Learn how to write books or create other learning content
Creating Information Products
Random Thoughts relating to creating how to’s in formats other than books
5 Qualities of a Good Webinar or Teleseminar (or Book for that matter)
02 months ago
One of the characteristics that distinguishes a professional learning content seller from the hacks that infest much of the internet is the quality of their learning products. Their webinars, teleseminars, live course and books are worth investing the time in. And frankly they just look better.
Now I’m not saying they’re perfect. They aren’t. There are a number of reasons that a quality producer may have less than stellar product. What I am saying is that there is a line … and you can tell that the quality producer has at least tried to keep over the line.
But what is quality?
What is it that will keep your audience returning?
After all, you can’t build quality into your products if you don’t know what it is. So in this webinar on our youtube channel we discuss the 5 qualities of a good webinar or teleseminar. It applies equally to a book or live event.
Please enjoy!
Creating any learning product is an exercise in egotism. Not that bad egotism that is displayed as a form of bragging. But the good egotism where the quality of the product is a direct reflection of the importance of the subject and the pride the creator takes in his or her creation.
Creating a good learning content product is something that every content creator wants!
But how?
Webinars and teleseminars are no different from any other learning content product in this. Your ego as creator is directly connected to the quality. After all, you’re putting a little bit of yourself into the creation.
But how do you define a good webinar or teleseminar?
In this video, I’m going to describe five of the qualities that define a good webinar or teleseminar.
1. The content is relevant to the audience. In many ways this is the most important characteristic of quality. Without this quality your webinar won’t be watched or teleseminar listened to. And without that the quality doesn’t really matter. In order to motivate your audience to pay attention you need to focus on one of their motivators. And then your content needs to either solve the problem, show them how to avoid a pain, or show them how to achieve a desired goal. We call this relevance. And without it you have nothing.
2. The content is honest and sincere. Your audience doesn’t necessarily think of your content as honest and sincere. Those are two words you wouldn’t necessarily use about the material you are teaching. However, it is what your audience will say about you. You need to present material that is as correct and believable as you can make it. You need to present information that you believe is correct. And you need to present it from the real desire to help your audience. If you don’t, your audience will know and will react accordingly.
3. The webinar or teleseminar is well-organized. Nothing is more frustrating to your audience than a webinar or teleseminar that goes off into the ether, exploring the outer reaches of irrelevancy. Your webinar or teleseminar must provide organization to the material. After all, that’s what the audience is paying you for — with time if not money. They are expecting you to organize the material so that they understand it.
4. The webinar or teleseminar is designed for the media. Have you ever been to a live PowerPoint seminar where the overheads have 20 tightly packed, far too small points per slide? Bored weren’t you? Did you even bother to stay? Each of the media has its strengths and weaknesses. Each affects the cognitive limits differently. You need to design your webinar or teleseminar to work within the limits imposed by that media. Having too many points on a slide or worse in your teleseminar is a certain way to lose your audience.
5. The webinar or teleseminar is professionally presented. At first glance this might seem like an onerous quality to impose. After all, being a professional presenter is something that you need to learn over time. But being professional and being perfect aren’t the same thing. There are two elements involved in being professional with your presentation. First, you need to pay attention to the details. How the webinar slides look is important. You don’t want them to be overloaded or under-designed. Second, you need to avoid dumb mistakes. In the case of a webinar, spelling mistakes are an absolute no-no. You need to practice your webinar or teleseminar several times. You can’t afford to show that you are nervous when presenting. And only practice can help you build that level of confidence.
While you’re here please feel free to suggest other topics and let us know what you think of the video.
U.S. Justice Dept. After eBook Publishers
12 months ago
When I first entered the eBook business, you HAD to publish your own books. (Unless you wanted to go the Clickbank route. ) Prices were high (compared to print books) and learning content providers were known to misrepresent their reports as eBooks. And the major publishers toyed with eBooks but basically considered them as irrelevant.
Then came the Kindle from Amazon and other similar products.
Last year, Amazon tried to force the major publishers to sell their eBooks at much reduced prices. Ultimately, Amazon had to back down. However, they did succeed by introducing the 70% royalty for books under $9.95. Self-publishers and the market did what force, threats and banning couldn’t do.
Unfortunately, other sales outlets aren’t as open-minded as Amazon. Getting Apple, Kobo or Barnes & Noble (the Nook) to carry self-published eBooks is an exercise in frustration — especially if you are from outside the U.S.A. (like TrainingNOW). Simply put, most of the booksellers haven’t gotten the new business model yet.
In any case, the U.S. Justice department has announced that it will investigate the “Cartel” practices of Apple and the big publishers. You can read more about this on ZDNet (part of CBS Interactive) Justice Dept. to sue Apple, other publishers over e-book ‘cartel’ . The European (antitrust) Commission began a similar investigation about three months ago.
It will be interesting to see what the fallout will be.
If You’re in the IM Business
04 months ago
Since I’m in the “expert” business — in all my businesses — I follow a number of the so-called “gurus”. Unfortunately, some of them seem to know what they are talking about but frankly price their products out of my range. Understandable, they are looking for people who are at the next stage up from me. Cool. I understand that. Fortunately many of them give away a lot of great information.
One of those gurus I follow is a fellow by the name of Frank Kern. He is a master of the live video and his giveaways are always valuable. One of his yearly giveaways is The State of The Internet Address — lots of American xxxx of course but then again it is a pastische of the US President’s State of the Nation address. If you click on the link you’ll open the video up in another window.
Watch it. The information it contains is essentially what I’ve been preaching for years now. But it’s something that a lot of “gurus” seem to ignore. Besides it is a good example of how to work a camera.
BTW — no, I’m not getting anything from this recommendation. (Silly me)! I’m suggesting it because I agree with him. On the other hand, be aware that he is going to be selling at the end.
So what does he have to say in summary?
- To succeed you need to have:
- Technology (least important) (e.g. push button traffic)
- Marketing (not as important as we think)
- A Magic Bullet Product (most important) (i.e. the perfect product to solve your customer’s most important problem)
- Generate leads through advertising (and we always pay for advertising)
- Convert leads into Customers (through good salesmanship)
- Delight your customers
Hope this helps in developing your own bullet product!
How to Improve Your Writing in One Step
15 months ago
One of the problems I have is that I’m often forced to squeeze my time. I’m also an insatiably curious fellow. That’s why I leave research to my business partner. Frankly it plays to my weaknesses — time and terrier learning.
One of the solutions I have found to that problem is to play videos and audios in the background while I write. Or at least put words to pay since I typically have written the piece long before. It saves time, and I learn and work at the same time. For most of my findings the amount of attention I pay to the background is sufficient to learn the material.
Unfortunately, every once in a while I find my self stopping and paying attention to the background “noise”. Even worse sometimes I end up putting my work aside and picking up another page to begin work on an idea that the “noise” has burned into my brain.
That is the nature of this video I found on the TEDxWaterloo site.
One of the core elements of the Content Mapping system is determining what it is your reader wants to read. You never want to bother writing anything that your reader has no interest in. It doesn’t matter what media you choose. In fact, you need to do this no matter what business you are in (it applies outside of the Expert/Information Product/Training business too).
In the full Content Map system, there is a whole process associated with identifying and building upon this. In the Content Map itself, one half of the map is concerned with documenting and communicating that information to your hindbrain.
In the discussions on delivery, I regularly bring up the concept of presenting as though you were conversing with your audience. You want to sound like a conversation around the kitchen table. Or a bar if you’re more comfortable there. Or your living room Chesterfield. You need to talk to your audience in the natural way that you speak with your friends.
It is seldom that I have heard these ideas brought together and spoken of in quite so succinct and well thought out way.
So I present to you The Walrus … (in the much more agreeable and entertaining form of Shelley Ambrose)
How to Find The Time To Write (part 3)
05 months ago
Welcome to the third and last of the series of free videos on “Finding the Time to Write”.
If you want more information on this topic, check out http://www.learningcreators.com/buyvideoa.htm. There you’ll find a 2 DVD home study course on this topic.
Now so far, we’ve covered the three areas that you need to focus on in order to “Find the Time to Write”. They form what I’ve called the Work Equation. Unless you balance them, you’ll never find the time to write your book. You’ll just go from one problem to another. You fix one problem and you find another reason not to write. Just because it’s a series of excuses doesn’t mean it’s your fault. It just means you haven’t solved the whole problem.
Next, we covered the solutions to the whole issue. This is what we need to do in those three areas in order to ensure that we solve the whole problem.
We need to:
- Motivate ourselves – and keep our motivation up
- Find 4 hours of time per week as a minimum
And
- Make it as quick and easy as we can to write
Motivate, Find the Time, Use a System. Do one and the problem will reoccur. Do all three and you’ll succeed.
Cool.
Now today, I’m going to give you three tips — one in each area — to help you create your own system. By the way, these are different tips from those in the DVD workshop.
So let’s get started.
First off, you need to build your desire to write your book. To do that you need to motivate yourself just like you would for any other employee. And then, you need to sustain that motivation.
Picking the best motivation involves a number of models that I frankly don’t have time to show you in 5 minutes. In our two DVD course, we can go through the most important but in 5 minutes, there’s just not enough time. Sorry.
So my tip, instead, is going to focus on how to sustain your motivation. How to actually motivate you after you’ve chosen your motivations.
All of the windows operating systems – XP, Vista, and 7 can replace the picture you use behind your desktop. With Vista and 7, you can use a slide show. With XP, you need a tool you can download from Microsoft. If you use a Mac, you can also do a slide show.
Find yourself pictures that illustrate why you are writing your book. Find pictures that illustrate what is motivating you. Pictures that will inspire you. Then use a picture manipulation tool — Paint will even do the job — and add a phrase or sentence to drive the point home.
Then all you need to do is add the pictures as a rotating slideshow desktop.
Whenever you aren’t taking up the whole desktop with a program, you’ll see the reasons for writing. Even if you only see a part of the picture, it’ll help to focus your mind on your motivations to write a book.
Now the second part of the solution is that you need to find the time to write.
So how much time are you going to need?
At your most efficient, you can expect to write about 5,000 words in one morning. Now for most people, that’s also the most you can reasonably expect to write in a day. That means that for a 100-page book you’re going to need about five writing days or five four-hour blocks of time to write. Plus you’ll need a little bit for research and planning. But that you can squeeze in anywhere. We’re talking an hour here, an hour there.
Once you’ve eliminated all the time you waste, you may find that you still can’t get enough time to write a book. So try hiring a temporary worker to take on one of your tasks. Writing your book is presumably worth more than the ten or twenty bucks you’ll spend on getting your lawn cut. Or on babysitting or on cleaning the living room. Check out your local high school. They sometimes have students who are looking for spending money. Or even work-terms. Having a research assistant for free, may help you finish your book sooner.
The third part of the solution is a little more complex. It’s the system you use to write. It’s more complex because it includes the writing processes but also your environment and your work habits.
Your environment has a major effect on how fast you can write. But sometimes it’s good to slow things down – slightly. This preparation time can help you to focus yourself on your writing. That’s part of the reason you should always edit your previous day’s writing before you begin today’s writing.
Creating a ritual — any ritual — will also help. It doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, simple and fast is better. But it says to your brain — “It’s time to write now.” For example, checking my backpack to be sure my computer, my notebook and my pens are in the backpack is part of my ritual. Even though it’s done about fifteen minutes (or more) before I write. It helps me to prepare.
To create a ritual you need to do something the same way, every time. That causes your brain to link the steps. And that means that one of those steps needs to be writing. So when building the ritual you absolutely MUST produce some writing. The second sub-tip is that it takes roughly 28 repetitions to create a ritual or habit.
Okay that’s the end of the video course. I hope you found it interesting and useful. Thank you for your time and attention.
If you want more information, you can always check out the blog. However, we also have a 2 DVD home workshop that covers the information in these three videos in much greater detail. Now this home video workshop is essentially the same information we had in our full day live workshop. We’ve even included the same exercises that we used. We’ve just called them homework. So this is over two and half hours of pure information. Plus guidance developing your own responses — your own customized solution. We walk you through the entire process. From identifying where you are weak to choosing where you are going to write. And everything in between.
You can find out more information by going to http://www.learningcreators.com/buyvideoa.htm
How to Find The Time To Write (part 2)
15 months ago
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work“
Emile Zola (1840-1902) French artist and philosopher
Welcome to the second in our series on “Finding the Time to Write”.
Now in the last session we discussed the real problem that we have. We cover it up by calling it “Not enough time to write” or some such excuse. Let me be clear here. I’m using the word excuse here because it focuses on a symptom or a solution. Unless we focus on the real problem, we won’t be able to solve it. What’s the real problem? The real problem is simply “Not being able to get our book written”.
Examining that problem led us to the Work Equation. When that equation gets out of balance then we can’t get any writing done.
Cool so far?
Okay, in the next six minutes or so of this session we’re going to talk about identifying a solution to our problem.
So how do you get the Work Equation back into balance? How do you make sure that you are really going to write?
The answer is that you need to deal with all three elements of the work equation. Doing just one won’t cut it. That’s why you get the usual advice that just doesn’t seem to work. It’s not that it’s wrong per se. It just doesn’t work because it focuses on only part of the problem.
Yes, the solution is personal. My solution won’t work for you and your solutions won’t work for me. That’s fine. And yes, you can make poor decisions and poor choices. It’s unlikely given the problem but you can do it. Nevertheless, it’s not you.
The advice you usually get won’t work for anyone … except in a few unusual cases. It’s the advice itself that’s wrong.
In the last session, I gave the three most common versions of advice that are used to fix the problem of not being able to write a book. You’ll notice that “Figure out why you’re writing” and “Visualize the result” are focused on building the desire to write. “Just get it done” is focused on the system. Okay, I’m being generous here. Some people just like being cantankerous. But I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to focus on the positive here and presume they are talking about following a particular system.
The fourth most common piece of advice I didn’t really mention last time. It is usually referred to as building time management skills. This is focused on the ‘available time’ part of the equation.
And that’s why they don’t work. They’re all attempting to fix all of the problem by only fixing part of the problem. And since they don’t fix the whole — something else just goes wrong. You get past that bump and run into a wall.
So how do we deal with the whole? How do we fix the whole problem?
That’s where the three elements come in.
Now the first element is Desire. To build that up we need to focus on motivating ourselves. No different than any other employee. Just part of being a manager. We have to work too. We’re employees too. So you need to manage yourself. And part of that management is to keep yourself focused and interested in producing. In other words — motivated.
Now there’s two parts to motivation. The first is to figure out what will motivate you. “Figure out why you’re writing” as the guru said. Not entirely bad advice, just incomplete. The second part is that you need to continually reinforce the motivation. Motivation fades with time. It’s not a one-time effort. You need to continually motivate yourself.
The second element is Time. Let’s get practical here for a second. If you don’t have at least four hours to write per week, you’re never going to finish. Sorry. Even at four hours a week, you’re going to have a problem maintaining your motivation over the two months it will take to write a short 100-page book. So you need to find the time. And that means you may have to adjust your current schedule.
Look, we’re all busy today. I don’t know anyone who can just sit around for four hours a week. Or anyone who has a spare 24 hours to spend in a week. If you want to write, you’re going to have to become more efficient and more effective with your time. You’re going to have to steal minutes from other tasks.
Finally, the third element is actually three separate elements we can combine into one. Overall, I call it “The Effort Involved”. The solution to that piece of the pie lies in what we term your writing system. Now, I’m changing hats here for a second and talking from a Process Analyst point of view here. That’s why the “We”. It’s plural not royal. Okay? A system — any system — consists of process, environment and agents. How you write is the process. You’re the agent in this case, so we’re really talking about your work habits. And by environment, we’re talking about where you write. Mix them together and you have a writing system.
And your writing system determines how long it will take you to write and how easy it will be.
So the solution to finding the time to write is really a combination of Motivation + System + Stealing Time from your busy day.
Now here’s the kicker. You’re going to have to determine the details of the solution yourself. Why? Because it needs to be customized for you. What works for me won’t work for you. What works for you won’t work for me.
However, there are commonalities … ideas that I can share from which you can pick and choose exactly what you will use. And that’s what the next session will be about.
I hope you enjoyed this session and that you found it useful. In our next and last session, I’m going to give you three practical tips to help you develop your solution to the problem of finding the time to write. And I’ll also have a very special offer for you.
Next & Last Session – Due Friday!
How To Find The Time To Write (part 1)
15 months ago
Welcome to a five minute presentation by LearningCreators. This is the first of three presentations on this topic. So what’s the topic?
It’s probably the most common problem my customers complain of … Finding the time to write.
Everyone has a slightly different cut on the problem … “I don’t have the time to write because I work all day” or “I have to get my kids to school and soccer and football and … ” or maybe it’s a matter of “I don’t want to start because I’m not sure people will want to read it”.
But there’s one common theme throughout this …
Excuses!
And that tells me there’s a problem.
You see there’s a problem with problem solving. And providing excuses is a symptom of that problem.
In order to solve any problem, you need to be solving the real problem. You need to solve the problem that’s underlying the stated problem. You need to drive down to the core of the issue.
In North America especially, we have a tendency to state problems in terms of one particular solution. And we have a tendency to focus on symptoms and panaceas rather than looking at actual causes and actual solutions. But that doesn’t help to cure problems. In fact, it leaves us chasing solutions to one symptom after another.
And that means if you look around you’ll find all kinds of “solutions” to the time problem. Everyone has a solution to finding the time to write.
For some gurus it’s “Figure out why you want to do this and that’ll carry you through”. All you need is to do is build up your desire.
And then there’s the new agey gurus “Visualize the result if you do it and magic will happen.” They believe that if you dream it hard enough the universe will just magically make it happen.
And then there’s always the disciplinarian in the bunch who says, “Shut up, sit down, write. And stop cryin’ about it.” They don’t exactly give you a lot of latitude in fixing the problem. But that’s okay ’cause they don’t exactly give you a solution either.
The problem with all those solutions is they don’t seem to work.
You try one solution after another and they just don’t sustain you. You still haven’t got the time to write.
So you go on and you try someone else who says basically the same thing in different words, and guess what. It still doesn’t work.
So you start thinking it’s your fault… or you give up entirely. Well, guess what?
It isn’t your fault.
You have a problem and no one has bothered to help you solve it. You need to know the real problem if you’re going to solve the problem. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
So what’s the real problem?
It’s simple.
You want to write a book or create a course or whatever … but … it never seems to happen.
Well duh … I know it sounds really silly and simplistic. That’s because it is.
No one said the problem had to be hard. It just has to be the real problem and not a symptom or a solution.
The problem isn’t that you don’t have the time. The problem is that you want to write a book or create a course and it isn’t happening. You can’t seem to build the energy to start and finish it.
One potential solution is that you need to find the time. But it’s only one solution. And that means that even if you find the time you’ll may never actually finish your book. Why? Because you’ve fixed the symptom not the problem.
We need to get further in behind the problem . We need to explore the situation a little deeper.
It turns out that how much writing you do is a combination of five elements.
- Your desire to write
- The amount of time you spend
- How hard it is to write
- How quickly you can start
- How effective you are at writing
You can combine the last three together to make things a little bit easier to understand and work with.
We call the result the Work Equation.
The amount of work you get done is proportional to
- The effort involved in writing
- Your desire to write
And
- How much time you have to write
If you aren’t writing, you’ve allowed one of the elements to overload the function. Something — we don’t know what — is out of step with the rest of the function. The result is that you aren’t getting anything done. And you aren’t going to get anything done until you get all the elements into alignment.
So what’s the solution?
Well that’s the topic of our next 5 minute presentation. I hope you’ll join us again in for the next presentation. I hope you’ve found this presentation has helped you get a better handle on your own problems finding the time to write. And that you’ll join us for the rest of the presentations.
Next Session – Due Thursday!
Writing a book isn’t enough #2
19 months ago
One of the basic rules of internet marketing is that you need traffic. Everything starts with the traffic. It’s like a bricks and mortar store. If people don’t come into the store it really doesn’t matter how good your product is, how competitive it is or anything else. Without the foot traffic you aren’t going to sell anything.
And it’s no different over the internet.
In order to have an audience — readers, course attendees etc. — you need the traffic. After all, not everyone who investigates what you offer is going to want to listen/read/watch it. You need enough people passing by in order to get enough people to stick around.
So how do you do that?
One of the best techniques is Article Marketing. Many traffic techniques drive traffic to your site. But it’s often the wrong type of traffic. And that just chews up bandwidth and money. Article Marketing drives high quality traffic — traffic that sticks around and eventually buys.
Now, I’m no slacker when it comes to Article Marketing. But I’m also not the number one author on EzineArticles.com. My coach, Sean Mize is.
I’ve arranged with Sean to make his 6 MP3 audio series Article Marketing Advanced available to you. It will show you how to write articles that drive traffic that sticks, where to post your articles, and much, much more. You can find more information here.
Writing a book isn’t enough
19 months ago
One of the biggest problems that writers face is having to sell their book after they’ve written it.
In fact, selling your book afterward is probably one of the worst things you can try to do.
What? Am I crazy … what in heaven’s name am I trying to spout here. After all, the whole point of writing is to be read and without selling your book you won’t be read!
No I’m not crazy. In fact, you do need to sell your book. But you need to start the process before you even begin to write. In fact the first thing you should be doing is to identify who is going to read your book and why.
Once you’ve written your book (and incorporated your reader’s hot buttons), edited and refomatted your book it’s time to actually get out there and sell it.
Selling on the internet is actually pretty simple in theory. You drive traffic, give them something in return for their email, use emails to build a relationship and then along the way sell your book (or other product including audio, video, CD, DVD, webinars etc.).
In practice, however, building that initial list is a lot more difficult than it seems.
Now I’m the last person to claim that I’m an expert marketer. And while I can speak to it and teach people about it — I think you can do much better than myself (even if you can at least trust what I have to say). Unfortunately, to build my own business I’m sort of forced to become an expert marketer.
So how did I become an expert (internet) marketer?
Well, I started out by taking a number of courses. But eventually I reached a point where I realized I needed a coach. Someone who could help me get ahead using this distribution channel. After a fair amount of research I settled on a chap by the name of Sean Mize. Sean came with three key ingredients … he actually was able to build a business on the internet from scratch (most started from web design companies), he produced his own training materials (most outsource both coaching and course development) and he told the truth (press a button and get tons of traffic isn’t his style). And to boot he was the number 1 author on EzineArticles.com.
So why am I telling you all this?
I’ve arranged with Sean to make his courses on internet marketing available to you my loyal subscriber. The first of these is his List Building MP3 Series. This is a 10 MP3 training course that will turn you into a list building machine. Plus there are bonuses!
If this sounds like something you might need check it out here!
Researching in Eight Steps
110 months ago
One of the questions that comes up quite frequently is how do you research? How can an information marketer be sure that they are giving their customers the best information possible?
Now there are a lot of different ways to research. Just as there are many different reasons to research. In fact, in a future article I’ll discuss the source of a major disagreement between my partner Paul, and myself. And yes, it’s related to how to research. Or maybe when.
But there is a basic process to research that everyone should follow:
- Develop a strong question list
- Identify the goals of this research
- Pick one or more Research Types
- Confirm the scope of this research
- Pick appropriate information sources
- Document the results carefully
- Verify accuracy of those results
- Analyze results and find “discoveries”
Researching well can be one of the ways you distinguish yourself as an information marketer (aka learning creator).
(To learn more about researching check out our new audio (MP3) product “Researching Your Next Book“ — for more information just click here. )
