How to Create Information Products That Sell

How to Create Information Products That Sell

Marlon Sanders' recent series of articles about creating your own information products are mini-tutorials in their own right.

Marlon is passionate about steering you in the right direction - if you have information that other people need and want - that you can create into an information-based product - that fills this desperate need.

Here are links to two other articles by Marlon Sanders that give solid information about creating infoproducts, along with the cutting-edge information that he shares in this new article (below).

How to Get Ideas for Your Own Products
6 Tips For Making It Through the Night of Uncertainty:
A message of encouragement if you feel uncertain, doubt if what you're doing will be successful or sometimes feel like you're on the wrong track.

Now, to the latest article. It was primarily written as new, additional information for purchasers of Marlon Sanders' program The Info Product Dashboard, but it contains really good ideas and examples, even if you don't have the Dashboard.

(If you enjoy Donny Deutsch's TV show "The Big Idea" - you'll get a lot from this article.)

How To Come Up With 12 Product Ideas, So You Can Do Your Survey And Sell What You Know People Want To Buy

How to Use S.E.T. Trends To Develop New Product Ideas

by Marlon Sanders

As you know if you follow my ezine at all, I'm a big advocate of doing 12-product surveys to find out what people want to buy before you go to sell it to them.

The problem some people have is coming up with 12 good product ideas to START with!

Let's talk about HOW you come up with product ideas.

Here is a new angle I didn't discuss in The Info Product Dashboard...

Step 1: Survey the S.E.T. trends of the market

S stands for social changes.

An example of social changes online would be the way people are using Facebook to hook up with friends and to meet new people.

There are MANY social changes you can identify.

Here are a few social changes I've identified in my market:

-- Use of Facebook for networking
-- JV's built around "clans" of marketers
-- Isolation of top tier marketers
-- Growing popularity of Warriors Forum
-- Huge increase in the number and variety of seminars
-- Events specifically designed for JV's (joint ventures)

You'll want to write out the social changes in YOUR market.

E stands for economic changes.

As changes occur in an economy or industry, and as price points raise or lower in a market, new opportunities are created.

Here are a few economic changes I've identified in my market:

-- Growth of $10,000 seminars and programs
-- Big ticket seminars and programs commonplace
-- Less quality ebooks on the market
-- Paypal being accepted in more countries

T stands for technological changes.

YouTube, Facebook, online video, social sites -- all these are fairly recent technological changes that create opportunity.

Here are a few of the technological changes I identified in my market:

-- Advent of CMS (content management system) software
-- Addition of an affiliate module to Amember software
-- Cheaper/easier direct mail
-- Print on demand publication of books
-- Fancier packaging being used on info products
-- Lowering email response
-- Email deluge
-- Email deliverability problems
-- Online video
-- Name merge on outside voice broadcasts
-- Improvement of webinar software

Those are the technological changes for MY market.

What you do is write down the S.E.T. factors for whatever market you're considering. The premise is that CHANGE creates opportunity. So you look for the social, economic and technological changes.

For more info on doing 12-product surveys, refer to The Info Product Dashboard.

For more info on the SET method for coming up with product ideas, refer to: Creating Breakthrough Products by Jonathan Cagan and Craig Vogel.

Step 2: Find the new opportunity

Then you ask yourself, "What NEW opportunities will these changes create?"

And write there you have a product idea.

I know of one marketer who has done very well by developing a system for generating leads off of YouTube then teaching that system to others.

Here's a change that is still undeveloped -- Amazon just came out with this Kindle ebook reader. Someone is going to make a tidy fortune creating and selling an info product related to Kindle.

Within the market you've selected, look at the social, economic and technological changes. Then find the opportunity created by the change.

Step 3: Stay within one step of the market

The secret to good ideas is to look for ones that are only one step ahead of where the market is right now. If you go two or three steps away, you'll be too far ahead of the market.

You want to sell and idea whose time has come. Not an idea whose time will come in five years.

Step 4: Find the next logical progression

If all else fails, look at what's selling and ask what the next logical progression will be.

Products follow a chain of innovation. One thing leads to the next which leads to the next. What you want to be is "the next."

But base this on what is ALREADY selling. You sell into demand. You don't sell into a gigantic sea of uncertainty.

What I mean is, you find out what's already selling then you try to improve on it just enough to be the next big thing.

Step 5: Know your USP going in

You wanna know what your Unique Selling Proposition is before you even create the product.

USP is the 1 - the "ONLY" - factor of your product. Only your product gives X benefit or has Y feature and benefit.

Marlon Sanders

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Marlon Sanders is the author of "The Info Product Dashboard."
If you want to create your own info products, please click here.