Finding hot topics

Which information should you sell? The answer varies, depending on your knowledge, experience, and goals. The topic of your information product is essential, so ask yourself a few questions to get started:

• What am I good at? Suppose you’re at a party or get-together and a friend or an acquaintance hears about your job and life story and asks, “Hey, how did you do such-and-such?” or “What did you need to know to get that opportunity?” That’s a source for your information product.

  If your life experience has trained you to excel at a difficult topic, such as assembling a complicated piece of equipment or laying out an interior design for a new home, you can capture and record that experience to help others and profit from the experience. People pay for experience all the time — if they didn’t, every consultant in the world would be out of a job!

• What are people having problems with? If you notice that a number of people are having the same problem in one area, an information product to help solve that problem can be quite profitable.

  Sometimes, the information is out there but it’s hard to find, it’s packaged poorly, or it isn’t explained well. For example, someone who had attended driving school for a traffic violation found out how to legally challenge traffic tickets in court, exploit the most common loopholes that cause tickets to be dismissed, and inform drivers of all their legal rights when investigating and disputing traffic tickets. He wasn’t a born expert, but he learned what he needed to know and made money by presenting that information in an organized and clear fashion.

• What areas of service does my business provide? Sometimes, the best way to explain what your business does is to transfer some key functions or knowledge areas of your business into an information product, and use it to introduce clients to your business or get noticed in your community.

  Real estate agents commonly package small information packets describing the top 10 things that new homeowners should look for in new homes. By distributing this packet, an agent can provide instant value to a potential client, show experience in an area, and, hopefully, gain some business beyond what the packet explains.

Put together a focus group consisting of your family members and friends. Ask them which books they bought recently, which magazines they subscribe to, and which television programs they watch. It doesn’t hurt to expand your reach by talking to your customers or people in your field and asking them similar questions. Understanding your market is critical for any product, including information products.

Researching the information

After you know what area you want your information product to focus on, you have to research the information. In some cases, even though you may know everything you want to say, that doesn’t mean you’re done with this step. You should always start by making a list of everything you need to complete this product, even if the only thing you need is your experience.

As you prepare your list, you may want to start by creating the outline of your information product and matching up your research with sections of the product. For example, if you know that part of your product will include a contact list of professionals, one research item should be “Compile list of professionals.” Every section of your product should have at least one research task, even if that task is “Think about it and write it down.”

Before you finish your list, make sure that you cover the three Cs:

• Current: Make sure that your information is current. Even if you’re an expert in a certain area, the rules may have changed since you last looked into it. If you’re writing a guide for self-employed people doing their own taxes, for example, brush up on the new tax laws. If you’re writing a guide to hot travel sites, revisit those sites and make some phone calls to make sure that everything is still open and accessible. Add a task to your research list to do follow-up, or fact checking, as they call it in the media.

• Competition: See what else is out there, and read up on other information products in your area. Find out what areas are covered, the length of the product (in pages), how much is being charged, and the means of distribution to sell it.

  Don’t copy other people’s paragraphs word for word. Just get an idea of the scope that they cover, and make sure that your product is competitive with (and, you hope, better than) those other products.

• Content: What’s the meat of your information product? What’s the substance of the information you will charge for? Sure, you might copy some background information, some examples, and some information from a third-party source (such as the address, phone number, and mission statement of a business that someone needs to call as part of your product), but the specialized information you’re adding is the reason that people are buying your product. Sometimes, the value of a product consists of the random pieces of information gathered into one document; at other times, the value lies in a streamlined set of instructions that nobody else has provided.

Organizing your thoughts

Even if you know your topic backward and forward, can you convey this information so that anyone can understand it? Some of the most brilliant people in the world may specialize in their areas but cannot commit that information to words and pictures to explain it to others. Explain the process or product in a clear and straightforward manner.

The best way to organize all your information into a product is to imagine that you’re the customer for this item. Determine which information you would need to see first. Think about what state your customers are in when they start reading your product. If you have any assumptions about what your customers have done before they start reading, make those assumptions clear from the beginning. For example, if your information product is only for people who have already signed up with a particular web host, make sure that you state up front: “Do not read any further until you select your web host and sign up for an account.”

Many people organize their information by using this structure:

1. Explain the problem.

   Summarize why people bought this product, the situation they’re in, and what this product provides. “Still on the lookout for a great apartment near your work? If you’re ready to find that perfect apartment, this 10-page guide walks you through all the steps and puts you on the right track.”

2. Lay out the solution.

   Start to give the “meat” of the product as you lay out the core of your information.

3. Give examples.

   As you’re explaining the situation, be sure to give lots of examples and hypothetical situations of how your information is used in practice.

4. Summarize with a conclusion.

   Give a concise overview of what you just presented, remind readers of the most important points you brought up, and give them an action item showing what they can do after they read your product.

Use figures and illustrations to make your point. People respond to visual cues better than they do to words, so be sure to include illustrations in your information product to drive home your point. You can use computer screen shots, drawings or blueprints, or photos relating to your topic. Take a look at one artist’s use of images to explain his point in Figure 3-1.

As you lay out your document, make sure that the sections make sense in the order you present them so that readers can logically understand the points being made. Research has shown that people respond well to a story format, with these three parts:

• Beginning: Explain the problem.
• Middle: Describe your solution.
• End: Give examples of using your information.

Use appendixes, glossaries, and indexes to help people find specific facts quickly. This way, people can use your product as a reference guide after they initially read it.

Creating the document

Because most people use computer programs such as Microsoft Word to write their documents, creating an e-book is easy. You can simply convert your document file into an e-book in a few steps. Then again, if you write everything using pen and paper, the first thing you'll need to do is enter all that information into a word processor, such as Microsoft Word.

One format for an e-book is Portable Document Format, or PDF. This technology was developed by Adobe so that people could exchange documents without losing their style and formatting. Adobe has provided free software, the Adobe Reader, which allows anyone to read a document by using the PDF standard. Businesses around the world have adopted PDF as their standard for reading and exchanging documents. One great thing about PDF is that you can lock your PDF file so your customers can’t change or edit the document. After the text is created, it’s locked into place and your formatting decisions don’t get lost or changed. Every customer sees the same page layout.

PDF refers to a specific kind of computer file that stores formatting information along with text and graphics. When you send the file to other people, it appears the same way to them when they view or print the file.

You have different ways to create a PDF file. Microsoft Word has a built-in feature that will convert your document to PDF. You can also find software on the Internet whose only function is to convert different kinds of documents into PDF files or to print your files as PDF output instead of sending the files to the printer.

If you plan on creating a steady stream of PDF files, check out Adobe PDF Pack, an Internet-based utility at www.acrobat.com/createpdf. You can pay for a monthly or yearly subscription that allows you to create unlimited PDF conversions.

You can store your e-book in formats other than PDF. As of this writing, the Amazon Kindle is the number-one handheld book reader, so many e-book authors are converting their e-books to the Kindle format, called AZW (as of this publication), to be sold in the Amazon Kindle store. The Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader, as well as the Apple iPad, Apple iPhone, Android phones, and the Sony eReader, supports the ePub format, which allows authors to protect their digital rights. Some people use scanners to take pictures of the pages in their e-books and save each page as its own image file. The most common picture formats are JPG, GIF, and BMP. By using image files, you (the creator) can lock in the text and formatting, just like in a PDF file.

Distributing your e-book on e-shelves

You created your e-book; now you might wonder how to hand it to your customers. In most cases, you also want to collect payment before you send the e-book to them. You can use one of these methods to distribute your e-book:

• Sell it directly on your website.
• Auction or sell physical (printed) copies or digital copies saved on a CD-ROM on eBay.
• List it on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or Apple’s iTunes Store as a product.
• Sell it on an information distribution website such as Lulu.com or ClickBank.com.
• Find a partner business that reaches the same customers as your target audience.

After the payment is collected, you can offer your customers several options for delivering the e-book to them:

• Download: Store your e-book on an Internet web server and tie it into a web page on your server or a third-party server (see Figure 3-3). When people use a web browser to go to the web page and click a special link, the browser asks whether they want to open the file or save it to their computers. The main copy of the e-book always remains on the server; each time a customer clicks the link, however, a new copy is created and sent from your web server to your customer’s computer.
• E-mail: Most e-mail programs allow you to attach an e-book file to an e-mail message. After you collect payment, you create a message to send to your customer, attach a copy of your e-book, and send off the message. Just like in the download method, your original, or master, copy of the e-book never leaves you. Instead, a new copy is made and attached to the e-mail sent to your customer.

• Flash/USB drive or CD/DVD disc: Even though you’re dealing with an electronic product that requires no physical media, you'll find that certain customers still want to buy something they can hold in their hands. Many e-book creators burn their e-books to Flash/USB drives or CD/DVD discs and then sell those physical objects with the e-books on them. Some sites, such as eBay, require you to have a physical item to sell or auction, so you have to create a drive or disc if you want to sell your e-book on those sites. This method can be especially effective if you're selling a large e-book that requires a long download time over the Internet. You can package your e-book with other documents or holders, to add some weight to your product.

  Burning refers to the process your computer uses to store on disc the information that makes up a file. A special type of drive receives an electronic file from your computer and starts engraving, or burning, the information on the disc so that information can be read later by another computer.

Your recording session

If you've taught a class or presented a lecture or seminar, you have the ingredients for creating your own webinar. You can simply have someone record you as you give your next seminar and then edit the video and audio to create your webinar file. If you make your own PowerPoint slides, you can simply record yourself explaining the information and then add the PowerPoint slides to the audio file to create a basic webinar. In this situation, you simply indicate when during the audio file to move ahead with a new slide.

One company that can help you develop your webinar is WebEx, which handles live meetings and webinars for a variety of people and companies. It can provide the tools and assistance to combine your video recording, audio recording, and slides to create your webinar. WebEx employees can also help you create a webinar to deliver information live from your laptop to an eager audience. Your customers then can connect to you by using WebEx and watch the proceedings from their Internet-connected device. You can find more information by going to www.webex.com/products/elearning-and-online-training.html and reviewing the Training Center features, as shown in Figure 3-4.

This popular trend has attracted software companies such as Adobe, which created the Adobe Connect program to help people meet virtually with integrated audio and video conferencing, an enhanced online whiteboard for collaboration, and the capability to write notes and questions back and forth, so that they can conduct meetings without face-to-face interaction. Go to www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect/trial.html to sign up for a free trial version of Adobe Connect software.

Finding your audience

You have two main ways to reach your customers with a webinar:

• Customers can watch you deliver the webinar live.
• You can record the webinar so that customers can download it and view it later.

Based on how you present your information, you need a specific strategy for finding the right audience for your webinar.

If you’re presenting a webinar live, recruiting customers is similar to finding students for a live class. Choose a date and start advertising it weeks in advance. Then plan a day and time that’s conducive to the audience you’re reaching. If it’s a business crowd, target sometime during the week and during the workday, perhaps a lunch seminar or an afternoon meeting. If you’re targeting a consumer audience, a weeknight after dinner or a weekend might be more appropriate. You charge admission to your webinar just like you do for a class, but rather than give out a conference room number, you provide an Internet link that customers can use to connect to your webinar.

Even if you present the information live, you should always record it to sell to students down the road. Selling a recorded webinar is like selling an e-book. The date of purchase isn’t as critical, and all the necessary information is available at the time of purchase, so focus on the immediate sale. At the moment of payment, the buyer should receive access to the special Internet link to start downloading the webinar. The recorded webinar gives customers immediate gratification, although they don’t get to ask questions while they’re watching it.