Creating Information Products But Which One? Part 8 – Deciding

When I started writing this series I didn’t expect it to go to 8 blog articles! I guess that’ll teach me.

Today is the final entry in this series.

So let’s do a quick review of what was discussed:

1. Introduced the topic and the questions
2. What types of information products can you get
3. Some Techniques for creating information products
4. Cost of creating products
5. Building a reputation (value in terms of reputation)
6. Training value
7. Dollar value (selling price)

And today we’ll bring it all together to make a decision.

If you remember back to the introduction (personally I looked it up  ) … I said that there are 6 questions you need to answer when deciding what form your information product needs to take:

1. What forms am I capable of doing?
2. What forms am I most comfortable with?
3. How much will this content cost (in time or money)?
4. Can I create multiple forms from one?
5. How important is this to my reputation?
6. How much will customers pay for (value) this form

So how do we start the decision ….

I suggest that you begin with the first two questions … Capability and comfort. To use a real life example, my partner Paul and I were initially intending that TrainingNOW was to be a company for live seminars and training consulting. However, Paul’s disability became much worse over the period we were creating the company and it’s assets. As a result we no longer do live seminars. And our consulting has been transferred to LearningCreators.ca primarily as internet facilitated and to LearningCreators.com as eLearning/Train the trainer. Although I do a little live consulting for training our concentration is now elearning and remote consulting.

As for video, again Paul’s disability has limited him to doing webinars and similar types of voice over (audio) presentations (at least that’s his claim  ).

One of the things I’ve learned through this experiment in internet marketing is that live and video are completely different. I’m quite comfortable doing live presentations. I’m used to doing them. I like doing them. Video, on the other hand, has proven to be a pain in the pitootie … a camera just doesn’t give you the energy back that a real audience  does. And somehow I become hyper-aware of every mistake.

In short, like anything, it takes practice to appear either live or in front of a camera or in voice over. And the practice in one doesn’t help with the others. (This is in addition to the practice for the presentation itself).

You may find that you are not comfortable creating certain types of information products. While practice will improve comfort levels there is a limit.

So both your ability and your comfort may remove certain formats from the list of options.

The next question is how important to your reputation is this information product. Sometimes, the whole reason for doing an information product is to build reputation. In this case, all other factors may be irrelevant.

Should this be the case, there is only one choice. A proper, well written, well organized, well edited and professionally published traditional book is required. The best, of course, is to have a traditional publisher publish the book, however, today’s self-published books are a close second. This book should be written as a stand-a-lone product using traditional methods rather than repurposing methods. If you decide to create another format as well, you should treat this as a different decision.

Once you’ve decided that reputation is not a driver then you are able to make a decision based on the mix:

1. suitability (training value)
2. cost
3. price

When making this decision keep in mind the different repurposing options available. You will often find that the best solution is to create all formats from a video. Typically, video is the first format that is dropped because it is the most expensive to do well. However, don’t underestimate that ability of modern camera. A $150 HD camera can produce a product which is amazingly professional as a raw product. And editing is now done using PCs and software which is generally available and often free (check out Jahshaka if you need a full editing program).

Like any other business decision, you want to maximize your profit while keeping your cost within your budget limits.