I get so many people asking me on forums, emails or on coaching calls – how do you make time to write a book, report or create an information product?
Of course we’re all swamped – if its not one thing its another and in the end, it comes down to a belief or lack of belief that we can find the time to write a book or finish our product.
As we point out in the detailed InfoProduct Creation Checklist available to members of InfoMarketersZone, creating your own profitable infoproduct business involves 3 distinct phases:
1. Deciding on a Market and Topic. For this phase, you activities are based around two important functions a) Understanding what you want and where you have built-in strenghts and b) Market research with the purpose of matching your passion and strengths against a market opportunity.
So – what should you be doing each day:
– Inventory your experiences, passions and strengths. For many new entrepreneurs this is the most challenging part of succeeding with their infoproduct business. Get this wrong, and you won’t have the motivation or the ability to dominate your target market and build a strong, profitable online business.
– Thoroghly and critically look at your market understanding where the money is being made with information today and where you can identify an opening (it only needs to be a small crack, not a wide open door) allowing you to uniquely position your information as different and more valuable than competitors.
In this first phase, you should be first, working on brainstorming, introspection, asking others what your strengths are and re-visiting the things in life that give you purpose. In the second phase, you need to be actively searching for competition on Google, in eBook directories, on Amazon and eBay and in bookstores as well as seminars and even extra college courses in your area to identify leading products so you can research and discover gaps.
Phase 2: Create the Product. Your main task here is to collect all of the questions that your market is asking about the topic you have chosen. Specifically, the questions they ask in line with achieving the goal you have chosen to write about. Rather than creating an infoproduct around informing a reader, you should be writing your how to book around adding value to their lives through saving them time, effort or pain, OR helping them achieve their most desired goals.
What are the questions your market ask on the way to achieving their goals?
Once you have a list of a hundred or so questions – you can easily organize them into a logical order which will become the outline for your book. We discuss this in great detail within the Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package.
Now, once you have the outline in the form of questions, its a matter of appying 30-60 minutes (or more if you have the time) to answering questions each day, and within a few weeks, you will have your product finished.
Alternatively, you can outsource the content generation by simply posting your project of freelance boards where your outline is the questions you have chosen to form the structure of your book.
Phase 3 – Getting Word Out. Here we are talking about marketing. Back at the end of Phase 1, once you have your market and topic, its best to launch your website and begin the process of list-building by offering a simply, benefit-oriented sales page giving your reader something in exchange for their contact information.
Techniques to use when launching your product include blogging, article writing, joint venture and affiliate program development, press releases and paid advertising.
Each day, by spending 30-60 minutes you can master the tasks associated with launching and building your own information product business – if you have the discipline, are passionate about your topic and have the confidence to know your weeks of work will payoff down the road.