Como crear sus productos de Información. 02 (Inglés)

Welcome back to your free course "How to Create Your Information Products!" Now it's time for lesson 1 of the course - "How to Make Your Decision".

You know from the previous lesson that For the Internet business, selling is necessary. There are no two ways about it - you have to sell.

Most people make online purchases on impulse. People make quick decisions to buy based on the benefits and solutions offered to them by a particular product.

What's the greatest influencing factor on these snap decisions to spend? The promise of a quality product... good service... and instant delivery! That's why products that can be delivered electronically over the Internet have a tremendous advantage over anything else that you might decide to market online - problems like expensive delivery charges, wrong addresses, stocking and packaging delays, snail mail slow downs, etc... are entirely eliminated. So, it's no doubt that electronic delivery of products has made catering to the demands of the impulse buyer a snap.

Fortunately, your computer can deliver your products instantly and automatically (with zero cost) over the Internet. In fact, it can even perform such administrative "work" like:

Capturing your customers' credit card numbers,
Wiring their money directly into your bank account,
And entering the customer info into your own private database.

Okay - so it's got to be electronically delivered, but surprisingly that still leaves a wide range of possible product ideas. Here're a few:

* Software / Scripts

If you are going to produce a piece of software or scripts, you will need to be a programmer.

* Audio / Video

Creating audio or video files requires strong artistic background and technical specialty.

* Membership Areas

You need Internet programming skills to code the membership areas.

* ebooks / e-Documents

Reading material is easily delivered and therefore perfect for the Internet environment. You might initially think that with the abundance of free information available on the Internet, no one will seriously buy an ebook that you write.

In fact you couldn't be further from the truth. 75% of online sales are informational products. Ebooks sell exceptionally well, and they frequently sell at a much higher price than a conventional paperback or even hardback book in a bookstore. Most people would think twice about paying $40 for any kind of book. Yet that's what plenty of 100 page ebooks will sell for.

* ePackage

When you combine an ebook and a few electronic bonuses (I'll cover the topic "Bonus" later), you have a more powerful product to sell online - I call it an "ePackage". An ePackage is what I recommend you create as your online product.

Here are some quick examples:

* Jonathan sells his ePackage "Perfect Resume Writing" that includes the following:

1. Main product - ebook "Perfect Resume Writing"
2. Bonus #1 - ebook "55 Interview Traps"
3. Bonus #2 - informational report "How to Find an Ideal Job Online"

* John sells his ePackage "Winning ACT Strategies" that includes the following:

1. Main product - ebook "Winning ACT Strategies"
2. Bonus #1 - informational report "Choose between SAT and ACT"
3. Bonus #2 - informational report "How to Apply for Financial Aid"
4. Bonus #3 - free online practice at his website.

* Tracy sells her ePackage "Culture Sensitivity in Language Translation" that includes the following:

1. Main product - ebook "Culture Sensitivity in Language Translation"
2. Bonus #1 - informational report "Machine verse Human Translation"
3. Bonus #2 - informational report "Online Dictionaries"
4. Bonus #3 - free translation or proofreading

So, ebook is the main product. But what can you write? And how do you know if your information is valuable?

Regardless of your background, education or career - teacher, author, automotive expert, business professional, consultant, parent, sports fanatic or healthcare professional - you have information and ideas that other people need. The saying, "one's garbage is another's treasure," may be a little too extreme, but anyone has something that others need.

You just need to harness your ideas and put them to work. Just like any other valuable asset, your ideas are worth money in the bank to you.

I started out pretty much like you. I didn't use rocket science to achieve my tremendous e-publishing success.

In fact, I worked in a printing shop. But I wanted to learn more, and do more, and was sincerely interested in searching myself for knowledge and capabilities that other people wanted, too.

So I wrote my first book, fine-tuned it, promoted it... and within six months (well, they seem short now!) I was profiting daily from sales on the Internet.

It's all here. So, to answer the question that so many people ask...

Yes, you can write your ebook!
The best possible idea is already in your head!

And there's a simple truth about ebook writing...

The topic that you will find easiest to write will be on a subject that you have already mostly mastered.

Up until this point you may still not have considered yourself to be an expert on anything in particular. But in fact, that's pretty unlikely.

You see virtually every one of us knows more about some subject or other, than most of the rest of the population. Think about it, there's something that you can really claim to have the "inside track" on, but you may have never thought about yourself in this way.

Start by thinking in the following directions and I guarantee that your knowledge is superior to most in some significant field. Consider any of the following aspects of your life and determine where you best knowledge lies:

* Consider your hobbies

Tracy's hobby is studying language translation techniques. She wrote her ebook on translation issues. Could you write about your favorite hobby? Do you know more than most about fishing, flying, cooking, decoration, shopping, landscaping, parenting, health care, organic foods, home improvement, auto restoration, or even weight losing or IRS auditing, etc. You have a subject and there might be people interested in knowing it.

* Consider your work life

Jonathan was a HR consultant. He wrote his ebook on job hunting advises. If you are working, think about your current job. If not, think about your past employments. What field are you knowledgeable and experienced in? Which industry do you understand best?

* Consider your close family members

The next best thing to basing your product on your own experience is to base it on a close relative. Maybe your partner or siblings have specific areas of knowledge and perhaps they'll be prepared to share that information with you.

* Consider these examples... taken from the experience of other "average" people (or at least, they thought they were average)...

A housing contractor, considering semi-retirement, is looking for an easier line of work. E-publishing sounds interesting, but he's spent his entire professional life with his head in blueprints. What could he possibly have to offer as an author? Hello?? He's a walking gold mine to any homeowner or potential homebuyer! Like very few others on this planet, he knows what contracting scams to watch out for... how to get lumber at cost... traps to avoid... checklists galore for doing just about everything in home construction... and much, much more. Sell it, fella!
A middle-aged woman is looking for an income stream that she can pursue from home, because she spends a lot of time taking care of her parents who live with her. She knows she has the energy and interest to become an e-author, but what to write about? She knows more than 99% of the population does about living with and caring for elderly parents - and with today's aging population, that's a book market that's growing daily!
Other examples... Where have you traveled, what did you learn, and what mishaps can you help others avoid? Yes, there are already hundreds of travel books - but who needs a huge book on an entire continent when they're only visiting the locale you know so well? For that matter, who knows your own city better than you? Wouldn't you love to show it to tourists and business travelers yourself? Do it! Twenty-seven years old and like to barhop? Create your ultimate insider's guide to the best spots in town.

What problems have you faced, or what mistakes have you made? How did you solve or fix them? What would you have paid to avoid them? What did you learn? Present and promote your knowledge properly, and others will pay to learn from your experience.

How long have you been in your business? 5, 10, 20, 30 years? You've learned so much, so gradually, you don't realize how much you know! It's a lifetime of information that people will pay for!

You have literally hundreds of starting points! All you need is some guidelines and a plan of action that you can follow.

Here are some guidelines to successfully brainstorm for your presentation organization:

* Writen down everything, no matter how crazy it sounds!

Actually this is the number one rule of brainstorming and it is also the place where most people go wrong. Do not edit or judge as you go along. Just throw up an idea and put it down on the page.

* Don't eliminate anything in the first round

The idea you just wrote down may seem complete rediculous, but leave it there for now. Never remove a thought from the page in round one of your brainstorming. The principle behind brainstorming is to allow your mind to think beyond the usual boundaries, to free your mind and to allow the creative juices to flow.

* Round two is when you start narrowing down your ideas

Once you have written a nice list of headlines or bullet points (all items that you wish to cover in your presentation), now's the time to start narrowing down that list. You can edit out those crazy thoughts, that you almost feel stupid for writing down at this point.

* Round three, four, and so on work the same way

Having had a first sift through, repeat the process and leave only your very best, most important items that you brainstormed on the page. The chances are that by now you're starting to get an idea fixed in mind, but if not there are some perennial "good ideas" that you could always develop in a new and interesting direction.

Knowing the results of others' brainstorming may give you inspiration.
Search Amazon.com for the titles of the top selling ebooks.

- Don't forget market research! -

Having spent a period of time brainstorming, you've now decided which product to create and are going to have it done.

Obviously you will want to take pride in your work, but more importantly you want your work to be read (or more accurately purchased) in the first place.

You could easily wind up spending days, weeks or even months on creating a product that quite simply "rocks". But there might only be one small problem - Virtually no one ever buys it - so the world will never find out just how great your product is! Surprisingly even experienced Internet marketers make this mistake from time-to-time. In fact my experience suggests that the so called "experienced" may be most frequently to blame for failing to properly discover up front whether there's actually a market for their product before fully creating it. That's because they begin to wrongly believe that they can second-guess the marketplace. But the reality is different.

So how do you assess the market for your product, before you've even properly created it? The answer is "market research". Market Research is absolutely essential, not a nice added extra.

Fortunately the Internet and the fact that you are producing a web based product combine to make your market research quite easy and straightforward. The Internet market research can be a thirty-minute, three-step procedure.

The procedure is discussed in details, with graphic demonstration and real-life examples, in my ebook "Cash Your Knowledge". You can get a copy through the website http://www.cashknowledge.com.

If you follow through the procedure, you will have a pretty strong idea about whether there is a market for your proposed product.

However, I don't want to kid you into believing that making the final decision to go ahead and create your full product is 100% scientific.

Frankly it isn't. If there were any completely guaranteed methods of market research prior to product launch then big corporations like Coca-Cola would never have fouled up by launching a new recipe, new flavor Coke some years back, only to have to reverse the decision.

But... don't let these high profile failures lead you to think that you shouldn't do market research. You'll be very sorry to have built the perfect product, but still be searching for your first customer!

Assess all the information that you've gathered from your market research, and as long as you see that the potential is there - go for it!

I'll be back in two days with lesson 2 "How to Create Your Product".

Sincerely,

Martin Johnston, President
(c) Cash Your Knowledge