Here’s something I come across alarmingly often in my dealings with online business owners.
It’s a common mistake slash distortion field in mindset, especially when creating your very first information product.
It’s actually easy to avoid too, but here’s what it is first:
- Creating a ‘one for all’ product with little to no regard for who the target customer, the beneficiary, really is (in other words, you’re doing it for yourself)
- Product creation via brain dumping may be easy, but it won’t make you much money – if at all (again, easy to do but close to worthless to the customer)
It’s heart-breaking, really. All that work and no reward, just because you wouldn’t stop and think for a moment what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and who you’re doing it for.
It’s yet another symptom of ‘trying to not show up‘.
photo credit: Inha Leex Hale
To avoid this predicament, do this instead:
- Spend time hunting for the positioning angle WHILE you’re privately doing the brain dumping through your mass of knowledge
- As soon as you’ve got the angle, repurpose and re-route the content to serve THAT
- Re-create part or all of the content if you must, because targeting and positioning is EVERYTHING in the info business (and all product business, really).
When you do it like this, you’ll end up with something that shapes up into a product much easier, instead of just a pile of information. A HUGE difference in consumability as well as marketability.
To help you with that, a few key ways to differentiate:
- A METHOD that nobody else is offering yet
- Undeniable proof from both big and small operators
- Latching on to a big ongoing change in the market
- A done-for-you type of product that saves time and/or cash
In other words… Make it supremely easy for your customers to BUY.
Always have the act of buying at the back of your mind, even as you create so-called ‘free content‘ for your pre-launch or what have you.
“Useful, but incomplete” – remember?
The content you splash out needs to be conceptually and directly linked to the underlying value proposition – the eventual order button.
Otherwise, what’s the POINT, right? You want to make money, after all.
So! When you set out to create that first product of yours, just curb the instinct to blurt it all out without any thought given to how it’ll be consumed.
Take a step back, and slap the content into an outline you make as you go along. At least that’ll help you organize your thoughts, and see things from your customer’s perspective.
And if you’re really ambitious, role-play your customer. That’ll give you everything you need to know about how to create the product and market it. Never fails.
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Research is key to success when creating products for the internet.
It is one thing to build a digital product and it is another to market and get hits on the web site and another to make the sale.
I have many e-books for sale on my web site and I created a lot of free information to get the client to the web site however today I think the web site is to create fame and if you want to sell your products they need to be in a online store like Amazon.
People go to a store to buy something and people go the web site for something free.
Well said, Perry. The web site is generally to create fame, following, and so on… And knowing your customers is key, in any case. When you know how they want to be served information and experiences… you’ll know how they want to buy, too. Thanks for stopping by!