Posted by: Daniel Levis
August 27, 2008
Issue #490

How to Quickly Create
Niche Info-Products That Sell …

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Probably the biggest pain point for aspiring info-product marketers is product creation.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked to people who are slaving over their first info-product for months, sometimes years.

Others seem to start one project after another never finishing any of them.

And still more bring dud products to market that never should have been born.

There are many reasons for these common afflictions …

Three of the biggest are the idea that your first info-product has to be a runaway best seller … that you have to personally create the content that goes into your info-product … and that it has to be perfect.

If you can sidestep these paralyzing erroneous conclusions, you can have your first product done and selling in mere weeks. It can be like picking up a dime and watching it turn into a dollar before it reaches your pocket.

The Lazy Man’s Way to Info-Riches …

One of the fastest and easiest ways to create a niche info-product that sells is to interview published authors. If you can find a topic with 20 or 30 different books written on that topic, it means you probably won’t have too much trouble selling information built around that same general topic. And you can get the authors of those books to do most of the content creation for you.

Most books are written for broad general audiences. What you’re going to do is niche the topic down so it appeals more specifically to a certain niche within the broader general audience.

For example, if there are dozens of books on the subject of Yoga, then you might create an info-product about Yoga for Busy Executives, or Yoga for New Mothers. That way you can charge more for your product. It will be easier to sell. And your media costs will be lower.

Here are the steps:

Step 1 – Market Research

Select a niche topic and then head over to Amazon to search for published authors who cover the topic in general.

If you can find a nice juicy list of authors, go to Google and check out how many people are searching on some of the more popular keywords related to the niche topic you’ve chosen to cover. Then figure out how much advertisers are bidding on those keywords. You can get an idea at www.spyfu.com.

If there are plenty of searches, and you can put an ad in front of them cheaply — relative to what you figure people will be willing to pay for your product — you may have a winner.

Look at competing products to help in your assessment. And yes, competitors are good. It means someone else has already proven your idea can make money. If there are no competitors, it’s a big red flag.

Let’s say after doing this research you think you can sell your product for $100. And you can buy clicks for $.50. Well that means you only have to sell 1 out of every 200 visitors to build your database of future customers for free. Don’t get all bent out of shape if the numbers don’t look outstanding from 30,000 feet. That’s your worst case scenario. And Google is only one place to get traffic.

If you have a house list of people to sell your product to — or can borrow one — you’ll want to discover their biggest questions, problems and goals about the topic. You’ll also want to inquire about the level of difficulty they’re experiencing in finding help and answers. This helps you to zero in on interview questions that will make your info-product as relevant and salable as possible. SurveyMonkey is a great tool for getting this done.

Don’t have a house list? Do your survey using traffic sourced directly from Google. Get a web host, an autoresponder or shopping cart account to collect responses, and put up a simple webpage with your survey questions. Promise respondents a free copy of your product as soon as it’s available.

You’ll also want to make a list of high traffic websites, e-zines and potential joint venture partners where you can advertise and promote.

Step 2 – Round Up Some Experts

Once you’ve got a good list of questions, e-mail your list of published authors and explain that you’re an online publisher who does expert interviews. Tell them you would like to interview them for 35 or 40 minutes for your audience.

In your e-mail, compliment them on their book if you’ve read it, tell them briefly what you would like to interview them about, and make it clear that you will give them ample opportunity at the end of the interview to promote their book.

Out of a list of 20 authors I would be very surprised if you didn’t get 10 to agree to an interview. That’s more than enough.

Remember, published authors are used to doing free interviews. That’s how they sell their books.

You also want a couple of them to be big names for the credibility it brings you.

Step 3 – Put Together Your Pitch

While you’re waiting for the authors you’ve contacted to get back to you, it’s time to start writing your sales copy. Take the questions, problems, and goals you’ve uncovered in your survey as being most important to your target audience, and promise to answer, solve, and fulfill them.

Until you actually find out who you’ll be interviewing you won’t be able to finish, but you can start working on coming up with a theme, headlines, lead story and so forth for your sales page.

There’s plenty of advice on copywriting in hundreds of other posts on this blog to help you so I won’t go into much detail here.

Step 4 – Plan Your Interviews

When the e-mails start coming back from the authors accepting your request for an interview, establish a date and time for each interview. Then buy those authors’ books and read them.

For each author, relate the questions you’ve pulled out of the market to their specific background and the angle of their book. Add a couple of additional questions the book inspires that you feel would be of interest to your market.

And in no time at all you’ll have 10 similar but different interview scripts to use on the agreed upon dates with your stable of contributing authors.

Step 5 – Record Your Interviews

You don’t need any special equipment. I use a service called Black and White Communications to record my interviews. I’ve also used Budget Conferencing, and there are plenty of other low cost providers.

When you dial into the bridge, make sure you turn off the call waiting feature on your telephone so the audio isn’t interrupted by a third party trying to call you during the interview.

Once the interviews are recorded, you may want to edit them slightly. I use an inexpensive software program called WavePad for this. Be sure to ask your bridge line provider to encode your audio files in MP3 format in order to keep file size to a minimum. You can also convert them to MP3 in WavePad if you have to.

Step 6 – Turn Your Interviews into a High Perceived Value Downloadable Product

Next, you’ll want to get the interviews transcribed. The quality you get back from various transcriptionists is all over the map. Etranscriptionist is the best one I’ve found.

Still, the transcripts won’t come back perfect. I used to edit them but I don’t anymore. It’s just too time consuming.  When the transcripts come back, you may want to get a graphic artist to pretty up the cover page. I usually don’t bother.

What you should definitely do though is write a short forward explaining what the reader will get from the interviews and how to best absorb the material. What I usually do is go through the finished interviews and create a summary, cheat sheet, or list of action items. This is another opportunity to brand yourself and borrow some of your contributing expert’s mojo.

When you’re done editing, convert the finished MS Word files to PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat, and FTP them along with the audio files up to your web host. If you’re technically challenged, there are plenty of people on Elance and other sites like it willing to help you. Many are in developing countries so it’s incredibly cheap.

Step 7 – Putting it all Together

At this point, send your survey respondents a copy of your material and ask for testimonials. Send it to other people you know and ask the same of them. Then finish your sales page.

As soon as you’re done, it’s time to create your website. You don’t need a fancy, shmancy one. Just a couple of pages will do.

Drop your sales copy into Front Page or Dreamweaver or one of the other HTML editors available (MyFreeWebSiteBuilder.com is a really good free one) and upload it to your web host along with any images you’ve decided to display on the page.

You may want to create a squeeze page as well to collect leads. Give one of the interviews away free on your squeeze page to get people to opt in to your list.

You’ll also need a fulfillment page where people can download your product. Make sure and put a link to some other product on your fulfillment page, even if it’s an affiliate link. Just having a text link that says “CONTINUE” at the bottom of the page will give you additional sales.

Those two or three pages are really all you need to start collecting money.

Link your sales page to your shopping cart or payment processor, (you can use PayPal if you don’t yet have a merchant account) … link your payment processor or shopping cart to your fulfillment page … link to your PDFs and MP3 audios on your fulfillment page … and hook your squeeze page up to your autoresponder.

Use bits and pieces of the interviews to create autoresponder “lessons” that follow up on non-buyers. Put a call to action driving those leads back to the sales page. And Bob’s your Uncle. You’re ready to take orders!

At first glance, this may sound like an over-simplification. But it doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to get done. You really can create a salable info-product in just a few weeks with these seven simple steps. And you can use the same simple formula over and over again to create a whole catalog of products.

The main thing is to bust your damn cherry and get some product out there building your database of prospects and customers. Now you’re ready to buy traffic, create joint venture relationships, and start making money.

Don’t waste another minute!

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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12 Comments »

1. Comment by Caleb Osborne — August 27, 2008 @ 10:55 am

   Daniel,

   When I sat next to you at Clayton’s seminar, I didn’t know you were such a smart guy!

   No offense of course

   But yeah, this is the best advice for "doing it" ever:

   "The main thing is to bust your damn cherry and get some product out there building your database of prospects and customers."

   For those that think this sounds too simple, it’s basically the exact same thing you did to create your masters of copywriting course, correct?

   Later!
   Caleb

2. Comment by James — August 27, 2008 @ 11:11 am

   Daniel,
   This has got to be one of the most practical and explanatory posts I have ever read.  Pardon my ignorance,  but there are steps here that  I would never have thought of, and there they are, laid out brilliantly, and concisely.   Thank you so much!

3. Comment by scott aughtmon — August 27, 2008 @ 11:49 am

   Hi Daniel & everyone else,

   I just wanted to confirm that this method works.  I know from personal experience.  I used a very similar method (with a couple twists) and put together my first recession e-manual back in 2002.  I just did it again and now have 2 e-manuals fand interviews rom 38 experts.

4. Comment by Brad — August 27, 2008 @ 12:06 pm

   Well aside from the rather crude remark "The main thing is to bust your damn cherry and get some product out there building your database of prospects and customers" (that was not necessary to make your point. A good writer doesn’t need to resort to that) excellent advise to follow and a well outlined plan.

5. Comment by John Deck — August 27, 2008 @ 12:33 pm

   When I start a project I begin with a process map. It makes the project flow some much better. What Danial laid out in his article is a step by step process that some gurus have charged hundreds if not thousands of dollars for. Danial’s steps for doing an info product can’t get much simpler.

   John

6. Comment by Bill Urell — August 27, 2008 @ 12:35 pm

   I remember Frank Kern explaining his not being on the marketing scene for a while by saying " I got tired, I mean how many different ways can you say ‘find out what people want and sell it to them’. I had to laugh, but that is like solving the homeless problem by telling someone to go build their own house, there’s a bit more to it.

   This is a simple strategy that I can see easily working. My block was thinking I was impinging on the expert, but when Daniel said, that authors are used to free interviews, that’s how they sell books, a light went on. It is now a win-win.

   Bill U

7. Comment by Marina — August 27, 2008 @ 6:32 pm

   Hi  Daniel  and  everyone  there!

   Thank  you  for  your  lesson!
   Yes,  it’s  true  that  exist  many  Professionals  and  it’s  true  that  there  are  some  Masters  which  can  show  you  what  they  can  do….but ,just  a  few  of  them   who  can Teach  you  How  simple  and   funny  it  can  be.
   That  i  found  today  in  your  method  and  in  your  manner  of  talk  about  this,  so  my  big  tnanks  for    quit  my  fear  of "how  complicate  is  this "  and  show   the  way  of  simple  and  clear  steps.

8. Comment by Jim — August 28, 2008 @ 12:52 am

   The "bust your damn cherry" comment was brilliant.  I mean, think about it!  You can either dream about sex or experience it- and most (if not all) of us know which one is better…

   Cheers to Daniel for nuts and bolts steps - please take this and do it!  Experience it!  You won’t be disappointed!

9. Comment by Jeremy Reeves — August 28, 2008 @ 8:44 am

   That sounds like a very easy way to get a product out there..and like I’ve heard many people say..people will view YOU as an expert just because you can now say that it’s "your" book!

   I might have to start getting to work on that

   Jeremy Reeves
   http://www.GetClientsIn20.com

10. Comment by Marc — August 28, 2008 @ 4:18 pm

    I’m in the middle of writing my first "how to" info marketing product.

    I am speechless…

    This is exactly what I needed.

11. Comment by Gerard LeBlond — August 28, 2008 @ 8:22 pm

    Bingo! You’ve hit the nail right on the head with a concise, systematic, reproducible plan to move from Point A (in executing a marketing project) to Point B. Thanks for putting the pieces together and representing them so clearly. Respectfully, Gerard LeBlond

12. Comment by James — August 30, 2008 @ 6:32 pm

    Hey Daniel
    Great Instructions for creating Info Products your a giver. It’s sure Is nice to see that there are people out there that enjoy
    teaching and don’t expect any monetary gain from their knowledge. I think we all have went through analyse paralysis at one point in our learning process. Don’t over think it and take action you’ll learn much faster by not being afriad of making
    mistakes. Thanks for sharing

    James