Many small business owners, health professionals or practising professionals have a lifetime of knowledge, practical and theoretical that could be very valuable to someone online. So valuable in fact, that they would be happy to pay for this quality information. This presents a great opportunity for them to make money selling information products online. But, if you are time poor, this might sound easier than it actually is.
Here is a great way to get started.
Firstly, by recognising that you have knowledge other people want, you can see a very strong possibility of being able to provide this information to those that want it most and charge them a fee. Here is a simple way that a busy professional or small business owner or could get started today towards creating a product to be sold online.
Now, I would suggest before getting into these steps, do a bit research. Find out what people are looking for in your particular area expertise or market niche. You can do this through keyword research, using tools like Wordtracker.com or Google’s External Keyword research tool. The reason for this, is that you don’t want to go through the process of creating a product for something that either is such a hard market to crack or on the opposite scale, has no interest at all from people wanting to buy it.
So if you are physiotherapist for example, you may not want to just provide a product on physiotherapy broadly, but pick a particular area or niche market within physiotherapy to focus on – possibly
”physiotherapy for back pain or back pain sufferers”.
So now, how do you get this happening – keeping in mind you hardly have any spare time as it is:
Step 1: Record your thoughts: And by this I mean, write, record audio or even record video to get your ideas and thoughts, knowledge and experiences recorded. For a busy person, a really good approach, may be buy a Dictaphone or some sort of hand held sound recording device. Carry this with you and start to record your thoughts – in the car, while you are waiting for a train or bus, or even set aside time each week to do this.
If you prefer to write, carry a pad of paper with you and take the same small slots of time to document your knowledge. You could also buy a hand held video camera, and record yourself as well. Either way, you are getting your ideas and thoughts on the topic out of your head into a form that can then be manipulated to create an online product.
Hot Tip: If you do presentations to groups of people on the topic, have this recorded either in audio or video and then continue to follow the steps below to get the same result.
Step 2: Consolidate what you have done: Once you have recorded your knowledge, you can then start to put structure to it. If you have an audio recording, you can send this to a service called Castingwords.com and have this transcribed into text. You can also get someone to do this through a service called Elance.com. Same thing can happen for video, but depending on what you want to do with the video, you could have someone who has the skills, create this into a complete movie or movie series on the knowledge you have recorded. This can be sold as online downloadable videos or even compiled into professional DVD series (particularly if you take up the hot tip above).
If you have taken notes, start to put these into some sort of order, so that they can be created into a book and therefore converted into an EBook.
Hot Tip: If you are not sure how to lay the content out and the headings to have, use Amazon’s look inside the book feature to see how similar books on the topic have been laid out.
Step 3: Create your product ready for sale: Once you have consolidated what you have done, either by getting your audio transcribed or putting your existing notes into Word for example, you can once again use the services from specialists on Elance.com or Rentacoder.com to help you create your product ready for sale online. If you have created an eBook, then get specialist on Elance.com to convert your text into a neatly formatted eBook, have a book cover designed and any images that you can use on your website to sell the eBook.
If your product is giving people access to the online videos you have created, you can work with a specialist video editor from Elance.com or Rentacoder.com who can make these into professional looking videos. I would recommend not loading these videos to Youtube.com to share them with those that pay for access to them. In the next step, having you website designed, have your website designer set the videos up on your website in their own online video player.
Remember, you are getting someone else to do all the technical stuff for you, so you are optimising your time.
Step 4: Create a website: Once again, you can have with sales copy and a thank you page so people can download your product designed and developed by a website designer from one of the outsourcing website I have already mentioned. Remember, you really only need a sales page, which I would recommend you get sales copy written for to increase the number of sales you produce from each visit. And a thank you or download page, where your product is made available to those that have purchased it, to download.
Use Clickbank.com or Paypal.com to accept payments for your product, as this will make it easy for you to accept payments, and also hide the thank you page with the download from your customer, so they cannot figure out how to get to that page without paying. Now onto marketing & promotion. You can register cheap domains for your website at a site called Godaddy.com.
Step 5: Start marketing the website and generating sales. Here, there are many ways you can start to market your new website. One of easiest and fastest ways to get traffic is to use Google Adwords. You can either do this yourself, or once again, have someone else do this for you. The idea is to have your advert for your website appearing in the sponsored section of Google (right hand section) when someone types in keywords relating to your product. Then as you start to generate sales, test and measure as you go and improve what you are doing. The great thing now, is that you have created the product once and done the work once, you can continue to market this website and make money from it over and over again.
Remember, you want to automate this process as much as possible, so the more you stick to selling just downloadable information products, the easier it will be for you.
If you still don’t think you have time for these easy steps, why not get your product or eBook ghost written. This means getting an expert writer to basically charge you for interviewing you and then compiling a book for you. This will be more costly, but the result could be the same. You can go to services like Elance.com to find people that can help you do this.
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