List Building or Product Creation?

As a relative newbie to list building, I'm pretty impressed with your numbers! I would probably buy a product on list building from you because you've obviously been successful with it, and have some valuable insights to share.

I may be old school in my thinking, but I'm a firm believer that product creation should really be a natural extension of who you are as an authority. You don't want to force yourself to create something you don't know or care about, or your list will be turned off by it.

Here is just a few of my thoughts on what you said...

Failure is the key to success. Learn to fail as fast as you can and don't be afraid of it. Learn to view it as a learning tool and it will become less scary.

Sounds like you're pretty good at list building. Create a course about how you did it. You don't have to create anything fancy like the gurus do.

Just present it in a way that is easy for you and fun and effective for your students.

Creating a product will allow you to grow your email list a whole lot faster. I know a guy who built an email list of over 66,000 just by launching his own product.

Creating good products gives you credibility and projects you as an authority in your niche...

And the more credibility that you have, the easier it is to build a list. (Your branding speaks for itself)

Once people trust you and what you say, they'll basically sign up for anything that you're involved with. (Especially in the MLM world)

Not only that, but creating your own product will allow you exponentially increase the amount of income that already earn.

Affiliates products can be yanked at anytime.

I had that happen to me once already...and it was making me a nice little income when the vendor pulled it.

But if you own your own product, you don't have to worry about that because you control your own product.

Basically, you have more control of your income when you sell your own products and not just someone elses.

Just my t cents.

Fred

Hi,
A few thoughts.

- One of the principles of good long-term list building is great, valuable, relevant content IMHO. In my experience, that content needs to be aimed at a particular niche and answer a specific need/problem.

- When I work withi client (subject matter experts) to build a list, the content generation and product creation go hand in hand. By the time they've written a years worth of posts, we can a) see which ones their audience liked the most and b) create product largely through curating this existing content. It is very low risk because the work is mostly done already.

- I generally start with a free ebook or 2 or 3 on various core topics on which they've established some authority.

- keyword research is a factor, as is post popularity (and a few other things) in deciding what the ebooks should be.

- then, as we see which ebooks people like and download, it further informs our choice of product to create.

-I often have clients also create added value.

So, for example, take 5 blog posts on one topic, that together become a pretty great ebook with a small amount of editing and some good graphic desing. A relatively small investment.

Then, augment that material with some videos that delve deeper in to a few of the most common questions that have been asked (we'll often just do a free webinar Q&A and record it as part of the product. That also tells us what kinds of questions the ebook doesn't go into enough depth on.) Then, add some quick reference material that makes it easier for people to implement your advice (cheat sheets, lists, checklist, reading recommendations, book reviews, infographics, flash cards, bookmarks - the possibilities are endless and depend on what people would need to make the product more practical IMHO.) You can even add on some partner products - you've no doubt seen that strategy many times where the bonuses are 5 great ebooks from other experts on related, but not competing, topics.

Sorry to be long winded - to return to my orginal point, I guess what I'm saying is that content creation for list building can be leveraged for lower risk product creation. There is value simply in how you curate and package the content - even if it can all be found for free on your blog - as long as it a) addresses a specific, pressing problem/need for a targeted audience - something they want to pay for - and b) you have established some authority and a relationship with your list, and are not simply churning through people who join your list, but have no relationship with you - where attrition is super high.

I guess it may be differnt if you are not an expert in your site topic. But even then, there are ways to create products over time - just using guest blogs, interviews, curation, reviews, etc.

Just some thoughts...
Jon

Wow, great reply Affillionaire, i really appreciate this advice! Best of luck to you too!