045: How to Create Your First Information Product in 30 Days | Creating the Product [Podcast]

This is part 3 of the series called How to Create Your First Information Product in 30 Days where I promised to let you look over my shoulder as I create a product. Today I will actually go over the product creation process and offer you a simple guide to creating products fast.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Creative Commons/The U.S. Army [/featured-image]

In case you are just joining in, I hope you too will take the challenge and create a product with me. I will walk you through it.

The previous posts can be found here:

• Intro of the topic – How to Create Your First Information Product in 30 Days
• Part 1 – How to Create Your First Information Product in 30 Days  | Finding Information Product Ideas
• Part 2 – How to Create Your First Information Product in 30 Days  | Writing the Sales Copy

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Topic of the Week: How to Create Your First Information Product in 30 Days  | Creating the Product

Product creation can mean a lot of things. From the simplest of recording yourself explaining how to do something to a friend to full production crew with cameras, directors, and writers. We have all seen both. So here is a caution!

CAUTION – “You cannot start where someone else finished.”].

In other words, do not try to match the products put out by people with staffs and large budgets. Think simple. What you need to do is teach people something and do it well. So go fire the production crew, stop the orders of the $1000+ cameras and audio equipment. Work with what you already have the best you can.

So here is my minimalist approach to creating a product fast. Ready?

Fast and Furious Creation of Information Products

1. Outline the product. What do you want to teach people? Think of 5 key points you want to teach, or 5 takeaways. Make a list. Forget the philopshy and history, but focus on what they will learn. Look back at your sales copy. What did you promise? Those promises are your points.
2. Create subtopics for each topic. Perhaps each topic has 3 subtopics. If you have 5 takeaways with 3 subtopics, you now have 15 talking points. That is enough.
3. Create an invitation and invite others to hear you deliver your talk. You can do over the phone with Free Conference Call, over a webinar with GoToMeeting, or in person at a local library. Use something like Eventbrite to create the invitation. Simply cut and paste your points into the text of Eventbrite and now you have an invitation. For example, I have used Eventbrite for my Awaken Your Entrepreneur series.  (Not very pretty huh? I made $2000 on this invite!) As an alternative, you can pre-record with just you. I do not like this as much, but do what works for you.
4. Charge or don’t charge. Either is OK. Do not get hung up on this point, just do it already!
5. Present and record it. Really all you need is audio. If you use Free Conference Call or GoToMeeting, they each offer recording tools. If you do it live, use a simple digital voice recorder such as the Olympus VN-702PC Voice Recorder or even your iPhone. Really audio is all you need. If you use Powerpoint slides, photos, or charts, just include them with the audio mp3 in the final product.

How I am Creating My Networking for Introverts Product

Next, I will NOT do this live. I have done it live about 50 times and have it recorded and could just deliver it as a product. So yes, I am breaking my own rule. But I will get it done because I have committed to you and others on this podcast. So I have POWERFUL accountability.

I am recording this in small segments (5-10 minutes each) using screen casting (powerpoint with voice over) and will distribute over the web. I am using Screenflow for the screencast since I am on Mac, but for MS Windows you will want Camtasia.

Pricing Your Product

I know many of you are thinking about the question of pricing, and I will discuss in the next episode. But, you have done some of the pricing work while writing the copy in episode 44. I have talked to multiple people over the last few weeks as they did this and they felt they had $20 products. I convinced them (I hope) they have $200 products. Value is not about the time, the length of the content, but about how it can be used. More on that next week.

Episode Resources

In this episode I mentioned some resources, including:

• Free Conference Call
• GoToMeeting
• Eventbrite
• Screencasting: Mac Users-  Screenflow. Windows users – Camtasia.
• You will find a similar post to this at How to Design Information Products
• BlueHost Webhosting for $4.95 per month
• How to Setup a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

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[reminder]How is it going for you? What struggles are you having in product creation?  [/reminder]