I often write about how you should have your own personal blog to brand yourself in your niche, and I stress about creating good content people want to read, and creating information products.
Now I’m going to explain how to go about creating an information product people actually want to read and love.
If you read my last post on creating information products then you should already have an idea if you want to create a ebook, audio, video, or all three. So below I will outline the steps to creating your first product your readers will thank you for.
Identify a problem
The first step is to identify problems in your chosen niche. If you actually know your niche well the best way to identify problems is start out with something you would pay money for if someone provided you with a solution. Everyone has problems, and if you can find a solution to solve their problem or prevent a problem from occurring they will gladly pay you for it.
In order to identify problems you will need to do research.
Market Research
If you’re in a niche you know well then you should be able to identify and solve problems much easier then you think you can.
If you know your niche well you should already know the terminology and lingo people use. In every niche they have unique sayings, and phrases they use to identify things, it’s kind of like a secret language.
Example: In the make money online niche some of the terms are– CPA, hosting, domain name, SEO, split testing, PPC, Organic Traffic, social media marketing, CPS, and affiliates.
To most people these terms would be very confusing, and they would look at you with the puppy dog look because they’re confused.
Once you know the secret language, open up a word document on your computer or go old school like I do with a trusty pad of paper and a pen.
Step 1- Now we are going to start searching niche specific forums, social media, yahoo answers, and wherever your market hangs out.
Step 2- Search for the popular terms(lingo) in your niche, and see what people are having trouble with.
Step 3- Note down everything you find, no problem is to small. Note down anything you notice many people are having trouble with.
Step 4- Find all the popular products(if any) in your niche. If you’re in a big niche like myself this will be easy to find. Find out what your competitors are doing. See what customers are saying about their products. I would even suggest buying the popular products people love.
Step 5- Figure out how you can create your own product. You want to take the information you found in the first 4 steps and find out how you can make a better product. You want to put your own spin on things, and make it unique so it’s not the same. Identify issues people are still having that the other products your competitors created didn’t solve.
Step 6- Now create your product
KISS- Keep It Stupid Simple
When creating your product don’t over complicate things. Follow the Kiss principle and keep it stupid simple.
I follow the one problem and one solution format. So basically what you’re going to do is create a product around one problem with one solution. You aren’t going to create a product that solves every problem in your niche.
When you try to solve to many problems you will create an inferior product because it will be to broad, and not solve a specific problem they have right now. You also will be selling yourself short because now when you want to create another product to solve a laser targeted problem they won’t want to purchase it because you already addressed it previously.
This is not unethical, this is just plain smart. You’re running a business, not a charity. You want to give massive value to your customers with each and every product you create, but we aren’t going to give out the whole farm.
By keeping things simple you will sell more, and you will create loyal customers who want to buy more of your products when you release them in the future.
Selling The product
Now that you have your product you’re probably thinking great, but what next?
If you kept the product simple you should be able to sell the benefits much easier. I’m sure you’re aware that copy writing sells products, but you don’t have to be a professional copywriter to make a nice living.
When you first start out you want to model after your competitors and learn what they’re doing to sell their product.
Look at their sales page and see how they’re marketing their product. Are they using a long sales letter? Do they have fancy graphics, and slick sales copy?
If so you want to match what they’re doing. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Don’t copy your sales copy off their sales page, this is illegal and unethical. That’s a quick way to make enemies in your niche.
Instead just model closely what they’re doing and craft your sales letter in your own words.
Create a Lead Magnet
Now you have your product and sales page setup you want to create a lead magnet to get people into your sales funnel. A lead magnet is a free gift you can give away to exchange for the visitors email. This will get the visitor to opt in to receive the free gift.
This doesn’t have to be award winning, but spend a little time on it to make it good. The idea is to give away something that you could charge for. check my website where you get a free course to learn how to build your first website. Your lead magnet can be something that solves a small problem in your niche.
I could charge for this to make money, but the email is much more valuable to me. This makes it so we can lead them down our sales funnel, and market to them as long as they’re on our list. If they like your free content, they will be open to purchasing your premium content.
Putting everything together
Now that we have our product to sale, and we have our lead magnet to give away for free we need to set everything up. You should already have your personal blog that you’re blogging from on a regular basis and providing great content, but if not you need to setup one now.
Your going to build your list and get people to opt in for your free product so you can market your paid product to them later. So what you want to do is put a opt in form in your sidebar advertising your free product, and updates to your blog.
Once they opt in you want to send them regular emails, and focus on building a relationship and helping them with their problems and providing them with great content.
DO NOT SELL TO THEM RIGHT AWAY- DON’T BE THIS GUY!!!!!
After you have sent a few emails following up with them, and present them with more great content on your blog you created you want to present them with your paid product you created.
You want to explain to them that if they liked your free content they should check out your product you created for them. If you did a good job providing them with good content they will be interested to see what you’re offering.
Once you have some buyers you have people you know you can market to in the future. You ask these people what they thought of the product, how you can improve it, and what they would like to see from you in the future.
Thats it in a nutshell. There is more to it, but you will have to learn from experience. I will create lots of articles in the future detailing step by step how to put everything together, but product creation and list building comes from experience.
You will learn how to create great products, interact with your list, and how to create more expensive products people will be happy to purchase from you.
Hope this helps and if you have any questions leave them below in the comments section.