I get asked fairly frequently about finding a way to completely outsource a product creation and product launch – a sort of  “info-product” business in a box if you will.
It seems logical, that you could find someone out there that could identify an opportunity, produce one or more products and setup a launch including a sales funnel so that within a few weeks you can be operating your own online infoproduct business.
Having more than 15-years in the information product marketing business indicates otherwise though…so here is a detailed look at the main stages of product creation and product launch that you will need to get right in order to be successful making sales and profit from your own info products.
The Main Product Creation & Launch Steps
While it is possible to outsource nearly every aspect of your product creation and product marketing for an info product based business, you will most likely need to break the outsourcing projects down into a few areas.
What I thought would be useful is to give you a bigger picture of the steps involved in bringing your product to market and how we have handled this for our various information products (including the foundation of the tools, training and mentoring available within Information Marketer’s Zone)
Let me start by saying that we have dozens of information products on the market that span 3 large niches ranging from low-cost special reports right up to high-end coaching programs with many ebooks, membership sites, home study programs and video courses falling into the mid-market range.
The outline below has been taken from years of experience creating and launching these products as well as hundreds of opportunities to coach and work with top info marketing experts out there today.
What I tend to do now is the following:
1. Niche Market & Product Idea
Our own team does our niche and product idea discovery. Â I would strongly advise against you outsourcing this part of the business as much of your success or lack thereof will depend on how well you understand your market and have identified a hot opportunity/desire for information and transformation within that niche market. Â Frankly, unless you have a permanent business partner who you work with to do this, niche market and product idea generation is in your court.
2. Product Outline – Getting Started
We outline our info products (always plan for a give away, intro level product and most of the time, a higher-end product). Â Again, I strongly urge you to do this in-house…leaving product creation entirely up to a 3rd party is dangerous (at best) as they will not understand how to organize information into its most valuable form. Â By simply structuring your information correctly (as a training guide instead of pure information) you can pull 5X to 10X the profit out of a given product
3. Product Creation – Development
From here – we either take on the actual development of the product ourselves or we outsource either one of the writing or the video creation (our products typically are produced in both written form and video training). Â You can easily outsource this part of your product creation, though we typically find we must outsource “writing” projects separately from “video creation” projects and often need to add a 3rd outsourcing aspect which is the “voice-over” – though some video outsourcing resources can sub-contract that on your behalf and manage the entire video course creation process. Â With a video version of your course you have the potential to offer a high-end version of your product or take advantage of other distribution mechanisms such as Udemy or other video training platforms
4. Sales Funnel Design & Setup
For sales funnel – to create the pages we use OptimizePress 2, there are other theme packs you can use as well, but we find OP2 is good for most projects. This allows us to quickly create the following
- A sales page
- Squeeze page
- Thank you pages
- Blog
- Some other specialized landing pages that we use as part of the sales funnel
5. Copywriting – Your Sales and Offer Copy
Most copywriting I do myself, but on occasion will outsource either the complete copy development or outsource a copywriter review to improve a sales letter/landing page. Â Copywriting is one of those skills that takes some time to master (best to learn by studying the masters such as Gary Halbert, David Ogilvy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton…Study their approach and get to understand the main triggers for influence and persuasion – these can be used again and again in business and in life
If you do decide to outsource your copywriting – be prepared to pay into the $1000’s (at least), pretty much everyone else that operates at more “reasonable” rates has little or no experience or track record with writing copy and that means you will be throwing good money after bad (believe me, even I have fallen for this on several occasions!)
Another approach (that we recommend to our coaching clients) is to learn the basics about copywriting from the studying the material above and examining successful ads from the past and then only use professional copywriters to review and critique your copy…this ends up to be less expensive and offers you a great way to both learn the craft as well as improve the copy to where it would have been had you outsourced the entire project in the first place.
One more recommendation, if you want the next-best thing to having our proven product creation, marketing and launch team train you and support you alongside you as you launch your own product-based business online, then Information Marketer’sZone is a terrific way to get that help for MUCH less than what it would cost for even 1-hour of personal consultation.
Oh ya, and if you are looking to outsource any part of the 5-step process above, there are some things you really need to watch for and understand to make your outsource project a success…we teach those within InfoMarketer’sZone as well – plus you get our personal outsourcing agents (which we don’t usually give to anyone because we keep most of them pretty busy on our own)
