Product Creation For The Average Marketer

You can get OptimizePress for your sales pages and Squeeze Pages. You can also have some Warrior write powerful and high-converting sales copy for you at very cheap prices.

Customize PLR for an efficient way to invest in quality content you make unique.

By all means, I would encourage you to create your own products.

However, if you have struggled with promoting 'other' products, you will likely work harder, longer, and spend more time and money creating your product. That is not the 'real' problem, or going to solve your issue of making money.

The problem is, you should concentrate on what makes the products you buy or have bought successful?

In most cases, they were marketed properly, offered value to their audience, and provided either solutions or benefits to the end user. Then, most successful product owners recruit or adopt affiliates who boost sales to that product/service.

My point is, the [exact] set of skills needed to successfully market an affiliate product will be critical to your success - especially, in marketing your own product.

Hey George,

You can save documents in a PDF format when you use MS Word or if you don't have that you can download OpenOffice for free at Apache OpenOffice Downloads - Official Site which is basically the same thing as MS Office and save your document in pdf in that as well.

You can use either MS Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress (included when you download OpenOffice) to make the slides for your video presentations.

The way I make videos is to record the audio first then edit out any mistakes out. I then save it as an MP3 file. I use Mixcraft from Acoustica to record with myself but I think there are some free options out there that maybe someone can help you with.

I have also outsourced having the audio done and it generally has run about $100 for 10,000 words for a good quality job. This can be a big time saver, but depends on your budget.

I then make the slides using OpenOffice Impress and export them all as jpg files (you'll need to download the extension for OpenOffice to do this at Export As Images | Apache OpenOffice Extensions - Beta)

After that I import the MP3 and all the slides into Sony Vegas (you can get a free 30-day trial) and match the slides up to the audios. Again, there is probably some sort of free option other than Vegas you can do this with, but it's what I'm used to so I stick with it.

Then I render it as wmv files as well as mp4s.

For screen capture 'how-to' videos you can use CamStudio which is free. Or Camtasia which is about $300.

Sounds easy but it can take a lot of time depending on the type of video you make, but when you're done you've got a product that's yours forever so it's worth it.

You can buy PLR products to speed up the process a lot if you don't actually want to write anything yourself. Many of these you can use 'as-is' to make audio and video products with - or you can rewrite them.

The bottom line is to concentrate on what you're good at and outsource everything else. Copywriting in particular if you're not really, really good at it. I'm learning about copywriting but I realize I suck at it so that is my biggest outsource expense.

You can consider outsourcing salespage and squeeze page creation. They can be created for ~$150 total. However copywriting (writing sales letter) is a different thing. Having a good copywriter write sales letter can be expensive.

About product format , it depends what is the selling price. If the price is low, a pdf should be fine. If it is expensive, you may want to include some videos/softwares etc.

We have been creating products for more than 20-years - first offline training guides and for the last 10-years, online information products.

The key steps are relatively simple, though I agree it can take some time and effort the first time around to work through the steps and get it right:

1. Find a compelling desire to want to have, become or overcome an issue that is urgent. In your case, if your focus is on Wordpress, blogging in IM - then you want to scour the landscape to find out what people are struggling with the MOST! It could be something like a) Finding out how to get traffic to their blog b) Learning how to write magnetic posts that attract interest and evoke participation c) Finding out how to pull readers and turn them into customers - etc...

Find a compelling desire and your job as a product creator is 100X easier...in other words, you can mess up with your product, your marketing, etc... IF you do a great job of focusing on a topic that people urgently want solved

2. Outline your product in a way that not only informs, but trains people to achieve their desired outcome. This not only makes your product stand out, but it increases its perceived value - it becomes a means to an end instead of just information.

3. Write your product to the outline - it can be as short as 40-50 pages to start, again focusing on walking people through a step-by-step process of achieving their desired outcome - simple!

4. Take a stab at writing your own sales letter (after studying some great copywriters would be my advice) and then test it - if you can't get close to the conversion you want, pay a pro copywriter for a critique and improve it that way

5. Sure, have a sales page, squeeze page, thank you page and email or video funnel created - you can do this yourself or have it outsourced. The idea is to have a landing page (squeeze page) that will collect your more interested prospects and walk them through a "warm up" to trust that you and your product are for them.

That's really it - add in a process for getting reviews and testimonials (social proof) and you have the fundamental of growing a very large and profitable infoproduct business

Jeff

It doesn't cost anything to sit down and write out a document or record some videos.