Ways to Create an Information Product

By Brian Baulch | Blog

Jun 27

Ebooks: E-books can be written using Microsoft Word or the free version of word using Open Office. You simply create a new document and begin typing. Look at this e-book for an example of the format/ header page, etc. Ebooks can be anywhere from 2 pages to a couple hundred pages. After finishing your document you simply “Save As” – “Adobe PDF”… Voila! That is an e-book!

Interviews (easiest way): By interviewing an expert in your market/ niche/ or industry, you automatically get street credibility. You simply contact the expert and request to feature him in your upcoming information product launch. You request a quick 30 minute interview and use a phone recording service to record the interview. The basic flow of the interview questions will be asking questions pertaining to what they did in order to be where they are at now…

Teleseminars: Holding teleseminars or webinars are also one of the easiest ways to create an information product. You simply set up a teleseminar or webinar by using GoToMeeting and invite people to join it. Remember to record the webinar or teleseminar so that you can package the information into your product. GoToMeeting allows you to record these and once the presentation is complete you automatically have the video or audio files on your computer. This a great way to create the product while actually helping other people out at the same time who are on the teleseminar.

E-zines & Newsletters: These can be written using Microsoft Word or Open Office again and are great ways to create information products that can be delivered to your customers over email or physical mail.

Reports & Research Data: Compiling research data into an easy to read and understand document or file is a superb thing to include in your info product. Microsoft Excell can easily help you organize data and reports to be delivered to your customers electronically.

Videos: Recording how-to videos are definitely my favorite way of delivering information. Your customer can actually see you and feels connected to you and it is very easy to sit in front of a camera and speak. We went to Hawaii to record our information videos and it worked great! You can get an HD camera at WalMart for pretty cheap. The Flip Video is great for shooting quality videos and audio. Once you put your video files on your computer you will need to compress it to a file size that will allow people to easily watch the video as it ‘streams’ to their computer. The easiest way to do this is to upload the video to YouTube (they will automatically compress the video for you) and copy the Embedded Code over to your squeeze page. This will pull your video through to your page but will have the YouTube logo on the player. The benefits of using YouTube are twofold: 1). You don’t have to compress the video yourself; you can upload the video immediately after recording and be ready to go, and 2). You don’t have to host the video on your own server.

If you want to edit the video you can use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. Our team uses Premiere Pro (which is for PC, and is basically the same thing as Final Cut Pro which is for Mac).

Our team exports to .AVI and then compresses to .FLV for web viewing. We use Sorenson Squeeze to compress to .FLV

Some organizations use Windows Media Player videos for their online content. You can use Windows Media Encoder (which is free) to compress to .WMV.

Once you have your .FLV or .WMV you’re ready to upload it to your server via your FTP client, and then create the video player code on your webpage.

Audio: Recording audios is another great method of delivering information to your clients. All that you need is your computer microphone and you simply record yourself speaking. Audacity is a great place to edit your audio and convert to mp3 so your customers can download it to their computer.

Screen Captures: CamStudio is free screen recording software. A great information product is to provide screen captures of you accomplishing things on the internet. I have recently started using Jing to do screen captures and this works similar to Camstudio.

Flow Charts: Flow charts are a superb method of delivering valuable information. SmartDraw is even better for creating flow charts of all sorts.

Help files (excel, calendars, to do lists, etc): Providing excel files, calendars, to-do lists are one of the final types of information you can send to your customers.

Software: Creating software that someone can use is another way to deliver info products…

a. Build the software yourself if you have the technical expertise or an in-house programming team

b. Hire a team to build your vision. There are many website out there devoted to putting you (someone who wants to build software) in touch with teams of developers (people who actually CAN build software). There are some important things to remember when hiring a development team through one of these websites.

– Do Not select the lowest bid simply because it is in your budget.
– Do Not give any money to your coder in advance before he/she finishes the work.
– Do Not talk outside of the site in which you hired the team. (If you must chat, which is important at times, post your chat to the site and have
your coder verify that it is correct.
– BE WEARY- Of coders who have no prior work completed through the site.
– Choose a coder with high ratings on the site
– REMEMBER: A coder will only create what you tell them to. They are programmed to program NOT to build upon your ideas. Be very specific with your requests.
– Be professional, you are a business owner.
– Make sure things are stated in advance. You will need to see weekly progress reports (don’t just have them give you written verification that they are working, but rather have them show you the code or work that they have done weekly.

A vast majority of us are NOT programmers and cannot write in program language: PHP, Sql/Mysql, Ajax, and html are all probably foreign languages to you and that is fine. You can still create software and advanced web applications without knowing programming language, but you must have a vision. If you can dream and visualize what you would like to create, enough to write an elaborate description (remember: your team will build exactly to your specs) and draw a mind map; then you can create software by outsourcing to a professional coder.

Social Network Empire, or http://snempire.com builds businesses and clients a custom social networking sites. Along with the software, in-depth training is provided to clients to ensure that their social networking sites become successful. Social Network Empire runs nearly 1000 social networking sites.

Visit: http://snempire.com for more information about SNE and what it can do for you and your business.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marc_Horne
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