be very substantially reduced as compared to writing
a whole book.
If you really feel you can't even write the small amount
of documentation required for these types of products - then team
up with somebody else who can. You can work on what you're best at,
the writer works on what he's good at, and at the end of you have
a better (and hopefully more profitable) product than either of you
could have produced alone.
It could well be that your product works best as a combination
of an E-Book and other elements. As the publisher of EBookCompiler.com,
I'm probably not supposed to say this, but the bottom line is that
an E-Book Compiler is just a tool - admittedly a powerful one - but
it isn't necessarily the only development tool you need to create
a great product.
Whichever kind of "info-twist" product you
develop, the last step is to make sure the whole package hangs together.
Make sure the documentation really does describe all aspects of your
product, and package everything together in a single automated installation
procedure if your product consists of multiple components (you can
get free software for building automated installations at www.jordanr.dhs.org/).
And one the last tip: always see your product through
customers' eyes. Customers' interest will always be the benefits your
product can deliver to them - not how you developed it - not what
component took the most work to create - not all the technical details
- but the real tangible benefits they can get today. The most successful
combination products are nearly always the ones where the customers
don't even know they're doing the info-twist.
