I have some ideas for a info product for a niche and I could use your knowledgable, vast, collective direction.

I need to know the A-Z of developing ,creating, marketing a product. Of course insight on all the back end stuff and how to do that correctly. I would even like to know where to go to have it printed or cds made.

Is there anything out there (that is not a million bucks) I can buy to learn all of this? Does anyone have a real good system?

thank you for any thoughts

Paul

Motley,
A great place to start is at David Frey's main website. Be sure to read through his forums as well (see link at the top of his page)... very informative stuff for getting those idea wheels turning.

For your offline window cleaning business, check out David Frey's instant referral system.

Come'on Paul you know a lot of this stuff already!

Printers, cd duplicators... there are zillions of potential suppliers (I'd probably start off doing as much "in-house" as I could-- printing manuals, duplicating cd's-- not exactly "splitting the atom" kind of stuff).

I know Dan Kennedy has a couple different products on information marketing. BUT really the most important things are:

1. How are you going to get prospects in your "pipeline"?
2. What does your sku consist of?

Concerning #1 here are additional questions I would ask:
1. What are the ways (media) I can access my niche? I hope there are some very simple identifiable ways or harvesting this niche may not be very profitable.
2. What costs are going to be incurred with a beginning marketing campaign?
3. Where does my info product rank in being able to solve a problem suffered by the members of this niche? Is this a big problem or not?

Concerning #2 here are additional comments:
1. Having a single product is probably not going to be successful-- not once you figure in your customer acquisition costs.
2. I would consider 3 sku's to start: A free report in order to build my "house" list of prospects, a medium priced item from $49-$199 and then a high-end item priced from $499-$999.

Before I created the first product I'd probably spend some time surveying members of the niche to get a handle on their specific problems and what their expectations would be for an information product-- including what format they would find to be most beneficial.

The key to the whole thing is access to the niche. There needs to be magazines, mailing lists, email lists, directories or some other collection of names in order to make the most expensive part of the process (building a list of interested prospects) as simple (and hopefully as inexpensive) as possible.

Hi Paul,

I have a special report I wrote recently on 21 ways to create your own info products easily. I also cover some of the online resources that I use for physical products or for print on demand.

It doesn't cover everything you asked for, but maybe it would help you on the inital start. Easy Information Products Easy Information Products

Hope that helps,

Mike

Paul

Michael and Stephen are full of good advice.

One great resource is:
Get Started With Information Marketing

That's a product by my friend Stu McLaren (and it's not an affiliate link).

I would add this: the thing I see holding people back is spending too much time thinking about all this, trying to figure it all out, instead of doing it.

For instance... you could create six products this week. Here's how:

Do five phone interviews with people who are experts in your market. Do two of them on Monday, two on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday.

Next step: get a free account at Kunaki.com and upload each of your calls as a separate product. Kunaki will make a physical audio CD for you, in a case, shrink-wrapped and with a bar code.

I recommend getting your own custom artwork done for the CDs, because Kunaki's artwork sucks. You could use Sean Lowery's Mini Site Graphics (he does excellent work at reasonable rates to do the art.

The duplication cost, once you have everything uploaded, is $1.60 per unit, plus $3 shipping. That's a real cost of $4.60. You can charge whatever you want for each CD... say $67. Kunaki will take the order, produce the product, ship it, and send you a check for the difference.

How easy is that?

Plus, if you would rather control the look and feel of the shopping cart and sales process, you can just order a box of your own product from Kunaki, and do the shipping yourself.

So let's assume you have your 5 interviews made into nice-looking CDs. I suggest audio CDs inside DVD cases; it looks nicer and has higher perceived value. You could also do data CDs in DVD cases, in which case you could include MP3 files and PDF transcripts.

Next Step: get someone to transcribe each call. Actually I would do this as you do each call. Just send the audio to your transcription service immediately, so that all 5 calls are transcribed before the week's end.

Meanwhile, be working on a template for a salesletter you can use for each of the five minisites you're going to set up. Get your domains registered, and get your aweber account loaded with an AR sequence for each one.

By day 6, you should have basic, rough, non-perfect versions of:

• 5 products that Kunaki produces (with 2 day shipping you could even have them in hand)
• 5 transcripts
• 5 minisites with their own domain names
• 5 nearly-cloned salesletters up, each customized for that interview
• 5 autoresponder sequences

Non-perfect is good enough. Because you got started. Most people never do.

And you can always improve from here.

Now that you have your 5 products...

You can also bundle them as a set. Now you have 5 individual products, or a set of all 5 that you sell as a "bigger" product. That's a total of 6 products.

You just set up 6 salesletters, one for each of the 5 CDs and one for the big set.

6 websites, 6 products, and it can all be done inside 7 days.

Is it a lot of work? Yep.

But at the end of that incredibly intense week, you'll be further ahead than most people who are still trying to "figure it all out".

This is just one possible way to do it. You could do 3 interviews, or you could give yourself a month to do it all, or whatever you're comfortable with. But I like playing the game of "what could I do if I went crazy on this?" It opens your mind to what's possible.

I'm not saying you should follow my plan. It's just one plan. There are many others. My intent was to maybe inspire you (and anyone reading this) to perhaps take fast, massive action... and leapfrog past the "figuring it out" stage.

I encourage you to dive in!

Get out there and start cranking out products. And light a signal fire to let us know what you're doing!

Another solid graphics guy is Eric Reed at Affordable Graphics and Banners.

So if you aren't ready to drop $500 for a full custom graphics package, then head over to Eric's site: miracle

The bottom line is, take action and get started.

Good luck,

Mike