Those figures will tell you how much interest your readers have in the topic before they reach your page. They won’t tell you how much interest remains after they’ve read your page. While it’s unlikely that a single blog post will be enough to completely satisfy people who want to know about a topic, it’s certainly possible that a good post will leave them feeling that they know enough not to need to read more. (That’s not a reason to write poor posts, though. If one post can satisfy readers, then the topic is too narrow for an information product.)
However, you do have a measure that tells you how much interest remains after someone has read your post. Your ad stats don’t just reveal how well your ad units have been optimized, they also show you that having read your post and looked at your page, your readers still want to learn more. They’ve clicked the ad to continue their education. That tells you there’s a demand that still hasn’t been met.
When you’ve listed the posts and topics that have attracted the most views for the longest amounts of time, add the pages with the highest click-through rates.
All of these figures will give you a sense of the demand for your expertise. But they won’t give you an answer to the question, “What should I create an information product about?” They’ll give you areas to think about. They’ll inspire you. But you still have a couple more things to throw into the pot.
Your information product should be on a topic you know well and can talk about intelligently. There’s no point in choosing a subject that you think your audience would pay for if you don’t actually know more about it than they do.
And it has to deliver results.
That’s the really crucial bit. When you’re asking people to pay you money for information, they’re only going to reach into their pockets if they believe that money is going to come back to them. That doesn’t have to be in cash form—although you can certainly find plenty of information products on the Web that promise to help people earn giant stacks of cash—it can also be money saved.
Create an information product that explains how to build a deck, for example, and you’ll be able to tell people that they’re saving the labor costs involved in hiring someone to do the work for them. As long as you’re charging less than the amount that a buyer would have had to pay, you’ll be offering a bargain. Your buyers need to feel that they’re swapping the cover price for a later return of money or some other benefit.
I wish I could tell you that there’s a fail-safe formula for coming up with ideas for information products. I wish I could walk you through the process of reading your server stats and ad stats until the opportunities leap out and grab you. And I wish I could claim that if you do all of these things, check the market, and outline the value your product brings that you’re guaranteed to make a profit.
But I can’t.
When you’re creating information products, there are no guarantees. There are gambles of various odds and risks with different levels of reward. But there are also ways of reducing the risk, and there are so many opportunities available that the biggest risk you can take when building an online business is not creating an information product at all.
Creating the Product
What kind of product do you want to create? A book? An e-book? A set of DVDs? Or how about a subscription-based virtual classroom that, over the course of several months, teaches your customers everything they need to know to complete their goals?
There’s no one way to create an information product. Instead, there are a number of different ways of transforming the information you have into a format that can be sold online. For the buyer, the format itself doesn’t matter. As long as the information is able to flow efficiently from you to them, they’ll be getting their money’s worth. But what the different formats can do is affect how that information is transferred, how much information is transferred—and how much you have to invest in creating the product.
E IS FOR EASY... AND E-BOOK
The easiest approach is to write an e-book. This is how I started creating information products and the result just blew me away (Figure 4.1).
After I’d seen what AdSense could do, I got in touch with a few friends and told them what I’d discovered about optimizing ad units. A day after trying out some simple strategies for himself, Chris Pirillo, creator of blog network Lockergnome.com, got back to me with the single word: “Dude!” Dave Taylor (AskDaveTaylor.com) and tech guru Bob Rankin (TheInternetTourbus.com) were also enthusiastic, and soon I was telling everyone I met that they needed to be shaking up their ads, blending them into the page, and testing different formats.
Figure 4.1The first edition of my AdSense Secrets e-book was about 60 pages long ... and I sold thousands of copies at $77 each.
At that point, someone suggested I put the results of my experiment in an e-book and share it online.
I didn’t know anything about information products then. I’d never created one, and much of the content on my web site was being provided by volunteers and professional writers. I was contributing only occasionally, so the idea of sitting down and writing an entire book didn’t appeal to me a great deal.
But I wanted people to know this stuff. I’d wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of money by not optimizing my ads, so the sooner people understood what AdSense could do, the sooner they could earn real cash, too. Of course, I wasn’t completely altruistic, either. The more people who used AdSense, the more advertisers would like it, the more ads there’d
