photo credit: katerha

It’s very, very common for people to start creating an infoproduct, only to give up on the project months, weeks or even days later.

The path to creating an infoproduct is long, hard and contains many unexpected pitfalls.

Knowing what pitfalls to expect can help you prepare yourself psychologically for when they’ll inevitably arrive.

That in turn will help you sidestep those pitfalls and eventually arrive at the finish line: An infoproduct that you can call complete.

These are five of the most common unexpected barriers to creating your first infoproduct.

Barrier #1: “It’s Not Good Enough to Publish”

There’s something very scary and vulnerable about putting your own name on a product.

You’re staking your reputation on it in a way. You’re saying to the world, “this is something I stand for.”

As a result, people are often very hesitant to put out a product. They always feel like it’s not good enough. That it needs more work.

This feeling can keep holding you back for months, even years until the project fades into oblivion.

The reality is, you’ll never feel like your product is perfect. At some point, you just have to launch it.

Microsoft didn’t wait until they got all the bugs out of Windows before launching. Apple didn’t wait until the iPhone was perfect.

The secret to launching a top notch product is often to just get it out the door. Get the product quality to B+ level, then launch and improve it once it’s up and running.

Barrier #2: It’s Too Short

Often time’s you’ll think of an infoproduct in your head and think that it’s more than enough to fill an entire eBook or four hours worth of DVDs.

But once you start writing or recording, you find that it’s way too short. The eBook comes out to just 30 pages. Or you’ve said everything you need to say in under an hour.

If that’s the case, finish this current iteration of your product, then put it down for a couple days.

In the meantime, review some other products in your arena. What areas did they cover? What did they go in depth on? What made their products longer?

Come back to your product with a pair of fresh eyes after a couple of days, then add content that you hadn’t realized you needed before.

Rinse and repeat.

Barrier #3: Losing Interest Along the Way

The harder your product is to create, the more prevalent this problem will be.

It’s not hard to sustain interest while writing a 50 page eBook in one week. It’s a little harder to sustain interest over a 10 DVD set that takes 3 months to film. It’s much harder to write a 300 page book over the course of a year.

Sustaining motivation for creating a product when you don’t know if it’ll sell or succeed can be very, very tough.

What can you do about it?

Start by selling a smaller product. If this is your first infoproduct ever, don’t start with a 5 hour video. Start with a small eBook.

This will allow you to get validation from the marketplace and get some traction with making sales before committing to creating a large scale product.

Enroll other people to work with you. It’s much harder to bail on a project when there are multiple people working together, rather than just you alone. Take on a partner for the project or take on investor money to increase commitment.

You can also just announce that a new product is coming before it’s ready. Announce it 3 months out and tell them all the amazing things they can expect in the near future. That’ll commit you to finishing the product, as your audience will expect it.

Barrier #4: Difficulty with Graphics & Formatting

How do you add a header and footer to your eBook? How do you add a cover page? What about a Table of Contents? How do you create one of those 3D eBook renderings that you see on other people’s eBook salesletters?

For videos, how do you create animated intros? How do you improve the sound quality? How do you export your videos in a way that’s web friendly?

Getting the graphics and the formatting right can be very tricky. There’s one resource I’d recommend above all others in this regard: Fiverr.

How much does it cost to get a header and footer designed and added? $5. What about an eBook cover and a 3D cover? $5. An animated introduction to your videos? $5. A logo? $5.

Just about anything you can think of, you can outsource on Fiverr. Most problems with formatting and graphics can be handled through this cheap and simple outsourcing method.

Barrier #5: Not Being Engaging

Creating an infoproduct is half about creating a product and half about constantly selling them on actually consuming the product.

Anthony Robbins estimates that half of all self-help products go unused. People order a self-help product, feel good about having done something to improve their lives, then leave it on the shelf.

The reality is, in order for you to make a difference (and make more future sales) with your infoproduct, you need to actively get them to read or watch your infoproduct.

That means that the “Thank You” page users see after ordering should be highly compelling. They should be compelled to immediately open and consume the product.

You should have a follow-up sequence ready and waiting for buyers, again to “sell” them on consuming your product.

At the end of every chapter, you should sell the next chapter’s benefits to keep them reading. At the beginning of each chapter, include a “teaser” that hooks them into reading.

Despite the fact that they’ve paid for your product, you still have to sell them on actually using it.

You wonder: Why? What went wrong?

Of course you want to fix it ASAP so that you can get that virtual cash register ringing.

Here are three reasons why your (good) info-product might not be selling…

1. Nobody Knows About It – Do this quick self-check and tell me how many places your potential customers can find your product. The answer should NOT be ONE. Many people place their first product on the products page of their website and wait for people to find it. Don’t play hide and go seek with your customers! Give them as many paths to your product as you can. Make those paths easy to find and follow. That means links should be evident from your articles, in your sidebar, in pdf documents, products, website header, website footer, etc. You decide what fits for your business and marketing. Add eCovers or graphics in opportune locations to catch the eye and compel the hand to click that mouse.

2. It’s Hard to Buy – It’s so important that you use the KISS principle when you get to the point of closing the sale. It’s also important you understand how your market likes to buy. For example, in many markets more people prefer to pay with Paypal. Don’t put up a roadblock by only offering them credit card payments. Another way to ease them through the payment is to check what online shopping carts your successful competition offers. Chances are if they are buying from the system your competitors use they will be comfortable going through that same system to buy from you. One final tip is only ask for the information necessary to complete the sale. The more info you ask them, the less likely they are to buy.

3. You Don’t Have an eCover or Graphics – Can you imagine walking into a library or book store and not one single book had a cover? Would you take the time to randomly open books, read a bit and move on the the next? Or would you walk right back out again? Now translate this virtually to your visitors arriving at your offer that has no eCover – no visual representation of what you offer. Do you think they’re likely to walk right out of your ‘store’, too? I do. Ecovers are not expensive. In fact, you can create them for yourself with a program called Gimp and a set of easy to use eCover templates that you’ll find right here.

One or all of these three reasons could very likely be causing you to lose some or many sales.

If you have a product that truly fills a market need then I encourage you to work on the points about and track the results.

Good luck and go grab some more sales!

photo credit: Davichi

Creating and publishing a Clickbank is one of the best ways to monetize blog traffic.

Clickbank not only makes it easy to publish an eBook by helping you bypass the merchant account setup process; it also makes it easy for you to expose your product to a lot of potential affiliates.

Here’s how to create and publish a Clickbank product.

What Do Your Readers Want to Learn?

Start by asking yourself: What’s the #1 thing your readers want to learn about?

Your Clickbank product should answer that question in an in depth way. Don’t worry if you’ve covered similar concepts in your free material already.

The idea is to go in depth and answer all the questions someone could possibly have on the subject.

For example, let’s say you run a blog on how to raise horses. You’ve already talked quite a bit about how to raise horses on your blog.

But if you created an all-inclusive guide to raising horses, with 150 page of content and 2 hours of audio, people won’t mind if you have some repeat. The all-inclusive guide is enough of a draw in and of itself.

Writing the Salesletter

The salesletter is one of the biggest parts of marketing a Clickbank product. It’s what gets someone from mildly interested to actually pulling out their credit card and buying.

There are a few different ways you can do your salesletter.

For one, you can write it yourself. If you have copywriting training, this is often the best way to go about it. You know your product better than anyone else and you’ll be able to write the salesletter with passion and conviction.

On the other hand, if you don’t have copywriting training, it can take quite a while to learn the skill. Instead of learning it yourself, you might choose to hire someone to do it instead.

The most important thing about hiring someone to do your salesletter is that you know enough about copywriting to be able to tell the difference between what good copy is and what’s not.

I’d recommend at least reading Dan Kennedy’s “How to Write a Salesletter” and “How to Write an Advertisement” before finding and hiring a copywriter.

Getting Your Product on Clickbank

Getting your product on Clickbank is fairly easy. You just need to read through all their guidelines and make sure you follow it to a T.

Clickbank has a few things that can trip newcomers up. For example, they have very exact requirements on how long the return period has to be. You can’t get creative and give a 1 year return policy and you can’t be stingy and give a 1 week policy.

There are just a few criteria you have to follow to get into Clickbank. Once you’ve setup your salesletter and product to comply with the requirements, just send in your application and pay the $50 startup fee. You’ll receive your approval notice within a few days.

Marketing the Product

Once your Clickbank product is live, the final step is to market it.

The first place to market your product is, naturally, your blog and your email list. Instead of just sending out a marketing blast, try to set it up so there’s a bit of a buildup to the launch.

Talk about the product before it’s launched. Hint at the things that are going to be in the product. Get people excited, before you actually put the product on the market.

If you can get affiliates involved, so much the better. Clickbank has a product ranking system called “Gravity” that’s based a lot more on how many affiliates sell your product than how many sales you make. The more affiliates you can get, the higher your gravity, the more likely it is that you’ll get more affiliates in the future.

If your initial sales look promising, you might also want to experiment with some paid traffic. Start with exact match keywords to get the highest ROI. If you’re profitable, then ramp up the traffic with phrase match, broader keywords and eventually broad match.

Creating a product and getting it on Clickbank isn’t difficult. The real trick is in making sure you have a high quality product people want, then lining up the proper marketing for that product. If you can do these two things, you’ll have a winner on your hands.

But like with all things in marketing, if you’re looking to command a great price and sell a lot of items, the product isn’t always enough…

Of course, a well-written product will serve you well, but there is still more you can do to increase the value of your product, boost your conversions and increase word-of-mouth.

Here are just a few ideas:

* Create a cover graphic. A graphics allows for a more tangible and traditional visual of your digital product.

HINT: Have a cover graphic for your PDF document as well. Keep the consistent professional image by having a cover page on your actual document.

* Go multimedia. Your customers like to consume information in different ways. Consider sharing your information through audio, video, etc.

* Add useful tools to your product. For example, checklists, worksheets, mindmaps, spreadsheets or anything that helps your customer apply what you’re teaching them.

* Include case studies and testimonials. Add them to your sales materials, but also incorporate them into your product for further social proof.

* Try physical. Consider offering your product in printed format. Services like Kunaki or Lulu can help you print your products on demand.

* Make updates. If your potential customers can see that you stay-up-to-date with the latest and greatest information, they will be more likely to buy your product with confidence. In addition, your current customers are more likely to tell others about you too.

The great thing about these ideas is you can add them one at a time. If you’ve got your product ready and want to launch it, get it out there and add the value as you go along. Your current customers will be wowed by the extras you’re providing them and you’ll likely increase your conversions as you go.

By the way, if you’d rather focus on the marketing and making money side of things, we can write your report or ebook for you. We’d love to give you a hand!

I always keep a library of reports (whether I wrote them, they were ghostwritten or if I purchased them) on hand because there is so much that can be done with them.

And  the thing about pre-made reports (i.e. PLR reports) is that you can unleash this awesomeness immediately.

Valuable:

Reports are valuable because they often have a higher perceived value for your readers than a simple article or blog post. Higher value means you can leverage the power of the report – whether you’re selling it as a product, using it as a bonus or using the report to sell something else.

Versatile:

Reports are versatile because you can do so much with them. You can…

* Use them as free gifts for opting into your mailing list.
* Offer them as bonuses for a paid product.
* Sell them as a product on its own.
* Give them away to generate buzz and promote your business.
* Allow affiliates to brand it and distribute them.
* Break them up into articles, blog posts or an email series.

And heck, you can just about do all those things with 1 report. Even if you start by selling a report as a product, when the report has run it’s course, you can start to utilize it in so many different ways.

Where to Get Pre-Made PLR Reports:

Well, yeah…we happen to sell some of these beauties ourselves and know other providers you might want to check out too. And even though we do sell them, let me be clear. We sell them because they ARE valuable and an important staple to just about any online business.

• All Private Label Content Reports: Mila and I have a growing library of reports for you to check out here. From health topics to business, we have you covered.
• DIYplr: We specialize in step-by-step tutorials with screenshots and photos…super high value content.
• Easy PLR Reports: Nicole Dean is a favorite PLR-provider of mine (because I AM a customer!) and she offers reports in a wide variety of niches. You can see all her available reports here…or check out this limited discount offer she has on these 4 business reports.
• Special Report Club: Melissa Ingold specializes in PLR reports for the Internet marketing niche and many of her packages come with squeeze pages, sales pages, graphics and other marketing materials.
• Mom PLR Ebooks: The name says it all…Wendy Wood has plenty of ebooks/reports on family topics.

How to Make Pre-Made Reports Your Own

Of course, you may be concerned that if you use PLR you may lose your voice or branding in the process. Not at all. Here’s the process I use to make PLR reports my own and to monetize them too:

1. Once you have your pre-made report, create a title page that includes your logo. You can also make a unique title for your report if you prefer. Perhaps a title that reflects a product that you you’re selling or reflects your unique perspective on the subject.

2. Add an introduction to the report. Don’t stress this one. Just a paragraph or two, maybe your photo and a note on why you’re sharing this report. Also, mention the product you feel is a perfect complement to the report and tell them why.

3. Read through the report and see where you can mention the product, add some of your own thoughts, examples and experience. This needn’t take a ton of time, but the more you can do to make the report yours, the better it will serve as a monetization tool as well.

4. Add a conclusion to the report. Sum up what you hope your readers get out of the report and also give a little harder push for the product you are promoting. Give them a number of benefits / reasons why to pick up the product.

That’s it…you’re done! PDF it, load it your server and distribute according to plan.