Creating Killer Ideas for Your Information Products
I started this book by talking about creating a content site. I think that’s always the best place for any Internet business to begin, because it’s the easiest. You don’t need any special skills to create a web site, fill it with content, and surround that content with ads.
Once you hear that KaChing sound for the first time, you’ll immediately receive a massive injection of motivation to keep going and to make that KaChing ring louder.
But there’s another reason I think that it’s a good idea to start with a free, ad-supported web site. As you’re writing content, reading comments, and talking with your readers on Twitter and Facebook, you’ll also be getting an idea of who they are... and what they need.
That’s incredibly valuable information.
Put up a blog post that no one reads and you’ll have wasted an hour, maybe two. But you’ll also have helped your site’s search engine ranking and learned something about what your audience doesn’t want to see. You’ll have risked little and won a little. That’s the worst-case scenario, and it’s really not terrible.
But creating information products does require a larger investment. As you’ll see, there are ways to reduce the risk without significantly affecting the returns, but the risk that you’ll lose time or even a little money creating an information product that doesn’t sell is always higher than the loss you might endure by creating a dud blog post. Three factors will decide whether your information product makes a giant KaChing or a dull silence: the idea, the implementation, and the launch.
The idea sounds like the hardest part of the product. It looks like it’s the most important and the toughest to get right. You need to do lots of research, test the ground, carry out surveys, and build focus groups. Get it wrong and you’ll never see a dime for your efforts, your product will fail, and you’ll have to stay at your job for the rest of your life.
Actually, none of that is true, and while you might want to do a bit of research before you get to work, you won’t have to do too much market testing before the release. You’re creating an information product, not a new flavor of Coke. There might be some risks associated with information products, but the costs are low ... and the brainstorming is very simple.
The first rule in choosing a topic is to follow your gut.
If you’ve created an online business in a field that you enjoy, that you understand, and that you’ve already spent time in, you should have a feel for the market. Your customers will be people like you, and you’ll have a sense for what you—and others with your interest—would be willing to pay to learn.
That doesn’t mean you should rush out and create the first information product you think of. If you’ve thought of it, there’s a good chance that someone else will have thought of it, too. You’ll certainly want to make sure that the product you’re thinking of creating isn’t already available and that there is room for your own take on the subject. Looking at those other titles will also give you an idea of what’s selling and what the market is used to seeing. All of that is important.
That’s straightforward enough, but though your sense for your subject can point you in a general direction, it’s not enough by itself to plot your course. You will also have to do at least some research.
And that leads to the second rule of information product brainstorming : Listen to your readers.
As a web site publisher, your readers are both a vital part of the market and a market that talks to you. The comments they leave at the end of your blog posts and the actions they take on your site give you tons of valuable information about what sort of information they might (and might not) be willing to buy.
The comments themselves are obvious, but they’re also unreliable. It’s possible that some users will say specifically that they’d be prepared to pay for a book that would tell them how to build their own patio or how to cook dinner parties in a snap, but you can’t rely on those kinds of posts to tell you what information product to create. What you can do is look at the number of comments your posts receive to see which topics push people’s buttons the most. Although there’s a difference between prompting people to write a comment and driving them to spend money, it is likely that controversial topics will help you to move more goods. The comment count will help you to identify the subjects most likely to generate interest among your users.
Comments are the most obvious sources of information about your user preferences, but they’re not the only intelligence that you can use to make smart decisions. Your web site stats will also tell you which pages are the most popular and how long users spend on them. That’s a measure of interest. If a blog post topic has generated lots of views and persuaded your readers to stick around and read through to the bottom of the page, that’s a good sign that people are gripped by the subject. There’s a reasonable chance that they’ll find it interesting enough to pay to continue reading.
As you’re wondering what sort of topic you should use for an information product, take a few minutes to look at your site stats. List the 10 pages that generate the most views, the 10 pages that generate the most comments, and the 10 pages that generate the longest views. You should find that there’s plenty of
