Okay, so Friday I promised a short series on how to select the type of information products … or more correctly the format. On Monday I was bad and posted a video from Will Smith that I thought you might find interesting. My bad! Me Busy! Me Lazy! But I really did think it was interesting. And given its subject that’s saying something.

So what’s the point of this — besides a backhanded apology.

The point is that that blog entry was as much an information product as the book I spent 2 weeks working on (24 hours writing, the rest publishing). It just cost a LOT less to get out.

So how do you decide what form your information product should take? I mean besides “I need this in fifteen minutes and I have no clue what to write. I guess I better rip something off YouTube!”.

Now before I start lets get something straight. The boundaries. Information products is really a large group of products formats. “How to”s, which we call Learning Content, alone can take seven (or more) physical formats. And Learning Content is only one type of information product. Software is also an information product. Web services (e.g. article posting tools, web design tools) are also information products. So are databases.

However, software, services, and databases are – for most of us – beyond our skills and capability.  Most of us produce information products in the form of  learning content.

So I’m going to restrict this conversation to traditional learning content (LearningCreators.com, and LearningCreators.ca remember?) and exclude software, services and other types of stuff.

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

Those questions basically bring out three characteristics of each of the formats:

  1. The cost of the format (Questions 1 through 4).
  2. The reputation value
  3. The dollar value

Over the next few posts in this series we’ll address these questions and characteristics.

In the next post we’ll look at the various formats of information product that are possible.

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